How do attitudes toward Sharia differ between Muslims in majority-Muslim countries and Muslim immigrants in Western countries?

1. How much support exists in majority‑Muslim countries — and what does “support” mean?

Large majorities in many Muslim-majority countries say they want sharia to play an official role, with support rates ranging from near-unanimity in places like Afghanistan to single digits in some former Soviet states, demonstrating stark regional variation; Pew’s multi-country survey reports examples such as 99% in Afghanistan and much lower figures in Azerbaijan and parts of Central Asia ^{[1] [5]}. Yet the surveys and journalists emphasize that “support for sharia” is not a single policy prescription: respondents differ sharply on which parts of sharia they favor (family law vs. criminal punishments), whether it should apply to non‑Muslims, and how it should be implemented — meaning majority support often reflects a general desire for Islamic guidance rather than agreement on specific legal codes ^{[4] [6]}.

2. Interpretation and emphasis: family law, morality, and punishment

Across the Muslim world, attitudes vary about concrete elements of sharia: many favor applying it in domestic and family matters even if they reject severe criminal punishments, and large shares say existing national laws already reflect Islamic principles in some countries while others see their laws as insufficiently Islamic ^{[4] [5]}. Reporting finds that while support for sharia as a principle is widespread, most respondents do not uniformly endorse extreme corporal punishments or the death penalty for apostasy, illustrating internal limits on how people imagine sharia in practice ^{[5] [6]}.

3. The role of religiosity, legal history, and politics in majority contexts

Levels of religious observance correlate with support for making sharia official — for example, populations with higher daily prayer rates often show stronger backing — and constitutional or historical arrangements matter too: countries whose constitutions privilege Islam tend to record higher support for sharia than secular states do ^{[7] [1]}. Analysts at the Council on Foreign Relations note that colonial legacies, modernization pressures and Western-educated elites shaped modern legal systems in many Muslim-majority states, producing hybrid legal arrangements and divergent expectations about the proper balance between secular law and Islamic norms ^[3].

4. Muslim immigrants in Western countries: pluralism, social ties, and differing priorities

Survey comparisons indicate that Muslims in the United States and other Western settings are more likely than many in majority-Muslim countries to have close friends of other faiths and to accept religious pluralism; American Muslims, for instance, more commonly say other religions can lead to eternal life and report interfaith social ties, a pattern the Pew-based reporting highlights ^[2]. That greater interfaith contact and the experience of living under secular legal systems often produces more pragmatic or selectively applied views of sharia — prioritizing personal morality and family practices over the imposition of sharia as state law — although polling still finds diversity within immigrant communities ^{[2] [4]}.

5. Common misconceptions and the limits of the data

Media and public debate sometimes conflate desire for sharia with advocacy for extremist or monolithic legal imposition, but Reuters and Pew both stress that Muslims “are not equally comfortable with all aspects of sharia,” and that support seldom implies uniform endorsement of punitive measures or application to non‑Muslims ^{[6] [4]}. At the same time, the available reporting is survey‑based and cross‑national; it documents attitudes and correlations but cannot fully explain the causal pathways—such as how migration experience, socioeconomic change, or second‑generation dynamics reshape views over time—beyond what these sources studied ^{[4] [3]}.