Why are Muslims more violent today than Jews and Christians when the Old Testament is often just as violent if not more violent than the Qur'an?

Answer 1

Percentage of Muslims
First, we need to take a moment and realize that Islamic terrorism is a very small percentage of the Muslim population, just as terrorists in general are a minimal part of the population. However, just because terrorists make up less than 1% of Muslims (it is estimated that there are roughly 300,000 Jihadists in the world out of 1.6 billion Muslims), this number is still significantly larger than other groups who perform terrorism and are responsible for an inordinate share of casualties. In the last ten years, over 85% of terrorist incidents and 85% terrorist-related fatalities were perpetrated by Muslims. This is far more than either the Jews or the Christians.

It is the same way that criminals are usually less than 1% of the population of a given country, but police are still needed to prevent more crime. Pretending that crime does not exist because 99% of people are not criminals is not a healthy approach.

Answer
As to the question today of why Muslims are more violent per capita than Jews or Christians, even where the Qur'an is only as violent if not less violent than the Old Testament, there are three major reasons for this:

1) Religious Moderation through the Enlightenment and Disempowerment
Both Judaism and Christianity have had documents that have moderated or delimited the violent passages in the Old Testament.

In the case of Judaism, the Mishnah, Talmud, and other books of Jewish Religious Jurisprudence have often made the more violent aspects of the Old Testament completely unenforceable. While the possibility of the return to more violent laws is possible in a Messianic Age, the Jews do not currently see it to be religiously proper to stone children to death for disobedience to their parents.

In the case of Christianity, the New Testament served as a watershed moment, effectively splitting the laws of the Old Testament into ceremonial laws, the judicial laws, and the moral laws. Ceremonial Laws are the laws concerning sacrificial rituals and holidays and judicial laws concern the particular punishments meted out for sinful behavior. Christian theologians argued that the ceremonial and judicial laws are no longer valid because Jesus was himself the fulfillment of the law and, therefore, these ways of getting to God were unnecessary. As a result, the moral law was the only law that survived.

Regardless of these steps, which pushed both Judaism and Christianity in the right direction, what further impelled religious moderation was the Enlightenment and the forcing of religion out of power. In a new, non-governmental position, religions became more about morality and less about forced conformity. As a result, Judaism and Christianity mellowed further.

2) Piety: Simply put, the average Muslim is much more religious than the average Jew or the average Christian. This does not mean that there are not millions of pious Jews and Christians, but rather that when you have a larger pool of religiously observant people and it comes from a religion whose violent beliefs were not moderated, you have a higher likelihood of generating violence.

3) Political Issues: In most of the Jewish and Christian World, baseline domestic concerns are taken care of. Conversely, much of the Islamic World is poor and often battle-scarred. This political instability is more likely to generate violence than a politically stable environment all else equal.

Related Questions
Please also see these Related Questions:

• Why is it that while not every Muslim is a terrorist, every terrorist is a Muslim?
• Why are Muslims intolerant of other religions?
• Are there any rules governing Muslims in relation to Non-Muslims?