Muslim societies/empires didn't catch the Renaissance and Reform era of European culture. And they sunk in their own ignorance. You see, Marx defined those societies as Asiatic, some kind of society that differs essentially from the Western societies that he used his class-conflict theory upon. These Asiatic types had their tyrants, usually as a scepter-holder of God which strengthened their power of throne. And there was no Catholic Church and a truly feudal system that left the people subjects and rayah in a slavery situation like the serves of the Europe of Dark Age did -well at least there wasn't the emerging struggle between social-economical classes. Those societies did not live the conflicts Western ones did, they did not give birth to new social classes like the bourgeois or the workers (blue collars in the Mills terminology). The main thing that happened is the modernizing revolutions that were imposed from the top of the governmental hierarchy, and since those societies always had the religious leaders in their bodies that were able to hold on in the modernizing times, the revolutions screwed up, being incommunicado from the real "people" and instead becoming elitist oligarchies that were bound to lose their power. It happened in Iran, it's happening in Turkey, but the best and most interesting thing is, the new world we live in, the internet world, people reach every type of information from their home terminals and it is a lot, I mean A LOT harder to keep the new generation people ignorant as they were supposed to be for the interest of this nondemocratic system. I like the way the things are going. I think radical Islamism will start to decline in the decades that lies before us.
