Pew Survey of Muslims

So I stayed up last night reading this Pew report on world Muslim opinion. As usual, there are problems of methodology and language barriers.  I have talked to John Zogby and to director at Gallup before about such problems.  I learned from Gallup that they phrase the questions in English and then translate them, for example.  And that they often do the interviews face-to-face escorted by government minders in Saudi Arabia or Egypt (under Mubarak).   I think that the ability of people to be frank or to deviate from government line is impaired.  Some questions don't even make sense in Arabic like this biblical question:  "% saying Islam's holy book should be read literally, word for word".    These questions are extrapolated from one religion and culture into another.  Even the comprehensive surveys of University of Michigan's Ronald Ingelhart suffers from problems: in his massive Human Values volume, you learn that Muslims in Turkey (90% of them) don't like to be neighbors with...other Muslims.  Obviously, someone mistranslated a question in that questionnaire.  On the sectarian differences, you find that House of Saud's work of sectarian hatred have been rather effective: of course, in Lebanon and Iraq there are less Sunnis who think that Shi`ites are not Muslims because there are intermarriages there.  They can't justify intermarrying with non-Muslism.  Fu'ad Sanyurah of the Hariri coalition in Lebanon is an active member of an ugly sectarian movement but his sister is married to a Shi`ite and other members of his family are intermarried with Shi`ites.  The report should be read but with caution.