Robert Spencer: New Study Claims Muslims Are the World’s Happiest People

Here is more of the West’s suicidal self-hatred, yet again emanating from academia: the UK’s Daily Mail reported Thursday that “Muslim people feel the most satisfied with their lives because they feel more ‘oneness,’ or connection than people of other faiths, a new study suggests.” Why the establishment media feels the need constantly to cover for an even proselytize for Islam is unclear, but it is certainly a project that it pursues indefatigably.

Not surprisingly, the source of the Daily Mail’s latest proselytizing effort is German academics at the University of Mannheim. “Measuring life satisfaction,” says the Daily Mail, “is about as close to quantifying ‘happiness’ as we’ve been able to get thus far, and a German psychologist’s new study suggests that a feeling of ‘oneness’ predicts overall contentment.”

Lo and behold, by this scale, Muslims turn out to be positively blissful: “And when the researchers divided their 67,562 survey respondents by religion, Muslims felt the greatest sense of oneness.”

The academics determined that “among all groups, Muslims were most likely to believe that they were connected to something larger than themselves, according to the new study, published in the journal of the American Psychological Association. Second to Muslims, Christians that considered themselves neither Catholics nor Protestants reported the greatest average oneness beliefs, followed by Buddhists and Hindus.”

One would probably have to be an academic to take this sort of thing seriously. And of course the Daily Mail, the worst paper in the Western world, runs with it eagerly.

But what the Daily Mail does not tell you is the fact that there are many such studies. Evangelical Christians have published studies saying they’re the happiest, most contented people. I’m sure others have as well. Happiness is a subjective thing and the purpose of such studies is simply to tout the virtues of joining the happy group in question.

Nor does the Daily Mail mention the fact that the Qur’an offers believers a pathway to happiness: jihad. The Islamic holy book tells believers that they can find comfort and remove their “fury” by fighting against unbelievers: “Fight them; Allah will punish them by your hands and will disgrace them and give you victory over them and satisfy the breasts of a believing people and remove the fury in the believers’ hearts.” (9:14-15)

And happiness in other senses is un-Islamic anyway. Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini famously said: “Allah did not create man so that he could have fun. The aim of creation was for mankind to be put to the test through hardship and prayer. An Islamic regime must be serious in every field. There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humor in Islam. There is no fun in Islam. There can be no fun and joy in whatever is serious.”

There is also the possibility that the Muslims surveyed by the University of Mannheim researchers really are happier than everyone else, because Islam is a closed system that purports to explain and provide the rules of acceptable behavior for every aspect of life, and which has a unique contempt and even hatred for other worldviews and belief systems. This might foster in Muslims, whom the Qur’an terms “the best of people” (3:110) a feeling of superiority over unbelievers, “the most vile of created beings” (Qur’an 98:6), which might translate to a smugness that could appear to clueless outsiders as actual happiness.

In any case, no matter how many such studies are published, the claim that Muslims are happier than everyone else can never be truly substantiated, and to publicize this claim is all part of the establishment media’s relentless efforts to normalize Islam and reduce suspicions about jihad terrorism and Sharia oppression among the public in Western Europe and North America.

Would the Daily Mail publish a study claiming to find that Christians or anyone else were the happiest people in the world? Not on your life. But this is the age of pandemic Islamopandering.

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His new book is The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.