February 03 ,2012
Islam’s Not So Bloody Borders
It really irritates me when I read the usual nonsense about how Muslims are trying to take over the world, and how we are more violent than anyone else. One of the usual pieces of evidence cited is the claim that Samuel Huntington, the late Harvard professor, made in his book “Clash of Civilizations”, that Islam has “bloody borders.” By which he meant that in the world of the early 1990s, when he wrote his book, a large proportion of the ongoing wars involved at least one side that was a Muslim-majority country. By this method, he concluded that there was something particularly violent in Muslim civilization.
Of course, there are several obvious problems with this approach. First, it would not be fair to look at a single year, wouldn’t a century give a better sense of whether any one type of country was more violent than another? Also, the definition of “war” is very broad, and the standard one used in academia is any armed conflict that has at least one thousand deaths per year. But then simply counting the number of wars isn’t really fair. Can the small number of deaths in the Moroccan war with Western Sahara rebels be seen as equally informative and significant as World War Two? Or even the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan?
In fact, if we judge by the total number of war deaths in the 20th century, a different picture emerges. 80% of the war deaths in the last hundred years were due to the First and Second World War, which were primarily initiated and fought by Christian nations. Does that tell us something useful in any way? Since 1950, the biggest war related death tolls have been Korea, Vietnam, Soviet-Afghan war, and the Iran-Iraq war. While the number of wars may be large on its face, in terms of significance, Muslim nations have played a minor role in the history of war-related deaths in the last hundred years.
What about the other major violent form of death in the 20th century, genocide? Scholars estimate 120 million people were killed by genocide in the last century, how much of that is due to Muslims? It turns out that 80% of the deaths were due to Mao (from communism, a product of Western civilization), Stalin (communism), Hitler (Nazism, another product of Western civilization), and Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist Chinese government. It just so happens that Chiang was a Christian.
Muslim countries have been involved in genocides (using the term to describe mass killings of civilian populations). The main ones were the Ottoman Turks and the Armenians in 1915 (about a million deaths), the Indonesian army against mostly the Chinese minority in 1965 (half a million deaths), the Pakistani army in Bangladesh in 1971 (about 1.5 million deaths), the Iraq army against the Kurds in 1989 (200,000 deaths), and the Sudanese against Darfur in the last decade (170,000 deaths). Sadly, Muslims have been involved in genocides in the last hundred years, but their “contribution” to the death toll is just a fraction of the total.
Now it is probably true that in the last 10 years, the majority of “international” terrorist incidents involved Muslim perpetrators, but if we look at all cases of terrorism the picture gets much broader. South America, India, and Africa all have problems with domestic terrorism that is not Muslim-related in any way. Terrorism is in fact highly exaggerated as a problem. Since 9/11, no civilian has been killed in the US as a result of terrorism. Meanwhile, 150,000 people have been murdered, and 350,000 have died in traffic accidents.
So why are there so many small wars in the last few decades involving Muslim countries? It is a result of botched decolonization for the most part, with groups being forced into one country that want to be apart, or forced to be apart when they want to be one country. The Palestinian conflict resulted from the fact that the Palestinians did not want Palestine partitioned into two countries. The Kurds have wanted their own state. The Kashmiris want to be in Pakistan and not India.
Even with all this data, there are many anti-Muslim bigots out there that insist that the Qur’an itself requires Muslims to go and kill for no reason, and that we are commanded to make war on the rest of the world until they become Muslim. This is nonsense, although perhaps Osama bin Laden believed it, but most of the bigots are literally picking out sentence fragments from the Qur’an to make their case.
To them I would say this. The Qur’an says many things about peace and war, and to understand what it is saying you have to read all of the relevant verses and then work your way logically through them to reach a conclusion. I’ve done that and this is what I know. The Qur’an clearly forbids Muslims from being the aggressor, but if you are attacked and forced to fight, then you should fight to win and kill your enemy (Qur’an 2:190). Muslims should always behave justly, justice is the highest virtue in the Qur’an and takes precedence over the interests of your family and even yourself (Qur’an 4:135). If you are in a war, and the other side offers peace, you must take up that offer, even if you fear that it is insincere and just a trick (Qur’an 4:61-62). And finally, rather than saying that Muslims should kill Jews and Christians, the Qur’an clearly says that they too can go to heaven along with everyone who believes in one God and does good works (Qur’an 2:62), and that a man may marry a Christian or Jewish woman (Qur’an 5:5).
This is the Islam I know, the kind that the bigots paint doesn’t exist.
