What proportion of the world’s Muslims are, or are likely to become, jihadists?

Nobody knows even an approximate number.

In search of an answer, we found this article at the website of Daniel Pipes. The content seems to have been gathered by an Indian professor from a book called Prophet of Doom by Craig Winn.

The article was posted in November 2006 and the Muslim population of the world has grown since then. It is now about 1.6 billion.

There has been a proliferation of terrorist groups in the Middle East and North Africa since the start of the  “Arab Spring”.

The Islamic State (IS/ISIS/ISIL) alone is waging war with over 30,000 fighters, a number said to be growing steadily.

Robert Spencer, a leading authority on Islam, wrote on June 4, 2014:

The threat to the U.S. from global jihadist groups has escalated in the past three years, with the number of groups increasing by more than 50% and the estimated number of militants doubling.

So the figures predicted in the article have almost certainly proved to be under-estimates. But here is what the author worked out:

I am often asked to guess as to how many Muslims are jihadists. …  I think the math goes something like this:

There are between 1.2 and 1.5 billion Muslims in the world. Half are women. While a substantial percentage of Islamic women support jihad, less than one in fifty Islamic terrorist acts is actually perpetrated by a female. That leaves us with a maximum pool of jihadists that is just over 50% of the total population.

The overwhelming preponderance of terrorist acts are conducted by young Muslim men 15 to 30 years old. This age bracket covers about half of the male population of the Islamic world, leaving us with a potential jihad pool of 25% of all Muslims – approximately 300 million people.

The most logical way to determine the percentage of Muslims who are salafi/fundamentalists – a precondition to jihad – is to consider the most recent elections in Islamic countries. For example, the fundamentalist Islamic group Hamas received 65% of the popular vote in “Palestine.” The somewhat secular Fatah, at least by comparison to Hamas, won only 30% of the votes.

While he was not popularly elected, Turkey’s president, Ahmet Necdet Sezar, is a fundamentalist Muslim. Turkey’s parliament, which selected him by a 70% majority, is formed as a result of a popular mandate and it is predominately comprised of fundamentalist Muslims. Turkey’s Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is the nation’s most popular leader. He is a convicted felon who believes: “Mosques are our barracks, domes are our helmets, minarets our bayonets, and believers our soldiers.” He won a landslide victory in 2002 – and Turkey is considered to be the most moderate Islamic state.

The newly elected fundamentalist Islamic nutcase ruling Iran, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, earned 62% of the popular vote. The most moderate Islamic challenger garnered less than twenty percent support. The notion that the majority of Iranians are hostile to the Shia mullahs, and are poised for a revolution, is a myth

In Lebanon, politicians got all excited when 50,000 people marched in support of democracy. The following week when 500,000 people protested in support of Islam/Submission, the percentage of fundamentalist Muslims became clear.

Fundamentalist Islamic candidates in the most recent Iraqi elections, those individuals who belonged to clerical parties like the Islamic Revolution in Iraq founded by Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani, won 65% of the seats in the new parliament.

While opinion surveys can be suspect, and are often tainted by the manner in which a question is phrased, there are two that are worth mentioning. Opinion polls taken by the British Government reveal that 70% of Iraqis think killing Americans is justified, something that is impossible to justify outside the conditioning of fundamentalist Islam. The rising death toll of American troops and stunning escalation in terror in Iraq give credence to those numbers. Polls taken in Pakistan, where bin Laden is being harbored, reveal that 70% of Pakistanis view the world’s most famous Islamic terrorist very favorably. In fact, Osama has become the most popular name for boys in the region.

Therefore, based upon the most objective data available to us, at least 60% of all Muslims have the potential to be jihadists by way of their fundamentalist voting patterns. That is to say, Islam has grown substantially closer to its salafi, and thus terrorist, roots over the past decade.

It is safe to say that 750 million Muslims are fundamentalists trying to follow Allah’s orders and Muhammad’s example. And as fundamentalists, they are potential jihadists.

If the 60% response levels derived from polling data is an accurate reflection of the current state of Islam, then sex and age criteria further reduce Islamic terrorist candidates down to a maximum of one in every seven Muslims – 25% of 60%. That means that no more than 15% of the total Islamic population of 1.2 to 1.5 billion people has the potential to be a terrorist should the opportunity arise. That equates to a minimum of 180 million potential jihadists and a maximum of 225 million.

But when it comes to actual jihadists, to those who have or will commit an act of terrorism in Allah’s name, my research suggests that they represent no more than one in one hundred of the 180 million young fundamentalist Muslim men prepared mentally, morally, and spiritually to be terrorists. That means that there are 1.8 million actual Islamic jihadists on the planet today – a number which could jump one hundred fold almost instantaneously should the opportunity arise.

Middle East political commentator Daniel Pipes says that there are no less than 130 million Islamic jihadists but I don’t believe that is possible because there haven’t been sufficient jihadist attacks over the past 20 years for that many Muslims to be engaged in the business of killing people for Allah.

But there have been sufficient jihadist attacks now to make that figure plausible. According to the tally kept by The Religion Of Peace (shown continuously in our margin) there have now been over 24000 lethal terrorist attacks by Muslims (most of them on other Muslims) since the jihad attacks on America on 9/11/2o01.

The potential pool of jihadists, however, is reasonably close to Pipes’s estimate. …

Keep in mind that while only 15% of Muslims are potential jihadists today, that percentage is growing rapidly. Thanks to OPEC funding and clerical indoctrination, the Islamic world is becoming increasingly fundamentalist. In twenty years most Muslims could be terrorists – and probably will be.