Pew report based 38,000 interviews showed Muslims in US more opposed to suicide bombs than Muslims in other countries

Muslims in the US are generally more opposed to suicide bombings than their co-religionists round the world, according to a new report by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life published Tuesday.

The findings come in the wake of the Boston bombings in which three people were killed and 264 wounded, attacks blamed on the brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokar Tsarnaev, both of them ethnic Chechens and Muslims. No motive has yet emerged for the bombings.

The 152-page Pew report compares the attitudes of Muslims across the world on a series of issues, from violence to friendships with non-Muslims.

"Muslims around the world strongly reject violence in the name of Islam. Asked specifically about suicide bombing, clear majorities in most countries say such acts are rarely or never justified as a means of defending Islam from its enemies," the report says.

The report, The World's Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society, is based on more than 38,000 face-to-face interviews conducted in more than 80 languages in 39 countries and territories over a five-year period. In addition, there is an interactive feature that explores demographics and other material.

The report, in the section dealing with US Muslims, concludes: "In their attitudes toward modern society and their relations with people of other faiths, US Muslims sometimes more closely resemble other Americans than they do Muslims around the world."

Neha Sahgal, a senior researcher at the forum and one of the authors of the survey, said: "The report shows that few US Muslims as well as Muslims around the world consider suicide bombing justified. But we do see a few countries where there is a higher level of support for suicide bombings."

She added: "Boston was not a suicide bombing but there is some comparability."

US Muslims were interviewed in a Pew survey about their attitudes towards suicide bombings two years ago, and most of the findings were published at the time. What is new in Tuesday's report is the comparison between US attitudes and those of Muslims elsewhere.

Asked about suicide bombings, only 1% of American Muslims in the survey said they were "often" justified in defence of Islam, and 7% "sometimes". While even that will be seen as uncomfortably high by some, it is relatively small compared with the 81% who said they were "never" justified and 5% "rarely". The remainder either refused to say or said they had no view.

This compares well with a global median of 72% who say such attacks are "never" justified and 10% who say they are "rarely" justified.

The figures worldwide on suicide bombings are subject to wide variations.

The highest level of support among Muslims for suicide bombings, saying they are "often" or "sometimes" justified, is 40% in Palestine, followed by 39% in Afghanistan, 29% in Egypt and 26% in Bangladesh. The lowest levels – lower than the US – include Russia, where there is only 4%. The US figure is closer to Iraq, where 7% say it is "often" or "sometimes" justified and 91% that it is "never" or "rarely" and Indonesia, 7% and 92% respectively.

Sahgal said the relatively low level of support for suicide bombings in the US fits into a larger pattern showing up differences between US Muslims and their co-religionists round the world. American Muslims are more accepting of the idea that there are various routes to heaven, not just Islam. Fifty-six percent of American Muslims take this view compared with the 18% global median.

According to the survey, Muslims worldwide tend to be friends mainly with other Muslims: the global median for those whose friends are only or mostly other Muslims is a high 95%. In America, though, about half of the Muslims will have friends who are non-Muslim. Only 48% of American Muslims said all or most of their friends were Muslim.

The defence reporter Spencer Ackerman, in a blogpost for Wired, in February, before the Boston bombings, put the number of terrorist incidents involving Muslims into perspective.

He wrote that American Muslims were largely resistant to attempts by al-Qaida to woo them. "Only 14 people out of a population of millions were indicted for their involvement in violent terrorist plots in 2012, a decline from 2011′s 21. The plots themselves hit the single digits last year."

"Terrorist incidents from American Muslims is on the decline for the third straight year. After an uptick in 2009, there were 18 plots in 2011 involving 21 US Muslims. And it's not just violent plots. Fewer Muslim-Americans are getting indicted for money laundering, material support for terrorism, and lying to investigators. There were 27 people indicted on those terror-support charges in 2010, eight in 2011 and six in 2012," he said.