[cbeach]

That "balance" doesn't seem to be contributing much to the economies of Muslim-majority countries, and their living standards, though, does it?

Except for those nations sitting on abundant oil reserves, the Muslim world is chaotic, unproductive and has terrible human rights / freedom of expression.

[sshumaker]

You have to be very careful to tease out correlation from causation here. In the Middle Ages the Islamic world was significantly ahead of the West in these regards. For a bunch of historical reasons (ineffectiveness of Ottoman Empire for several hundred years, World War I) most of the Islamic world is indeed behind first-world countries.

But that's also like blaming Christianity for the problems in Central America or Central Africa. Religion is only a small factor.