Is Islam a Religion of Peace? What the Terrorism Data Shows

The charge usually arrives with a number attached. One ex-Muslim commentator told an American audience that more than 72,000 Islamic terrorist attacks have struck almost every country on earth since 9/11, and attributed the figure to a well-known annual terrorism index. A popular video essay cites polling to estimate 150 million Islamists and three million potential terrorists. The numbers deserve scrutiny, because the argument stands or falls with them. So does the honest answer: jihadist groups are among the deadliest organisations operating today, and Muslims have to reckon with that.

Where the 72,000 figure comes from

The index cited is published annually by the Institute for Economics & Peace. Its underlying database records a little over 76,000 terrorist incidents of every kind, worldwide, for the whole period from 2007 to 2025. That total covers terrorism of every ideology. A count of 72,000 attacks by one religious category since 2001 cannot come from that dataset.

The figure matches a running tally kept by an anti-Islam website that counts any killing where the perpetrator saw Islam as a motive, “as interpreted by the perpetrator,” and whose own compilers say the list includes honour killings and executions alongside terrorism. A partisan tally with its own inclusion rules is a different thing from a research index, and attributing one to the other misleads the audience.

What the index reports

The 2026 edition of the index reports that deaths from terrorism fell 28 percent in 2025 to 5,582, the lowest figure since 2007. The Islamic State and its affiliates remained the deadliest organisation, responsible for 17 percent of attacks worldwide. The Sahel region of Africa accounted for over half of all terrorism deaths.

Two findings complicate the critics’ story. Fatalities in the West rose to 57 in 2025, and the report attributes the rise largely to antisemitism, Islamophobia and political terrorism. And in sub-Saharan Africa, where jihadist violence is heaviest, 71 percent of recruits named abuses by state security forces as the final trigger for joining an armed group. The data describes an insurgency feeding on failed states and ungoverned borders, carried out under a religious banner.

Who dies

The United States National Counterterrorism Center reported in 2011 that, where the religious affiliation of victims could be determined, Muslims suffered between 82 and 97 percent of terrorism-related deaths over the previous five years. The same report attributed roughly 70 percent of the year’s 12,533 terrorism deaths to Sunni extremist groups. Both facts stand together. Jihadist groups kill more people than any other category of terrorist, and the people they kill are overwhelmingly Muslims.

That second fact matters for the argument. If Islam itself produced the violence, the victims would be the enemies Islam names. The actual victims are overwhelmingly Muslim villagers and worshippers. Groups that massacre Muslims at prayer are waging war on the Muslim community as much as on anyone.

What Muslims say about violence

A 2013 Pew Research Center survey of eleven Muslim publics asked whether suicide bombing and other violence against civilians could be justified in defence of Islam. In Pakistan 89 percent said never; in Indonesia 81 percent; in Nigeria 78 percent. In Malaysia 58 percent said never, while 27 percent said such attacks were sometimes or often justified. Among Palestinian Muslims a majority said such attacks could be justified. The results show broad rejection of terrorism alongside troubling minorities in specific countries, most of them in active conflicts.

The polling figures cited for stoning and the death penalty for apostasy come from a companion Pew survey, and they measure something else. They are shares of Muslims who already favour making sharia the official law of their country, and they record opinions about state legal punishment. A person can hold a harsh view of criminal law and reject terrorism. Pakistani Muslims, who returned high support for classical punishments in one survey, returned 89 percent rejection of attacks on civilians in the other. Treating one set of numbers as a count of potential terrorists conflates two questions the surveys kept apart.

What the sources forbid

The Quran lists the unlawful killing of a human being among the gravest prohibitions.

The Prophet forbade the killing of women and children in war (Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 3015). He also placed the non-Muslim living under a covenant of safety beyond the reach of any Muslim’s violence.

A muʿāhad (one under covenant) is a non-Muslim who lives among Muslims or enters their lands under an agreement of safety. The modern visa and the grant of citizenship are covenants of exactly this kind. A Muslim who lives in London or Paris lives under exactly such a covenant with the people around him. The attacker who kills them breaks the covenant and, on the Prophet’s own words, forfeits Paradise.

Islam and Islamism

The same video essay that estimates three million potential terrorists draws a distinction between Islam and Islamism, and concedes that hundreds of millions of Muslims are not Islamists. Its own example is Egypt, where millions of Muslims took to the streets in 2013 against the Muslim Brotherhood government. The distinction is sound, and it defeats the claim that the violence flows from the religion as such. Movements such as the Islamic State and al-Qaeda are modern political projects that emerged from the wreckage of states in the last half century, and Muslims have been their first and most numerous opponents.

The honest position holds two things at once. Jihadist violence is real, organised and deadly, and it claims Islamic justification. The Quran and the Prophet forbid what it does, the data shows Muslims are its main victims, and the surveys show most Muslims reject it. A religion whose texts forbid killing the covenanted, and whose adherents are the chief victims and chief opponents of the groups that do it, is poorly described by the figures its critics repeat.