It doesn't take much effort to find that conditions and attitudes in a lot of these Muslim countries haven't changed much since 1867...
It goes back much further than that, to about 1250. As Twain in his book, and as others have similarly commented on, there is a stark absence of technological advancement and a general ignorance in most Muslim countries. It didn't used to be that way. The Qu'ran was penned in the late 600s. Between 750 and 1250 we had what is known as the Golden Age of Science, and it took place in the heart of Muslim Land, in Mecca and Baghdad, the primary trading intersection of that side of the world, and within the accepted teachings of Muhammed and the Qu'ran ("The scholar's ink is more sacred than the blood of martyrs.").
During the Golden Age Muslims gave us Arabic numerals, al gebra, al gorithms, and al chemy (all Arabic names). Despite George Bush stupidly and ironically announcing to the world that it was "our God who named the stars," (unless he worshiped Allah) it was the Muslims that gave us the names of most of the stars visible to the eye: Aldebaran, the Andromeda galaxy, Betelgeuse, Deneb, Rigel, Vega, and hundreds more, 75% of all of the stars to this day have Arabic names. Following the Quran's teaching "For every disease, Allah has given a cure," Arab-Islamic doctors furthered the art of surgery, built hospitals, developed pharmacology, and compiled all the world's medical knowledge into comprehensive encyclopedias and the still-in-use-today seminal
Canon of Medicine. And they advanced art and architecture beyond what even the mighty Greeks and Romans had begun.
But that all ended rather abruptly when an influential Socrates-esque Islamic philosopher named Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, an important philosopher, theologian, and mystic from 12th century Persia, declared a few things about how Islam should be practiced and how Allah should be worshiped. As the Golden Age ended, Islam spread, and science within died.
Since the end of the Golden Age, not a single major invention or discovery has come from the Muslim world. In the history of the Nobel Prize in sciences, only two have gone to scientists working in Muslim countries, and both of those were peripheral Muslims, at best. Typically throughout the world, every professor at a university will have publications of some kind. There are about 1800 universities in Muslim countries. Less than 20% of those universities have even a single faculty member who has ever published anything. It's truly pathetic.
What al-Ghazali did was, he in effect codified the Islamic religion, essentially banning scientific research as being the work of the devil and contrary to the teachings of Mohammed, thereby stifling and destroying of one of history's greatest intellectual cultures. He invented Sufism, which in simplistic terms is basically a rejection of worldliness and outside influences and a focus on inner spiritualism and complete devotion to God (or Allah, if you like). Al-Ghazali's book
Revival of Religious Sciences is considered his most important, and is the seminal work on Sufism. Essentially, any intellectual pursuits you are to undertake are to be limited to learning more about Islam and how to serve Allah. But it was more than that.
Equally important was the unification of competing schools of thought. He unified the tenets of Sufism (which he invented) with those of sharia law, the moral and religious law of Islam. Sharia governs nearly all aspects of human behavior, including not just religious law but also personal matters and secular matters. Al-Ghazali made these compatible with each other. He also unified Sufism with Sunni Islam, the orthodox version of the Islamic religion. By reinforcing Sunnism, sharia, and Sufism within a single philosophy, al-Ghazali out of necessity drew boundaries that excluded any and all competing philosophies, including that of intellectual pursuits.
A large part of this was the rejection of the great Greek philosophers. Greek philosophy was to understand the world; al-Ghazali's was to understand God. Since God created the world, God was all that mattered, and everything else was a distraction from devotion, thus a tool of the devil.
Of course, during the Golden Age the Islamic Empire was continually stretching its reach by conquering other regions and nations, and eventually was spread so thin that geopolitical fractioning took place and the empire began to crumble under its own weight. Mongols to the east fought back, Pope Urban II invented the Crusades and overwhelming armies of Christians and barbarians and anyone else not-Muslim overran and destroyed the great Arab centers. The great irreplaceable libraries were burned, the universities leveled, and the Holy Land fell. Muslims and Jews alike throughout the region were killed in really large numbers.
The only thing that survived was the idea, the philosophy, the ideas of al-Ghazali. The abandonment of intellectualism (of intelligence, really) in favor of pure religious pursuits was reinforced by the Crusades, actually, where amidst death and destruction they turned to Allah. Muslims don't need science, because the Qu'ran aleady has all the answers, even the answers to science. Clerics scour the Qu'ran to find support for all science and they always find it, even new discoveries, because the Qu'ran is infallible. It is the word of Allah.
Ironically, Europe was already immersed in it's own period of forbidding intellectual pursuits, and for the same reasons, in a decree set forth by the Holy Roman Catholic Church, and is a time known as the Dark Ages. The fact that Christians were not to spend a lot of learning time outside of the Bible and Muslims were hot and heavy into science (and therefore gaining power through knowledge) was one of the many factors which prompted the Crusades.
After the smoke cleared between the 14th and 17th centuries, Europe entered its Renaissance (a cultural and intellectual rebirth), while the Arab-Islamic world did not. Why did this happen? Why did Europe move forward and the Arabic world remain stagnant? Just compare the dominant ideologies: Europe's application of philosophy was to understand the world; al-Ghazali's Arabic application was to understand God.
I think there is a massively important lesson to be gleaned from all that.
