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Some thoughts on Islam and terrorist violence

Some thoughts on Islam and terrorist violence

Last updated on: August 29, 2026 at 8:42 pm by Dan Peterson

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Some thoughts on Islam and terrorist violence 2026-08-29T20:42:57-06:00 Dan Peterson

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My wife bought me this bag for Father’s Day a few years ago. The writing on it reads, in my translation, as follows: “There is no goal for this text except spreading terror in the souls of those who fear the Arabic language.” I love it.

Charles Kurzman, who is a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has carved out an important scholarly niche for himself. His published anthologies Liberal Islam: A Sourcebook (Oxford, 1998) and Modernist Islam (1840-1940): A Sourcebook (Oxford, 2002), for example, represent fundamental resources on the little-known (and often studiously ignored) tradition in modern Muslim thought advocating democracy and tolerance. On Kurzman’s website at kurzman.unc.edu, he has compiled “Islamic Statements Against Terrorism,” which is a reassuringly large number of such statements from Muslim leaders worldwide.

He’s also been publishing annual reports over the past few years on “Muslim-American Involvement with Violent Extremism.” For instance, the one covering 2016 showed that American residents were more likely to be murdered in that year because they were Muslims than they were to die at the hands of extremist Muslims.

A number of studies have demonstrated that American parents tend to seriously miscalculate the risks that their children face (see “5 Worries Parents Should Drop, And 5 They Shouldn’t” on npr.org), for instance.). The same appears to be true with respect to our evaluations of the threat posed by Islamist terrorism: A total of 159 Americans have been murdered by Muslim extremists in the United States since 11 September 2001 — out of more than 399,067 American homicides through 31 September 2025.

Kurzman’s 2011 Oxford volume, The Missing Martyrs: Why There Are So Few Muslim Terrorists, which he updated in a 2018 second edition, provides answers to a question that few Americans are asking. The fact is, though, that such Islamist terrorist leaders as Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri have long lamented the passiveness or inactivity of the vast majority of their fellow Muslims. And they have solid reason for their dissatisfaction. Fewer than 1 in 100,000 Muslims, Kurzman points out in The Missing Martyrs, have rallied to the extremist cause since 9/11. In fact, Islamic societies tend to be relatively nonviolent (see “No, Islam isn’t inherently violent, and the math proves it.”)

“Yet,” Kurzman observes,

terrorism dominates the headlines far out of proportion to its death toll. Terrorists are grimly successful at attracting public attention. Of the thousands of violent incidents that occur around the globe each day, the world media efficiently sifts for hints of terrorist motivations, then feeds these incidents over the wire services and satellite networks to news consumers who may not realize how rare terrorism really is. In this way the media are accomplices to terrorism. They bring the perpetrators’ message to vast audiences; without these audiences, the terror would only be felt locally. Indeed, if a terrorist act occurred and nobody heard about it, it would be a failure.

And Islamist terrorism, of course, captures the lion’s share of media attention. But there are plenty of other kinds of terrorism worldwide. American news media simply don’t devote much coverage to, say, anti-Sikh, anti-Muslim and anti-Christian violence in India.

Further, over the now more than sixteen decades since the close of the American Civil War in 1865, the second-most lethal terrorist act on American soil — by a considerable distance — has been Timothy McVeigh’s April 1995 bombing of a federal office building in Oklahoma City, which was motivated not by Islam, nor even by religion (McVeigh described himself as an agnostic), but by resentment toward the federal government.

Kurzman readily admits that the media are simply doing their job in reporting terrorist violence. But, he observes, the result of much media coverage is that ordinary members of the public trying to keep up with world affairs are often given a skewed picture of the prevalence of terrorism. Not, of course, that he dismisses the threat:

The bad news for Americans is this: Islamist terrorists really are out to get you. They cannot be deterred by prison sentences, ‘enhanced’ interrogations, or the prospect of death. They consider the United States to be their mortal enemy, and they would like to kill as many Americans as possible, in as dramatic a way as possible.

They are, he writes, “a brutal and inhumane bunch. It is worth taking them seriously.”

“The good news for Americans is this: there aren’t very many Islamist terrorists, and most of them are incompetent,” Kurzman writes.

They fight each other as much as they fight anybody else, and they fight their potential state sponsors most of all. They are outlaws on the run in every country in the world, and their bases have been reduced to ever-more-wild patches of remote territory, where they have to limit their training activities to avoid satellite surveillance.

Kurzman’s The Missing Martyrs provides an approachable, clear-headed perspective that will deflate several common and fundamental misconceptions about Islamist terrorism. And accurate information is always good.

[Note: The material above is slightly modified from a 2017 Bill Hamblin-Dan Peterson column in the Deseret News of which, as it happens, I was the sole author.]

A statue of the great twelfth-century Andalusian Arab philosopher, jurist, and Aristotle commentator Ibn Rushd (Averroës) in Córdoba, Spain. We’re, umm, not exactly talking about Ibn Rushd’s famous Aristotelian commentaries below. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

Over at the Peterson Obsession Board, one of the posters seems recently to have assumed the task of interpreting my thinking to his fellow board participants. (He takes his moniker there from a notable Book of Mormon robber and murderer.) It is, I suppose, a noble effort, though I don’t think that his prospects for success in this new enterprise are very high. I mean, his is an audience that seems, on the whole, to have tastes and predilections more suited to People Magazine or the National Enquirer than to, say, the Journal of the American Philosophical Association. Most of them appear to have a ravenous appetite for gossipy speculation. But for actual ideas and arguments? Maybe offline, perhaps. (Who knows?) There’s little evidence of any deep thinking among most of those on the POB. Just personal contempt, insults, and hostility. And, sometimes, self-congratulation.

In any case, my commentator’s track record thus far isn’t especially impressive, notwithstanding (or, perhaps more accurately, partly because of) his recent endorsement by the ever-mendacious and continually juvenile (≈)Everybody’s WC. He plainly thinks, despite his palpable animus, that he understands my views, but his attempted summaries of Peterson Thought are unrecognizable to me. (“Don’t believe me?” he writes at the end of one fundamentally misguided exposition. “Ask him!” Which, of course, nobody has. Including him.) As the saying goes, he’s almost always wrong, but never in doubt. But he’s undeniably clever, so I’m reminded of what is sometimes called the “second corollary” to Murphy’s Law: “It’s impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious.”

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