Body Count: A Quantitative Review of Political Violence Across World Civilizations

by Naveed S. Sheikh

37 pages, Unknown Binding

Published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Jackson · Rating 1 out of 5]

Dubious piece of scholarship. The author ignores certain genocides committed by members of his own faith. The institute that has published the work may also represent a source of ulterior motives. I suspect that the author has been commissioned to produce propaganda in the form of affirmative bias towards Muslims.

Academic integrity is also in question. The front-matter cites the University of Louisville, however it conceals the nature of the connection. You could easily be confused into assuming that the work has been published by University of Louisiville through: The Royal Aal Al-bayt Institute for Islamic Thought in Jordan, however the two institutions bear no relation. The work entirely lacks a reference-list which is inexcusable because there is a controversy regarding exact numbers. Author acknowledges that the numbers he has used are rough scholarly estimates subject to biases but the paper should elaborate further on this aspect of the paper.

Tl;dr
The work has good academic formatting but entirely fails to reference sources. Paper seems more of a demonstration of an academic paper for self publishing or low tier propaganda rather than a scholarly piece of work.

[Kenneth Vaughan · Rating 1 out of 5]

While I think the class of civilizations thesis advanced by Huntington is flawed, Islamophobic, and potentially racist as well, this short study offers a poor response. It is methodologically flawed in very similar ways. The author does a poor job of defining political and religious violence. They likewise do a poor job of assigning death tolls to relevant parties, and the connections between religions, civilizations, and wars is often dubious.

[Toushif Haque · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a research study done at Louisville University that calculated the death toll or casualties of people from different religions from wars, conflicts, etc., from 0 AD to 2008 AD.
The conclusion:
Christians killed 177 million people – the MOST.
Atheists killed 125 million people.
Sinic groups like the Chinese killed 107 million people.
Tribal indigenous people killed 45 million people.
And Islam had killed 31 million people, coming in at 6th.

[Reader · Rating 1 out of 5]

The author paints a biased picture against Christianity without a proper understanding of the religions at fault. For example, WW2 was listed as a war by Christian nations thus every death was counted toward the “body count” for Christianity. Hitler and most other Axis nations were Atheist and banned Christianity in their nations. Regardless, the conflict was not based the principle of spreading Christianity.

[Myriu Dvorak · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is clear that this piece of work made a lot of clueless and biased people -who lack the very same thing they claimed this piece lacks- rate this study poorly.
Overall, this is logical estimate to the body-count caused by a number of demographics throughout history, and the only thing that is misrepresented is the number of causalities that have been occurring since 2023.