Riots in Paris

Wretchard, over at the Belmont Club, is trying to figure out the causes of the Parisian rights, and the question seems to turn on whether these riots are racial/sociological or racial/religious in origin.

I don't think the composition of race riots and Muslim riots is really that different. Both depend on group instead of individual identity, both use awareness of ostensible status as a foundation for grievances, a status that is conferred to the group and therefore transmuted to the individual. Segregation heightens this perception of collective grievance, and also reinforces the group identity at the expense of the individual's.

Sociologically, the conditions are the same for both types of unrests. It is dangerous to combine group identity, segregation, descrimination, and grievances within walking distance of their causes. The determinative variables, if one starts with the premise that a group is in fact subject to the above situations, are the strength of that particular group identification and the immediacy or primacy of the catalyzing injury.

Islam is unique because it is so successful at supplanted the self with the ideas and loyalties of "Muslimness," which, as Wretchard points out, provides a reckless vitality to Islamic mass movements. It is a lesson worth learning, because if one has a Muslim minority exposed to the sociological tripwires mentioned above, the admixture is uniquely toxic and flammable and might be uncontainable once ignited.

So the answer is that the riots are sociological in their origins, but specifically Muslim in the intensity of their manifestations.