Identifying 'sources' of fanaticism.

• Author: Book, Elizabeth G.
• Position: Security Beat

The Western world's values and judgments about economic development contrast sharply with the Muslim world, which "literally decayed after the 12th century," due to rigid political systems, said Douglas North, a Washington University constitutional economist and Nobel Prize winner. "There is no country in the Muslim world that now has any real economic strength, except in oil, which was made necessary by the Western world anyway," he said.

"We have to understand the sources of...