The Institute for Social Policy and Understanding’s American Muslim Poll 2022 puts numbers to something that is usually argued about anecdotally: how much more often Muslims meet discrimination in the ordinary institutions everybody else passes through without incident.

The findings below are summarised from Arsalan Iftikhar’s write-up for Georgetown University’s Bridge Initiative, published 1 September 2022. Read the full article →

Discrimination, Institution by Institution

Muslims reported religious discrimination far more often than the general public in every setting measured:

Read the airport line again. Forty-four per cent against three. That is not a difference of degree in how two groups experience the same system; it is a description of two different systems.

And Online

Nearly half of American Muslims — 46% — reported some form of anti-Muslim discrimination on social media in the previous year: posts removed, accounts closed, or being put off a platform altogether. The figure for the general public was 36%.

This one is worth sitting with, because it runs against the assumption that online hate is something Muslims are subjected to rather than something they are also removed for objecting to. The platforms are not neutral ground.

A Community That Is Not Secularising

On religious observance, seven in ten American Muslims told researchers that religion is a “very important” part of their lives — second only to white Evangelicals at 83%.

Two details give that figure its weight. Muslim men and women answered almost identically (71% and 69%), and Muslims of every age group were equally likely to say it — which suggests, as Iftikhar notes, that this devotion will carry into the next generation rather than thinning out with it.

Why SAMNET Is Sharing This

South Africa has no equivalent dataset. We have incidents, impressions and the strong sense of a community that things are getting worse — and almost nothing that a journalist, a court or a government department would accept as evidence.

That absence is not neutral. It is routinely used to argue that there is no problem to address. A poll like this one is what makes the argument concrete somewhere else, and it is the reason SAMNET has argued for years for an Islamophobia register here: not because counting solves anything by itself, but because nothing gets solved until it is counted.

Summarised from “‘American Muslim Poll 2022’ Shows Islamophobia is Alive & Well” by Arsalan Iftikhar, published 1 September 2022 by the Bridge Initiative, Georgetown University. Underlying survey data: the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding’s American Muslim Poll 2022. Figures are quoted as reported; the analysis of what they mean for South Africa is SAMNET’s.

Shared by the South African Muslim Network. info@samnet.co.za