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Communism is only for developed countries. I often wonder at how Vietnam (let alone Cambodia) ever got it.
Engles best outlines it for me, in his 'what is communism' pamphlet. Communism is not about mental conditions but material positions in life. In it, the correct developmental economic stage, with a bourgeois class that owns and dominates an industrial class being kept on the breadline are the conditions that will cause the proletariat to fight the bourgeois rulers.
Most Islamic nations only have Aristocracies, the main exception is Turkey, which is not Arab, and which entered the 20thC with a kind of society that could give rise to secularists like the Young Turks.
The world giving rise to this renaissance of reactionary Islam, is poor, oppressed, frustrated, betrayed. It has the hallmarks of a Peasents Revolt, a revolt that began the end of serfdom, in Engles view, he would say that the Arab would first needs to remove its Aristocrats (like the Bin Laden and Saudi families) in order to get to a stage of the middle-class ruling, in order for the working classes to become aware of itself and begin to stir. Oddly, Iran has in fact gained a bourgeois ruling class after it removed the Shah, thus making it extremely dangerous to the west, who cannot allow an Islamic bourgeois to rise that can remove the web of Aristocracies and Tyrants that the west has created.
Never forget that Watt Tyler was an affluent model man of his times, a soldier, he fought in wars for those that then began to abuse their power after. A man of his position is not far from the educated, world-aware, conservative and deeply hurt men that are blowing themselves up in London and smashing planes into buildings today. some of whom fought if not for the west, then certainly at its behest.
Watt Tyler was defeated, but not before society had to be altered forever.
However Marxism never had much attraction in itself for the masses in Muslim countries (or any other for that matter) and neither did proletarian internationalism. A traditional "ultra-nationalist-international" is a contradiction in terms. But, Islam squares that circle: Islam works on the level of the most militant, nationalist chauvinism, while at the same time being totally international constantly searching for common denominators among Muslims everywhere.
In the cold war equation there was no wild card factor like Israel, which at the same time stimulates nationalist and internationalist feelings among the masses and elites alike in Muslim countries. This is what makes political Islam so revolutionary... Really, all that was necessary was to add modern communications (Internet and Satellite TV) and the Israel/Palestinian/Iraq conflict to the waiting Umma to get critical mass. DS