Is Radical Islam in the Minority among Muslims?

Great Debates
161

Okay, here goes.

Yes, it is absurd to claim that when one person uses words/pictures to be ‘offensive’, and another responds with calls for, or actual acts of violence, that the two are in any way, shape, or form, comparable events.

Yes, it is a weaksauce apologia to claim that, so offended, any blame lies with the person who used words/pictures to offend, rather than the lunatic barbarians who go berserk and call for or carry out acts of actual physical violence.

Yes, it ultimately is condescending and infantalizing to make excuses for people who go berserk and take to the field like drunken Huns, as if they simply couldn’t control themselves due to being so evilly offended. Only very, very young children and the mentally retarded are given such a pass, to afford that pass to religious fanatics does not do them the compliment that some believe it does.

Yes, while it’d be nice to be able to go through life without having one’s sensibilities offended, we don’t live in such a world. Besides which, offending someone on purpose is merely rude. If the worst act someone commits during the life is to be rude, then they’re a far better person than most of us.

Yes, we grant special privileges and rights to religious sensibilities. We often feel free to mock or make fun of any number of deeply held convictions, and yet religion is seen as (no pun intended) sacrosanct. There is no valid reason that one should be more careful of offending religious sensibilities than political sensibilities.

Yes, radical Islam (which is not just confined to the Wahabist sect, although it is found there in concentrated form) is a threat to all of humanistic values, all modern global civilization and, indeed, moderate Islam is included in that which is threatened. That it is an existential threat, however, is almost certainly untrue barring MAD level nuclear arsenals in the hands of fanatics.

And yes, as Islam is the only major religion never to have had a reformation and, yes, many fanatics draw their inspiration directly from Islam, there exist systemic problems. Islam is certainly open to abuse, perhaps uniquely so in the modern era (The Crusades, among other events, show that in previous eras Islam was not alone in its possible destructive influence). But, of course, speaking of “Islam” as it if was one single entity is a trap that should be avoided if at all possible[sup]*[/sup]

And yes, tom is far too willing to excuse far too many religiously motivated and justified horrors because they represent examples of localized expressions/understandings of Islam. Although it isn’t perfect, we may roughly speak of Saudi Islam and Iranian Islam and Jordanian Islam, etc… and the features that are dominant in each culture’s branch/flavor/schism of the religion. It is clear that a great many people use their interpretations of Islam to motivate, justify and excuse behavior which is simply unacceptable in a modern, humanistic civil society.

But no, Intention, you go much too far when you leave the realm of valid statistical science, and begin, essentially, inventing claims. The specific stats you posted about the beliefs on apostasy in the UK are, honestly, terrifying. There is simply not sufficient statistical data, however, to then conclude that radical Islam is the majority. There simply isn’t. Your argument goes from something that’s fairly tight and compelling, to something that begins to sound much more like some of the ugliest bigoted rantings that can be found on various ‘anti-Islam’ sites on the 'net. (Notes, begins to. Your argument isn’t at the level of standard 'St+rmfr+nt posters or the more vile Little Green Footballs blooddrinkers).

You do yourself no service when you abandon a fundamentally fact based argument for a screed, and your argument loses much of its potency when you trade tight reasoning for broad brush attacks.

*Remember, if you can, that any belief system held by a billion human beings, across numerous timezones, nations, languages and cultures, is only held to be the ‘same’ thing in all cases via a process of reification. Islam[sub]as practiced and understood by a female American doctor[/sub] is probably not the same Islam[sub]as practiced and understood by an unemployed 19 year old immigrant who doesn’t speak the language in France[/sub] is probably not the same Islam[sub]as the Salafists practice[/sub].

Avoid fallacious fungibility where and as you can.

162

finnagain, thank you for an interesting and balanced recap and overview of the thread.

However, at the end you say:

What is it with you guys wanting to accuse me of bad practices? You were doing so well, now you say I am making up facts. You should understand that to me, that is a scientific crime of the highest order, one which I would never knowingly do. Your ugly insinuations are unwarranted, unpleasant, and untrue.

Asking for a citation is the usual way to handle this. What I have posted may in fact be untrue, I have been wrong before and will be again. But claiming that I am doing it intentionally is a bridge too far.

As I and several other posters have pointed out, we first must define “radical” before we can assign a size to it. For me, a “radical” is, among other things, someone who thinks that people should be physically punished for leaving their religion. In 2008, there is absolutely no justification for beating up anyone for leaving a religion. Anyone who does that or approves of that is, to me, a radical.

However, I don’t put too much weight on any given poll, I just use them as a snapshot dependent on time and place. Having said that, I would say that all polls are wrong, but some polls are useful.

You are correct, sometimes my passion gets the best of me, and does me no good service at all

However, the problem is huge, and perforce the brush must be broad. The reality is that the physical mistreatment of apostates by Muslims around the planet is much more widespread than most imagine, because much of the beating takes place behind closed doors, and few make the newspapers.

So you are right, only a minority of Muslims may approve of death for apostasy … but how many approve of physical punishment of some kind for apostasy? My guess is a majority of Muslims worldwide would approve of some kind of physical punishment, but I’ve never seen a poll about that.

What you say is quite true, but almost trivial. Yes, there are differences between all of the major schools of Islam. Yes, there are differences beween Muslims in New York and in the Rub Al Qali.

So what?

I say this seriously. What you describe is true in every field of study. There is an overarching concept, say “Animalia”, which encloses all of the next lower level concepts, say “Aves” and “Mammalia”. The lower level groupings each contain their own sub-categories, until at the most detailed level we have a particular female Islamic doctor in Des Moines.

So what?

Some statements will be true of all of the members of the overarching group at all levels. All chordata have backbones. Some statements are only true of a sub-group, or a sub-sub-group. Mammals have backbones and hair.

So what?

One thing of interest to me is what statements are true for the largest number of the sub-groups. “All Muslims believe in Allah” applies to the female surgeon just like every other Muslim. “Shi’ites believe Ali should have taken over after Mohammed died”. These kind of statements help us to understand the similarities between what at first may seem to be disparate groups, what they have in common.

A different kind of statement which is also of interest are statements that distinguish between groups. For example, “Islam is the only major modern religion whose religious texts actively encourage the physical punishment of apostates”.

So while we should certainly avoid fallacious fungibility as you recommend, at times it is precisely those statements that are true, those behaviours that are observed across most or all sub-groups (that truly can treat them as fungible) that are of the greatest interest.

The persecution and mistreatment of apostates, as near as I can tell, applies to the a large majority of the subgroups under the huge tent called “Islam”. Yes, there are both many individuals and many subgroups that don’t believe in it. But as I have shown, it is all too common across the length and breadth of the Muslim world.

Why?

Because the revealed Word of Allah and a great number and weight of Hadiths all instruct the faithful to deal very, very harshly with apostates. It’s not a social custom, or a cultural option. It is a religious directive straight from the lips of Allah.

Thanks again for your post,

w.

163

Not at all.
You have committed the fallacies of hasty generalization and biased sample. For instance, you used the subset of “Muslims who are in the MSM or who would take to the streets to protest” to decide that acceptance of brutal penalties for apostasy was in the majority.

You may not have knowingly shrugged off proper statistical methodology, but you did exactly that. That fact is neither ugly, unpleasant nor untrue.

In order for a statistical generalization to be valid and sound, you must do several things. The first, is that you must have a randomized sample. The second, is that randomized sample must be large enough for you to expand your generalization from that with a certain degree of confidence. 1000+ randomly selected individuals is usually enough for that. You must, also, make sure that your questionnaire is as bias-free as you can make it, a survey that was non-random, and whose only question boiled down to “Have you vocally opposed Jordan’s apostasy law, or are you a radical?” would be thrown out of an valid scientific study.

The burden of proof lies on you, and one does not have to prove the specific percentage breakdown of belief among Muslims in order to point out that your claims lack scientific rigor. The intellectually honest answer at a certain point is, simply “we don’t know, we can make some educated guesses, but we do not know.”
And we don’t know. There are certainly a lot of radical Muslims, but we simply don’t have the data required to assign anything but a very rough estimate of “a lot”.

But that’s part of the point. You can’t make a valid statistical generalization without following valid statistical methodology. If you abandon the proper taking and reporting of statistical data (polling), by definition it becomes much, much more difficult to speak about people, especially a billion individual people. You can say, for instance, X number of countries have apostasy laws, but going from that to saying how many people endorse and support them is quite another matter.

At best, you can form a rough estimate of how many condone them. But condoning =/= supporting.

Which still does not justify, let alone necessitate fallacious broad brushing. You can say, with accuracy “The problem is huge”. You can say “We don’t know the true extend of the problem, because it is socially/politically acceptable in many countries and isn’t reported.”

You abandon statistical validity, however, when you claim that the majority of Muslims are radicals, without then backing that up with hard data. As well as when you ascribe the problem to Islam, as if it was a reified, fungible entity. The facts and figures that you, yourself have presented, for example, show that many UK Muslims might as well practice a different form of Islam and that, for them, there’s no real problem with being an apostate. Lumping them together with other Muslims who feel diametrically opposed on the same issue, doesn’t help accuracy, or precision.

You do understand, though, that making a statement about a billion people, the world over, without any hard statistical data will remain as simply a guess, right? That’s the point. You prefer to guess, I prefer to stick to statistical methodology and simply say “I do not know”. Because I don’t. And neither do
you.

So, you can’t speak of them all as if they’re interchangeable. Or talk about problems with “Muslims” or “Islam” if those divisions and distinctions may disallow any such broad brush comparisons.

So, you don’t take a look at song birds and say “a majority of animals have beautiful songs.” You don’t take a look at some raptors and say “Birds have huge talons and slicing beaks.” There are very few generalizations that hold true for all of Animalia. For specifics, we have to analyze groupings that are ever smaller.

Treat Islam in the same manner. All Muslims believe Mohamed was a prophet and that God is One. One ‘phylum’ of Muslims may accept certain passages of scripture at face value, another ‘phylum’ may reject those same passages and prefer another set, etc, etc, etc…

Your argument would be statistically valid and logically tight if, for instance, you could pin down the numbers of Muslims in various locations who support punishment for apostasy. Barring that, all we’ve got is that all who do, draw (most of) their motivation and justification from scripture. Which doesn’t tell us anything other than that Islamic scripture is open to being used to support/justify/mandate horrible behavior.

164

finnagain, I said:

Seems clear to me. I say my guess is that a majority of Muslims approve of physical punishment for apostasy, but unfortunately either the pollsters haven’t asked that, or I can’t find it.

Yes, finnagain, when I describe something as a “guess”, I do know that it is a guess. When a man calls something a “guess”, he probably knows it is a guess.

But your assumption that I would “prefer to guess” is merely your fantasy running away with you. Like you, I’d prefer to have harder data … but I haven’t been able to find any. Which I also said.

So what is your point? That I have made a guess? I said that. That a guess is a guess, and remains a guess? D’oh … That polls are better than guesses? Thanks, but not a revelation.

You seem to be under the impression that all generalizations are untrue, or something, as though it were untrue to say that Bushmen are shorter than the Tutsi. You see, while you may not have gotten the memo, people make statements like this all of the time.

And generally, along with the statement there is the unspoken assumption that there are exceptions to every rule. I didn’t think I had to say that, since most people assume it, but I guess in your case I have to.

This reminds me of the old story about three mathematicians riding in a train in Scotland. One looks out the window and sees a flock of sheep, with one black sheep among them. He says, “There are black sheep in Scotland”.

The second says, “No, that’s wrong. All we can say is that there is at least one black sheep in Scotland.”

The third says “That’s wrong too. All we really can say is that in Scotland, there is at least one sheep that is black on at least one side.”

Now if you want me to take the discussion to that kind of kindergarten level, I can do so. Or you could just assume that, like most people on the planet, I know that, to once borrow a line from Godel,

“All generic statements are untrue, including this one.”

As I said before, I have a number Muslim friends and aquaintances, some of whom I respect greatly. And some of them would be horrified by someone getting beaten up for leaving Islam.

So you can take it as read that when I say something like “Islam supports punishment for the apostate”, that yes, finnagain, I do know the sheep might only be black on one side.

w.

PS - I had said:

So I asked for details of what you were accusing me of, saying “asking for a citation is the usual way of handling this.”

You replied.

Look, finnagain, two things:

  1. You accused me of doing it knowingly. Now you you want to say “you may not have knowingly shrugged off …” Make up your mind. You accused me of lying, of making facts up. Now you say I “may not” have made them up.

When you accuse a man of being a liar, the polite thing to do is say what you think he is lying about. Instead of doing that, as I had requested, you now half back down, and say I “may not” be a liar … gosh, thanks, finnagain, but you are still calling me a liar.

If you want to call me a liar, grow a pair and tell me what I’m lying about. What statistical methodology did I “shrug off”? What “hasty generalization” does finnagain not like? Where did I say anything regarding “Muslims who are in the MSM or who would take to the streets to protest”? Those are your words, not mine, don’t pretend that I said them by sticking them in quotes.

  1. I say that your accusations that I am lying, that I am making up facts, are ugly, unpleasant, and untrue.

Your response? Without listing a single fact that I supposed made up, without showing that I have lied about anything at all, you come back to say your accusations that I am a liar are not ugly, or unpleasant, or untrue.

Right, finnagain. I guess that explains a lot. You call me a liar, and refuse to back it up with any facts. Then you try to convince me that you calling me a liar is not unpleasant, or ugly …

Finally, I do not base my claim that apostasy is widely punished in Islamic circles on “Muslims who would take to the streets to protest”. How could I, there’s very few Muslims on the streets protesting on the topic of apostasy.

I base it on a variety of evidence, including but not limited to:

a) The statements of a variety of people involved in a number of incidents regarding the reasons for their actions.

b) The strong strictures in the Koran and the Hadiths, which prescribe extensive punishment or death for apostasy.

c) The widespread nature of the phenomena, which occurs in a wide variety of Islamic cultures and societies.

d) The existence of laws against apostasy in a number of Islamic countries.

e) Historical accounts of the punishment of Islamic apostates throughout history.

Certainly, I would prefer to have accurate statistics on this question. But since neither you nor I have been able to come up with any, how can I be ignoring the proper statistical approach that you recommend?

Please spare yourself the indignity of trying to guess why I, or anyone, supports some particular idea. You just end up looking foolish.

165

finnagain, one more thing. I am, by inclination and training, an excellent mathematician. More to the point, I am also someone who delights in statistics and has studied them extensively. I happily spend hours discussing things like the proper method to adjust statistical confidence intervals to take into account the effects of the Hurst coefficient of the dataset, and the intricacies of the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem and its application to non-normal data … do you? I was reading Shannon’s work when I was sixteen, which was pushing a half century ago … were you?

Because if not, lecturing random people on the web about proper statistical practice may not be the best idea … for example, you made the statistically improbable error of accidentally picking a dedicated statistician to accuse of statistical errors. What are the odds of that? …

You say that I have, what was it … “committed the fallacies of hasty generalization and biased sample”. Well, perhaps I have, but if you want me to believe that, you’re going to have to do more than just accuse me of it. I’m a statistician, and I can assure you that your vague accusations are statistically meaningless, not mentioning the fact that you have provided no evidence for them. Heck, if I were to cast a net as wide as yours, they might even “commit fallacies” in the bargain, who knows …

I said that my guess, which I clearly identified as a guess, was that people who support physical punishment for apostasy are a majority in the Muslim world. Because (as I also clearly stated) we don’t have good statistical data on this question, I based this guess on a variety of non-statistical evidence, some of which I listed in my previous post.

Now, perhaps you can explain to me how an educated guess, based on the best evidence that I can find in the absence of hard numerical data, can commit any statistical fallacy at all? It’s a guess, dude, a guess … and yes, it may only be black on one side, but it is still a guess, not a statistical claim of any kind.

If you believe I have made a statistical error, bring it on. I have assuredly made them before, and if you are correct in this case and I am wrong, I will be the first to admit it.

But an unsubstantiated “hasty generalization” of yours that I have made some unspecified statistical error is far from adequate. Point out the numbers I cited, quote (don’t interpret, but quote) what I said about those particular numbers, and tell us what you think is statistically wrong with my statements or conclusions. Then we’ll have something to discuss.

I hope you do see the difference between that process, and your simply accusing me of “inventing claims” without citing a single claim that I am supposed to have “invented”, just making the bald statement that I am a liar and moving on …

To conclude, if you have statistical concerns about what I have said, I’m happy to discuss them, if you can do so without calling me a liar in the process.

My best to you,

w.

166

I was finally able to track down the original of the poll of British Muslims that I referenced before. It is available here. Lots of interesting results.

One thing that surprised me, given the claim by a number of people that Muslims are all so different and not “fungible”, was the lack of diversity among the respondents regarding the statement “That Muslim conversion to another religion is forbidden and punishable by death.” based on where they came from. African, Pakistani, Indian, and other groups all were similar, about a third of all of them say death.

This poll was among the reasons I had said that I guessed that a majority of Muslims would approve of physical punishment for apostasy. If about a third of the Muslims in Britain approve of death for apostasy, surely many more must approve of a lesser punishment … and these are Muslims in the West.

Perhaps this is a “hasty generalization” … but I don’t think so.

w.