BEYOND SYRIA IRAQ

PUBLIC POLLING
These findings clearly belie the notion that IS somehow represents the
wave of the future for Sunni Arabs. One would never know it from the headlines
about sensational terrorist incidents, but a popular uprising on behalf
of the Islamic State is just plain implausible in any Arab country. If a power
vacuum opens in a particular location, IS may try to fill it. But it will not be
able to do so on the strength of public support.
That’s the good news. The other news is that the marginal popular support
for IS contrasts sharply with the substantial backing for certain other
jihadist groups in many of the same Arab societies. This does not include al-
Qaeda, whose support has plummeted from the 40–50 percent range in the
early 2000s to the 10–20 percent range today. But the Muslim Brotherhood,
for example, still registers around 25–35 percent popular approval—even in
places like Egypt or Saudi Arabia, or the UAE, where it has recently been
outlawed as a terrorist organization. Nor does the minimal appeal of IS mean
many Arab Muslims want to “interpret Islam in a more moderate, modern,
or tolerant way.” That question garners just 20 percent or less support in
most Arab societies polled. Popular support for sharia, conversely, tends to
be around 80 percent.
The unmistakable inference is that one must measure support levels for
particular groups, IS or otherwise, rather than for some abstract concept of
Islamic fundamentalism or reform. And one should certainly not assume IS
can trade on any underlying Salafi, sectarian, or similar sympathies to attract
and maintain wide popular support. Among Arabs, at least, such an assumption
would fly in the face of all the available hard data.
Turning to the non-Arab large majority of Muslims, the picture is again
surprising, but in a less pleasant way. As measured in a handful of 2014–16
surveys, approval of the Islamic State is somewhat higher in several of these
other societies, especially outside the Middle East. In Turkey, for instance,
Pew polls show 8 percent expressing some sympathy with IS—a small
minority, to be sure, but twice as large as in Arab polls, and representing
several million Turks. In Pakistan, the situation is typically murkier.
While very few there voice support for IS, the majority (62 percent) say
they “don’t know” about it. From past experience with Pakistani polls, this
probably means many would simply prefer not to answer such a politically
charged question.
Further east, in the equally large Muslim societies of Bangladesh or Indonesia,
or in the small but active Muslim enclaves in the Philippines, polling
data on this very timely question is, sadly, very scarce. Impressionistic yet
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