Terrorist Muslims! Hide Behind the Couch!

Sometimes I get requests to google things because 1) I'm super good at googling and 2) I'm relatively good at synthesizing information and regurgitating it. 

Request today: are all Sunnis terrorists?

Answer, no.

Wait! I didn't google yet... OK so seriously, this wasn't a genuine question. We already know the answer, but it was actually a request for verifiable statistics about Islamic extremism and Sunni involvement in terrorism, specifically.

So, just to clarify, I'm starting off here pretty much raw, what I know about Islam comes directly from World Religions by Huston Smith, and I haven't read that book in like a million years. I know tons about medieval Muslim culture in North Africa and Southern Europe, but honestly that has nothing to do with this. So, lets say you know more than me and I get something wrong, please tell me (*cough cough* Zara; ok now I hope you've actually read this). Thanks.

So let's start with some definitions, Islam is, of course, the religion based on the teachings of Mohamed as recorded in the Koran (this is the version my spell check likes, so I'm using it to avoid the annoying wavy red line). Fundamentalism, according to google's dictionary is “a form of a religion, especially Islam or Protestant Christianity, that upholds belief in the strict, literal interpretation of scripture”. So that clears that up. I'm gonna bet that fundamentalists don't have to be terrorists. Why? Remember how I said I know a lot about Muslim culture from the Middle Ages? Yeah, that's why. In the middle ages, Islamic minorities ruled several non-Islamic states without resorting to large scale religious oppression. This is despite the fact that several Popes had condoned all violence against Saracens in the Holy Land as a way to get out of purgatory. It's interesting to note that, during the Crusades (which were not fought solely in the Holy Land, but also throughout Europe against pagans and heretics), Muslims were considered to be either pagans who worshiped Mohamed, as a god or followers of Mohamed. who was in fact simply a Christian heretic. In modern times Islam has become known as a member of the Abrahamic tradition, and Catholic Catechism states that as believers in the god of Abraham, Muslims will also be saved on the last day. The Koran itself states that Jews, Christians and Sabian (Gnostic Hermetic Christians), among others, were as eligible for judgment as Muslims, this perhaps accounts for a greater degree of religious tolerance for Christians by Muslims than the other way around.

The religious split that is vaguely recognized by the western press as “sectarianism” occurred in Islam immediately following the death of Mohamed. Briefly, it went like this: Sunnis believe that the prophet did not not appoint his successor and so elected Mohamed's father-in-law Abdullah ibn Abi Qhuhafah (Abu Bakr Siddique) as Caliph (basically, Caliph means community leader, specifically here, he was intended to be Mohamed's successor): Shias believe that the decedents of Mohamed hold a particular place of spiritual importance and they elected `Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib, cousin and son-in-law of Mohamed, as Caliph. Several more sects followed, and obviously any person of any group can be a fundamentalist of that group, but we'll stop there, because these two, the Sunni and the Shia are by far the two largest denominations of Islam, and Sunni extremism is the main focus of the question.

So here's the thing about understanding Islamic ideas, there is no one way to interpret them. This is, in fact, one of the ultimate truths about any group of religions. If you climb inside the Bible it is chock a block full of precepts, directives, and admonitions, in both testaments, and there's quite a few that disagree with one another, and a whole bunch that modern Christians ignore completely, which makes sense, because honestly most of it has nothing to do with how we live our lives now. The same is true of Islam. You've heard of Sharia, the set of laws that Muslims follow? It's the same thing. Where Sharia is not interpreted by a governing body, it's up to the individual to choose how to behave, and even when there is some oversight, there are wide differences between one group and another as to how laws are interpreted, or even what is a law and what isn't.

Ok, what about Jihad? Jihad is what causes terrorism, right? Here's the translation provided by wikipedia of the relevant passages of the Koran:

2:190 Fight in the way of Allah those who fight you but do not transgress. Indeed. Allah does not like transgressors.
2:191 And kill them wherever you overtake them and expel them from wherever they have expelled you, and fitnah is worse than killing. And do not fight them at al-Masjid al-Haram until they fight you there. But if they fight you, then kill them. Such is the recompense of the disbelievers.
2:192 And if they cease, then indeed, Allah is Forgiving and Merciful. 2:193 Fight them until there is no [more] fitnah and [until] worship is [acknowledged to be] for Allah . But if they cease, then there is to be no aggression except against the oppressors.

So that's... vague. Fitnah, you might be wondering, means something like “persecution” in this context. So again, this is a concept that is open to interpretation by disparate groups and thinkers. This is a conflicting texts issue, in places in the Koran, we are told that worship should not be compulsory, but in others, that those who do not believe in Allah and the last day should be fought. What's a confused person to think?

I'm not going to get into the argument about whether or not Islam is a peaceful religion, or whether or not Jihad is about violence or not, I won't even weigh in on the multifaceted criticisms of terrorist philosophy. Lots of really interesting arguments have been made by a lot more educated persons than me. It's important to note that polls consistently show that a large minority of Muslims believe that violence is often justified in a number of famous cases, such as 9/11, 7/7, and honor killings. These opinions however, are just that opinions. 93% of Muslims are in fact moderates. How can this be? Well, consider the people you know, how many of them would jump at the chance to run off to a different country and kill people who disagree with them? Not many, I bet. But if you view polls, the American populace is split right down the middle as to whether or not the war in Iraq was a good idea or not, and a lot of people think that the war in Afghanistan was a great idea, but that Barack Obama is fouling it up, mostly by not fighting enough. Sunni Muslim extremists are responsible for about 70% of all terrorist killings, the next most active group being anarchists. Just for funsies, here's an article from the Washington Post about how war is actually good for us.

So the short answer is this: out of 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, only 7% are fundamentalists, compared to 2 billion Christians, 10% of whom are fundamentalists; as much as 90% of Muslims could be considered Sunni, so by basic math even if all the fundamentalist Muslims were Sunni (which they aren't), it's not possible for all Sunnis to be fundamentalists; even if we only calculate “approval of terrorism” we're still looking at less than half of the population of Muslims who consider any terrorist action to ever be justifiable, as opposed to more than half of the Christian population of the United States, that thinks that war against groups of people who have nothing to do with terrorism, as retaliation against terrorism, is awesome. So, wait, who are the terrorists?