There has been quite a lot of discussion about numbers recently, suggesting that maybe 1/3 of the world population was Muslim and that a high percentage of these favour violence. Firstly, the group is for building relationships rather than debating statistics. Secondly, there are a couple of comments that I would like to make: 1/ Most of the statistics can be found on the Pew Global site (pewglobal.org) and the Pew Research site (pewresearch.org). Years ago I was a delegate at a Pew sponsored consultation in Philidelphia. At their expense they had flown in people from all round the world for that consultation. I was very impressed with the quality of the delegates and felt myself to be the least of them. One of my friends, a fine scholar from Edinburgh, was a staffer there for a few years. I would trust Pew statisics, though I would add that some of the questions are significant for what they do not ask rather than what they do ask. For example, though they ask how many Muslims agree with violence to protect their culture, there is no research done to find out how many Westerners or Christians agree with violence to protect their culture. 2/ Debating statistics rarely develops relationships and therefore I would counsel care with this approach. When approaching peacemaking common ground is essential. Looking at statistics can help in developing common ground or it can degrade into my statistics are better than your statistics which gets nowhere. History shows that small numbers of people have changed the world, so even if the number of peacemakers from Muslim and Christian world views is small, if we approach it correctly we can make a difference.
Posted on: Thu, 09 Oct 2014 08:26:07 +0000
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