The much celebrated economist Thomas Piketty has recently proposed that the rise of Islamic State can be explained by income inequality. Benjamin Weingarten disagrees:
Piketty succumbs to the widely held belief that the global jihad can be understood through a Western prism rather than on the jihadists’ own terms. This Western prism is obscured by a materialist screen, which assumes that all peoples are ultimately driven by the same motives, desires, and ambitions—namely, economic ones. We in the West believe that a love of freedom is sown into the hearts of all men, and that we all seek a good job, a nice house, and a fine education. But liberty is not a universal ideal; upper-middle-class values aren’t shared by everyone.
For the pious Muslim, according to the jihadists, the great overarching goal is to bring the whole world into Dar al-Islam, the House of Islam, ruled by sharia under Allah. Subscribers to theo-political Islamic-supremacist ideology are expansionistic because it is their religious duty to be so. . . .
That Piketty would come to such an ill-conceived conclusion . . . may be a mere reflection of his myopia—indeed, anyone heavily invested in a particular area of study may imagine linkages in other areas. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that a socialist interprets the jihad according to materialist first principles. But it should disturb us that many in the Western elite—including President Obama—either share such sentiments or are willing to mislead us for political purposes.
Read more on City Journal: http://www.city-journal.org/2015/eon1208bw.html