the Muslim world is suffering from one huge inferiority complex with respect to that world's very poor current position as compared to revered past glories

I think that this puts a little too simplistic a point on it. In particular, I have objections with referring to it as an inferiority complex. I think it's more akin to frustration. The Arab world has a very distinct culture from the ``Western'' world, and I think that they have a hard time interspersing western culture into their own, at least a much harder time than Japan, Hong Kong, or Singapore, for instance. If that hard time comes from incompatibility, incapability, or unwillingness, I don't know, but it seems to exist nonetheless. Combine that with what seems to be an inability to deal with the ``western'' world (and, therefore, these days, the rest of the world) on anything but it's own terms (again, whether due to incompatibility or unwillingness on either party's part), and I think you find a culture that becomes more and more isolated, with one hand wanting to deal with the rest of the world, and the other busy slapping it away because it's been burned so many times already.

I've posted it before, but you may not have seen it: Newsweek ran quite a long article on ``Why Do They Hate Us'', by Fareed Zakaria, that I think has a reasonable explanation for that, which I've tried to paraphrase above.