Oil wealth visibly underwrote the Islamic revival and enabled reversal of West-Muslim power relations

Evidence

The Islamic revival, it has been argued, was also “a product of the West’s declining power and prestige. … As the West relinquished total ascendance, its ideals and institutions lost luster.” More specifically, the Resurgence was stimulated and fueled by the oil boom of the 1970s, which greatly increased the wealth and power of many Muslim nations and enabled them to reverse the relations of domination and subordination that had existed with the West. … Just as Western wealth had previously been seen as the evidence of the superiority of Western culture, oil wealth was seen as evidence of the superiority of Islam. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 318

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the thesis in Ch.2-3 that civilizations rise and fall on material power attractions — wealth as prestige evidence is a recurring Huntington mechanism. — connects to: Saudi wealth transformed Wahhabism into a global ideology under the guise of Salafism — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 1842
• QUESTION: How strong is the causal claim that oil money financed the global Resurgence, versus autonomous grassroots piety? Worth checking counter-evidence.