Ghazala Wahab

In the early years of the last decade when the global war on terrorism (GWOT) was underway, it appeared that the biggest threat facing the world was indeed terrorism of the jihadi variety. The audacity of the 9/11 attack had convinced most people, including this writer, that driven by the Islamic fervour and tempted by the lust for paradise and the pleasures lying therein including 72 houris, Muslims en masse were signing up for the global jihad.

In those few years, uncountable number of books were published on the subject of jihad, few written by notables, many by wannabe experts and mostly by Islamaphobes who saw in this an opportunity to claim, ‘See, we told you, this is an evil religion’. In this competitive expertise on Islamic terrorism appeared a book in 2011 called The Missing Martyrs by Charles Kurzman.

In the opening chapter, he posed a provocative question, ‘why there are so few Muslim terrorists?’ He wrote, ‘…if there are more than a billion Muslims in the world, many of whom supposedly hate the West and desire martyrdom, why don’t we