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One of the main things that must drive Muslims crazy is that the only Islamic countries which are not in poverty are the ones with oil, that Islam does not work in a modern, technological society. The concepts of "future" and "progress" may have something to do with this.

I think it is pretty clear that Islamic culture is economically oppressive, as by you observation, although this may have as much to do with the whim of the ruling elites as the religion.

However, it is my understanding that Islamic teaching actually prohibits profiting from sales. I could be wrong about this and a more informed freeper might be able to shed some light.

I don't think that's an accident. The only Islamic country to successfully master modernity separated Islam from the state and adopted wholesale Western law, customs, and even the Latin alphabet! Kemal Ataturk's revolution in Turkey was extraordinary and his acceptance that his country's identity and future lay with the West was and is unique in the Islamic world. Its interesting Ataturk's reforms weren't copied elsewhere and that perhaps is the key to the misery and stagnation that's engulfed the rest of Islam ever since. And the failure of other Islamic countries to turn modernity into an asset has led to a rejection of the idea that progress is a necessary and inevitable outcome of the human condition. In particular Islamist Nazis have taken this victimhood mentality by blaming the West for Islam's backwardedness and in an ironic twist have used the West's own instruments of progress to destroy the advertised superiority of a culture and way of life they find completely unbearable. The West is faced then with people who view themselves as a failure and who seek to validate that view by taking down those they believe are responsible for that condition. What is particular striking about this point of view about Islamic man as articulated by Islamist Nazis is how much it shares in common with the self-hatred of leftist Western intellectuals for the success of the West. This is not a state of mind the West can address or cure; it will have to simply defend itself from both its external and internal enemies the best it can. Whether the Islamic world is capable of surmounting its victim condition and stop hating the West and become an adult and accept that it alone can change the state to which it has condemned itself is the issue that will define the rest of the 21st century and perhaps decide the fate of the world itself.