The Missing Martyrs: Why Are There So Few Muslim Terrorists?
Charles Kurzman
Abstract
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? Such questions may seem counterintuitive, in light of the death and devastation that terrorists have wrought around the world. But the scale of violence, outside of several civil war zones, has been far lower than the waves of attacks that the world feared in the wake of 9/11. Terrorists’ own publications complain about the failure of Muslims to join their cause. Thi ... More
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? Such questions may seem counterintuitive, in light of the death and devastation that terrorists have wrought around the world. But the scale of violence, outside of several civil war zones, has been far lower than the waves of attacks that the world feared in the wake of 9/11. Terrorists’ own publications complain about the failure of Muslims to join their cause. This book draws on government sources, public opinion surveys, election results, and in-depth interviews with Muslims in the Middle East and around the world to examine barriers to terrorist recruitment, including “radical sheik,” liberal Islam, revolutionary rivalries, and an inelastic demand for US foreign policy. This revised edition, updated to include the self-proclaimed “Islamic State,” concludes that fear of terrorism should be brought into alignment with the actual level of threat, and that government policies and public opinion should be based on evidence rather than alarmist hyperbole.
Keywords:
terrorism,
Islam,
Muslims,
extremism,
radical sheik,
liberal Islam
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2018 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780190907976 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2019 |
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780190907976.001.0001 |
