A poll purporting to show that one in five British Muslims had “sympathy for jihadis” was constructed by calling people with “Muslim surnames” in an effort to complete an affordable survey of opinion in the week after the Paris terror attacks.

Survation – the polling company used by the Sun – said it had picked out likely respondents using the help of an academic expert on naming, a method that rival polling companies said did not necessarily amount to a representative sample of the British Muslim population.

The controversial methodology was used to underpin a front-page story in Monday’s edition of the Sun – headlined 1 in 5 Brit Muslims’ sympathy for jihadis – after 19.5% of those surveyed said that they had either a lot or some sympathy with young Muslims who leave the UK to join fighters in Syria.

Survation told the Guardian that it arrived at a list of people to question after filtering its database of 42 million profiles against a list of what it described as “1,500 Muslim surnames”. The company then asked whether the people it had identified by this method were Muslim or not before proceeding.

Survation was approached by the Sun because the paper’s regular pollsters, YouGov, “didn’t want to do the poll”. YouGov said it did not want to carry out the study because it could not be confident that it could accurately represent the British Muslim population within the timeframe and budget set by the paper.

A spokesperson said: “To survey Britain’s Muslim population, particularly at a time of such heightened sensitivities, requires the kind of time, care, and therefore cost, that is beyond a newspaper’s budget.”

Other pollsters told the Guardian that it could require tens of thousands of phone calls at a cost of tens of thousands of pounds to generate a statistically representative sample of the 2.7 million Muslims who live in the UK.

It cannot be determined how representative the Survation sample is because of a lack of various socioeconomic and demographic details.

Opinion polling has been under pressure since the general election, when all the pollsters failed to predict a Conservative majority government. Subsequent analysis by the companies has suggested problems with the accuracy of sampling was one of the likely causes of the debacle.

There were also concerns about the phrasing of the question used by the newspaper and pollster. A total of 5% of respondents agreed with the statement “I have a lot of sympathy with young Muslims who leave the UK to join fighters in Syria” – while 14.5% said they had some sympathy.

Critics said the use of the term “sympathy” was ambiguous and open to misinterpretation, adding that it was not spelled out who was meant by “fighters in Syria”.

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Ben Page, chief executive of Ipsos Mori, said: “The main issue with this poll is the reporting, which made it appear that one in five of those sampled supported Isis, when in fact they were expressing sympathy with people going to fight in Syria, as I understand it, which could of course include British ex-servicemen fighting against Isis with the Kurds, or anti-Assad Muslim forces who are also fighting against Isis.”

A similar poll conducted by Survation for Sky News in March showed a higher proportion of Muslims – 28% – showed at least some sympathy with young Muslims leaving the UK to join fighters in Syria. Non-Muslims were also polled, using the same word, and 14% agreed they had at least some sympathy with the statement.

About half of the people sampled in the Sun poll also responded to the Sky News poll and had said they were happy to be contacted again.



One of Britain’s largest Islamic organisations, the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), accused the Sun of “sensationalising” the poll findings.

“Many Muslims will find this poll hard to believe,” said Dr Shuja Shafi, secretary general of the MCB, who added that the “vast majority” of British Muslims “abhor” terrorism.

“Poll after poll attests to this, as do the many surveys showing how almost all British Muslims would report someone from the Muslim community to the police if they knew they were planning an act of violence.”

“Of course, even one person harbouring sympathy for the Daesh death cult is one too many. Terrorism is indeed a problem and many a British Muslim parent is worried whether their children may be lured to go off to in the chaos in Syria.

“But dubious headlines as that printed today in the Sun does not help matters. The grand strategy of Daesh is to divide our communities and stoke fear between communities. We should not play their game.”

Adil Ray, the creator and star of the BBC 1 sitcom Citizen Khan, said that he was among those who were called for the survey, adding that “every question was open to distortion.”

He told the Guardian that he didn’t want to take part in the poll but wanted to know what some of the questions were.

“With the ‘sympathy’ question I remember thinking ‘that’s such an odd question to ask and so easily misconstrued’,” said Ray, who confirmed that he was asked at the start of the conversation if he was a Muslim. “Saying ‘no sympathy’ felt like the closest answer. What I wanted to say is that I had some understanding of why they chose to fight.”

He added: “The Sun has a great responsibility to do what it can to create a better understanding between us all. Not to further divide us. Surely the Sun, with its recent past, would do well to demonstrate some humanity in these difficult times.”

Ray said even the person who had called him agreed that the phrasing of a question about whether Muslims were responsible or not responsible for the lack of integration “wasn’t correct”.

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Maajid Nawaz, the chairman of the Quilliam Foundation, tweeted: “In conclusion, the Sun has made it harder to have vital conversation around worrying levels of support for Islamism. All for a cheap headline.”



Others criticising the newspaper included Humza Yousaf, a minister in the Scottish government, who tweeted that the front page was “inflammatory, flawed and puts Muslims at risk of further abuse.”

A spokesperson for the Sun said: “Most of our survey, commissioned after the Paris atrocities, probed Muslim attitudes to IS [Isis] specifically. No one agreeing to the statement ‘I have a lot of sympathy with young Muslims who leave the UK to join fighters in Syria’ was in any doubt which fighters we meant.

“Some on the political left claim ours was a ‘rogue’ poll. In fact, the numbers expressing sympathy for jihadists were down on similar surveys by the BBC and Sky after January’s Charlie Hebdo massacre.”



