With the turn of the twenty-first century, scholarship and policy debate on Islam and Muslim societies have come to focus primarily on Islam's ability to make young Muslims—both men and women—gravitate towards violent anti-modernity movements. If September 11 established the threat to the West from jihadi groups who had found safe havens within ungoverned spaces such as war-torn Afghanistan, the November 2015 attacks in Paris (and later the March 2016 attacks in Brussels), planned and executed by European-born Muslims, have been interpreted as confirming the threat posed to the West from within by militant Islam. Further, within policy circles and even academia there is a strong impulse to attribute not only jihadist violence, but also the overall socio-economic and political stagnation experienced in many Muslim societies, to Islamic theological or legal dictates. The persistence of authoritarian rule in many Muslim countries is routinely attributed to an alleged incompatibility between Islam and democracy, as is any evidence of women's marginalization. As a result, the interpretative rigidity of the ‘ulamā’ (traditionally trained Islamic scholars) who control the mosques and the madrasahs, the primary platforms for transmission of Islamic knowledge, routinely comes under scrutiny: many are accused of promoting radical ideas encouraging Muslims to resist Western modernity. These assertions, however, ignore much evidence that proves otherwise.

First, a growing number of studies show the need to distinguish between Islam (a set of scriptural beliefs) and the lived experiences of Muslim societies. The sheer diversity of institutional arrangements within Muslim societies across the globe and across time show how they have been shaped by local socio-economic and political institutions, and not only by religious dictates. The burgeoning theoretical literature on institutions, of which religious belief is but one, convincingly illustrates how any given individual action or collective societal outcome is contingent on a complex interplay among different institutions: in Douglass North's terminology, the “institutional matrix.” Rarely is one institution the sole shaper of an individual or collective societal outcome.