That`s a great post.
Some additional stuff
"The dead hand of the past"
Arab Islam has not escaped its resonance to Greco- Roman civilization. In Antiquity only the educated man could ascend into the elite. But what did it mean to be truly educated? Not fluency in Latin or even Greek, rather a command of the whole body of the civilization, and a sure voice in stainless Attic Greek. Who could afford this course for their life, which even with the best rhetors might take twenty years to achieve?
58 Like the Greco-Roman world of late Antiquity, the Arab world celebrates the full inhabitation of its civilization. This means true mastery of Arabic, one of the most demanding of tongues. Just to approach the fullness of this world requires study as rigorous as any course in Antiquity. No wonder elite Arabs shy away from science. It is not simply because science is an alien and infidel art. Their social goals require a course in civilization that brooks no time for other knowledge. This helps explain why two-thirds of all Ph.D.s awarded in Arabia are in Islamic studies.59 It also helps explain the continuing lock of a religious elite on those societies' very identity.
For Arab elites, with cultural achievement comes only a limited calling: to teach, to preach, and to judge. Only those with Islamic authority may be considered true members of the elite. Like Greco-Roman civilization, they preside over a complete—and completed— civilization. Greco-Roman nostalgia for a "Golden Age" and Islamic romancing of its early days both suggest a backward-looking vantage. Also like Greco-Roman civilization, Islam has not overcome its cultural crystallization, occurring shortly after origination (Hourani places it in the latter half of the 7th century
60). Sunni religious leadership, which includes the leadership of the insurgency, has no path to significant innovation.
Unquote
Note the last sentence - "no path to significant innovation."
This suggests brittleness in politics or other structure that may shatter if the proper conditions arrive...
Full text here http://jhuapl.edu/POW/library/Terror_Islamsm.pdf