If education and affluence increase Muslim extremism, then what?

Randall Parker at ParaPundit discusses a recent poll of 9,000 Muslims and an article about it in Foreign Affairs showing that, contrary to conventional unwisdom, radical Muslims are more highly educated and more affluent than moderate Muslims. Here is a revised version of the comment I posted about this:

Mr. Parker writes:

“More educated Muslims view themselves as in more direct status competition with Westerners. Their educations raise their expectations. Their occupations put them in economic competition with Westerners. Less educated and lower class Muslims see highly educated Westerners as more akin to the Muslim upper classes and more distant from their own lives. People who feel they are competing for status are more likely to resent their competitors who are more successful…. Education usually leads to greater experience with the West and therefore greater chance to feel inferior to it.”

That’s a great insight. I’ve written previously that as long as Muslims have no geographical or political contact with non-Muslims, they have no immediate cause to wage jihad, but that contact between Muslims and non-Muslims inevitably triggers jihad, and therefore we should keep Muslims physically isolated from ourselves. Mr. Parker has added a new twist to this. He is saying that status competition, even in the absence of physical proximity, can be a form of “contact.” Once non-Muslims come into the ken of Muslims as competitors, as possessors of the “goods,” whether economic, or educational, or cultural, or whatever, to which the Muslims aspire, the non-Muslims become an immediate and pressing presence in the minds of the Muslims. And the classic way—indeed the only way—that Muslims have of responding to non-Muslims is jihad.

The finding that education and affluence increase Muslim radicalism not only demonstrates that poverty is not the cause of Muslim radicalism. More profoundly, it shows that any increase in education, affluence, and overall social status in Muslim societies relative to wealthy non-Muslim societies—in other words, any narrowing of the socio-economic gap between non-Muslims and Muslims—will increase Muslim radicalism. Therefore it is in the vital interest of the West, not to democratize and modernize the Muslims, as President Bush and the neoconservatives want to do, but to LET THEM BE. Let the Muslims reside in their historic backwardness. The most dangerous thing we can do vis à vis the Muslim world is to modernize it and thus make it more equal with our world, because that will only awaken Muslims’ sense of competition with us and so trigger their inherent jihadism.

- end of initial entry -

Mark P. writes:

I disagree with the article on one thing. Education’s effect is not what it suggests. Rather, American education does two things: 1) Muslims buy into all the Western self-loathing propaganda, treat it as true, and this, combined with Islam, leads them to hate the West; 2) Muslims believe liberal propaganda is nonsense, but they are horrified that such beliefs are so prevalent. Seeing how internally destructive liberalism is, they vow to do whatever they can to keep it out of their civilization, which, of course, leads them to hate the West.

I think #2 is the more prevalent problem and it will affect us even beyond the Muslim world.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 02, 2006 12:36 PM | Send