Levels of Negativity: How Muslim and Western Publics See One Another

By Richard Wike and Brian J. Grim

News headlines seem to bombard us daily with more examples of conflict between the Muslim world and the West, whether it is the war in Iraq, the search for al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, or efforts to stop Iran’s nuclear program. In Europe, long-running tensions over how to integrate and assimilate the continent’s growing Muslim minorities have been exacerbated in recent years by terrorist attacks in Madrid and London, rioting in France, and an international controversy over the publication of cartoons in a Danish newspaper portraying the prophet Muhammad.

In 2006, the Pew Global Attitudes Project set out to explore these tensions, examining how non-Muslims in the West and elsewhere view Muslims, as well as how Muslims think about people in Western nations. The results reveal a disturbingly high level of negativity on both sides, with Muslims and non-Muslims associating a wide array of negative characteristics with one another, although there is generally more antagonism in Muslim countries toward the West than vice versa. Here we investigate how these tensions vary across countries, using data from the 2006 survey.

The 2006 poll included a number of questions designed to measure how people from different cultural and religious backgrounds view one another. It asked non-Muslims in eight countries whether they associated a series of positive and negative characteristics with Muslims, and it asked Muslims in ten countries the same set of questions about Westerners. The eight non-Muslim publics included five “Western” nations—Britain, France, Germany, Spain, and the United States—as well as Russia, India, and Nigeria, which is roughly divided between Christians and Muslims. The ten Muslim publics included the predominantly Muslim countries of Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Pakistan, and Turkey, as well as Muslim populations in Nigeria, Britain, France, Germany, and Spain.

In Britain, France, Germany, India, Nigeria, Russia, Spain, and the United States, non-Muslim respondents were read lists of positive and negative traits and, for each one, were asked whether they associated it with Muslims. In Britain, Egypt, France, Germany, Indonesia, Jordan, Nigeria, Pakistan, Spain, and Turkey, Muslim respondents were read the same lists and asked whether each trait applied to people in Western countries such as the United States and European nations. The question stem for the battery of characteristics read as follows:

Which of these characteristics do you associate with [Muslims/people in Western countries such as the United States and Europe]? The first is… Do you associate this with [Muslims/people in Western countries], or not?

The positive qualities from the survey included in our analysis were “generous” and “honest,” while the negative characteristics were “arrogant,” “greedy,” “immoral,” “selfish,” and “violent.” The results showed that many non-Muslims associated negative traits with Muslims (see Figure 1). Majorities of survey respondents in Nigeria, India, Spain, Russia, and Germany saw Muslims as violent. Large numbers, including majorities in India, Nigeria, and Russia, also considered Muslims arrogant. Many also associated selfishness with Muslims, although India was the only country where a majority did so. Non-Muslims were less likely to rate Muslims as greedy or immoral—in France, for instance, only 10 percent said Muslims were greedy, and just 18 percent labeled them as immoral.

The data on Muslim attitudes toward Westerners also revealed a variety of negative views (see Figure 3). In the five majority-Muslim countries, as well as Nigeria, at least 40 percent of Muslims in the survey characterized Westerners as arrogant, violent, greedy, and immoral; meanwhile, relatively few said Westerners were generous or honest (see Figure 4). And Muslims in these countries were particularly likely to say Westerners were selfish—in all six, majorities suggested selfishness was common among people in Europe and the United States. Negative assessments of Westerners were fairly common across all six of these countries, although they were slightly more prevalent in Jordan and Indonesia. European Muslims were consistently less likely to associate negative characteristics with Westerners and were more likely to label them as generous and honest.

How might we compare the level of religious-cultural negativity among the various publics? One approach is to create an index based on the average country responses to each of the survey questions. We can justify this if the questions are conceptually and statistically interrelated. First, conceptually, we suggest that these questions each tap into a more general attitude, which we call religious-cultural negativity (RCN) and define as a low opinion toward social groups whose core religion-related social identity is perceived to be different from one’s own. Though “Western” is not an explicitly religious concept, being Western, as religion scholar Philip Jenkins has noted, is traditionally understood to be closely related to being part of what was formerly called Western Christendom. Being Muslim, is, of course, an explicitly religious identity.

Second, statistically, each of the seven variables has a highly significant correlation with each of the others. In other words, publics with negative views on one measure are also significantly likely to hold negative views on the other measures. However, the presence of these correlations is not sufficient statistical evidence to justify building an index based on these seven questions.

A statistical procedure called factor analysis provides a more thorough test of whether using the seven items to construct an index is statistically justified. When we include the seven items in a confirmatory factor analysis model using all the responses from the thirteen countries in our analysis, we find, as Figure 5 shows, that each question significantly relates to the common factor religious-cultural negativity (RCN), and that the model fits the data.

The results shown in the figure include cases where Muslim respondents gave their opinions of Westerners and where non-Muslims gave their opinions of Muslims. We conducted further tests and found that these questions continued to relate to a common factor when Muslim and non-Muslim respondents were analyzed separately.

These analyses provide strong evidence that the seven questions statistically related to a common factor.

Next let us discuss our straightforward procedure for using these questions to generate an RCN index for the Muslim and non-Muslim publics in the countries. We calculate a religious-cultural negativity (RCN) index score for each respondent based on the seven items, each of which is scored “1” if a respondent indicated that the characteristic applied to the other group and “0” if the respondent indicated it did not. The index thus ranges from 0 (all positive assessments) to 7 (all negative assessments). The RCN score for each country is calculated by taking the weighted mean (average) of a country’s individual scores. As Table 1 illustrates, the mean RCN index for these countries ranges from 2.1 in France to 5.2 in Turkey.

Overall, the Muslim publics are more likely to associate negative traits with Westerners than vice versa. However, there is significant variation among Muslim populations. Turkey emerges as the country with the most negative views of Westerners, perhaps a surprising finding, given Turkey’s longstanding ties with many Western countries and its membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). However, as F. Stephen Larrabee has noted in a recent essay in Foreign Affairs, “Turkey’s ties to the West have deteriorated” recently, and now this Muslim nation of over 70 million people is “in the unprecedented situation of having poor relations with the EU and the United States simultaneously.” Fueled by frustration with the stalled negotiations over their country’s bid to join the European Union (EU) and by deep opposition to American foreign policy, Turks have soured on both Europe and the United States. The most recent Pew Global Attitudes survey, conducted in April and May of 2007, found that the percentage of Turks with a favorable view of the United States had plummeted from 52 percent at the start of this decade to 9 percent in 2007. And the favorability rating for the EU dropped from 58 percent in 2004 to 27 percent in 2007.

Similar dynamics may be influencing opinions in other Muslim countries, as well. Among Muslims in Indonesia, Jordan, Egypt, Pakistan, and Nigeria, attitudes toward the United States and American foreign policy also tended to be quite negative, although the EU was held in somewhat higher regard. Still, many sensed antagonism from Europe—at least half of the Muslims surveyed by Pew in 2006 in Egypt, Pakistan, Jordan, and Nigeria said that most or many Europeans were hostile toward Muslims.

Indeed, perceptions of hostility or threat from the West may be leading to negative views of Western people. A considerable body of literature from political science, sociology, and social psychology suggests that threat perception is linked to negative views of societal “outgroups” or groups that are perceived as political enemies. Recently, for example, in a 2006 article in Perspectives on Politics, Ronald Inglehart, Mansoor Moaddel, and Mark Tessler found that threats to “existential security”—essentially threats to survival—have led to extraordinarily high levels of xenophobia among Iraqis. In a similar manner, perceptions of security threats from Western nations may be linked to negative views of people from those nations, and, in fact, survey research in Muslim countries has found high levels of concern about threats to national security and to Islam itself. The 2007 Pew survey found that solid majorities in all eleven predominantly Muslim countries included in the survey believed the United States could become a military threat to their country someday. And in a 2005 Pew survey, at least 46 percent in the five Muslim countries included in the study said they believed there were serious threats to Islam today (in Jordan, for example, a remarkably high 82 percent thought so).

The findings among European Muslims in the 2006 survey generally support the notion that familiarity breeds favorability—the four European Muslim publics had the least negative views of Westerners. However, significant variations among these four Muslim publics were reflected throughout the Pew survey. As Martin Walker wrote recently in the Wilson Quarterly, contrary to some of the more alarmist analyses published in recent years, Islam in Europe is not monolithic—there is no “[single] such phenomenon as European Islam”—and important distinctions exist among Europe’s Muslim communities.

In particular, British Muslims stand apart from their coreligionists elsewhere in Europe. On our RCN measure, they receive the highest score, indicating more negative attitudes. In fact, the RCN score for British Muslims is closer to those for Muslims in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa than to those for France, Germany, or Spain. Muslims in Britain differ from those elsewhere in Europe on other measures as well. They are more inclined to see a conflict between Islam and modernity, more likely to identify primarily with their religion rather than their nationality, and more deeply concerned about the future of Muslims in their country—80 percent said they were very or somewhat concerned. Of course, the British Muslim community has been a major focus of attention from writers, policymakers, and religious leaders since the July 2005 London bombings.  

The French and Spanish Muslim populations, on the other hand, were the least negative Muslim publics in the survey. The findings regarding France may be surprising to some, especially in the United States, where the dominant images of the French Muslim community probably stem from the autumn 2005 rioting by Muslim and other youths in banlieues of Paris and throughout the country. However, in their study of Islam in France, Jonathan Laurence and Justin Vaisse argue that these riots were mainly about economics rather than religion or culture, and they suggest that in many ways the French model of integration and assimilation has been more successful than many presume. Similarly, Stephanie Giry notes that most French sociologists “agree that the integration of Muslims into French society has proceeded fairly well.” After reviewing the Pew data, Jodie Allen concludes that “despite their problems—prime among them joblessness among youth generally, not just Muslim youth—the French need take no integrationist lessons from their European neighbors.”

Among non-Muslim publics included in the study, Indians tended to be the most negative. Of course, at points over the last few years, India has experienced considerable tensions between its Hindu majority and Muslim minority, including clashes in 2002 that left as many as 2,000 dead in the western Indian state of Gujarat. Opinions were also relatively negative in Russia, which has also experienced tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims, punctuated by attacks by Chechen separatists in Moscow and Beslan. A 2006 Council on Foreign Relations report calls xenophobia in Russia a major “social ill” and notes that “violent and organized xenophobia has gone beyond the garden-variety ‘skinhead-ism’ encountered in many European societies.” Nigeria, which is the third most negative non-Muslim public on our index, has also suffered violence as a result of religious and ethnic conflict, resulting in as many as 15,000 deaths since 1999, according to a recent article by Jean Herskovits.

On the whole, the five Western nations associated the fewest negative characteristics with Muslims, although there were important differences among these countries. The Spanish had the most negative views, ironically despite Muslims in Spain having the least negative views of Westerners among the populations surveyed. This finding on the non-Muslim Spanish public is part of a broader pattern in the 2006 survey results; favorability ratings for Muslims, Jews, and Arabs, as well as for Americans, were lower in Spain than in any other Western country. Research has often demonstrated that negative views toward one outgroup can be a part of a broader set of ethnocentric attitudes, and future research on Spain should explore the extent to which negative opinions of various groups are linked.

The United States and Germany occupied something of a middle ground on the RCN. In the former, views in the survey differed by age and party identification, with younger Americans holding somewhat less negative opinions, and independents voicing fewer negative opinions than Democrats or Republicans. Meanwhile, the British and French held the least negative views, despite high-profile tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims in both countries over the past few years, including the 2005 bombings and subsequent concerns about “homegrown” terrorist cells in Britain, as well the 2005 riots in France. Interestingly, Britain and France emerged as the two countries with the least negative views, despite having very different approaches to dealing with their Muslim communities. As the Pew Forum’s David Masci has noted, Britain “aims not to change immigrants into Englishmen, but to get them to accept Britain’s core institutions and to learn English,” while France pursues “a vigorous policy of assimilation through its educational and other institutions.” It is also worth noting that Muslims in Britain have more negative views of Westerners than non-Muslims in Britain have of Muslims—a trend opposite to that found in Spain.

Just as negative attitudes held by Muslims about Westerners may be due in part to perceptions of threat, other research we have done suggests that threat perceptions related to security concerns are important drivers of Western views toward Muslims. In particular, concerns about the threat posed by Islamic extremism in Western countries and the perception that large numbers of Muslims in the West support al Qaeda are associated with a greater likelihood of assigning negative traits to Muslims.

The 2006 Pew survey revealed that throughout Muslim societies, Western societies, and elsewhere there are considerable variations in how Muslims and non-Muslims view one another. Future work should focus on developing other measures to examine these attitudes. As Brian Grim and Roger Finke, as well as other authors, have noted, negative public sentiment toward religious outgroups is tied to violence along religious lines, making this a topic of ongoing importance for public opinion researchers.

Richard Wike is senior researcher, Pew Global Attitudes Project, and Brian J. Grim is senior research fellow, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

Details about the survey

The Pew Global Attitudes Project, a Pew Research Center Project, is principally funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts. The surveys of European Muslims included in this study (in Britain, France, Germany, and Spain the survey was conducted among oversamples of approximately 400 Muslims) were conducted in partnership with the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, another project of the Pew Research Center, which works to promote a deeper understanding of issues at the intersection of religion and public affairs. For more details on the 2006 Pew Global Attitudes survey, including information on sample sizes and survey modes, please see “Conflicting Views in a Divided World,” at www.pewglobal.org.

Details about the factor analysis

The statistical correlation of the seven variables is highly significant (p < .001, two-tailed). The p-value of .001 can be interpreted to mean that there is only one chance in a thousand that the tendency of the variables to increase or decrease together occurred by chance. Factor analysis further evaluates the underlying relational pattern in the data to determine whether the items ‘load’ significantly onto a shared common factor, and it allows use of maximum likelihood estimations. Factor analysis also allows the model to take into account significant correlations between error terms. Overall fit statistics for our analysis demonstrate that the model fits the underlying pattern in the data. The Normed Fit Index (NFI) value is .993 and the Tucker Lewis Index (TLI) value is .961, both indicating a strong fit (values between .90 and .95 are generally acceptable, and above .95 are good); the Root Mean Square of Error Approximation (RMSEA) value is .045, which also indicates a good model fit (values of .050 or less are generally acceptable and scores above .100 indicate a poor fit). The amount of variance explained by the RCN factor for each question ranged between .27 and .53 (R-square values); the seven items each load onto the factor at .50 or stronger. We also analyzed other models that included additional items from the 2006 GAP survey characteristics battery, but found that the model that fit the data was one where the seven items describe in this article loaded onto a single common factor. The characteristics that were included on the 2006 GAP survey that did not load were: devout, tolerant, fanatical, and respectful of women.

Details about the Muslim and non-Muslim models

The model fits as well in each sample (e.g., NFI = .983 for the Muslim sample and .993 for the non-Muslim sample); the seven questions each significantly relate to the common factor religious-cultural negativity (RCN) (P < .001, two-tailed) and load onto the factor at .50 or stronger. There were only minor differences in strength. We also tested the model at the country level, and found that the RCN factor fit the data as strongly or more strongly—for example, among Nigerian Muslims (RMSEA=.029), Nigerian non-Muslims (RMSEA =.035), in Turkey (RMSEA =.031), among French Muslims (RMSEA=.023), and French non-Muslims (RMSEA=.000). While it would be possible to use the regression coefficients or factor loadings generated in the factor analyses to adjust the index to match how the seven questions relate to the common factor on a country-by-country basis, we do not do this because in most cases the differences are small. Moreover, to do so would distort the true relationships in the data by inflating the value of variables in some countries, depending on which endogenous variable is set to one, which is an arbitrary choice in factor analysis.

Details about the index

Additional Reading

Allen, Jodie T. 2006. “The French-Muslim connection: Is France doing a better job of integration than its critics?” Pew Research Center, Washington, DC, August 17.

Council on Foreign Relations. 2006. Russia’s wrong direction: What the United States can and should do.

Giry, Stéphanie. 2006. France and its Muslims. Foreign Affairs. September/October.

Grim, Brian J., and Roger Finke. 2007. Religious persecution in cross-national context: Clashing civilizations or regulated religious economies? American Sociological Review 72:633-58.

Herskovits, Jean. 2007. Nigeria’s rigged democracy. Foreign Affairs. July/August.

Inglehart, Ronald, Mansoor Moaddel, and Mark Tessler. 2006. Xenophobia and in-group solidarity in Iraq: A natural experiment on the impact of insecurity. Perspectives on Politics 4:495-505.

Jenkins, Philip. 2007. God’s continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe’s religious crisis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Larrabee, F. Stephen. 2007. Turkey rediscovers the Middle East. Foreign Affairs. July/August.

Laurence, Jonathan, and Justin Vaisse. 2006. Integrating Islam: Political and religious challenges in contemporary France. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.

Masci, David. 2005. An uncertain road: Muslims and the future of Europe. Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

Pew Global Attitudes Project. 2006. Conflicting Views in a Divided World.

Walker, Martin. 2006. Europe’s mosque hysteria. The Wilson Quarterly. Spring.

Wike, Richard, and Brian J. Grim. 2007. Western views of Muslims: Evidence from a 2006 cross-national survey. Paper to be presented at the Annual Meeting of the World Association for Public Opinion Research, Berlin, Germany, September 20.