A survey of schools in the German region of Lower Saxony has shown that close to 10 per cent of Muslim students have direct sympathies for radical Islamic groups like Islamic State and some even support acts of terrorism.
One in three of the Muslim students who responded to the survey said that they would be willing to fight and die for Islam.
Twenty-seven per cent said they agreed with the statement: “The Islamic laws of Sharia, according to which, for example, adultery or homosexuality are severely punished, are much better than the German laws,” Die Welt reports.
Eight per cent said they agreed with the creation of an Islamic empire or caliphate in the Middle East through the use of force. A further 3.8 per cent said they agreed that sometimes it was justified for Muslims to engage in acts of terrorism to further their goals.
A fifth of the Muslim students agreed that Muslims are oppressed all over the world and they have to defend themselves by force, and 18.6 per cent said that it was the duty of Muslims to spread Islam and “fight unbelievers”.
The results come from a study conducted in 2015 that had previously not been made public. Criminologist Christian Pfeiffer made the data public as part of his own study into the cause of immigrant crime. The authors of the original study point out that only 280 Muslim students answered the survey but added that the results were noteworthy.
Previous studies of young Muslims have shown similar results and attitudes leading some to speculate that Muslim youth are a “ticking timebomb” of radicalism.
Young Muslims have been shown to be extremely open to extremist ideas in recent years with many notable cases of underage Muslims travelling to the Middle East to join the Islamic State or conducting terror attacks in Germany.
In some cases, the underage Muslims are asylum seekers like in the case of the failed bombing of a music festival in Ansbach in 2016.
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