Yet both Britain and the United States are at the same time held up by many Muslims as the best representatives of what is most admired about the West — the freedom of its citizens.

While admiring Western values, many Muslims feel they are not respected by the West and that the values the West espouses, such as democracy, are only given lip service when it comes to applying them in the Muslim world.

A recent example was the 2006 election in the Palestinian territories, which the Islamist movement Hamas won in a free and fair poll. The United States and Israel have since done much to ignore the result and try to push Hamas out of office.

“More than 65 percent of Egyptians, Jordanians and Iranians believe that the United States will not allow people in their region to fashion their own political future the way they see fit without direct US influence,” Mogahed said.

“When we asked Muslims around the world what the West can do to improve relations with the Muslim world, the most frequent responses were for the West to demonstrate more respect for Islam and to regard Muslims as equals, not as inferior.”

US surveys show that Americans do in fact have a low opinion of Muslims, with only 34 per cent of those polled by Gallup saying they had no prejudice towards Muslims and 19 per cent saying they had a “great deal” of prejudice.

When the authors looked at where opinions of the West were lowest in the Muslim world, it tended to correlate with where conflicts were going on — nations bordering Iraq or Israel and the Palestinian territories were more negative in their views.

... contd.