Study released on Muslims and violence

A study that was conducted by UC-Berkeley Professor M. Steven Fish on the link between Muslims and violence has been cited in numerous news articles around the internet recently. In his guest post for the Washington Post, Professor M. Steven Fish provides an angle not often offered in mainstream media, citing statistics for murder rates in Muslim-majority countries as a counter argument to the viewpoint often asserted that Muslims are a more violent community than non-Muslims:

One explanation we can rule out is that Muslims are violent people. Predominantly, Muslim countries average 2.4 murders per annum per 100,000 people, compared to 7.5 in non-Muslim countries. The percentage of the society that is made up of Muslims is an extraordinarily good predictor of a country's murder rate. More authoritarianism in Muslim countries does not account for the difference. I have found that controlling for political regime in statistical analysis does not change the findings. More Muslims, less homicide.

Fish also re-ran numbers to exclude non-Muslim-majority states with extraordinarily high murder rates (Colombia, Guatemala, El Salavador, Honduras, Jamaica, Lesotho, South Africa and Venezuela). Countries with a large Muslim population were found to be less murder prone by a significant margin.

However, CAGE acknowledges that there are many other factors that contribute to violence rates, such as widespread poverty, institutional racism, corruption, how the law is implemented and how the justice system operates generally.

Whatever one makes of this study, CAGE welcomes discussions which aim to unpack the often prevalent narrative that Muslims are more prone to violence because of religion (a narrative exacerbated by government programs such as PREVENT). These ideas, if left unchallenged, only serve to perpetuate islamophobia, general ignorance and fear, which, in turn is then used to justify increased state power via draconian laws (such as the CTS Bill) and mass surveillance.