By Patrick Goodenough
December 27, 2011
Rescue workers push a dead body after a bomb blast at St. Theresa Catholic Church in Madalla, Nigeria, Sunday, Dec. 25, 2011. An explosion ripped through a Catholic church during Christmas Mass near Nigeria’s capital Sunday, killing at least 25 people, officials said. A radical Muslim sect claimed the attack and another bombing near a church in the restive city of Jos, as explosions also struck the nation’s northeast. (AP Photo/Sunday Aghaeze)
(CNSNews.com) – Condemning the deadly attacks on Nigerian Christians on Christmas Day, Islamic organizations around the world called the atrocities un-Islamic, yet opinion polls tracking views on terrorism suggest that significant numbers of Muslims disagree.
While scientific polling has found a decline in support for suicide bombings over the decade since 9/11 in most major Muslim countries, minorities of respondents – in some cases, large minorities – continue to regard them as justified “in defense of Islam.”
The percentages extrapolate to tens of millions of Muslims across Africa, the Middle East and Asia who hold that view.
In Nigeria, where at least 39 Christians were killed in a series of attacks Sunday – most of them at a Catholic church near the capital, Abuja – 34 percent of respondents in a Pew Global Attitudes Project poll last year expressed support for suicide bombings.
About 50 percent of Nigeria’s 155 million population is Muslim. Thirty-four percent of the Muslim population of Africa’s most populous country would amount to 26 million people.
(Pew surveyed 1,000 Nigerian adults in what it described as a “[m]ulti-stage cluster sample stratified by all six geo-political regions and Lagos and the urban/rural population and proportional to population size.” It gave a margin of error of plus/minus four percent.)
A child walks past a wall bearing graffiti about the al-Qaeda network in northern Nigeria’s Kano state, one of 12 where shari’a has been imposed for the last decade. (AP Photo/Schalk van Zuydam, File)
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