Religious revival thrives in advanced, secularized Muslim societies, not backward ones.

Evidence

Neither nationalism nor socialism, al-Turabi argues, produced development in the Islamic world. “Religion is the motor of development,” and a purified Islam will play a role in the contemporary era comparable to that of the Protestant ethic in the history of the West. Nor is religion incompatible with the development of a modern state. Islamic fundamentalist movements have been strong in the more advanced and seemingly more secular Muslim societies, such as Algeria, Iran, Egypt, Lebanon, and Tunisia. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 274

Categorization

• QUESTION: If fundamentalism correlates with relative modernity within Muslim societies, the standard ‘backwardness drives extremism’ narrative needs closer empirical testing.
• XREF: Mirrors the Protestant-ethic thesis; connects to Weber and to the counterintuitive pattern where revivalism grows in secularizing cores.
• SEED: Angel for a piece on how ‘modernization causes religiosity, not secularity’ in the non-West inverts Weber’s assumption about development and secularization.