Nearly 400 million Muslims live under authoritarian despots, many of them Western puppets, whose corruption and incompetence have left their people in economic and social shambles. It is against this backdrop that one must look at the current malaise of Muslims and their increasing emotional reliance on their faith.

Economic Woes

The total GDP of the fifty-seven members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, representing more than a fifth of the world’s population, is less than 5 percent of the world’s economy. Their trade represents barely 7 percent of global trade, even though more than two-thirds of the world’s oil and gas lie under Muslim lands. The standard of living in Muslim nations is abysmal, including in parts of the oil-rich regions, because of unconscionable gaps between the rulers and the ruled. A quarter of impoverished Pakistan’s budget goes to the military. Most of the $2 billion a year of American aid given to Egypt as a reward for peace with Israel goes to the Egyptian military.

The most undemocratic Muslim states, some of them close allies of the US, are the most backward.

The Arab nations, with a combined population of 280 million, muster a total GDP less than that of Spain. The rate of illiteracy among Arabs is 43 percent, worse than that of much poorer nations. Half of Arab women are illiterate, representing two-thirds of the 65 million Arabs who cannot read or write. About 10 million Arab children are not in school.30 The most-educated Arabs live abroad, their talents untapped, unlike those of the Chinese and Indian diasporas, who have helped jump-start the economies of their native lands.

A disproportionate percentage of the world’s youth are Muslim. Half of Saudi Arabia’s and a third of Iran’s populations are younger than twenty. There are few jobs for them. “Young and unemployed” is a disproportionately Muslim phenomenon.

A majority of the world’s 12 million to 15 million refugees are Muslims, fleeing poverty and oppression. Europe’s 20 million Muslims suffer high unemployment and poverty, especially in Germany and France (see European Muslims). It was inevitable that many Muslims would find comfort in Islam.

Islamic Resurgence

Fundamentalism has been on the rise, and not just in Islam. There has been a parallel rise in Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Sikhism and Buddhism, with its inevitable political fallout — in the Israeli settler movement in the Occupied Territories, the politicization of the American conservative right (culminating in the election and re-election of George W. Bush), the rise to power of the Hindu nationalists in India in the 1990s, the Sikh separatist movement in the Punjab in India in the 1980s and the still-active aggressive nationalism of the Sinhalese in Sri Lanka.

That many Muslims have become “fundamentalist” does not mean that they are all fanatic and militant. Nor is their height ened religious consciousness fully explained by petro-dollars. First, the much-derided Arab financial support for Islamic causes and institutions is still no match for the resources available for Christian global missionary or Zionist political work. More to the point, the rise of Islam is not confined to areas of Arab financial influence; it is a worldwide phenomenon.