christiefan915
Catalyst
There's a lot more to this article than the C & P here and the author makes some very good points.
...Of course it isn’t a religion of violence. If it were, why would so many Muslim societies be so peaceful?
The savagery of the terror assaults perpetrated by ISIS and its franchise groups has helped build support for claims in the West that Islam is a religion of violence. But the faith of 1.8 billionMuslims, almost a quarter of the world’s population, is far too complex and open to far too many competing interpretations, to be reduced to simplistic slogans like a “religion of violence”—or indeed a “religion of peace.” Islam is both.
What is striking about the current debate is how extraordinarily little its participants appear to know about the extent of Muslim—and non-Muslim—violence. It appears, for example, that none of the anti-Muslim critics are aware that, with respect to the single greatest source of deadly intentional violence worldwide, Muslim societies are among the least violent in the world.
This reality might seem to lend credence to claims that Islam is indeed an inherently violent religion, but this is to confuse the ultra-violent ideology of a very small minority of Muslims at a particular point in time with the Islamic religion as it is understood and practiced today by the overwhelming majority of a billion-plus Muslims worldwide. This majority, of course, despises the gross brutality of ISIS, al-Qaida, and the other ultra-violent Islamist groups. The animus of mainstream Islam is hardly surprising—ISIS has mostly killed fellow Muslims...
Given today’s headlines, it may come as a surprise to learn that in the 1970s there were no major conflicts involving Islamist radicals being waged around the world. This raises an obvious question. If Islam is in fact an inherently violent religion, how do we account for these—and many other—long periods of peacefulness within Muslim societies? Discussions about the violence of contemporary Islam focus overwhelmingly on armed conflict and terrorism. But a more appropriate metric for determining the propensity for violence of a particular society, culture, or religion is the incidence of intentional homicide. In almost all societies it is murder, not war, that accounts for the large majority of intentional killings...
It is far more difficult to mount an armed campaign against a state than to kill an individual. And even today, wars directly affect only a relatively small minority of countries. All countries suffer from homicides, however. In 2015, the Global Burden of Armed Violence published by the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey, found that between 2007 and 2012, for every individual killed in war or terror campaigns around the world, seven individuals were murdered....
So if there really is an inherent—Islam-driven—propensity for deadly violence in Muslim societies, we should expect to find that the greater the percentage of Muslims in society, the greater would be the numbers of homicides. In fact, the reverse is the case: The higher the percentage of Muslims in a society, the lower the homicide rate...
In 2011, a major study by University of California, Berkeley, political scientist M. Steven Fish presented cross-national statistical data showing that between 1994 and 2007, annual homicide rates in the Muslim world averaged just 2.4 per 100,000 of the population. That was approximately a third of the rate for the non-Muslim world and less than the average rate in Europe. It is also approximately half the homicide rate in the United States.
In comparing individual countries, the difference is even greater. The latest homicide statistics from the U.N.’s Office on Drugs and Crime reveal that for every murder perpetrated in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim state, seven people are murdered in the United States. This reality should give American Islamophobes pause.
It is possible in principle, as some critics have argued, that the lower murder rates in Muslim countries could be due not to a generally low propensity for homicide but to authoritarian governments whose harsh anti–violent crime policies are more effective in reducing the incidence of murder than those of democracies like the United States. But Fish’s careful statistical analyses controlled for this possibility and found no evidence to support it...
(Continued)
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_...m_isn_t_inherently_violent_or_peaceful.2.html
...Of course it isn’t a religion of violence. If it were, why would so many Muslim societies be so peaceful?
The savagery of the terror assaults perpetrated by ISIS and its franchise groups has helped build support for claims in the West that Islam is a religion of violence. But the faith of 1.8 billionMuslims, almost a quarter of the world’s population, is far too complex and open to far too many competing interpretations, to be reduced to simplistic slogans like a “religion of violence”—or indeed a “religion of peace.” Islam is both.
What is striking about the current debate is how extraordinarily little its participants appear to know about the extent of Muslim—and non-Muslim—violence. It appears, for example, that none of the anti-Muslim critics are aware that, with respect to the single greatest source of deadly intentional violence worldwide, Muslim societies are among the least violent in the world.
This reality might seem to lend credence to claims that Islam is indeed an inherently violent religion, but this is to confuse the ultra-violent ideology of a very small minority of Muslims at a particular point in time with the Islamic religion as it is understood and practiced today by the overwhelming majority of a billion-plus Muslims worldwide. This majority, of course, despises the gross brutality of ISIS, al-Qaida, and the other ultra-violent Islamist groups. The animus of mainstream Islam is hardly surprising—ISIS has mostly killed fellow Muslims...
Given today’s headlines, it may come as a surprise to learn that in the 1970s there were no major conflicts involving Islamist radicals being waged around the world. This raises an obvious question. If Islam is in fact an inherently violent religion, how do we account for these—and many other—long periods of peacefulness within Muslim societies? Discussions about the violence of contemporary Islam focus overwhelmingly on armed conflict and terrorism. But a more appropriate metric for determining the propensity for violence of a particular society, culture, or religion is the incidence of intentional homicide. In almost all societies it is murder, not war, that accounts for the large majority of intentional killings...
It is far more difficult to mount an armed campaign against a state than to kill an individual. And even today, wars directly affect only a relatively small minority of countries. All countries suffer from homicides, however. In 2015, the Global Burden of Armed Violence published by the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey, found that between 2007 and 2012, for every individual killed in war or terror campaigns around the world, seven individuals were murdered....
So if there really is an inherent—Islam-driven—propensity for deadly violence in Muslim societies, we should expect to find that the greater the percentage of Muslims in society, the greater would be the numbers of homicides. In fact, the reverse is the case: The higher the percentage of Muslims in a society, the lower the homicide rate...
In 2011, a major study by University of California, Berkeley, political scientist M. Steven Fish presented cross-national statistical data showing that between 1994 and 2007, annual homicide rates in the Muslim world averaged just 2.4 per 100,000 of the population. That was approximately a third of the rate for the non-Muslim world and less than the average rate in Europe. It is also approximately half the homicide rate in the United States.
In comparing individual countries, the difference is even greater. The latest homicide statistics from the U.N.’s Office on Drugs and Crime reveal that for every murder perpetrated in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim state, seven people are murdered in the United States. This reality should give American Islamophobes pause.
It is possible in principle, as some critics have argued, that the lower murder rates in Muslim countries could be due not to a generally low propensity for homicide but to authoritarian governments whose harsh anti–violent crime policies are more effective in reducing the incidence of murder than those of democracies like the United States. But Fish’s careful statistical analyses controlled for this possibility and found no evidence to support it...
(Continued)
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_...m_isn_t_inherently_violent_or_peaceful.2.html