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Modern Jihad : The Islamist Crusade

This article compares the roots of the medieval Christian Crusades and of the modern Islamist jihad. Focusing on the economics of these two phenomena, the author argues that religion provides a cohesive and convenient identity for a partnership motivated far more by economic factors than by religious fervor. The alliance of the papacy, the nobility, the emerging commercial classes of traders, merchants, and bankers, and the starving peasants of Europe took shape under the banner of the First Crusade as a reaction to the economic hegemony of Islam over the Mediterranean Basin. Similarly, today, religion provides the ideological ground upon which the emerging Muslim classes of traders, merchants, and bankers have built a partnership with the religious leaders and impoverished masses of the Muslim world. This alliance targets the hegemonic domination of the West, strengthened and supported by corrupt Muslim elites and governments. Islamist armed groups, like the Franj knights of the Crusades a thousand years before, are only the vanguard of a war of economic liberation cleverly disguised as a war of religion.