Another survey of Muslims, this time a telephone survey of North Africans, shows massive support for sharia law.  (Link is in French.)  The Breitbart news service has a report on the study.

Seventy-nine per cent of Libyans believe Sharia should be the sole source of legislation as do 63 per cent of Algerians, 60 per cent of Egyptians, 55 per cent of Moroccans with, again, the only notable exception being Tunisia at 23 per cent…. The findings perhaps do not bode well for freedom of speech in Western European countries which have large, and growing Muslim populations. It also suggests such countries are demographically, on their current course, on track to adopt Sharia law in the future.

This poll will be subjected to the same criticisms normally wielded against such polls by apologists.  They will point out that its internals are not available, and that telephone polls are subject to certain inaccuracies.  These criticisms miss the main point.  The central issue to empirical science is the ability of others repeating the experiment to replicate your findings.  If you replicate the same findings using the same methods, that’s telling.  If you replicate the same findings with both the same and different methods, that’s even more suggestive that you’re on to something.  Every poll of Muslim populations, regardless of its methodology, shows strong support for sharia.

Last summer, the Center for Security Policy commissioned a poll that found 51% support for sharia among American Muslims.  There were critics who pointed out that this poll was an online poll, and one that only surveyed those who opted in.  However, the Pew polling service found that half of American Muslims are recent immigrants, chiefly from countries in which their global survey of support for sharia tops 80%.  Three of the leading countries for Islamic immigration to the United States are Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.  The figures for those countries are 91%, 84%, and 99% respectively.

If half of American Muslims come from countries with such vast support for implementing sharia, 51% ends up sounding pretty plausible.  It’s also right in the range of this new survey of Muslims in north Africa.  It’s also in the same range as this poll of British Muslims, for whom only a quarter proclaimed support for implementing sharia but in which over half proclaimed support for banning homosexuality by law.  That poll came under fire too, both for its method “but also over the wisdom of conducting polls that focus on a religious minority in such heated times.”

When you find the same thing no matter how you study the question, you’re probably finding something that’s really there.  Whatever problems this poll has, in the context of so many similar polls showing the same results there is little reason to doubt it.