Social critic and author Mike Davis writes that in the growing world of urban slums,

“Marx has yielded the historical stage to Mohammed and the Holy Ghost. If God died in the cities of the industrial revolution, he has risen again in the postindustrial cities of the developing world.

Today, populist Islam and Pentecostal Christianity… occupy a social space analogous to that of early twentieth-century socialism and anarchism… where… Islamist movements like Justice and Welfare… have become the real governments of the slums: organizing night schools, providing legal aid to victims of state abuse, buying medicine for the sick, subsidizing pilgrimages, and paying for funerals.

And indeed, a Justice and Welfare activist recognized that ‘confronted with the neglect of the state, and faced with the brutality of daily life, people discover, thanks to us, solidarity, self-help, fraternity. They understand that Islam is humanism’.”