Islamist parties taking state power have mostly made their countries poorer

Evidence

Political Islam has generally not done well wherever it has tried through Islamist parties to take state power. Iran may be an exception, but neither Sudan, which is in fact an Islamic state, nor Algeria, riven by the contest between Islamic groups and a brutal soldiery, nor Afghanistan, a turbulent and now ultrareactionary country, has done anything but make itself poorer and more marginal on the world stage. … I would say that most Arab Muslims today are too discouraged and humiliated, and also too anesthetized by uncertainty and their incompetent and crude dictatorships, to support anything like a vast Islamic campaign against the West. — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 45

Categorization

• SEED: An essay opposing the ‘Islamic threat’ framing with the empirical record: Islamist governments tend to fail economically, which the alarmist coverage never mentions.

Related

• Islamic doctrine has justified opposite political programs alike (similarity 0.79)
• Western ideological camps all reduce Islam to a scapegoat (similarity 0.78)