The findings, which were conducted ahead of the broadcast on Wednesday of a documentary, What British Muslims Really Think, also found that attitudes to antisemitism and the Holocaust broadly differed between British Muslims and the wider population.
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The poll carried out by ICM is the subject of a Channel 4 documentary called What British Muslims Really Think, presented by Trevor Phillips – former Equality and Human Rights Commission chairman.
Polling data, as reported by The Guardian, also revealed that 23 percent of British Muslims support the implementation of sharia law in Britain.
And while the poll of men and women found that 39 per cent believe wives should always obey their husbands, as many as 79 per cent condemned stoning those who have cheated on their partner.
ICM used face-to-face, in-home research to question a representative sample of the 1,000 UK Muslims.
According to the survey, conducted on behalf the U.K.’s Channel 4, some 4 percent of British Muslims said they sympathize with suicide bombers and the same percentage said the sympathized with people who committed terrorist actions in general.
Furthermore, 47 percent said they didn’t think it is acceptable for gay people to be teachers, compared to 14 percent of the public at large.
Philips said “the integration of Muslims will probably be the hardest task” the country has ever faced.
“Many British Muslims will find it bemusing that commentators and the media have constantly tried and failed to paint a picture of British Muslims at odds with the rest of the country”, an MCB spokeswoman said in a statement.
The survey highlighted how many Muslims living in Britain hold opinions that are at odds with the vast majority of the UK’s population. He added that, “Britain’s liberal Muslims are crying out for this challenge to be confronted”.
A large majority of British Muslims (86 per cent) said they felt a strong sense of belonging to Britain, with 94 per cent saying they felt they were able to freely practise their religion.
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“Choosing specifically to poll in areas that are poor and more religiously conservative skews the results and makes it indicative of these areas and not of British Muslims nationally”, the spokeswoman said. It means that as a society we have a group of people who basically do not want to participate in the way that other people [do]. “It will require the abandonment of the milk-and-water multiculturalism still so beloved of many, and the adoption of a far more muscular approach to integration”. For whatever reason Philips has bought into a prevailing security prism through which successive governments have viewed Muslims and which has fostered a social climate in which they can be demonized on the basis of their faith in a manner that is considered unacceptable for other social groups.
