There's been a lot of reporting from Egypt about what the people there want. Much of the reporting and media commentary would lead us to think that the mass of Egyptian people are moderates eager for Western-style freedom and democracy. Pew Research Center, however, has a report on the opinions of Egyptians and others in the Muslim world which gives a much different view of what the Egyptian people think, and it's not encouraging.
In Egypt 31% of Muslims see a struggle between moderate modernizers and hard-line fundamentalists and of that cohort 59% identify with the fundamentalists.
Majorities of Muslims in Egypt, as well as Jordan, Pakistan and Nigeria, say they favor imposing harsh punishments for adultery, robbery, and converting to another religion. Eighty two percent of Egyptians favor stoning people who commit adultery. Seventy seven percent favor whipping and cutting the hands off people who commit theft. Eighty four percent of the Egyptian people believe those who leave the Muslim religion should be executed.
Egypt and Pakistan were the two countries surveyed in which the percentage of people holding these views was highest. In some of the other predominantly Muslim countries surveyed – Turkey, Lebanon and Indonesia, for instance – most Muslims oppose these measures.
I suppose it's reassuring that something less than half of the people in these countries favor death sentences for those who convert from Islam. No wonder Muslim emigrants to Europe and elsewhere often have such a hard time assimilating.
Anyway, the take-away here is that, at least in Egypt, the overwhelming number of people are not at all what most people think of when they think of "moderates".
