Liberal Conspiracy has a piece on the use and abuse of opinion polls when it comes to understanding and reporting the attitudes of Muslims in the UK. Not sure he gets everything right, and I will let others point out the flaws, but looks like a decent starting point for an interesting topic.

That Liberal Conspiracy post also points to a blog called British Born Muslims which claims to have carried out more rigorous survey of Muslim opinion in the UK. Hmmm.

I once asked someone (who is meant to know about these things) about the paltry level of data we have about ‘British Muslims’. He pointed out a study on opinion polls of Islam and Muslims in the UK by Clive Field, entitled “Islamophobia in Contemporary Britain: The Evidence of the Opinion Polls, 1988– 2006″.

A very broad and general conclusion seems to be that we in Britain lack credible data on the category of people known as ‘British Muslims’.