The dominant Western narrative of world history said these left-behind folks were vestigial elements of a bygone era that would gradually disappear as developing nations became developed nations, as despotisms realized the errors of their ways and became democracies, as that universal panacea called education eliminated superstition and replaced it with science, as parochial emotion gave way to dispassionate reason. According to prevailing doctrines, the problem plaguing the left-behinds of the Muslim world (and of other regions) was not the social conditions in which they lived, but the wrong
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