As the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks approaches, 21 per cent of respondents told a study they had detected "a great deal" or "a fair deal" of support for extremism in their areas.
While the vast majority said that suicide bombings and other forms of violence against civilians to protect Islam were never justified, 19 per cent of respondents did not agree with this statement. [telegraph.co.uk] Read more
.... according to a recent survey by Germany's Goethe-Institut, the bulk of youths in the world's largest Muslim-majority country share remarkably traditional values about faith and family, despite a decade of social and political change since the fall of the Suharto dictatorship.
More than half of nearly 1,500 Indonesian Muslims aged 15 to 25 years polled from October to November last year supported the eye-for-an-eye Hudud punishments for crimes such as theft, adultery and apostasy.
Fully 66 percent agreed with capital punishment for murder and 68 percent favoured whipping for alcohol consumption.
Conservative beliefs were stronger in relation to family matters, with nine in 10 respondents disagreeing with interfaith marriage. Of those willing to marry non-Muslims, most expected their spouses to convert to Islam. [AFP] Read more [via National Secular Society]
.... Based on their survey responses, Finns were best disposed towards Christianity, had mostly positive impressions of Buddhism and Hinduism, and felt most critical towards Islam.
Only six percent of the survey respondents thought of Islam in positive terms, with the vast majority clearly holding negative impressions—which, says researcher Kimmo Ketola from the Church Research Institute, is mostly down to the media.
“There are very few Muslim immigrants in Finland compared to many other European countries. The media can convey an exceedingly harsh and negative picture of Islam,” Ketola says. [YLE] Read more [via Islamophobia Watch]
Viennese public opinion agency Karmasin spoke with 500 Austrians to find that 71 per cent of them were in favour of such a law prohibiting wearing burkas in public places.
There are no figures on how many Muslim women living in Austria wear burkas which are considered by some as a sign that they are repressed by their religious husbands.
While newspapers speculate that most burka-wearing women were wealthy tourists on shopping sprees in Vienna and other holiday hotspots, Social Democratic (SPÖ) Minister for Women Gabriele Heinisch-Hosek revealed she could imagine implementing an anti-burka regulation similar to restrictions in France, Belgium and other European countries. [The Iconoclast] Read more