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Sentencing the Rochdale gang yesterday, Judge Gerald Clifton appeared to give credence to the idea that cultural issues were involved. "All of you treated [the victims] as though they were worthless and beyond respect," he told the men. "One of the factors leading to that was the fact that they were not part of your community or religion."

However, when asked to what extent they agreed or disagreed that homosexuality should be legal in Britain, 18% said they agreed and 52% said they disagreed, compared with 5% among the public at large who disagreed. Almost half (47%) said they did not agree that it was acceptable for a gay person to become a teacher, compared with 14% of the general population.



In a series of questions on the terror threat in Britain, 4% said they sympathised with people who took part in suicide bombings (1% said they completely sympathised and 3% said they sympathised to some extent), and 4% said they sympathised with people who committed terrorist actions as a form of political protest generally.



Nearly a quarter (23%) supported the introduction of sharia law in some areas of Britain, and 39% agreed that “wives should always obey their husbands”, compared with 5% of the country as a whole. Two-thirds (66%) said they completely condemned people who took part in stoning adulterers, and a further 13% condemned them to some extent. Nearly a third (31%) thought it was acceptable for a British Muslim man to have more than one wife, compared with 8% of the wider population.



ICM conducted face-to-face, at-home interviews with a representative sample of 1,000 Muslims across the UK between 25 April and 31 May 2015. A control sample of 1,008 people representative of the country as a whole were interviewed over the phone to provide a comparison.


The polling was commissioned by Channel 4 for a documentary, What British Muslims Really Think, which is due to be broadcast on Wednesday presented by Phillips.



Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, he said: “On specific issues – families, sexuality, gender, attitudes towards Jews and on questions of violence and terrorism – the centre of gravity of British Muslim opinion is some distance away from the centre of gravity of everyone else’s opinion.



“One in six Muslims say they would like to live more separately, a quarter would like to live under sharia law. It means that as a society we have a group of people who basically do not want to participate in the way that other people [do].



“What we also found is that there is a correspondence between this desire to live separately and sympathy for terrorism. People who want to live separately are about twice as likely to say that they have sympathy for terrorist acts. Anybody, including most people in the Muslim community, would find that extremely worrying.”