Christian and Islamic view of Violence

Christian and Islamic view of Violence

Introduction

Few matters in contemporary world politics command more interest than the relationship between Islam and political strife. Are Muslims especially prone to political violence? Office conversation among elites in Jakarta, Washington, Paris, Delhi, Beijing, and Ankara—not to mention kitchen-table talk in Surabaya, Kansas City, Marseille, Bangalore, Wuhan, and Istanbul—swirls around the issue. Yet the task of testing whether a relationship between Islam and political violence exists has hardly been touched. Few investigations adduce empirical clues on whether Islamic societies are actually more or less violent. This article seeks to assess whether Muslims are more prone to large-scale political violence than non-Muslims. We do not focus on terrorism, which normally takes the form of dramatic, one-off events that may be transnational in character and that usually have a relatively small number of casualties. Nor do we concentrate on interstate war. Instead, we investigate large-scale intrastate violence. We cannot pretend to resolve the weighty question at hand or to make causal inferences. Despite enormous public interest in the issue, scholarly investigation is in its infancy. Empirical treatments are scarce, and the data available to us make a statistical evaluation of hypotheses difficult. Our item makes three contributions. First, it offers some original data. Building on a major effort initiated by another scholar, Monty Marshall, we provide a database of events of large-scale political violence. We enrich Marshall's data by drawing out a particular set of cases and adding several coding categories. By doing so, we create a database that may be of interest to students of intrastate political conflict and of political Islam. Second, we use the data to explore whether Muslims are especially violence prone. We find no evidence of a correlation between the proportion of a country's population that is made up of Muslims and deaths in episodes of large-scale political violence. Third, we investigate whether Islamism (the ideology), as opposed to Muslims (the people), is responsible for an inordinate amount of large-scale political violence. We find that Islamism is implicated in an appreciable, but not necessarily disproportionate, amount of political violence.

Islam And Violence

Violence is a value inherent in mankind. It is an affliction that wreaks havoc both at the level of national politics and the global system. After all, birth and death are essentially two violent, life-shaping events. Islam has certainly had its fair share of violence. This is particularly true since this universalistic religion has assumed, since its inception in the 7th century, aworldly role that required the regulation of the behavior of both believers and infidels. Anderson (1997, 17) asserted that “the substantive dogma of Islam does not tell us when or why its adherents will actually resort to violence to further a quest understood to be Islamic.” Evidence suggests otherwise. Islam came with a zeal for conquest and to spread the world of Allah to humanity in its entirety. After successfully taking control of the North African coast, Arab-Muslim army commander Uqba bin Nafi cried at the ...