Terrorism and Muslims: 5 facts about the data and the texts

One widely circulated critique says that 85 percent of terrorism is Islamic, that 4 percent of the world’s population emulates Muhammad (peace be upon him), and that such terrorists are twenty times more lethal than others. Each number can be tested.

The population figure is the easiest. The Pew Research Center estimated that Muslims numbered about 1.8 billion in 2015, roughly a quarter of the world’s people.^[1] The critique’s 4 percent is far from that count of Muslims, though it speaks of people who emulate the Prophet, a different and unmeasured group, so the two cannot be compared directly. The 85 percent and “twenty times” figures arrive with no named dataset, and no match to them was found in the Global Terrorism Database, the open record of attacks kept since 1970 by the START consortium at the University of Maryland.^[2] The share of attacks and deaths linked to jihadist groups swings with the years, the countries and the definition of terrorism chosen. A single figure for all times and places needs a source and a stated method.

A fair reader will ask whether the true numbers are lower but still large. The next entry takes that up.

Jihadist groups have caused a very large number of deaths in recent decades. The Global Terrorism Index, published each year by the Institute for Economics and Peace from Global Terrorism Database records, names the Islamic State and its affiliates as the deadliest group in its 2025 edition, followed by JNIM in the Sahel, the Pakistani Taliban and al-Shabaab.^[3] The attacks of 11 September 2001 killed nearly 3,000 people in one morning.^[4]

Other findings qualify the picture. The same index places the worst of the violence in the Sahel, Pakistan, Nigeria and Somalia, so most victims are local, and many are Muslims.^[3] Europol’s annual TE-SAT reports on the European Union have counted more separatist than jihadist attacks in some years: for 2017, 137 separatist attacks against 33 jihadist ones, although the jihadist attacks caused 62 of the 68 deaths.^[5] A 2017 report of the US Government Accountability Office counted 85 fatal extremist attacks in the United States from 12 September 2001 to the end of 2016: 62 by far-right extremists and 23 by jihadists, though the jihadist attacks caused more deaths, 119 against 106.^[6]

The defensible statement is narrower than the critique’s: jihadist groups have been a leading cause of terrorism deaths worldwide in the past two decades, and most of their victims are Muslims.

Jihadist groups do quote scripture, and it would be a mistake to deny it. Al-Qaeda’s 1998 statement leaned on Quranic passages about fighting. Groups commonly cite Quran 9:5, often called the sword verse, and a hadith (a report of the Prophet’s words and deeds) in which he says he was ordered to fight people until they testify to God’s oneness.^[7] The critique concludes that the attackers follow Muhammad’s orders.

Classical scholars read such texts as rules for war, held inside strict limits. The verses around 9:5 exempt those with whom treaties stand (9:4) and require that anyone seeking protection be escorted to safety (9:6). The Quran says that killing one person unjustly is like killing all of humankind (5:32) and forbids transgression even in fighting (2:190).^[8] The Prophet forbade the killing of women and children in war,^[9] and said that whoever kills a person under a covenant of protection will not smell the fragrance of Paradise.^[10] Abu Bakr, the first caliph, gave his army the same instruction.^[11] For these rules in detail, see War, killing and execution in Islam: 5 facts.

Hijacked airliners and office workers fall outside every one of these limits. Researchers disagree on what drives such attacks; some stress ideology, others occupation or social networks.^[12]

Condemnation came from major institutions. After the attacks of 2001, Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, then Grand Shaykh of al-Azhar, publicly condemned the killing of civilians.^[13] In 2014 more than a hundred Muslim scholars from many countries signed an open letter to the leader of the Islamic State, arguing point by point that its killings, enslavement and declaration of a caliphate violate Islamic law.^[14] In 2010 the Pakistani scholar Tahir ul-Qadri issued a book-length fatwa (a legal opinion) declaring terrorism and suicide bombing forbidden.^[15]

Ordinary Muslims were asked as well. Pew surveyed Muslims in dozens of countries in 2011 and 2012 and published the results in 2013. In most countries, majorities said that suicide bombing and other violence against civilians in defence of Islam is never justified, although support was higher in a few places.^[16]

Scholars are not unanimous on every question. Some defended armed resistance against occupying forces, a separate dispute from the targeting of civilians, and Muslim jurists still argue about it. On the killing of civilians in New York, Washington and London, the leading voices in the tradition agree.

The critique says all Muslims must unite under a single leader, citing a hadith in Sahih Muslim (Book of Government): if allegiance is pledged to two caliphs, kill the second.^[17] The report exists. Scholars have read it as a ruling against splitting a community that already has a lawful ruler, a matter of civil order inside a caliphate. No recognised caliph has existed since the Ottoman caliphate was abolished in 1924, and the 2014 open letter cited above argued that a caliphate cannot be declared by one armed group without the agreement of Muslims at large.

The critique also quotes a Saudi preacher on television calling for the enslavement of women. The sermon could not be verified here. A single preacher is not a source of Islamic law, and Saudi Arabia formally abolished slavery in 1962.^[18]

Last, the critique forecasts that oil money will fund weapons of mass destruction and that a quarter of humanity will die within twenty-five years. No source is given, and no dataset could support such a forecast. Governments of every faith share the real concern about terrorists obtaining such weapons.

A related claim says the media hides Islamist terrorism. A shooter who is Muslim becomes a “lone wolf.” A shooter who is not becomes a terrorist from the first headline. Political correctness, the claim runs, decides which word a newsroom reaches for.

The gap in coverage volume is real and measured, not asserted. Erin Kearns and her co-authors at the University of Alabama coded 136 terrorist attacks in the United States between 2006 and 2015 and matched each one to its news coverage. After controlling for the number of fatalities, the target type and whether anyone was arrested, attacks by Muslim perpetrators received 357 percent more coverage than attacks by everyone else.^[19] Muslims committed about 12.5 percent of the attacks in the sample and received more than half the coverage. A narrower slice of the same data, 2011 to 2015, found Muslim perpetrators at 12.4 percent of attacks and 44 percent of the coverage, a gap of 449 percent.^[20]

What the numbers do not show is suppression. Kearns and her co-authors found that fatality count was the single strongest predictor of coverage, with perpetrator religion a significant but smaller factor on top of it.^[20] Islamist attacks in the West are also rarer and often more lethal per incident, which alone buys more coverage under ordinary news judgment. And major outlets do use “Islamist” and “jihadist” in their own headlines, as coverage of the Manchester Arena bombing and the Bataclan attack showed within hours.

So the honest version of this claim is narrower than the one usually made. Attacks by Muslim perpetrators draw more coverage per incident than attacks by anyone else, after the obvious factors are accounted for, and nobody has a settled answer for exactly why. That is a real finding worth sitting with. It is a different claim from “the media never names Islamist terrorism,” which the front pages of the last 2 decades do not support.

A third claim points to a specific set of crimes: organised child sexual exploitation in towns including Rotherham, Rochdale and Telford, carried out mostly by men of Pakistani heritage, missed or minimised for years by police and councils afraid of being called racist. The claim treats this as a distinctly Islamic pattern of crime, covered up by the same political correctness named above.

The named scandals happened, and minimising them helps nobody. Professor Alexis Jay’s 2014 inquiry found that at least 1,400 children were sexually exploited in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013, and that council staff were, in her words, nervous about identifying the ethnic origin of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist, with some managers giving direct instructions not to.^[21] The Telford Independent Inquiry, published in 2022, found more than 1,000 children exploited over decades in that town, again with race-related nervousness among the reasons the exploitation went unchecked.^[22] In the court cases these scandals produced, the pattern was real at the level of the individual prosecution: a review of 27 UK grooming-gang court cases up to 2014, covering 92 convictions, found 79 of the men, 87 percent, identified as being of South Asian Muslim origin.^[23]

That is the strongest honest form of the claim, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a dodge. The UK Home Office reviewed the national evidence on group-based child sexual exploitation in December 2020 and reached a narrower conclusion than either side of this argument wants. It found the underlying data too poor, inconsistently recorded, with ethnicity assigned by police rather than self-reported, and missing in large numbers of cases, to settle the question nationally.^[24] Figures its reviewers cite from different studies disagree sharply: one 2013 dataset put 75 percent of offenders in usable groups as Asian, while a 2014 Children’s Commissioner study put the figure closer to 14 percent Asian against 42 percent White, and the Home Office treats neither as reliable nationally.^[25] Its own conclusion states plainly that it is not possible to say whether Asian or Black offenders are over-represented in this type of offending nationally, that the ethnicity of group-based offenders most likely tracks child sexual abuse generally, where most offenders are White, and that no one community or culture is uniquely predisposed to offending.^[26]

Hold both findings at once rather than picking the one that suits an argument. Rotherham, Rochdale and Telford were real, their ethnic pattern in the convicted cases was real, and the specific institutional failure, local officials who stayed quiet about race out of fear, was real and is documented in 2 separate official inquiries. None of that licenses the jump to a national, religiously defined crime wave, which is a different and larger claim than the evidence the Home Office itself reviewed will carry.