The missing martyrs: Islam specialist Charles Kurzman
A professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Charles Kurzman specializes in Middle East and Islamic studies and has studied Muslim-American communities in the United States. He wrote The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran and edited Modernist Islam, 1840–1940: A Sourcebook. His most recent book, just published by Oxford University Press, is titled The Missing Martyrs: Why There Are So Few Muslim Terrorists.
The subtitle of your new book refers to there being "few Muslim terrorists." Why do you say few?
Because terrorism is not nearly as widespread as many people feared it would be after 9/11. In fact, terrorists' websites complain about Muslims' failure to join the revolutionary movement.
What kind of numbers are we talking about?
The figures I find interesting are the number of deaths by violence per day by terrorism compared to the number of deaths by violence overall. According to the World Health Organization, 2,000 people die each day by violence around the globe. According to the National Counterterrorism Center, the number of deaths per day by terrorism peaked at 63 in 2007 and has shrunk to half that.
