"The failure of modernization theory to explain political, social, economic, and cultural processes in the Middle East and Muslim countries beyond it seemed to US establishment scholarship as less related to the theoretical fallacies of modernization theory itself and more a function of the exceptionalism of Arab or Islamic cultures more generally. While the rest of area studies and anti-establishment Middle East scholars were turning to dependency theory to underdtand socioeconomic and political processes unfolding in Africa, Asia and Latin America (Samir Amin, who is primarily Middle East scholar, is a pioneer theorist of dependency ...), mainstream Middle East Studies was turning to Islam and culture, ignoring the central attribute of imperial connections to the region that are primarily defined by oil, it was not the nature of US imperial interest in and control of oil production that was seen as "exceptional" about the region, regulating the types of its ruling regimes and the kinds of resistance they generated, but rather the facile notion of Islamic and Arab "culture."
—Jospeh Massad, Islam in Liberalism, 2016 ed. pp. 39-40