The Missing Martyrs: Why There Are So Few Muslim Terrorists
Charles Kurzman
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 0199766878
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Why are there so few Muslim terrorists? With more than a billion Muslims in the world--many of whom supposedly hate the West and ardently desire martyrdom--why don't we see terrorist attacks every day? Where are the missing martyrs?
In this startlingly counterintuitive book, a leading authority on Islamic movements demonstrates that terrorist groups are thoroughly marginal in the Muslim world. Charles Kurzman draws on government sources, public opinion surveys, election results, and in-depth interviews with Muslims in the Middle East and around the world. He finds that young Muslims are indeed angry with what they see as imperialism--and especially at Western support for local dictatorships. But revolutionary Islamists have failed to reach them, as can be seen from the terrorists' own websites and publications, which constantly bemoan the dearth of willing recruits.
Kurzman notes that it takes only a small cadre of committed killers to wreak unspeakable havoc. But that very fact underscores his point. As easy as terrorism is to commit, few Muslims turn to violence. Out of 140,000 murders in the United States since 9/11, Islamist terrorists have killed at most three dozen people. Of the 150,000 people who die each day, worldwide, Islamist militants account for fewer than fifty fatalities--and only ten per day outside of the hotspots of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan. The real bulwark against Islamist violence, Kurzman finds, is Muslims themselves, who reject both the goals of the terrorists and their bloody means. With each bombing, the terrorists lose support among Muslims.
Incisive and authoritative, The Missing Martyrs provides much-needed corrective to deep-seated and destructive misconceptions about Muslims and the Islamic world. The threat of Islamist terrorism is real, Kurzman shows, but its dimensions are, so far, tightly confined.
ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror
Terrorists Creed: Fanatical Violence and the Human Need for Meaning
Critical Terrorism Studies: A New Research Agenda
Domestic Terrorism (Roots of Terrorism)
in Palestine during the British colonial period, argued in his most widely distributed pamphlet, The Defense of Muslim Lands, that the two most important sites for Islamist activism are Afghanistan and Palestine. For most Muslims, he wrote, Afghanistan comes first—“not because Afghanistan is more important than Palestine, not at all, Palestine is the foremost Islamic problem. It is the heart of the Islamic world, and it is a blessed land, but there are some reasons which make Afghanistan the
emerged to run for seats in the Indonesian parliament, along with dozens of other parties. With remarkably high voter turnout, the United Development Party dropped to 11 percent in 1999, then 8 percent in 2004, then 5 percent in 2009, while a new liberal Islamic party committed to toleration and democracy, Abdurrahman Wahid’s National Awakening Party, earned 17 percent in 1999. Several hard-line Islamist parties won only 1 to 3 percent of the vote. From the first free parliamentary election in
liberal, multicultural, and Third Worldist political biases that they failed to notice the emergence of Islamist terrorism: “Twenty years of denial had produced mostly banalities about American bias and ignorance, and fantasies about Islamists as democratizers and reformers. These contributed to the public complacency about terrorism that ultimately left the United States vulnerable to ‘surprise’ attack by Islamists.” At the same time, Kramer charged, Middle East specialists profited from the
directly in the eye during conversation. Green plus signs floating above the virtual Iraqi characters “indicate the Iraqi’s opinion of you just went up, because you showed cultural sensitivity,” the developers’ promotional video explains. “Bad move!” the video chastises after a cultural blunder. The Iraqi character “had no connection to militias, but he may now consider joining.”9 DARPA’s vision for the social sciences aimed to develop a rule-based model of society as a whole. “Imagine that you
debunking the idea that poverty breeds terrorism—it turned out that poor communities were statistically no more likely to produce terrorists than rich ones. The government official had read the study and was looking for a terrorism expert to debunk the debunking. His reasoning was that Congress would increase international development assistance for poor countries if these programs could be marketed as a deterrent to terrorism. He saw hundreds of billions of dollars being allocated to the
