And a cursory look at the data shows that from 1994-2008, I found that 204 high-casualty terrorist bombings occurred worldwide and that Islamists were responsible for 125, or 61 percent, of these incidents, accounting for 70 percent of all deaths.
I exclude from the data all terrorist incidents that occurred in Iraq after the American invasion, and I consider attacks on occupying military forces anywhere to be guerilla resistance, not terrorism. I also use a restrictive definition of “Islamist” and classify attacks by Chechen separatists as ethnonational rather than Islamist terrorism. In other words, even when we define both “terrorism” and “Islamist” restrictively, thereby limiting the number of incidents and casualties that can be blamed on Islamists, Islamists come out as the prime culprits.
So, all that would seem to suggest Islam is more violent, right?
Not so. Rewind fifty or a hundred years and it was communists, anarchists, fascists, and others who thought than any means justified their glorious ends. Even now, Islamists are by no means the sole perpetrators. The Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka and Colombia’s “narcoterrorists” blow up civilians and have nothing to do with Islam. In the United States, law enforcement considers the “sovereign citizens movement” to be a greater threat than Islamist terrorists. However, Islamists do commit most of the terrorism globally these days.
Look more closely, though, and you’ll see they don’t attack in the West very often. Of the 125 attacks committed by Islamists that I studied, 77—62 percent—of them were committed in predominantly Muslim countries, and their victims were overwhelmingly other Muslims. Another 40 attacks took place in just three countries—Israel, India, and the Philippines. Only four of the 125 attacks happened in the Western Hemisphere or Europe. They were ghastly and dramatic, just as they were intended to be. But they were, and still are, rare.
… Things get even more interesting when we look at other ways that people kill each other besides terrorism. In one of the most influential works of social science penned in the late 20th century, Samuel Huntington claimed that Muslim societies are “bloody.” He asserted that they experience more major intrastate political violence, meaning civil wars, rebellions, interethnic clashes, and sustained government repression. These types of violence claim far more lives than do terrorist acts, which take the form of one-off events.
Huntington provided no support for his claim, and I tested it. The world experienced 235 episodes of intrastate violence that claimed over one thousand lives between 1946 and 2007. A total of just over 21 million people lost their lives in these conflicts.
Huntington’s thesis about Muslim bloodiness fares badly when we look at the evidence. In predominantly Muslim countries, on average, 0.65 percent of the population perished in major episodes of intrastate violence. In non-Muslim countries, 0.72 percent died in such episodes on average. In the postwar period, Muslim countries suffered slightly less severely from loss of life in major episodes of political violence than non-Muslim countries.
Analyzing the data is tricky. In order to have confidence in the results, it’s necessary to crunch the numbers in a multitude of ways. But any way you slice the data Huntington’s thesis falls flat. Muslim societies are not more prone to mass political violence than others.
What about violent crime? Here Muslims are way behind the rest of us—and in a good way. Homicide rates in Muslim-majority countries average about two murders per annum per 100,000 people. In non-Muslim countries, the average rate is about 8 per 100,000. Murder rates fluctuate from year to year, but they are consistently low in Muslim societies. The homicide rate in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim country, is 1 per 100,000—one-fifth the rate of the world’s largest Christian country, the United States. Christian countries live with murder rates that are unknown in the Muslim world. Brazilians and Mexicans are used to murder rates in the 15-25 range; the rate in Venezuela tops 50. Turks, Egyptians, Iranians, and Malaysians live with rates in the 2-4 range. In a good year, Christian South Africa lives with a murder rate of around 30. In a bad year, the rate in Muslim Senegal is one-tenth of that. Anyone who is skeptical of these numbers is invited to walk through minaret-dotted Dakar and steeple-studded Johannesburg at night and compare their experiences in the two cities. For that matter, have a stroll after dark in the low-income areas of Istanbul or Ankara. Then do so in Philadelphia or Oakland.
