270 million

[Aimless]

I've seen this number pop up in a dozen or so discussions every day for the past week or so. I've encountered it previously, but it's spreading faster than it did before. It is cited as the number of people murdered in the name of Islam. The claim is always unattributed but we know its source:

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/arti...ctims_of_Islam

Now, we know that there must have been many victims of Islam, but how many deaths can be attributed to Islam really? What is the consensus on the current best estimate?

RB? Lewk? Can you guys help, please?

[RandBlade]

Not sure why you named me its really not my area of expertise. Plus are you talking about in all time or just recently?

My guess would be far too many and the same could be said about Christianity. But in historic times when a higher proportion of people were killed in religious inspired wars there was less population than there is now so the numbers of fatalities even if horrific don't sound incredible when compared to atrocities like the Nazis or Communists as there were simply not that many people to kill.

[Loki]

If we're counting collateral and indirect damage, it would be hard to top the French, British, Chinese, and Spanish Empires. Probably the Mongols, too.

[RandBlade]

What's terrifying to think about with regards to the Mongols is not just how many deaths there were, but like I said regarding that era is how few people there were relatively to be killed. The proportion of fatalities the Mongols inflicted (even without counting the plague-related deaths) is probably without precedent.

To put it into context the Mongol invasions were not long after the crusades finished. The crusades typically had tens of thousands on each side. The Mongols resulted in the deaths of tens of millions. More died to the Mongols than the whole of WWI put together yet the population of those nations involved in WWI was vastly, vastly greater than Asia and eastern Europe that the Mongols reached.

[LittleFuzzy]

If we're counting collateral and indirect damage, it would be hard to top the French, British, Chinese, and Spanish Empires. Probably the Mongols, too.

What do you lay at the hands of religion and what do you lay on other interests/impulses? Missionaries were a common component of the European drive for empire.

[EyeKhan]

In the book 1491, the author discussed recent estimates that the Americas were populated with as many as 100 million indigenous people at the time Columbus arrived. Successive waves of disease depopulated both continents by as much as 90% in the next couple hundred years. Given the lack of human genetic diversity in the Americas and the lack of prior exposure to so many diseases common to the rest of humanity, that catastrophe seems to have been unavoidable. Eventually, contact with Europeans, Asians or Africans would have touched it off, if not Columbus.

Anyway, that's like 90 million people, whole cultures, falling to the age of exploration. Or the rise of colonialism. Or whatever you want to call it. The sky fell on the original Americans. Hard. Nobody meant to do it. Hell, they were almost certainly unaware of it at the time, but the irony of course is that the powers then would not have given a fuck anyway. Probably.

[RandBlade]

The same had happened but with the shoe on the other foot a few centuries earlier.

The Mongols killed 30mn people in their wars across Asia and Eastern Europe but what really devastated Europe (and to a lesser extent India and other parts of Asia) was that they brought with them the bubonic plague - the Black Death. A third to 60% of Europeans are believed to have died due the plague and total world population is estimated to have gone from 450mn to 350mn and the world population didn't recover for four more centuries.