Peace & Violence

No. The question rests on a modern myth that religion is uniquely prone to violence while secular states keep the peace.

The theologian William Cavanaugh, in The Myth of Religious Violence (Oxford University Press, 2009), shows that the line between "religious" and "secular" is a modern Western invention, drawn in ways that serve power. Once that line is drawn, the violence of non-Western peoples, especially Muslims, is cast as fanatical and irrational, while the violence of Western states is cast as rational and necessary. The record does not support the myth. Two world wars, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Holocaust, and the mass killings of the Soviet and Maoist states were all carried out by modern states acting in the name of nation, race, or ideology. As Imam Tom Facchine argues in The Dark Truth About Secularism, the story of a violent religious past and a peaceful secular present does not survive contact with history.

Islam, by contrast, makes the protection of life one of the higher objectives of its law. The Qur'an equates killing one innocent person with killing all of humanity (Qur'an 5:32), and the Prophet ﷺ defined the Muslim as the one from whose tongue and hand people are safe (Sahih al-Bukhari, no. 10). The honest question is not whether a religion is violent, but under what conditions people of any faith or none turn to violence, and what limits their traditions place on it. On that measure, Islam's limits are among the strictest.

Video: Is Islam a Religion of Violence? | Animation

Because a long habit of thought explains Muslim violence through Islam itself, while explaining everyone else's violence through politics, psychology, or circumstance.

The anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani calls this habit "Culture Talk": the assumption that every culture has a fixed essence and that its politics flow from that essence. As Nour Soubani explains in What is Islamophobia? Race, Power, and the Roots of Anti-Muslim Discrimination, Culture Talk treats an attack by a Muslim not as an act of one person or group but as an expression of a supposed core value within Islam.

The double standard is easy to see. In 2011, a Norwegian gunman killed seventy-seven people while claiming to defend Christian Europe, and in 2019 a gunman in Christchurch killed fifty-one Muslim worshipers. Neither attack is remembered as "Christian terrorism." A 2019 study in Justice Quarterly found that attacks by Muslim perpetrators in the United States received several times more news coverage than comparable attacks by others. The anthropologist Talal Asad, in On Suicide Bombing (Columbia University Press, 2007), asks why a suicide bomber provokes such horror while aerial bombing that kills far more civilians is accepted as the normal conduct of war. The answer, he suggests, lies less in the violence than in who commits it.

Video: Is Islam to Blame for Violent Groups? | Animation

Muslims do. They are the main victims of terrorism, of foreign wars, and of state violence across much of the world.

A 2011 report by the US National Counterterrorism Center found that, where victims' religion could be determined, Muslims suffered between 82 and 97 percent of terrorism-related deaths over the previous five years. The same report attributed most of those deaths to militant groups operating in war zones such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, which means the people most threatened by such groups are Muslims themselves. The wars waged in the name of fighting terrorism have been deadlier still. Brown University's Costs of War project estimates that the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya, and Somalia have been linked to at least 4.5 million deaths, most of them from the collapse of health systems, economies, and food supplies.

The pattern stretches across decades: the massacre of more than eight thousand Bosniak men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995, the expulsion of the Rohingya from Myanmar, the destruction of Gaza, and the war in Sudan. Yaqeen has traced this pattern in From Srebrenica to Gaza: The Dehumanization of Muslims, and Hashiya has examined it in Farah El-Sharif's Islam After Gaza and Alexander Thurston's The War in Sudan and Its Implications for the Umma. A question about Muslims and violence that ignores this record is asking the wrong question.

Jihad means striving: exerting oneself for a good cause in the face of difficulty. Armed struggle is only one of its forms.

The Qur'an uses the word for preaching an unpopular truth (Qur'an 25:52), for persevering on the path to God (Qur'an 29:69), and for defending the community from attack. The Prophet ﷺ applied it to caring for elderly parents (Sahih al-Bukhari, no. 3004) and called a word of truth before a tyrant one of the greatest forms of jihad (Sunan al-Tirmidhi, no. 2174, graded hasan by al-Tirmidhi). The historian Asma Afsaruddin, in Striving in the Path of God (Oxford University Press, 2013), shows how early Muslim scholars understood jihad as a broad ethical concept long before it was narrowed to warfare.

The common English translation, "holy war," has no equivalent in classical Arabic. It is a European idea, rooted in the Crusades, projected onto an Arabic word. Meanwhile, modern nations routinely wrap their own wars in sacred language, calling soldiers' deaths the "ultimate sacrifice" and their causes a defense of civilization, yet no one translates those wars as holy. For a fuller treatment, see Surkheel Sharif's Is Islam a Conquest Ideology? On Jihad, War, & Peace.

No. The verses most often quoted to make this claim address armed enemies already at war with the Muslim community, and they are hedged with limits.

The phrase "kill them wherever you find them" (Qur'an 2:191) comes directly after the command to "fight in the cause of God those who fight you, but do not transgress" (Qur'an 2:190). It concerns attackers the early Muslims expected to face, and it ends with the instruction to stop if the enemy stops (Qur'an 2:192–93). The so-called "sword verse" (Qur'an 9:5) addresses Arabian tribes that had broken their treaties. The verse before it exempts those who kept their agreements (Qur'an 9:4), and the verse after it commands Muslims to grant protection to any enemy who asks for it and escort them to safety (Qur'an 9:6). The Qur'an states plainly that God does not forbid kindness and justice toward those who do not fight Muslims (Qur'an 60:8).

Any scripture, constitution, or national anthem can be made to sound murderous when lines are cut from their context. The method itself is the problem, not the text. See Misquoting the Quran: "Kill Them Wherever You Find Them".

Islamic law placed binding limits on war more than a thousand years before the Geneva Conventions, and it holds Muslims to those limits even when their enemies ignore them.

The Prophet ﷺ forbade the killing of women and children (Sahih al-Bukhari, no. 3015) and instructed his armies not to steal from the spoils, betray, mutilate, or kill a child (Sahih Muslim, no. 1731). Classical jurists extended these protections to the elderly, monks, farmers, and others who take no part in fighting. Islamic law also forbids answering an enemy's atrocity with an atrocity of one's own: a war crime remains a crime whoever commits it first. Captives must be fed and treated humanely, and crops and trees are not to be destroyed without military necessity. These rules are laid out in War, Islam, and the Sanctity of Life and Jihad in Islam: Just War Theory in the Qur'an and Sunnah.

Modern warfare has moved in the opposite direction. The firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo and the atomic bombing of Japan deliberately targeted cities. Today, civilian deaths are routinely described as "collateral damage," and Yaqeen's own essay on Islamic ethics and artificial intelligence notes the use of AI-assisted targeting in Gaza. Measured against that record, the classical Islamic code of combat is not a problem to be explained away. It is a standard the modern world has failed to meet.

No. Most of the world's Muslims live in lands where Islam spread through trade, scholarship, intermarriage, and missionary work over many centuries.

The Qur'an declares that there is no compulsion in religion (Qur'an 2:256), and the historical record matches it. The historian Richard Bulliet's study of conversion in medieval Iran found that the population became majority Muslim only gradually, over roughly two to three centuries after the conquest. Christians remained a large share of Egypt and Syria for centuries more. Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country in the world, was never conquered by a Muslim army; Islam arrived there with merchants and scholars. Forced conversions did occur in exceptional cases, but they violated Islamic law and were never the norm. Hassam Munir examines the evidence in Did Islam Spread by the Sword? A Critical Look at Forced Conversions and How Islam Spread Throughout the World.

The charge sounds very different when applied evenly. Charlemagne's laws for the conquered Saxons in the 780s prescribed death for refusing baptism. Spain expelled its Jews in 1492 and its Moriscos, the descendants of Muslims who had been forcibly converted, between 1609 and 1614. The conversion of much of the Americas followed conquest. By the standards of premodern empires, the spread of Islam was notably slow and notably uncoerced.

Video: Did Islam Spread by the Sword? | Animation

Yes. Islam affirms the right of the oppressed to defend themselves, and it binds that defense with the same ethical limits that govern all use of force.

The first Qur'anic permission to fight was given to "those who are fought, because they have been wronged," people who had been driven from their homes for saying, "Our Lord is God" (Qur'an 22:39–40). The Qur'an also rebukes those who fail to defend the weak who cry out for rescue (Qur'an 4:75). In We Won't Back Down: When Righteous Anger Becomes a Moral Duty, Dr. Hatem al-Haj explains that anger at injustice is a moral force that deters tyranny, provided it remains principled and disciplined.

This is not a peculiar Islamic idea. Americans celebrate their revolution, Europe honors the resistance movements of the Second World War, and Western governments have praised Ukrainians for fighting an invading army. In 1982, the UN General Assembly reaffirmed the legitimacy of peoples' struggle against colonial and foreign domination (Resolution 37/43). What Islam adds is a firm boundary: no cause, however just, permits the deliberate killing of noncombatants. As Dr. Ovamir Anjum writes in Between Pharaoh's Riviera and the Divine Promise, the struggle against outer tyranny is inseparable from the struggle against the tyrant within.

The research points to occupation, political grievance, and personal networks, not to religious doctrine.

The political scientist Robert Pape studied every suicide attack he could document worldwide and concluded, in Dying to Win (Random House, 2005), that suicide terrorism is driven mainly by foreign military occupation of land the attackers consider their homeland. For years, the group responsible for the most suicide attacks was the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, a secular nationalist movement. The sociologist Charles Kurzman, in The Missing Martyrs: Why There Are So Few Muslim Terrorists (Oxford University Press, 2011), shows that if Islam drove terrorism, there would be vastly more of it: among nearly two billion Muslims, the number who join violent groups is vanishingly small. A leaked 2008 study by Britain's MI5 found that many people involved in terrorism were religious novices, and that a well-established religious identity appeared to protect against violent radicalization.

None of this excuses terrorism, which Islam forbids without exception. It does mean that treating Islam as the cause misdiagnoses the problem and leaves its real drivers untouched. See the infographic Is Islam a Hub for Terrorists?

Governments do, and they apply the label selectively. There is still no agreed international definition of terrorism.

The sociologist Lisa Stampnitzky, in Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented "Terrorism" (Cambridge University Press, 2013), shows that "terrorism" emerged in the 1970s as a political category rather than a neutral description of violence, one that marks the violence of non-state enemies as illegitimate while leaving state violence unnamed. Nelson Mandela remained on a US terrorism watch list until 2008. The anthropologist Darryl Li, in The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity (Stanford University Press, 2020), notes that Muslim volunteers who traveled to defend Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s were branded "foreign fighters," while Western volunteers who traveled to fight for Ukraine were widely celebrated. Li's white paper with Palestine Legal and the Center for Constitutional Rights, Anti-Palestinian at the Core (2024), traces how US antiterrorism law was built in large part through hostility to Palestinian movements, a history Farah El-Sharif discusses in Islam After Gaza.

When the same act is "terrorism" if done by one side and "security" if done by another, the word describes the actor, not the act. Islam's standard is the reverse: the deliberate killing of noncombatants is forbidden no matter who commits it.

There is little evidence that they do, and strong evidence that they treat ordinary Muslim life as a warning sign.

Counter-radicalization programs rest on the idea that religious conviction is a stage on a "conveyor belt" toward violence. Researchers have found little evidence for that model. As Yaqeen's paper Counter-Radicalization: A Critical Look into a Racist New Industry explains, programs such as Britain's Prevent have produced policy-based evidence rather than evidence-based policy, with effects on Muslim communities that resemble the War on Drugs' effects on Black communities. Nour Soubani notes that US programs taught teachers, social workers, and neighbors to watch for indicators such as growing a beard, wearing hijab, attending the mosque, and speaking out for Palestine. In one widely reported British case, a ten-year-old was questioned after misspelling "terraced house" as "terrorist house."

The scholar Arun Kundnani, in The Muslims Are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror (Verso, 2014), places these programs in a longer history of state surveillance of dissent, from the FBI's COINTELPRO operations against civil rights groups and the Nation of Islam to the monitoring of mosques today. See also Is "Counter-Radicalization" Hurting Muslims? | DoubleTake.

Because they are held collectively responsible for the acts of individuals in a way no other group is.

No one asks white Christians to apologize for the Christchurch massacre or the Oslo attacks, and no one demands that every Hindu answer for anti-Muslim violence in India. Muslims are asked to condemn every attack, and when they do, the condemnations go unheard. Heraa Hashmi compiled a list of Muslim condemnations that runs to hundreds of pages. In 2014, more than 120 Muslim scholars signed an open letter refuting the theology of the so-called Islamic State point by point. The demand persists anyway, because its purpose is not information but suspicion.

The paper "Why Don't Muslims Condemn Terrorism?" Western Violence and Scapegoating in an Age of Islamophobia turns the question around: the governments that demand condemnations from Muslims have rarely been asked to account for torture, rendition, and wars that killed far more people than any militant group. Muslims condemn the killing of innocents because their faith requires it, not because anyone demanded it.

Islam honors those who die defending the innocent and fighting for justice, as every nation honors its fallen, and it forbids suicide and the killing of innocents absolutely.

In Islam, martyrdom is a wide category of mercy. The Prophet ﷺ counted among the martyrs those who die of plague, of abdominal illness, by drowning, or in a collapsing building (Sahih al-Bukhari, no. 2829), and those killed defending their property (Sahih al-Bukhari, no. 2480). Taking one's own life is forbidden (Qur'an 4:29), and classical scholars did not permit killing oneself in order to kill others. Jonathan Brown explores how this tradition is distorted in Is Islam a Death Cult? Martyrdom and the American-Muslim Imagination.

The accusation also ignores the cult of sacrifice at the heart of the modern nation-state. Nations build tombs to unknown soldiers, praise the "ultimate sacrifice," and teach children that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. Imperial Japan sent kamikaze pilots to their deaths, and Western militaries award their highest honors for self-sacrifice in battle. As Mohamed Elshahed has argued, cited in Hashiya's Islam After Gaza, calling Islam a "death cult" reflects a structural ignorance that is often used to justify killing Muslims.

The Qur'an prescribes no worldly punishment for leaving Islam. The classical death penalty belonged to a premodern world in which abandoning one's religious community was treated as treason, and many contemporary scholars distinguish disbelief from sedition.

The Qur'an warns apostates only of loss in the Hereafter (Qur'an 2:217, 4:137) and declares that there is no compulsion in religion (Qur'an 2:256). The Prophet ﷺ did not execute anyone solely for leaving the faith. Classical jurists did hold that a sane adult who publicly renounced Islam could face the death penalty, imposed only by a court and only after the person was invited to recant. But they did so in a world where religion defined political loyalty, and leaving the community often meant joining its enemies. Jonathan Brown explains in the recently updated The Issue of Apostasy in Islam that modern scholars such as Mahmud Shaltut held that Islam punishes not disbelief but taking up arms against the community, and that Yusuf al-Qaradawi distinguished "transgressive" apostasy that undermines society from private apostasy, which is left alone.

Premodern Europe treated apostasy and heresy far more harshly. Geneva burned Michael Servetus for heresy in 1553, Scotland hanged the student Thomas Aikenhead for blasphemy in 1697, and England's law for burning heretics stayed on the books until 1677. Modern states have not abolished the idea; they have relocated it. Treason remains a capital crime under US federal law, and Britain has stripped citizenship from hundreds of people on security grounds. Every political order punishes what it considers betrayal. The difference is that the Qur'an itself leaves the question of belief to God.

No individual has the right to punish blasphemy, and the Qur'an tells believers to meet insults with patience and to turn away.

The Qur'an instructs Muslims to leave conversations that mock God's signs until the talk turns to something else (Qur'an 6:68, 4:140), and it tells them they will hear much that is hurtful and should respond with patience and God-consciousness (Qur'an 3:186). When the Quraysh insulted the Prophet ﷺ by calling him Mudhammam ("the condemned") instead of Muhammad ("the praised"), he told his companions that God had turned the insult away from him, since they were cursing someone named Mudhammam while he was Muhammad (Sahih al-Bukhari, no. 3533). Classical scholars differed on the penalty a state could impose. Abu Hanifa (d. 150/767) and the Hanafi school held that a non-Muslim who insulted the Prophet ﷺ did not thereby lose his protected status. In every school, punishment belonged only to a lawful court, never to a mob or an individual. See How the Prophet Muhammad Rose Above Enmity and Insult.

The deeper assumption, that Muslims are uniquely unable to tolerate offense, does not hold up. Many European countries criminalize Holocaust denial, Germany's criminal code penalizes insulting religious communities in ways that disturb the public peace, and in December 2023 Denmark made the public desecration of holy texts punishable by up to two years in prison. In Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech (2009), Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood show that liberal societies also protect what they hold sacred; they simply do not call it sacred. Mahmood argued that the Danish cartoons wounded Muslims through their intimate attachment to the Prophet ﷺ, a kind of injury that liberal law has no language to recognize.

The hudud are fixed penalties for a few serious crimes, hedged with evidentiary standards so strict that they functioned more as moral deterrents than as routine punishments.

Islamic law requires that these penalties be averted wherever there is doubt. A conviction for adultery, for example, required four upright eyewitnesses to the act itself, a standard almost impossible to meet, and a confession could be withdrawn at any time. Theft penalties did not apply to the hungry, to goods of small value, or to property that was not securely kept, and the caliph ʿUmar suspended them entirely during a famine. As Jonathan Brown explains in Stoning and Hand-Cutting: Understanding the Hudud and the Shariah in Islam, historians have found such punishments to have been extraordinarily rare across centuries of Muslim rule.

The charge of barbarism assumes a modern West that punishes gently. In 1800, England's "Bloody Code" listed more than two hundred capital offenses, many of them property crimes, and executed people for stealing goods of modest value. Today, the United States operates the largest prison system in the world, carries out executions, and sentences people to die in prison for nonviolent offenses. A justice system that makes punishment rare and mercy the rule deserves to be judged against that record, not against an imagined ideal. See Is Shari'ah the Most Barbaric Form of Law? | Animation.

No. Islamic law treats an honor killing as murder, and violence against women is a global crisis, not a Muslim one.

When the companion Saʿd bin ʿUbada asked the Prophet ﷺ whether a man who found another man with his wife could kill him, the Prophet ﷺ told him that he must instead bring four witnesses before a court (Sahih Muslim, no. 1498). Islamic law gave no husband, father, or brother the right to take a life in the name of honor. Jonathan Brown argues in Islam Is Not the Cause of Honor Killings. It's Part of the Solution that these killings persist where tribal custom overrides Islamic law, not where Islamic law is followed. Tesneem Alkiek examines the wider problem in Islam and Violence Against Women.

The United Nations estimates that about 48,800 women and girls were killed by intimate partners or family members worldwide in 2022, and the rate in the Americas was nearly twice the rate in Asia. Yet only killings in Muslim communities are routinely labeled "honor crimes," while similar killings elsewhere are called "domestic violence" or "crimes of passion." The anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod, in Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Harvard University Press, 2013), shows how the "honor crime" label turns a universal form of violence into a cultural trait of Muslims. Until 1975, French law excused a husband who killed his wife on discovering her adultery. The tradition that refused that excuse was Islam's.

Video: Are Honor Killings an Islamic Phenomenon? | Animation

Far better than they fared under medieval Christian or colonial rule. Wherever Muslims governed before the colonial era, native religious communities kept their places of worship, their languages, and their practices.

Under Islamic law, Jews, Christians, and others lived as protected communities (dhimmis) with the right to practice their faith, keep their houses of worship, and run their own courts. This was not modern equal citizenship, which no premodern society offered, and it involved real legal distinctions, including the jizya tax. But it gave minorities a secure, recognized place that medieval Europe rarely did. The historian Mark R. Cohen, in Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 1994), concludes that Jews generally fared better under Islam than under Christendom. England expelled its Jews in 1290 and Spain in 1492, and many of those expelled from Spain found refuge in the Ottoman Empire.

In almost every land that Muslim rulers governed before the colonial period, whether they came by conquest, by treaty, or at the invitation of the local population, the native religious communities kept their sites of worship, their communities, their languages, and their practices. Christians and Jews in al-Andalus did so for nearly eight centuries. Hindus remained the majority of South Asia through centuries of Muslim rule. Ancient churches still stand in the Levant, Egypt, and Iraq, where communities such as the Copts and the Assyrians have survived more than thirteen centuries of Muslim rule, and the Jewish communities of Morocco, Tunisia, and Yemen endured into the twentieth century. Isolated exceptions, such as the persecutions under the Almohads in twelfth-century North Africa and Spain, stand out precisely because they broke the pattern.

The same cannot be said of the colonial powers. After the Christian conquest of Spain, mosques were destroyed or converted, a royal decree of 1567 banned the Arabic language and Muslim dress, and the Moriscos were finally expelled; no Muslim community survived. In French Algeria, the authorities turned the Ketchaoua Mosque into a cathedral in 1832, seized the religious endowments that funded mosques and schools, and in 1938 classified Arabic as a foreign language in its own land. Soviet rule closed the great majority of Central Asia's mosques and replaced the Arabic script with Latin and then Cyrillic. The settler-colonial project in Palestine has continued this pattern, from the hundreds of Palestinian villages and their mosques erased in 1948 to the destruction of mosques across Gaza today. Blanket campaigns against a people's faith and language of this kind have no parallel in nearly twelve centuries of Muslim rule.

Tesneem Alkiek's Religious Minorities Under Muslim Rule and the paper Are Muslims Intolerant? Is That Even the Right Question? examine some of this history in depth.

See full infographic: Religious Minorities Under Muslim Rule

Yes. Islamophobia is not only a prejudice; it has repeatedly ended in the killing of Muslims.

A gunman killed six worshipers at a Quebec City mosque in 2017. Another killed fifty-one worshipers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019. In 2021, a man drove his truck into a Muslim family out for a walk in London, Ontario, killing four of them, and in 2023 a six-year-old Palestinian American boy, Wadea al-Fayoume, was stabbed to death near Chicago. In the three months after October 7, 2023, the Council on American-Islamic Relations recorded a 180 percent increase in complaints of anti-Muslim bias. These incidents are documented in Nour Soubani's What is Islamophobia?

The narratives behind these attacks are produced and funded. Yaqeen has examined the networks that sustain them in The Far Right's Love Affair with Islamophobia, Hindutva and Anti-Muslim Violence, Akan Malici's The Green Scare, and The Multi-Million Dollar War on Islam. The same image of the violent Muslim that justifies wars abroad also justifies surveillance at home and, at its extreme, the murder of Muslims at prayer.

To stand firmly for justice, to refuse the silence that enables oppression, and never to imitate the oppressor's methods.

The Qur'an commands believers to stand firm for justice even against themselves and their own families (Qur'an 4:135), and it warns that hatred of a people must never lead them to act unjustly (Qur'an 5:8). The Prophet ﷺ told his companions to help their brother whether he is the oppressor or the oppressed, and explained that helping an oppressor means stopping him (Sahih al-Bukhari, no. 2444). Jibran Khokar's Why Silence Is Not Neutral: The Bystander Effect and Moral Responsibility in Islam explains that standing by while injustice unfolds is itself a moral choice. Farah El-Sharif's Islam After Gaza describes the steadfastness (sumud) of Palestinians as a source of renewal for the whole community of believers.

This is the answer to the question this page began with. The problem was never that Islam lacks limits on violence. It is that the world applies its limits selectively, condemning the violence of the weak while excusing the violence of the powerful. Islam holds every party, Muslims first among them, to one standard: protect the innocent, resist oppression, and never become what you are fighting.