Most people believe Muslim values are incompatible with British ones, a new poll has found. It makes for bleak reading
A
ccording to YouGov, more than half of people do not believe Islam to be compatible with British values. I’m often dispirited by these polls, as much by the timbre of the questions as by the responses (how many times do we need to ask one another whether we can afford to avert a climate catastrophe, for instance?) But I can’t remember the last time I was stunned.
This latest poll found that 41% of the British public believe that Muslim immigrants have had a negative impact on the UK. Nearly half (49%) think that Muslim women are pressured into wearing the hijab. And almost a third (31%) think that Islam promotes violence. Farhad Ahmad, a spokesperson for the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, which commissioned the poll, was surprised that I was so surprised. Things had been really bad for ages, he said, directing me to not dissimilar numbers in 2016 and 2019.
This is the first year the community has included the question about the hijab, which strikes its own particularly depressing note. The hijab was a hot talking point in the early to mid-2000s, when military support for the US in its interventions in Afghanistan was often rhetorically justified by the toxic misogyny of the Taliban. Veils of all kinds came to represent the subjugation of women, to the dismay of many at the time.
