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By MuslimAnswers.net Team

بِسْمِ اللَّـهِ الرَّحْمَـٰنِ الرَّحِيم

One of the recurring allegations we hear about time and again concerning the pure Islamic religion is that there is something intrinsically violent within the teachings of Islam which drives the Muslims towards perpetrating levels of violence –and particularly deadly violence- not seen among the non-Muslim peoples.

In this article we will show that for the past 65 years – since 1945- the “teachings of Islam” cannot be blamed for a number of deaths that is disproportionate to the world average for the same time period. We hope that by doing this, a great many Muslims and non-Muslims will see that there is nothing abnormally ruthless or violent about the application of the teachings of Islam when compared to the non-Muslim ideologies and ways of life. Before we move ahead, though, there are a few points that we wish to bring up:

1.     We try to avoid those issues dealing with the rules and regulations of Islam (or some may say, the physical consequences of Islamic laws), since the truth of Islam should be analyzed based on its logical premises, such as the Islamic concept of the Divine Being and how this is superior to the other ideologies/religions espoused around the world. However, since there are so many objections to Islam being “abnormally violent”, we wanted to show that even according to this viewpoint brought up by our opponents, there is nothing particularly violent or strange about the Islamic religion or the Muslim people.[1]

2.   We have chosen the year 1945 as our staring point since this is the year when World War II ended and the United Nations was formed. The importance of the latter event is that when our opponents bring up the notion that Islamic teachings “violate human rights” or that Muslims do not respect “universal human values”, they are referring to those rules and regulations as drafted and promulgated by the United Nations and its sister organizations.[2]

3.     Not only should we include wars in our tabulation, but it is also necessary to add deaths by government-sponsored plans and tactics that lead to deaths within a given country. This is also necessary, since our opponents maintain that an Islamic system of governance leads to an exorbitant number of deaths, so we should expect our opponents to keep in mind all those who are killed by systems of governance other than Islam.

4.     For the number of deaths we have mostly relied on Matthew White’s website (http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/index.htm), along with some figures from other sites for the more recent conflicts that may not be included in White’s site.

5.     When presenting such numbers, we concede that there is a great deal of divergence between different estimates of those killed in conflicts, and White’s estimates seem to keep this reality in consideration.

6.     We have chosen to include only those conflicts/situations that have caused 50 thousand or more deaths. This is because once the major conflicts with the greatest number of deaths are taken into consideration, the conflicts or situations that follow- even if numerous- do not change our grand total by a lot, nor do they modify any conclusions we may reach through analyzing such numbers.

7.     If some of the readers –for ideological or nationalist reasons- feel that some of those listed as “killed” should be removed or greatly reduced due to the reader’s loyalty to a particular regime or leader, then this is a decision that will not modify our broad conclusions all that much. For example, if someone feels that Stalin’s regime was in fact good for the Soviet Union, or that the killings done under communism were at most a “necessary evil”, we would look at this as an opportunity to engage with such a person about the ideology of communism and show to them how Islam is superior and how Islam is the truth.[3]

After bringing up these matters, we will present the estimates first for all the people who have been killed in known wars, conflicts, and repressive regimes since 1945[4].

Event	Time Period	Estimated Number of Killed
Mao Zedong’s regime	1949-1975	40,000,000
Soviet Union	1946-1989	8,650,000[5]
Second Indochina War	1960-75	4,200,000
DR Congo Civil War	1998 onwards	3,800,000
Korean War	1950-1953	3,000,000
North Korea	1950 onwards	3,000,000
Sudan Civil Wars	1955,1972, 1983 onwards	2,700,000
Chinese Civil War	1945-49	2,500,000
Post-War Expulsion of Germans from East Europe	1945-47	2,100,000
Afghanistan Invasion by Soviet Union, Civil War	1979-2001	1,800,000
Ethiopia (minus Ogaden and Eritrean Wars)	1962-1992	1,769,000
Cambodia, Khmer Rouge	1975-1978	1,650,000
Rwanda and Burundi	1959-1995	1,350,000
Bangladesh War of Liberation	1971	1,250,000
Nigerian coups, Biafran War	1966-70	1,000,000
Second Iraq War	2003 onwards	1,000,000
Mozambique	1975-1992	800,000
Iran-Iraq War	1980-1988	700,000
Tibet	1950 onwards	600,000
Yugoslavia, Tito’s Regime	1945-1987	572,000
Algerian War of Independence	1954-1962	537,000
Partition of India	1947	500,000
Angolan Civil War	1975-2002	500,000
Somali Civil War	1991 onwards	432,400
First Indochina War	1945-1954	400,000
Indonesian political violence	1965-1966	400,000
Vietnam, post-war regime	1975 onwards	365,000
Iraq UN sanctions	1990 onwards	350,000
East Germany, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Albania, Czechoslovakia under Communism	1949-1989	343,000
Uganda, Idi Amin’s regime	1972-1979	300,000
Iraq, Saddam Hussein regime	1979-2003	300,000
Ugandan Bush War	1979-1986	300,000
Kurdistan political violence	1980’s, 1990’s	300,000
Liberia civil war, political violence	1989-2003	250,000
Zaire Civil War	1997	250,000
Russian intervention in Chechnya	1994 onwards	238,000
Ogaden War, Eritrean War of Independence	1964-1993	231,000
Cambodian Civil War	1978-1991	225,000
Colombia Violence (Bogotazo)	1946-1958	200,000
Guatemalan civil war, political violence	1960-1996	200,000
East Timor, conquest by Indonesia	1975-1999	200,000
Bosnian Civil War	1992-1995	175,000
Lebanese Civil War	1975-1990	150,000
First Persian Gulf War	1990-1991	150,000
Burma/Myanmar Civil war, political violence	1948 onwards	130,000
Dutch East Indies rebellion	1945-1946	106,000
North Yemen	1962-1970	100,000
Congo Crisis	1960-1964	100,000
Iraq	1960’s	100,000
Afghanistan, American Invasion	2001 onwards	100,000
Algerian Civil War	1992-2002	100,000
Native Brazilian genocide	1950 onwards	100,000
Angola Anti-Colonial War	1961-1975	80,000
Israeli-Arab Wars	1948 onwards	75,000
Sierra Leone Civil War	1991-2002	75,000
Eritrea-Ethiopian War	1998-2000	70,000
El Salvador Civil War	1979-1992	70,000
Sri Lankan Civil War	1983-2009	64,500
Mozambique Anti-Colonial War	1961-1975	63,500
Nicaraguan Civil War	1972-1991	60,000
DR Congo, Ituri Conflict	1999-2007	60,000
Nigerian religious violence	1990 onwards	57,800
Iran political violence after 1979 revolution	1979-1987	56,000
North Vietnam	1954-1975	50,000
Chad civil War, political violence	1965 onwards	50,000
Equitorial Guinea	1969-1979	50,000
Somalia, Barre regime	1969-1990	50,000
Tajikistan Civil War	1992-1996	50,000
Peru political violence	1980-2000	50,000

 

From these statistics we can deduce a number of points:

1. In this table we have listed 69 major causes of death worldwide due to political violence/death, and the total number of those killed in this period is a little over 91 million people. While it is true that 33 of them are somehow related to Muslim populations (in that at least one of the actors was nominally Muslim), the first six are  non-Muslim on non-Muslim conflicts/state actors (in that both parties were overwhelmingly non-Muslim). These initial six conflicts account for more than 62 million deaths, or almost 70% of the total deaths in the table.
2. We have purposefully placed some higher death totals for the wars where a Muslim actor was involved, so that we can later show that even if it is assumed that the higher death total was “caused by Islam”, there would still be no correlation between Islam and an unusually high death toll in worldwide conflicts where Muslims are involved.
3. Among those conflicts were at least one of the actors was indeed Muslim, in most of these cases we also see the active hand of non-Muslim actors and ideologies seeking to eliminate or undermine the  Islamic religion- or sometimes simply seeking to eliminate Muslims without paying much attention to the Islamic ideology. In addition to this, a careful study of most of these conflicts reveals that intra-non-Muslim deaths also contributed to the death toll. Some of the specific examples of this are as follows[6]:
   1.   Sudan Civil Wars: We have mentioned a total of 2,700,000 people killed. The North-South conflict is sometimes portrayed as a struggle between the animist and Christian south seeking to “liberate itself from Islamic rule”. Such a presentation ignores the fact that this struggle is in reality an extension of the British colonial rule and the struggle for independence. This is so because the policy of the colonial regimes was to hinder all things Islamic in southern Sudan, thus creating conditions for open rebellion once Islam and the dominant Arab culture of Sudan would have been introduced in the South.

In addition to this, one cannot escape the fact that during this long war, the Southern Sudanese have taken help from vastly different and conflicting ideological sources. Thus, in the First Sudanese Civil War, military supplies and training were sent to the rebels from Israel via Ethiopia and Uganda, along with help from pro-US politicians and regimes such as Moise Tshombe of Congo and Haile Selassie  of Ethiopia.[7] In the Second Civil War, the SPLA (Sudan’s Peoples Liberation Army) took substantial aid and assistance from Marxists- the Ethiopian Mengistu regime up to 1991- as well as from Christian American conservatives and even military equipment from the United States government.[8]

Also, it should be noted that many of the deaths can be attributed to intra-rebel fighting and repression, such as the Bor Massacre in 1991, when a splinter faction of the SPLA –of the Nuer people- deliberately killed civilians of the Dinka tribe. Many similar examples can be pinned down showing how excess deaths due to direct war or famine were caused not by Muslim forces or policies, but by power struggles and atrocities committed by the non-Muslims against each other during their “larger struggle” against so-called “Islamic hegemony”.[9]

3. 2. Afghanistan Civil War, Invasion by the Soviet Union: Here we have written a total of 1,800,000 deaths for the period from 1979-2001 (that is, before the American Invasion in 2001). In this case also, the majority of the deaths came from the Soviet invasion and subsequent deaths of more than a million civilians and fighters. It should be noted that in this case, the Soviet Union and the Communist government were the ones with the supremacy in weaponry and logistics, and that the “pro-Islamist” fighters were –perhaps ironically if seen today- receiving help from the United States.

Taking the rise of the Taliban as being the incarnation of the rise of “Islamic rule”, we see that its opponents were financed by Russia, India, the United States- all countries who had conflicting interests and goals in Afghanistan, but yet who were united in their opposition to “Islamic rule”. In this case we also see a switching of allegiances for some of the anti-Taliban elements, such as the case of Abdul Rashid Dostum, who has in fact an army commander under pro-Soviet forces in the 1980’s but who later on joined the US-backed Northern Alliance in order to overthrow the Taliban.

3. 3. Invasion of Iraq and subsequent political and civil violence: For this conflict we have written the number of deaths as 1,000,000. We should remember that in this case, the trigger for the great number of deaths was an event initiated by a non-Muslim power (the invasion of Iraq by the United States and its coalition of forces).[10] It may be objected that the number of deaths was mostly caused by Muslim-on-Muslim violence mostly orchestrated by militias, death squads, and terrorists, and that the invasion of Iraq itself caused a small fraction of these deaths.  This line of reasoning overlooks the fact that Coalition forces recruited and trained a considerable portion of the death squads as a way to counteract those communities perceived to be supportive of anti-American forces.[11]
   4. Indonesian political violence: For this period of conflict we have written 400,000 deaths in the period of 1965-1966. These led to the wiping out of the Indonesian Communist Party, as well as the killing of numerous ethnic Chinese. But before we lay the blame on “Islamic rule”, it should be noted that the Western anti-Communist powers were elated at the events taking place in Indonesia at that time, to the point that certain articles show a close relationship between the United States government and the military coup staged in Indonesia in 1965 and the killing that followed. We thus read[12]:

Suharto’s overthrow of the Sukarno government in 1965-66 turned Indonesia from Cold War “neutralism” to fervent anti-Communism, and wiped out the Indonesian Communist Party- exterminating a sizable part of its mass base in the process, in widespread massacres that claimed at least 500,000 and perhaps more than a million victims. The U.S. establishment’s enthusiasm for the coup-cum-mass murder was ecstatic (see Chomsky and Herman, Washington Connection and Third World Fascism); “almost everyone is pleased by the changes being wrought,” New York Times columnist C.L. Sulzberger commented (4/8/66).

In addition to this, the establishment of Islamic Law was never the deciding factor in such killings, but it was rather the desire of the ruling elite to eliminate those whom they perceived to be their potential enemies- something that is not restricted to Islam by any means.

4. Even if we were to consider the position of our most rabid opponents and judge that all of the conflicts in which at least one of the actors was Muslim was directly caused by Islam, we would be left with about 13,700,000 deaths “caused by Islam”, which would still be only 15% of the total we have reached, a smaller share of the total global Muslim population.  Even if we were to shave off the 48 million people killed in the first two entries, we would see that the percentage of deaths would be around 30%, only somewhat higher than the overall Muslim population in the world.
5. As opposed to the claims of our opponents, the Muslim nations since 1945 have been anything but global superpowers. This is important, since mass death and repeated military involvements around the world can only take place when those involved in it have enough political and economic resources not to suffer long-term consequences for their involvement in world hotspots.

For the Muslims, the situation has not been one of making other people suffer due to “Islamic conquest”, but rather of being the ones suffering under the machinations and plans of the world superpowers, colonial powers, and non-Islamic ideologies as they set out to conquer the world and/or hold on to what they had conquered. This was obviously a common theme during the Cold War, as both superpowers involved themselves in any and every military conflict around the world in a quest for global supremacy of their ideologies and influence. Thus, Muslims and non-Muslim countries alike became the playing fields for Communist and Western interests, with negligible interference from Islamic ideologies, except when either side thought that using such ideologies would be good towards advancing their own interests.

After the end of the Cold War, the specter of “Islamic conquest” has indeed been raised by a number of non-Muslims. What such people forget is that the Muslim nations are still nowhere near a position to be global agents of colonization. Also, the Western nations have now achieved a position of cultural, economic, and military hegemony around the world perhaps unrivaled in the history of mankind. Even if we consider that certain nations such as China, India, or –once again- Russia may soon rival the Western nations in one or more of these aforementioned areas, it would still be the case that the non-Muslim majority countries and their ideologies have a near-monopoly on the direction of the world, and that our opponent’s claims that the world will soon be taken over by an “Islamic conquest” are very far away from the present reality.

Objection: Nowadays Islamic Power is not prominent, but when it was then we would have certainly seen many more deaths at the hands of “Islamic conquest” and other “Islamic causes”

This objection may be raised once our opponent realizes that, even with all the terrorism attributed to Islam[13] in recent years there is no way that so-called “Islamic causes” can be at par with the orchestrated and organized wars and violence or superpower politics. So it may be said that the killings and deaths caused by Islamic Empires at the height of their power would not be more than the normal ratio of human deaths due to other ideologies and religions.

In order to ascertain the truth of our opponent’s claims, we have again referred to Matthew White’s site, where he provides a table for the twenty worst atrocities in human history.[14]  His table is reproduced below:

 

According to this tabulation, the total number of people killed in the 20 greatest atrocities witnessed by mankind is 390 million, of which 49 million can be traced to Muslims. This gives us a percentage of approximately 12.5%, which is still lower than the global percentage of world Muslims, even if we factor in the growth of the Muslim population in the past century. It should also be considered that the Second World War- an event fought almost totally between non-Muslims in defense of non-Islamic ideologies- was responsible for 14 million more deaths in less than a decade, while the deaths attributed to Muslims are spread out over 14 centuries.

Even among the three main events mentioned in here, we can see that the intensity of the Muslims’ so-called brutality was not as pronounced as in other manifestations of conflict. Thus:

1.     The Middle East Slave Trade is said to have caused 19 million deaths. But these were over the course of 12 centuries, accounting for 1.5 million deaths per century, or at a rate almost one-third lower than the Atlantic Slave trade. Also, there is a difference between “Middle East” and “Muslim”, in that the Muslim population of the region has grown only slowly through the centuries, and without knowing the deeper breakdown of how these deaths during the slave trade occurred, we cannot say they were caused by the application of Islamic Laws.

2.      The Muslim conquest of India is said to have caused 13 million deaths over the course of 7 centuries, or a little less than 2 million deaths per century. While these are high numbers, we should not forget the high population of India, as well as the fact that this is still half the number of those killed by the famine in British India over a course of only twenty-five years[16].

3.     As was the case with the more recent conflicts, it cannot be said with any degree of certainty how many of the deaths mentioned above were a direct consequence of implementing Islamic Law and Islamic zeal, and how many of them were driven by considerations other than Islam. For example, we read the following about Timur Lenk[17]:

The Timurid Empire was not singularly defined by the fact that it was an Islamic empire. Its founder, Timur, was himself a Muslim, but he rarely invoked his religion as any sort of impetus for his invasions. All of the territories he invaded were also Muslim-ruled, and thus he could not proclaim a jihad, or holy war, as the reason for his attacks, as Islamic leaders before him had done. He did claim that his invasion of the Delhi Sultanate was provoked by that Muslim empire’s tolerant attitude towards Hindus, but even that reason could not mask his real desire to obtain some of the Sultanate’s great wealth.

4.    It should be noted that the numbers given here are much more imprecise than those given for the conflicts that took place after 1945, which is something to be expected given the spotty registering of conflicts, deaths caused by conflicts, etc., before the advent of the modern age. Thus, our presentation of such numbers is simply for us to have some idea of what different human actions have caused in terms of loss of life to other humans.

From the preceding discussions we see that there is nothing abnormally violent about Islam and Muslims when compared with the recent ideologies and powers that have governed the world for the past 65 years. Also, when compared to the distribution of deaths throughout human history, we see that the Muslims cannot be faulted any more than other humans in this respect, to the point that those deaths caused by Muslims are even less –in proportion- than those caused by non-Muslims. Even though at the beginning of our work we pointed out that such numbers cannot be used to analyze the truth of Islam, we hope that our work has shown the flimsiness of the arguments of those who portray Islam as an abnormally violent religion. We thus hope that Muslims and non-Muslims alike will appreciate the truth of Islam based on a study of its foundations and divert calls from those who seek to attack Islam based on criteria which are ultimately not directly related to the truth of Islam.