*The total Muslim population ranges between 1.3 billion and 1.6 billion. The uncertainty emanates mostly from three factors: outdated census in many nations, especially those embroiled in conflicts, such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Sudan; countries such as the US and France not recording their citizens’ religion; and Muslims in some countries, such as China, hiding their identity for fear of persecution. I have relied on estimates as listed in The World Factbook, www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/index.xhtml.

‡The Far East includes Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore and adjacent areas.

Chapter 1

The Politics

UNDER SIEGE

Contrary to the popular belief that the West is under siege from Muslim terrorists, it is Muslims who have become the biggest victims of the attacks of September 11, 2001, as inconceivable as that would have seemed in the aftermath of the murder of 2,900 people. Tens of thousands of civilians have been killed since in Iraq and Afghanistan. General Tommy Franks, the American commander who oversaw the invasions of both countries as part of the “war on terror,” famously said: “We don’t do body counts.” But some civic-minded groups and institutions have.

In Afghanistan, the civilian death toll, as of September 20, 2007, was at least double that of 9/11 — “between 5,700 and 6,500,” according to the Afghan Victim Memorial Project, run by Professor Marc Herold of the University of New Hampshire. 1But these figures are clearly too low, considering that the Associated Press news agency was reporting more than 5,000 deaths in the first nine months of 2007 alone.2

In Iraq, where the American military presence has lasted longer than American participation in World War II, the scale of civilian deaths has been staggering. Iraq Body Count, a group of British academics and peace activists, tally between 82,772 and 90,305 reported civilian deaths to April 2008.3 This figure is also too low, considering that in zones of conflict, governments and media are generally able to report only about a tenth of casualties. Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, therefore, opted for a different methodology of mortality count, one that had been used in the Congo, Kosovo and Sudan. Its team of researchers knocked on the doors of a representative sample of Iraqi households and asked if they had suffered any casualties. Projecting the results of the survey to the 4 million Iraqi households, it estimated the death toll across the country at 654,965 as of October 2006.4 Using a similar method, a British polling firm, Opinion Research Business, pegged the death toll at a shocking 1.22 million as of August 2007.5

Professor Les Roberts, co-author of the Johns Hopkins study, told me he agreed with the updated figure: “The toll stands at perhaps over a million,” more than 300 times the toll on 9/11.