Re: Interesting parallels: what do Muslims think?

A couple interesting points: Extremists are more likely than average to be educated and cosmopolitan, and are no more religious than average.

I have been insisting on that, both on GC when appropriate, and elsewhere when the topic is relevant. It is important because it dispels the notion that terrorism or radical Islamism in general are products of ignorance or isolation and that all it takes is greater exposition to the wonders of the secular West (or for that matter East - as in, Confucian East Asia) to destroy its social base. Well, it isn't so. Greater education is likelier to introduce ideas of revolution that would be absent otherwise; greater exposition to the comparatively free politics of the West outrages more those who live under so different conditions. The really ignorant and uneducated and unexposed to "global" thinking rationalize that "it was always this way; there be elites and underclasses" - you have to be more knowledgeable to claim that "another world is possible". As for religion, religion does provide an ideology to those looking for one, but the same social conditions would find another ideology as vehicle if Islam (or in general religion) was not available. (I find very adequate the comparison with the Marxist-Catholic "Liberation Theology" that swept through Latin America from the end of the feudal republics all through the age of the military dictatorships. Yet it would really be disingenuous, at least in historical terms, to label Catholicism as "revolutionary" because of Liberation Theology when it has much more often been "reactionary" and "on the side of the oppressors".) Besides, the politically oriented aspects of Islam (like those of Catholicism) are only a fraction of all the beliefs, so it's possible to expect political radicals to be "soft" on other parts of the doctrine, much like LibTheo was too.