Corporate surrogates

Modernity wants to separate the Church from the State and in Islam that separation doesn't come easy. 

The problem is the state in the Arab world has only been managed by the agents of those interested in Big Oil so the Europeanization the secular side of Middle Eastern politics has undergone was confounded by the resource curse. The undermining of and the weakening of the mainstream Mosque as a result of that Europeanization and secularization of the functions of government and the concommitant peeling away of those functions from the jurisdiction of the Mosque opened the way for the virulent, pagan strains of Islam to take hold. 

The resource curse ruined the civilizing and modernizing processes of colonialism and left largely single-ruler governments where democracy and the broad development of centrist institutions could have replaced the colonial powers. The resource curse turned what might have been merely a state-based form of colonialism into a corporate colonialism, which, it turned out, what less benign. The colonial powers abandoned there political holdings but left in their stead their corporate surrogates who maintained the influences of the resource curse and sustained the bias in favor of the strong men in the region. 

So the Middle East lost the civilizing effects of colonialism while retaining its exploitative effects.