The Search for Moderate Islam

Do you have any figures on where most of today's terrorism comes from, or do you just collect news stories about Muslim terrorists as an exercise in confirmation bias?In the European Union, it's fairly easy to track the ideologoical basis of terrorist attacks, since Europol publishes statistics on the issue every year. Figures for 2014 aren't out yet, but in 2013 only 7 people died in terrorist attacks in the EU (2015 has sadly topped this already). 1 was due to Islamic extremism, one to a far-right extremist, two to far-left extremists, and three to nationalist seperatists. I'd hazard a guess you all know about the Islamic one - the soldier murdered in Woolwich - but would be surprised in any of you have any memory of the other six deaths, which is something you should bear in mind when using 'stories I notice in the news' as your metric for estimating the relative rates of terrorism.This is just looking at deaths, of course. The vast majority of terrorist attacks fail or, if carried out, don't kill anyone. Looking at the full statistics for number of attempted and successful attacks; Europol in 2013 reported 84 by seperatist groups, 24 by leftists, and 2 by Islamists. This wasn't an odd outlier of a year either. Every year since they started published statistics, separatists have been responsible for by far the largest number of attacks.Now, if we're looking globally you may be correct that the majority of terrorist attacks are by Muslims at the moment, but this is not a timeless fact. Statistics are much harder to find here, but if I remember rightly it's only in the last 20 years that the number of suicide bombings by Muslims globally became larger than that committed by the Tamil Tigers, a nationalist or leftist organisation depending on how you want to look at it, but whose members are primarily Hindu or atheist.An important thing to note globally is that terrorist attacks are not distibuted evenly across the Muslim world; they cluster in specific places - currently Iraq and Syria, Pakistan, Yemen and Nigeria. Other majority Muslim countries like Djibouti, Azerbaijan and some of the gulf states, for example, have little to no problems with terrorism. This suggests, to me at least, that these terrorist hotspots are not some inevitable consequence of the local religion, but due to specific local political and social factors - just as the fact that most terrorism in the EU today happens in France, Spain, Greece and the UK is not due to anything inherent in the nature of these four countries.Hello everyone, by the way,

Let me know if you have any interest in reponding to anything I wrote.

I didn't read through the whole thread, but did you not find it yet? I read somewhere at the beginning the dubious qualifier that you weren't interested in 'moderate Muslims', but in 'moderate Islam', but which I presume you mean some clearly defined doctrinasl branch of the religion. So how about the Ahmadiyya sect? Their founder had this to say about how to treat non-Muslims.

quote:

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Islam teaches us to live with mutual love and affection and with humility. It teaches us no distinction between a Muslim or a non-Muslim. My message to everyone is that you must have ‘Love for all, Hatred for none!’

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Of course, Salafists would tell you that Ahmadis aren't really Muslims, but then Faith says Catholics aren't really Christians, and we don't listen to her.

Nonsense. Zionist terrorism began only in the 1920s, while the modern concept of terrorism probably dates back to Russian anarchist movements of the mid-19th century. By the end of the 19th century, anarchist terrorism was a big thing - with terrorist attacks by anarchists ending the lives of a Russian Tsar and Amercan and French Presidents, along with many other victims of lesser note.Terrorism is, of course, as old as politics. The only thing that changed in the 19th century was the invention of dynamite and bombs.

Amongst the targets bombed by the Irish Republican Brotherhood in their 1880s campaign were railway stations, bridges and the London Underground. Zionist terrorist groups were heavily influenced by the tactics of Irish Republicans who were old hands at the same thing.Amongst the anarchist terrorist attacks on the 19th century, one of the most famous was the bombing of the Liceu opera house in Barcelona, which killed 72 people, none Dukes. When asked in court how he could justify the murder of so many innocents in his bombing of a Paris cafe in 1894, anarchist Emile Henry opined that "there are no innocent bourgeois".

Catholicism and Protestantism are two different branches of a large religion with some doctrinal differences, which has led to much tribalist conflict between the two. Sunni and Shiite are two different branches of a large religion with some doctrinal differences, which has led to much tribalist conflict between the two. The article's claim that they are similar concepts is not a lie, on account of being true.A lie looks more like this: on account of being clearly false. The difference isn't that hard to grasp.

Of course it's not to those who care about these details, which is why I said the opposite, that "has led to much tribalist conflict between the two." Nor is the Catholic-Protestant split academic to those who care about such things - just ask Faith and the hateful Protestant preachers she's so fond of in Northern Ireland. I have many - it's a bit of a hobby. That's why I know that there's been plenty of peace as well as conflict between Shi'ites and Sunnis - including the millions who live peacably side by side today. In the late fifties the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, one of the most senior clerics in Sunni Islam, went so far as to issue a fatwa accepting Shi'a (along with the Druze) as schools of Islamic jurisprudence alongside the four Sunni schools.The modern Al-Azhar university has sadly turned its back on these ideas, but the current climate of extremism is not some endless and unchanging fact of life. The Sunni/Shi'a divide has meant very different things in different times and places, just as the Catholic/Protestant one has.

I understand how it's used by most people - to mean 'of interest only from a theoretical point of view and of no practical relevance'. I don't know if you're using it in some odd, idiosyncratic way, since it's always hard to say from the short, vague sentences you use in place of actually explaining what you mean. The split began as a dispute over who was the legitimate successor of Mohamed, if that's what you mean. Or are you asking why the distinction persists?

These are some of those who do not consider the Protestant/Catholic dispute academic: That's not an easy question to answer. The answer is certainly not 'on the death of the prophet Mohammed', as you're hoping for. There was violence at the time, but between Muslims and followers of other prospective prophets who popped up at the time. While it's hard to say much with certainty about the lives of Islam's early leaders, since everything we know comes from few sources heavily influenced by sectarianism, Ali (the first caliph according to Shi'ites) was still a collegue of the first three Sunni caliphs.If we want to put an arbitrary marker on the start of Sunni/Shi'a violence, we could say the Battle of Karbala in 680 - which was more a power struggle for control of the Caliphate that has retroactively gained religious significance by the growth of Sunnis as a sect.