Your theory is interesting but in fact I think that you the real factor is not religion but economy.
I don't think it has to be either or. Obviously all things can be traced back to economy and to who's making the money. But in the Islamic world we can trace things back to significant events that occur before economy was a factor.....
1) We know that in 1579 Istanbul got an observatory and that in 1580 Arab clerics had it demolished. A few centuries before this, Islam led the world in astronomy and math.
2) In 1728, Muteferrika remarked that "
it is vital for the Muslims, formerly in advance of the West in sciences, not to let themselves be eclipsed" when he started the Islamic world's first printing press. By 1745, Arab clerics had it shut down and prohibited the printing press.
3) Towards the mid of the 1700s Muhammed ibn
Saud struck a marriage of convenience with a religious "reformer" named Abd al-
Wahhab. You know where this went.
4) In the 1840s (?) Arab clerics bullied the Ottoman Empire to drop three seminal issues of religious reform: ending the Muslim role in the African slave trade, freeing the women from the yoke of the veil, and letting unbelievers live in the land of the Prophet. Mecca's chief clericleveled a fatwa against Istanbul....."
The ban on slaves is contrary to the Holy Sharia, permitting women to walk unveiled and placing divorce in the ands of women are contrary to the pure Holy Law, and that such proposals make the Turks infidels."
Once the Ottoman Empire took custody of Islam's care after the Crusades, the only undisputed glory that the Arabs could claim was the glory of Islam's founding moment. By preserving this declaration at every attempt by outsiders to reform the religion to the world's evolution they
petrified it. As they slipped further behind Europeans in military and material honor, momentum gathered for fundamentalism.
In the 1920s a Turkish General would abolish the Caliphate all together and by the 1950s Sayyid Qutb would go on to declare the West, especially America, as evil and the enemy of Islam due largely to cultural differences.
The oil and fight against Soviet communist influence came after these historical prescriptions that guided Islam into today's state. This was cultural suicide and in the twentieth century thay found themselves far behind the industrialized and fast progressivley moving world. Oil and America's dictator support during the Cold War are distractors and only serve as a crutch. As long as these distractors serve those who wish not to accept responsibility for their own cultural prescriptions they have the convenience of accepting that their is nothing they can do. Individuals do it all the time. If they can blame some one else for their troubles, then they make for themselves a state of acceptance while holding true to blame because it is not their fault. The same is true for civilizations.
There is no coincidence that the nation to finally abolish the Caliphate (Turkey) is the most westernized and socially progressive Islamic state given its earlier attempts to reform the religion and the culture. And there is no coincidence that the tribe that fought those reforms to preserve the old prescrioptions lags so far behind and produces the vast majority of religious extremism today.
In this case, perhaps the lack of economy is a factor because it was never allowed to gain momentum before the West discovered oil in the desert. Without observatories and printing press', creativity is all but stifled. Exportation was no-existent while the exportation of Western states were crossing oceans. The cultural prescription to look religiously inward while the rest of the world was encouraging inginuity and creativity is why the West gained and the Middle East didn't. And I've said this enough times..... where's the competition between a civilization that denies contribution from half its population (women) and a civilization that encourages contribution from all citizens?
I just refuse to give them their convenient excuse that the West's oil greed is why they exist in a barbaric state of thought.