It is within the bounds of possibility that the United States will in fact achieve energy indepence in a fairly short period of time. That thermonuclear device called the sun sends a LOT of energy our way, and inventive and capable people are, finally, figuring out ways to capture some of that energy.

This will have many consequences. Suppose, for example, that it was possible for a number of countries producing biofuels from algae to offer it at, say, $30/barrel. Or suppose Saharan nations, from Morroco to Sudan, were told that Europe would happily buy electricity produced by millions of solar panels from them but not petroleum.

I wonder what will happen when the oil runs dry in the Middle East, as it will in the next 50-150 years.

Governments will fall, and societies proppped up with oil money will crumble. Commerce capitals like Abu Dhabi will be probably do fine, though their cultures will change tremendously when their huge populations of migrant labourers fail to go home. But what about Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc.

The Middle East will become a very different place in the next century.

The gender dynamics of oil economies is just part of the negative impact of oil on the Arab and Islamic world. The rapid rise of the oil economies in the second half of the 20th century turned the societal balance of the Islamic (and Arab) world inside out: what once were peripheral areas (the UAE and other Gulf countries in particular) became the new centers, while historically significant centers of civilization (Egypt, South Asia, Morocco, Syria, Turkey) became of secondary importance, forced to shape themselves to the demands of the new centers. Most significantly, many people in the Islamic world view oil as a divine 'reward' to the Gulf Arabs, and believe that the prosperity of these countries is evidence of divine pleasure over the way they organise their societies. Under these circumstances, the most backward parts of the Arab world serve as the new role models for countries that were once at the forefront of Islamic reform movements.

Egypt, Algeria, Syria, Tunisia, Morocco, Mali, Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Chad, Somalia, Albania.

Let me know what you find. Thanks.

Cat vs. Roomba hinted at this. Several non-Arab nations are officially or mostly Muslim. Just off the top of my head: Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Iran, Turkey, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and (to a certain extent) Singapore. With a few exceptions (Afghanistan), women's rights are better in any of these nations than in most Arab states.

But by a fluke of history and geology, the really huge oil fields reside almost entirely beneath Arab (and not just Muslim) states. Since there's no non-Muslim Arab state, how can we disentangle the variable of Arab culture from this conversation?

Well a simple enough test would be to examine Muslim states that have no oil: Egypt, Algeria, Syria, Tunisia, Morocco, Mali, Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Chad, Somalia, Albania.

Egypt, Algeria, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen, Pakistan, and Chad are oil producing countries. While it may be the case that many of these countries have reserves that peaked long ago and have been in decline ever since, past oil reserves would surely have influenced the development of the current governments in these countries.

More generally, the argument is that any natural resource will do as it can be drilled for or dug up or otherwise harvested, and then sold abroad providing the national government with funding such that they do not need to collect taxes.

Foreign aid can have the same effect as these funds may also displace the need to collect taxes.

Citizens from whom taxes are collected will expect something in return from their government. No taxes leads to no representation. Lack of representation creates frustration. Frustration in most Arab countries can only be expressed in Mosques. Many Mosques are funded by Saudia Arabia which requires that the Mosques teach Wahhabism, an extreme form of Islam which preaches intolerance and violence and gets much of Islam wrong.

These funds permit governments to support themselves while resisting any effort to convert from feudalism to capitalism.

This is one of the arguments presented in the book "The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad" by Fareed Zakaria. The argument is also in a film named "The Road to 9/11". I just happen to have signed both of these out from my public library earlier this week (I saw the movie this morning and I am most of the way through the book). The film provides an excellent history of the modern middle east from 1918 (end of World War I) to the present.

I am not convinced by this argument at all. It relies on a pure economics (that comes across as an excuse) to explain deep societal and cultural dysfunction and outright hostility towards women. At best, they are seen as property.

How do you explain the low respect shown to women in non-oil states such as Afghanistan and in some African countries? How do you explain the fact that in a multicultural society like India, the Muslim minority generally treats its women with less respect that almost all the other religions? And how do you explain the better status enjoyed by Muslim women in a country like India compared to their sisters in most of the Muslim world?

Cultures can and do honor and celebrate women's roles even if the women are not engaged in income-producing activities. In most cultures women are honored for their life-giving and life-sustaining roles.

It fits only when you limit yourself to what you want to prove.

If oil production leads to sexist laws more than Muslim populations or Arab culture the first thing to look at would be nonMuslim nations that produce oil.

For example, Venezuela is highly dependent on oil production. How do Venezuelan women's rights compare to those of Iran and Saudi Arabia?

I see a difference that this theory doesn't begin to explain.

There are countries with oil as a product that also have manufacturing. The problem with Saudi Arabia is that it is in a desert - what kind of mining, or production, etc. can exist when you are sitting in a barren place? They had very little but camel dung, fish and dates before they discovered oil. The prior poster's point about Venezuela is correct. Even Iran, which has a very conservative Muslim government, nevertheless has more women involved in society than Saudi. Because they have more than oil.

So there is a good insight here - the rights of women are based or strenthened on female involvement in the workforce outside the home, specifically manufacturing or even office work (a very Marxist insight, I might add). The more an economy is based on extractive assets, the more manufacturing etc. is crippled, which does hurt women. Labor is the key here. This even translates to the U.S. where the most conservative states regarding womens' rights are those with the fewest women in the official workforce.