The Missing Martyrs by Charles Kurzman (OUP, £16.99 (From The Northern Echo)

The Missing Martyrs by Charles Kurzman (OUP, £16.99

2:49pm Monday 12th September 2011 in Non-Fiction By Steve Craggs

GOING by what we see on TV and read in the newspapers, the West is about to be overwhelmed by Muslim terrorists, many of whom are seemingly only too eager to martyr themselves for their beliefs. This message is constantly being hammered home scaring the living daylights out of most of us and demonising Muslims around the world.

And yet, says Kurzman, a leading authority on Islamic movements, there is precious little evidence to support this scare-mongering. Outside hotspots such as Afghanistan and Iraq, Muslim martyrs are as rare as snowflakes in the desert; the terrorist message is failing to register with the vast majority of the world’s one billion Muslims and the terrorists themselves acknowledge their failure to attract recruits.

Kurzman produces lots of facts and figures to back up his reasoning.

Who would have thought, for instance, that out of the 240,000 murders in the US since 9/11, Islamist terrorists have killed at most three dozen people. In cutting the terror threat down to size and allowing us not to terrorise ourselves, Kurzman presents a whole new picture of the Muslim world – a world which we should not hold in fear.