A peek inside “Londonistan”

Scott Barbour/AFP/Getty Images

Dalia Mogahed of the Gallup Organization, who teamed up with Georgetown scholar John Esposito to write What Makes a Muslim Radical? last fall, is back with a fascinating new web exclusive for FP that is full of surprising new data on what Muslims in London really think.

Along with coauthor Zsolt Nyiri, regional research director for Europe at the Gallup World Poll, Mogahed argues that the furious debate over the veil has obscured wide areas of agreement between Muslims and the public about what it means to be British:

When four British-born Muslims blew themselves up on the London transit system on July 7, 2005, many Britons were convinced that their country’s model of assimilation had failed. The attacks, coupled with a war on terror that seems to reveal an ever-widening gulf between Islam and the West, sparked talk of a crisis of integration, seen most clearly in the acute alienation of the country’s Muslim youth.

But for all the talk of crisis, a new Gallup World Poll finds that more binds the British majority with its religious minority than not. The greatest challenge of all may be in moving beyond minor, symbolic controversies in order to pave a path toward a shared future.

Check it out.