You make so many assumptions about history it's difficult to know how to begin responding to your post.
We'll start with the obvious: you assume history progresses in a line, which is not true. You assume history is characterized by a single, universal path of development, which is not true. You assume that the Western model is normative, which is not true..... <<Insert some average State School political science discourse>>
My friend, I am not terribly in disagreement with you. Almost by definition, history happens in a grand flow of random events, and the ones that made Liberal Western institutions ascendant by 2015 are different from the ones that made the Chinese Song dynasty so comparatively superior in the 11th century, in turn different from the factors that made the Persian Empire at it's zenith under Cyrus in 530BC a beacon for the world.
What I will say, however, is that is 2015, the larger Arab World, and in particular the Gulf Arab states, are generally 500 years "behind the times", and are in lock step with the Persians. This is not due to some British/American/Zionist conspiracy - it is on account of having a society dominated and legally bound to an absolute belief in an angry Sky-daddy (trust me, most of us in the Western World would have retroactively preferred the corpse of Trotsky over the Ayatollah). I'm happy that the aristocrats of the Rashidun Caliphate molested young men in their time and place, and I think you might have a point that however laughably short of the modern world Nasir and Pahlavi reached for, you could at least have ordered a proper martini and seen a mini-skirt in 1974 Tehran. But we live in the here and now.
This has nothing to do with ethnicity, nothing particularly with culture, and I for one think eugenics is the past time of the stupid. It simply is an observation on existing institutions and their relative strengths. Great swaths of the world are almost lawless and horribly brutal (sub Sharan Africa, anyone?). Some parts are very corrupt and harsh. Most of the Arab world is horribly repressive and inhumanely theocratic - and this harkens back to Europe of the Dark ages. I think all men are equal, but all traditions certainly are not. And by your own admission, the Middle East has regressed away from "self rule" since the 1950s (when, curiously, they were the recently liberated regions of larger and more sophisticated powers who enforced foreign methods of government).
We can play nice all you want, but at the end of the day, the Middle East is the least Democratic region in the world, (at least according to the Economist). I have long admired the accomplishments of modern secular Turkey, and I tip my cap towards Sisi's structured authoritarianism in Egypt (Mubarak 2.0?), but how do you explain this aforementioned journalistic opinion?
