Recently there was a study done in which a statistical analysis was made of Quran and the Old Testament and the New Testament which made claims that the Bible was more violent than the Quran. This struck me as a bit odd because my analysis shows just the opposite.
I define violence as political physical violence i.e. when Cain kills Abel, this to me is not political violence because what I’m interested in is in the Old Testament, how Jews kill non-Jews and in the New Testament how Christians are ordered to kill non-Christians, just as when I measure violence in the Quran, the sunnah and the hadith, I’m interested in political violence. And the other thing is I’m interested in actual violence. You would need to do more than just count words. I gave a talk one time at a college, which had a lot of Muslims in the crowd and when I mentioned how violent the Quran was, in particular the Quran at Medina, a student raised his hand and says “I’ve searched on my device here and the word “jihad” only occurs this many times in the Quran.” I said “I’m not measuring the counting of the word “jihad”, I’m interested in measuring the actual act of jihad.” In the Quran there’s a verse which refers to the sleepiness and tiredness of the warriors. This is taken from the battle of Badr. It does not include the word “jihad” but virtually the entire surah is written about the battle of Badr so we want to measure the entire idea, not just what sentences occur. When I do this work, I find that I get a different result. I find that the most violent of all is the Quran, the Sunnah and the Hadith. The Old Testament is violent, yes but in the New Testament, I find no political violence in it at all. My measurement shows that there is no political violence in the New Testament. There are 34,000 words devoted to the Old Testament and 328,000 words in the Quran, the sunnah and the hadith.
There’s one more difference here. Most of the violence in the Old Testament is historical in nature, it describes tribal violence, it describes invasion but these are history lessons, they are not prescriptive. The bad thing about the violence in Islam is it is prescriptive. There are parts of it which say that this violence is to go on until every human being says there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet. You’ll notice there’s another peculiar thing about my measurement of the violence which is this: my violence measures what you read in the morning news. If you get up in the morning and see that Muslims have committed violence, are you surprised or shocked? Notice that it’s never methodist or mennonites. So my analysis agrees with the morning news whereas this other multicultural statistical analysis is at variance with the morning news.