New international survey shows broad Muslim support for harsh Sharia punishments(thanks to Robert Spencer)

"There's really no such thing as just Sharia, it's not one monolithic Continuum - Sharia is understood in thousands of different ways over the 1,500 years in which multiple and competing schools of law have tried to construct some kind of civic penal and family law code that would abide by Islamic values and principles, it's understood in many different ways..." -- Reza Aslan

Not really. Tiny Minority of Extremists Update: in "Sharia Über Alles" at the American Thinker, May 4, Andrew Bostom summarizes a new international survey's findings about the broad support in Muslim countries for the harshest Sharia punishments.

Despite a number of (deliberately?) mitigating biases, both methodological and interpretative, the latest Pew Research Forum report, "The World's Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society," released April 30, 2013, confirms the broad appeal of thetotalitarian Sharia, Islam's religio-political "law," across Islamdom.

The data were pooled from surveys conducted between 2008 and 2012, representing, as touted by Pew, "a total of 39 countries and territories on three continents: Africa, Asia and Europe." Collectively, the surveys included "more than 38,000 face-to-face interviews in 80-plus languages and dialects, covering every country that has more than 10 million Muslims." Pew did acknowledge this important caveat about Muslim populations not surveyed because, "political sensitivities or security concerns prevented opinion research among Muslims." Notably excluded countries were Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, and Iran -- all Islamic states, governed by the Sharia, Saudi Arabia and the Sudan under Sunni Islam, the third, Iran, being the world's largest Shiite Muslim state.

Responses to four related questions on the Sharia, comprise the surveys' salient -- and pathognomonic -- findings. The questions were, "Do you favor or oppose making sharia law, or Islamic law, the official law of the land in our country?", and these three internally validating (and equally edifying) queries, "Do you favor or oppose the following: punishments like whippings and cutting off of hands for crimes like theft and robbery?", "Do you favor or oppose the following: punishments like whippings and cutting off of hands for crimes like theft and robbery?", "Do you favor or oppose the following: the death penalty for people who leave the Muslim religion?" Summary data from the nations with the five largestMuslim populations (as per 2010) surveyed, Indonesia (204 million), Pakistan (178 million), Bengladesh (149 million), Egypt (80 million), and Nigeria (76 million), revealed: