12 June 2009
Inside Islam: What a Billion Muslims Really Think
A documentary film based on a Gallup Poll study has its world premiere
Washington — On June 4 at Cairo University, President Obama said, “I've come here to Cairo to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based on mutual interest and mutual respect, and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition.”
The one thing Muslims around the world hope to get from the United States, according to a 2008 Gallup Poll report on public opinion of Muslims in more than 35 nations, is not money, military support or even democracy. What respondents want is understanding and respect.
A new documentary film based on the Gallup Poll report, and carrying the same title — Inside Islam: What a Billion Muslims Really Think — had its world premiere in Washington on June 3. Unity Productions Foundation developed the film.
The documentary reports on the survey's surprising findings and implications, and brings it to life, interviewing researchers and others who conducted the public opinion polling. The film focuses on issues of gender justice, terrorism and democracy, and it challenges the notion that Muslims and the West are on a collision course. Like the research, the film highlights a shared relationship that is based on facts, not fear.
So, what do the world's 1 billion Muslims really think? Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, speaking at the premiere, said, “The fact that we even have to ask that question is because of the damaging failure to communicate between the majority in the West and the majority of Muslims.”
Albright said the United States is enriched by its ethnic, cultural, religious and language diversity. “The message in tonight's film is that we should be guided by facts, not fear,” she said. “That is a simple message with logic on its side, but the difficulty is that human nature and logic have a complicated relationship. ... The main difficulty has been our tendency as Americans to equate the different with the dangerous.”
“On the eve of President Obama's speech from Cairo, the idea behind tonight's premiere is crucial,” said Alex Kronemer, a co-founder of Unity Productions Foundation and one of the executive producers of the documentary. “It is simply this: In order to effectively engage the Muslim world, we have to understand what the Muslim world really wants.”
John Voll, a professor of Islamic history at Georgetown University in Washington, said the film “should encourage everyone to admit that real dialogue is truly possible between the Muslims of the world and the West, between Muslims and Christians and between whomever else we agree should be dialoguing."
Appearing in the documentary, among others, are: Dalia Mogahed, executive director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies and a member of President Obama’s Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnership; John Esposito, Georgetown University professor; Rami Khoury, editor of the Daily Star (Beirut); and Kenneth Pollack, director of research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institute.
Mogahed described several surprising findings in the study. On extremism, Mogahed said, Americans and Muslims are equally likely to find attacks on civilians as morally unjustifiable. On democracy, Mogahed pointed out that a large majority of Muslims would guarantee free speech if it was up to them to write a new constitution. Those polled also said that religious leaders should have no direct role in drafting such a constitution. On gender equity, a majority of Muslim men in most countries agreed, for instance, that women should be able to hold jobs.
Michael Wolfe, the other co-founder of Unity Productions Foundation and executive producer of the documentary, described the study as presenting “an alternative to the views of pundits and isolated Western experts interviewed in TV all these years. It tells us what, in fact, the people themselves think and feel about a host of subjects, public and private. For the first time, policymakers can now base theory and new decisions on actual information derived from the people their policies will affect.”
