The Myth of a Conservative Muslim Majority: How CAIR Plays with the Numbers to Serve Its Narrow Agenda

By Ahmed Nassef

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) released a “Survey of American Muslim Political Attitudes” on Tuesday. The big news was the dramatic shift that they registered among Muslims away from President Bush and in favor of Democratic Presidential nominee John Kerry (54%) and Ralph Nader's independent candidacy (26%). Only 2% of respondents said they planned to vote for Bush. None of this comes as a big surprise, given the Bush administration’s atrocious record on civil liberties and disastrous foreign policy.

However, there are a couple of stories here between the lines, and they bring up some important questions regarding the usefulness of the results, and the credibility of CAIR surveys and polling data in general. What’s more, CAIR’s questionable research methodology holds the key to unraveling the myth of an overwhelmingly conservative American Muslim population.

The first issue has to do with how Muslims really voted in 2000. As we have reported on MWU!, there are lingering accountability questions having to do with the endorsement by top Muslim groups of the Bush/Cheney candidacy in 2000. The people who took part in these decisions still haven't come clean about what really happened then during what MWU!’s Jawad Ali has called “Betrayal-2000.”

But back then, right after the election, CAIR and other Muslim groups gloated about the results, and they claimed that their endorsement of Bush helped put him over the top, especially in close states like Florida.

In November 2000, CAIR cited exit polling results that showed Bush got an overwhelming 72% of the American Muslim vote. According to CAIR, 19% of Muslims voted for Nader, and only 8% for Al Gore.

However, the results released this week show a very different picture: 56% of respondents said they voted for Bush, 23% for Gore, and 20% for Nader.

So at first glance, it now seems the endorsement of Bush by the establishment Muslim leadership in the US did not have nearly as much impact as they had initially claimed. Despite a heavy pro-Bush voter mobilization effort in 2000, their own numbers now show that 43% of Muslims still voted for Gore or Nader. This happened in spite of the heavy use of fear tactics--emphasizing Gore/Lieberman's pro-Israel ties (including not-so-subtle allusions to Lieberman's Jewish faith) and denouncing Gore's and Nader's pro-choice and gay rights platforms—to scare away Gore and Nader voters.

But it gets even murkier.

As with any type of quantitative research, survey results are only as good as the sample of respondents. A survey asking Latino voters about their choice for president, for example, would likely give very different results depending on whether the survey was limited to Cuban American respondents in Florida, Puerto Ricans in New York, or Mexican Americans in the Southwest. This is Market Research 101—before you look at results, look at the list.

Finding Latino Americans for a random sample that takes into account factors such as geographic location, income levels, national background, etc. is not so hard. Telephone, mailing, and email lists collected by the multitude of religious, cultural and media organizations serving the Latino community are easy to come by and are available for rental to research firms. The same goes for many other ethnic and religious groups in this country—African Americans, Jews, Catholics, etc.

Muslims, however, present a particularly difficult dilemma for researchers. American Muslims have not yet developed mature cultural and media institutions—the Muslim equivalents of the 92nd Street Y, Tikkun, or even Commentary are practically non-existent. Also, with the exception of places like Dearborn, Michigan and parts of Brooklyn and urban New Jersey, the American Muslim population is highly dispersed geographically—researchers can’t just pick a few malls in a dozen neighborhoods and be assured of running into enough Muslims for a large sample.

The only sure place to consistently find Muslims is the local mosque. Mosque members also form the backbone of all the establishment national advocacy and membership organizations like CAIR and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA).

So the quick answer might be to go to mosques to find out what Muslims are thinking. But what if a significant percentage of American Muslims don’t attend mosques at all?

On the surface, CAIR’s latest survey puts us at ease. According to the poll, a whopping 70% of American Muslims attend mosque at least once a week. Only 6% do not attend mosque at all. This is what CAIR’s ace researchers call a “religiously diverse” sample that comes from “a very wide spectrum.”

In fact, those numbers are remarkable in painting an extremely high degree of religiosity among American Muslims, a level far exceeding that of other American religious groups. About 38% of American Christians, for example, attend church on a weekly basis; 16% of American Jews attend synagogue at least monthly.

So are American Muslims really that much more religious than their Christian and Jewish counterparts, so much so that nearly twice as many as the national average attend religious institution at least weekly (and half of those attend more that once per week)?

Evidently, this is what CAIR would like us to believe. Most media are fine with that too—it confirms their stereotype of the Muslim “other”: bearded, hijabed, and isolated from mainstream American society. If you happen to be a Muslim who does not fit the CAIR profile—perhaps you haven’t attended mosque since the last Eid holiday, let’s say—you are an aberration, a member of that tiny 6% minority within a minority whose concerns could not possibly reflect those of the majority of American Muslims.

But wait a minute—let’s check the list that CAIR used to come up with all of this data. CAIR used its own email list to come up with their sample of 1,161 respondents!

This would be the same as MWU! sending out a survey to its own mailing list then issuing glowing declarations the following day proclaiming that “80% of American Muslims believe American Muslim leaders are clueless.” Again, the results are only as good as the sample.

But let’s compare the CAIR numbers to yet another one of their surveys from the past, the 2000 Mosque survey entitled “The Mosque in America: A National Portrait” released in April 2001.

That study estimated that 411,060 Muslims “regularly participate” in mosques in the United States. Out of an estimated total US Muslim population of 6 million, this comes out to a regular attendance figure of less than 7%.

So which CAIR number should we believe—the 7% from the 2000 survey, or the 70% from this week’s survey?

Not surprisingly, the 2000 survey has its own methodological problems—it was based on responses given by “mosque representatives” who, just like their counterparts in churches and synagogues, are more likely to paint a rosier picture of their institution’s regular attendance figures. Nevertheless, they could still come up with only 411,060.

This leads to one of two conclusions—either the vast majority of American Muslims have no relation whatsoever with a mosque, or the actual population of American Muslims is much lower than the estimated 6 million. Islamophobes like Daniel Pipes have been claiming for a while that American Muslims number around 2 million—a figure most mainstream observers consider far too low. Yet even at that dubious estimate, mosque attendance figures would still be no more than 21%, far lower than the national averages for other faith groups.

It all comes down to an inescapable reality that CAIR and the other ultra-conservative Muslim organizations just refuse to face—the vast majority of American Muslims are not connected with mosques at all and are not politically conservative.

This is supported by data from Zogby International, which in August 2000 reported that American Muslims identify overwhelmingly with the Democratic (46%) rather than the Republican Party (15.8%), a much wider division than the national average (38.9% and 34.2%, respectively). The same poll showed that American Muslims mirror the larger American society when it comes to social leanings—with 26% identifying as liberal or progressive and a third labeling themselves moderate.

The one thing CAIR’s surveys are good for is showing how the ultra-conservative mosque leadership is thinking. And that thinking is obviously out of tune with most American Muslims.

If groups like CAIR and ISNA had visionary leadership, they’d want to tap into that vast potential constituency. They’d welcome anyone willing to call themselves Muslim with open arms. They’d realize that doing so is their only protection against further marginalization and decay. They’d realize that being accepting, inclusive, transparent and accountable will also mean thousands of new members, much less dependence on foreign benefactors, and unprecedented vibrancy for Islam in America. They’d realize that Islam’s inspiring call for unity should transcend all ethnic, gender and sectarian divides.

Ahmed Nassef is editor-in-chief of MuslimWakeUp.com. He can be reached at anassef@muslimwakeup.com