The Islamic world’s salience as Western challenger is powered by rentier oil economies.

Evidence

No threat has compared to the threat of Islam and no civilization has been as close by either. Nowadays political Islam is often presented as the major outside challenge to Western hegemony. The world of Islam, unlike other challenges, encompasses a worldview, a way of life, a historical formation as well as a geographical space, stretching from Morocco to Southeast Asia. Its scope includes Islamic politics and law (sharia), Islamic geopolitics, Islamic economics and social policy, Islamic science, and Islamic identity and culture. To a varying extent these owe their present salience to government-sponsored initiatives, which are made possible by rentier oil economies. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 194

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how directly did oil wealth underwrite the modern Islamist revival? The bid tafteev of this causal chain is left vague.