Yes. And from a certain point of view, that's exactly what you see.

Imagine you had a hypothetical Violence-O-Meter that was accurate to ten decimal places, and you arranged all of the world's 1.7 Billion or so Muslims in one long North/South line from most violent to least violent. You'd have about 425 million people in the first quartile, 425 million people in the second quartile, 425 million people in the third quartile, and 425 million people in the fourth quartile. (There are a bunch of other interesting ways you could arrange them to approximate other statistical methods, but let's stick with the "one long line" graph for now.)

The Qur'an and Hadiths are demonstrably full of horribly violent calls to subjugation and genocide and terrible gory punishment. If the model proposed by various Muslim apologists and Islamophilic regressives is correct, then the only people who actually agree with those verses will be a few hundred whack-jobs standing at the far, far Northern end of that line. These people could be usefully described as "extremists", standing as they are on the "extreme" edge of the population.

Everyone in the second, third, and fourth quartiles, and most of those in the first, are happy lovey-dovey ecumenical feminist LGBT-positive pacifist hippies. Not a one among them would even dream of following the example of the sadistic, misogynistic, pedophilic warlord who wrote their Holy Book. Doesn't that sound like it would be wonderful?

Unfortunately, "sounding nice" is not sufficient to make something true. When you actually survey Muslims in the real world about their opinions, this is not the result that you see [1, 2, 3, 4]. People well into the fourth quartile will happily endorse the beheading of apostates and the stoning of adulterers. A good many more past them will cringe a little at the commands to violence, but stop short of actually disagreeing with them, handwaving away the unpleasantness with "Mumble mumble context". It's the people who categorically refuse to endorse violence, even Allah-approved violence, who can only be found close to one end of this hypothetical line.

In other words, it's the Muslims who deliberately misinterpret the Qu'ran as peaceful who are actually in the minority, at the "extreme" tail of the graph, and who might thus be described as "extremists".