Social Science Research Council

The politicization of scholars, experts and media commentators post 9/11 has created a minefield for policymakers and the general public. Many are caught between the contending positions of seemingly qualified experts as well as a new cadre of Islamophobic authors and their revisionist readings of Islam and Islamic history. Today, we now have a new empirically grounded tool that enables us to go beyond the limited interpretations and opinions of experts when asking: What do Muslims think, what do they care about, and what do they want? [...]

The world will long remember Benazir Bhutto as a modern Muslim woman who served two terms as Pakistan’s first woman Prime Minister: bright, attractive, articulate, talented, courageous, charismatic, an astute politician and political leader who called for a secular democratic Pakistan. Benazir was all of these but – like her father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and a number of other Pakistani political leaders – she also left a flawed political track record that both reflected and contributed to many of Pakistan’s problems. [...]