Statistical Islam, Part 4 of 9

Case 3: Political Islam


Religious Islam is defined as doctrine concerned with going to Paradise and avoiding Hell by following the Koran and the Sunna. The part of Islam that deals with the "outsider", the Kafir, is defined as political Islam. Since so much of the Trilogy is about the Kafir, the statistical conclusion is that Islam is primarily a political system, not a religious system.



Mohammed's success depended on politics, not religion. The Sira, Mohammed's biography, gives a highly detailed accounting of his rise to power. He preached the religion of Islam for 13 years in Mecca and garnered 150 followers. He was forced to move to Medina and became a politician and warrior. During the last 9 years of his life, he was involved in an event of violence every 6 weeks. When he died every Arab was a Muslim. Mohammed succeeded through politics, not religion.



An estimate can be made that there were 100,000 Muslims when Mohammed died. Using this information allows a graph to be drawn:



There are two distinct growth processes-religion and politics. Teaching and religion grew at a rate of about 12 new Muslims per year. Politics and jihad grew at a rate of 10,000 new Muslims per year, an enormous increase. This is a process yield improvement of over 800%. Politics was almost a thousand times more effective than religion.



If Mohammed had continued with preaching religion we can extrapolate that there would have only been 265 Muslims when he died, instead of the 100,000 that resulted from his politics and jihad. This gives us an estimate of 265 conversions due to religion and 99,735 conversions to due the political jihad process. We can calculate the relative contributions of religion and politics in growth. Islam's success was 0.3% religion and 99.7% politics at the time of Mohammed's death, 632 AD.



This political importance is reflected in the text of the Sira. There are many more pages devoted to a year of jihad than there are devoted to preaching Islam. It is instructive to see the amount of the Sira text devoted to these stages of development .





The Sira devotes about 5 times as many words to politics than religion on a yearly basis. It gives politics 5 times the coverage because it is that much more important.

Islam's political nature is also found in the Hadith that devotes 37% of its text to the Kafir.



There would be no Islam today, if it were only a religion. Statistics show that Islamic politics is what brought Islam success, not religion. To say that Islam is the religion of peace misses the point, since the religion is not the core of Islam's power. It is politics that count, not religion.



The statistical conclusion: Islam is primarily a political ideology.