: Polls of the Muslim World Come Under Fire

The National Council on Public Polls accused the Gallup organization last week of deliberately misleading news organizations about the results of a recent poll of Muslim countries. The polls, which made a big enough splash to warrant comments from President Bush, claimed to be a fair representation of the Muslim world. But the NCPP points out that the nine countries surveyed represent only 40% of the world’s Muslim population. Furthermore, news stories on CNN and USA Today based on the Gallup poll reported results in the aggregate “without regard to the population of the countries they represent.” In other words, Kuwait, with less than 2 million Muslims, was “treated the same as Indonesia, which has over 200 million Muslims” in the aggregate, thus skewing the average to look more negative. But since the damage has been done, this review appears to be only a footnote.

Zahed Amanullah is associate editor of altmuslim.com.  He is based in London, England.