Because in that religion, they’re all still free to advocate death to atheists. Christianists believe the same thing, but don’t want to admit it, though most still do.

Peace be upon you my friend. There are. But people rarely use twitter in my opinion. I dont. You can find a lot of people calling out these idiots on facebook if you care to look..

I agree that a deeper analysis would be good for providing context and giving a more objective understanding and a more reasonable approach to narrative. However, I question whether or not that would be useful or enlightening in a meaningful sense. A quick look over the hashtag shows that there is, in fact, support for the hashtag, including from Arabs, and that is encouraging. However, these examples of calling for the death of apostates still exist and are held with conviction. But if we were to be critical in our understanding of the general situation, we cannot use Twitter for that.

In my previous post (above) I argue that the Arab Twitter user base cannot be a representative sample of the Arab world, and indeed, not even statistically significant. A quick look at user and population numbers shows how insignificant the percentage of Arab Twitter users is: under 6 million users from a population of over 350 million, which is less than 2%. Providing context for such a small demographic is in no way representative of the predominant cultures in Arab states, especially when one considers that not all users are active and not all chose to participate in this hashtag. Some users might be unaware of the hashtag and some might have chosen not to participate. This logically makes the 2% (which might have been a high enough number) dwindle into insignificance if we’re discussing general cultural norms.

I claim that trying to formulate an objective understanding cannot be done through social media alone. This article is a representation of a niche demographic on a single platform. It reflects the attitude of those individuals, and sadly, these views are pervasive in the Arab world if you ever experience living there and immerse yourself in the culture.

I fully support the efforts for developing a much better understanding of context and numbers. However, this seems like a nearly impossible task. One cannot hook enough people, who would be a random and representative sample of Arabs, to MRI machines to find out their true attitudes. One cannot even assume that there would be a safe environment for the sample to express their beliefs honestly in a questionnaire or an interview. One cannot assume that researchers and statisticians would be safe in conducting their research.

As for the currently available statistics, be it from Arab governments or the US, it is very difficult to find them to be anything but excruciatingly inaccurate. For example, literacy rates of higher than 95% in countries I’ve been to and lived in are just impossible to believe; it is like Bashar Al-Assad winning 88.7 of the Syrian votes in 2014 during wartime. These numbers are not dealt with in a scientifically honest manner, and I am pessimistic of the possibility of obtaining fairly accurate numbers.

Best, most comprehensive and accurate summary I have come across. Thank you for that.

I took ten minutes out from editing a podcast to post it:-) A deeper analysis would be nice however…

If I were a commissioning editor (I’ve known a fair few) I would be tempted to say “yes, but so what?” There’s no context, just a sort of inverted beauty parade. How many responses did the hashtag gain overall? How many were positive? What were the common themes? What do we know now that we didn’t before?

The idea is a very good one, but I fear without that extra layer of context and narrative it can be used by the political Right to say “look, they’re barbarians” and regressives to say “but you’re being too general” with both feeling the article backs that position. I’ve seen there’s been a bit of the latter on Twitter.

That was a joke about regressivethink.

Not Reformation. Islam has had it’s reformation – that is what Salafism is all about. Reformation in the Christian world produced the bible reading literalists of the protestant movement who wanted to reach back to what they considered the “authentic” Christianity. In ISIS we have the same impulse in an Islamic context.

What the Islamic world needs is an Enlightenment. Screw the Reformation – that’s just playing in the same sandpit. Kick the castle over with an Enlightment.