The Empirical Results of Our Empirical Study
Authors: Tausch Arno 
Published: February 2023

The study clearly shows that identification with Turkey and Iran, with a political Islam that also influences elections and results in a theocracy, promotes religious and gender discrimination and advocates an Islamist interpretation of Islam, are very much the most important, interrelated syndromes of political Islam, which together explain more than 50% of the total variance of the 24 model variables used. If the states of Europe want to win the fight against jihadism, they must work closely with the moderate Arab states, such as Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other Arab Gulf states, and be aware that, on a population-weighted basis, 41% of all Arabs now view the Muslim Brotherhood, which is the strongest and most coherent force in political Islam today, negatively or very negatively. According to the data brought to light here, only 7% of people in the Arab world now have a high level of trust in their country's Islamist movement, while 14% have some trust, 19% have little trust, but 60% have no trust. Our overall index—Overcoming political Islam shows that Morocco and Tunisia are the top performers, while Iraq and Sudan bring up the rear. Following an important study by Falco and Rotondi (2016), we also explore the question of whether political Islam is more prevalent or less prevalent among the more than 20% of the Arab population who plan to emigrate in the coming years than among the population as a whole. Far from feeding alarmist horror scenarios, our evaluation shows firstly that Falco and Rotondi (2016) are correct in their thesis that among potential migrants to the West, political Islam is certainly less pronounced than among the Arab population as a whole. On a population-weighted basis, only 13.11% of potential migrants to the West openly state that they trust the country-specific Islamist movement. In the second part of our empirical evaluations, we explore religiously motivated political extremism (RMPE) by international comparison on the basis of the following items of the World Values Survey, which are sparse but nevertheless available on this topic: The proportion of the global population who favour religious authorities in interpreting the law while accepting political violence is alarmingly high in various parts of the world and is raising fears of numerous conflicts in the coming years in an increasingly unstable world system. It amounts to more than half of the adult population in Tajikistan (the international record holder), and Malaysia and some non-Muslim-majority countries. In many countries, including NATO and EU member states, it is an alarming 25–50%, and we mention here the Muslim-majority countries Iraq, Lebanon, Bangladesh, Kazakhstan, Nigeria and Indonesia. It is 15–25% even in core countries of the Western security architecture, but also in the Muslim-majority countries: Pakistan, Iran and Tunisia. Only in the best-ranked countries, among them the Muslim-majority countries Albania, Egypt, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan and Jordan, the potentially fatal combination of mixing religion and law and accepting political violence has a relatively small following of less than 15%. In the sense of the theses of the late Harvard economist Alberto Alesina (1957–2020), social trust is an essential general production factor of any social order, and the institutions of national security of the democratic West would do well to make good use of this capital of trust that also exists among Muslims living in the West.