Chechens, Arabs, Africans, Pakistanis. It has rapidly growing pockets in Europe and the Americas. Rough estimates say the world has some billion Muslims, one-sixth of the human race. Everywhere in that world the Islamic revival is creating tremors. All of them either have lots of oil and natural gas or have existing or planned pipelines for transporting those fossil fuels to the industrial countries.
Fossil fuels are to the world economy what blood is to the human body.
It is so vital that since the 1920's it has been quietly monopolized and dictatorially administered. While the conventional wisdom dates the bull market from 1990 there are good grounds for believing it began around August 1982. Stock price charts show a rising and ever steeper slope from that date on, though punctuated by a few thin spikes. Alarms went off in the corridors of oil power. And soon enough prices began to rise.