Why Most Terrorists Are Muslims

It’s important to note that terrorism is not just a weird phenomenon born out of having a tradition of shunning criticism. The act of terrorism is directly encouraged by the Quran.



Quran -- the heart of Muslim terrorism

You might have noticed that most terrorists are also Muslims. That means that, per capita, the group that produces the most terrorists is Muslims. Why is this the case? It boils down to differences in tradition. The cultures where Islam is dominant have traditions that promote terrorism where other cultures have different traditions that don’t do that. I’ll discuss these traditions in detail.

Traditions are ideas that are commonly known among the vast majority of a culture. People learn these traditions generation after generation. In some cultures, traditions change quickly, while in other cultures they don’t. The former are dynamic societies while the latter are static. So what causes the difference between dynamic and static societies?

Consider all the static societies you know – what do they have in common? Now consider the dynamic societies – what do they have in common? In dynamic societies there exists a tradition of criticism – that criticism is seen as something good, while in static society’s there exists the opposite tradition – that criticism is bad and thus frowned upon.

As David Deutsch explains in The Beginning of Infinity, in early human history there was one such dynamic society – the ancient Greeks. In their society, even children were encouraged to question the ideas of their teachers. Criticism was a good thing because it was seen as something that helps people learn to think better. It also helps correct mistakes from teachers.

But the Greeks lost this dynamic feature when they became an empire and fell to the Romans. After the Greeks, the next dynamic society was the Italians in the 16th century and the resulting phenomenon we now know as the Enlightenment. The West today is still a dynamic society and it has been this way since the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution that started over 400 years ago. And many cultures in our modern world have acquired this dynamic feature. These societies that have become dynamic did so by adopting the tradition of criticism. How did this happen?

The tradition of criticism was born out of the Scientific Revolution. This is evident in the process known as the Scientific Method. In this method, people create hypotheses about physical reality and then they and others create experiments with the intention of falsifying those hypotheses. With each new hypothesis, a scientist is guesses a new theory. And with each successful experiment, a theory is refuted, or part of a theory is refuted. Then scientists create new guesses for theories and again they create experiments to try to refute the new theories. Notice that the experiments are criticism – criticism that uses physical evidence.

Karl Popper examined the history of science and discovered that all scientific knowledge was and is created by guesses and criticism. And he realized that all knowledge is created this way, not just scientific knowledge. He realized that all knowledge evolves – step-by-step, one guess at a time, one criticism at a time.

Now imagine a society that doesn’t have a tradition of criticism. The one’s in authority don’t like it when other people criticize their ideas. Religious leaders tell people to not think for themselves and to just believe what the scholars say. Parents and teachers tell kids to do what they say without question. And when people do question these authorities, they get offended because they have been questioned and often this leads to anger and sometimes it’s followed by physical action, like spanking or raising a city.

So in these static societies, people learn that questioning authority leads to anger and retaliation. They learn to shy away from criticism because they fear retaliation. This affects kids the most because they can’t yet defend themselves from their parents. So kids develop a method of thinking that is void of criticism. They learn to judge ideas by justifying them by the authorities instead of criticizing those ideas themselves. And these kids grow up to be adults that do the same – they don’t think for themselves.

What are the ramifications of judging ideas without criticism?

Note that everybody has mistaken ideas – no one is perfect. So by adopting ideas from the authorities without your own criticism, then you are adopting all their mistaken ideas too – without any possibility of correcting those mistakes. A society that does this cannot correct its own mistaken ideas. So its mistaken ideas go on indefinitely without any mode of error correction; hence it is a static society.

Now imagine a society that has a tradition of criticism. People are encouraged to criticize the authorities. Children are encouraged to ask their parents and teachers critical questions. Children sometimes correct their parent’s mistaken ideas. So when they have their own children, they don’t make the same mistakes that their own parent’s made. Scientists are encouraged to criticize each other’s theories in an effort to discover mistakes and correct them thus getting ever closer to the truth. So criticism is seen as something that is good.

With a tradition of criticism comes the freedom of dissent. People know that it’s ok for everyone to have their own opinions. Sometimes people might get offended by other people’s opinions but resorting to physical retaliation is not part of the tradition. Instead people learn to debate – to hash out their differing opinions in peaceful discussion. And with each discussion both parties realize that each of them will learn something new that they didn’t know before going into the discussion. Their mistakes are being exposed and so they have the opportunity to correct those mistakes, and they regularly do. This is how knowledge evolves, within each one of us, and as a society as a whole.

So dynamic societies have traditions that promote error correction while static societies don’t. The reality is that our knowledge is not perfect. And it’s the imperfections that cause human suffering. In order to lesson our suffering, we must improve our knowledge. And the only way to improve our knowledge is to discover our mistaken ideas (using criticism) and to correct those mistakes (by guessing new ideas).

Now getting back to Muslims and terrorism. Islamic societies are static societies. These societies have not yet adopted the tradition of criticism. They see criticism as something bad and so criticism is frowned upon. Questioning your parents is bad. Questioning Allah is bad. This is what causes their knowledge to be static – it halts the evolution of knowledge.

Interestingly, the Quran explicitly states that it will not be changed. That Allah is protecting it from manmade changes. So it doesn’t evolve. And Muslims claim this as their proof that Islam is right and all other religions are wrong. But the reality is that knowledge evolution is good, because it corrects mistakes. So other religions like Christianity have evolved, and so their knowledge has improved, namely their morality.

What does this have to do with terrorism? Well what is terrorism? It’s an act of fear mongering – of trying to instill fear in other people. What is the point of fear mongering? It’s to try to prevent people from doing a certain behavior. Consider how some parents use physical punishment with their kids, like spanking. What is the purpose of that? To teach their kids that if they do a certain behavior, they’ll receive physical pain. And their purpose is to instill fear in their kids – fear of what would follow, which is punishment and the associated physical pain.

And why is it that parents respond with punishment? What can the child do for the parent to choose to punish him? The child must have disagreed with the parent. He must have criticized his parent’s idea. He must have questioned his authority. So the parent reacts with punishment. This is analogous to terrorism. Terrorists respond to the criticism coming from non-Muslims, like videos mocking their prophet, by physically punishing them. Clearly terrorists see criticism as something that is bad and that they should react with physical force. And this is a tradition that pervades all Islamic societies today.

This raises the question, how will terrorism stop? Well we need an agent of change, one that will change Islamic cultures everywhere. That agent of change will play a role in their societies adopting a tradition of criticism. I don’t know how this will happen. I don’t know what things must fall into place for this to happen.

What I do know is that by adopting a tradition of criticism, a society will enter a golden age, its own Enlightenment. And if it can sustain its tradition of criticism, then it will continue to be a dynamic society, indefinitely.

In this sort of society, people would not turn to terrorism. They would not see criticism as a bad thing. They would know that criticism is a necessary part of evolving our knowledge and so criticism is good! When people criticize our mistakes, they are providing explanations of flaws that they see in our ideas. This means that each one of us has multiple sources of criticism in which to discover our mistakes, not just ourselves. So exposing one’s mistakes is seen as a good thing because then we can correct them. So when our mistakes are exposed through criticism, we get ecstatic!

It’s important to note that terrorism is not just a weird phenomenon born out of having a tradition of shunning criticism. The act of terrorism is directly encouraged by the Quran. So how could Islamic societies adopt a tradition of criticism while their holy book explicitly states that terrorism is encouraged? The answer may lie in the other societies who have done similar things. Consider that there are some bad morals in the religion of Christianity too, and Western societies have evolved their moral knowledge away from those bad morals. The same sort of thing could happen with Islam.

Finally, there is the idea that the Quran cannot change. It’s questionable whether Muslims will accept the idea of changing the Quran such that its moral knowledge can be improved upon. Again the answer may lie in other societies who have done similar things. The Bible has changed, but some of its bad morals are still in there. And still, Western societies have evolved their moral knowledge away from those bad morals. The same sort of thing could happen with Islam. Muslims of the future might see the Quran the same way that Christians see their Bible today, a book about God and morals and some other weird symbolic stories that only the people of previous centuries thought to be real.

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