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By better, I mean more economically developed, less culturally entrenched, with a smaller radical influence, and especially with decently-functioning civil societies. Democratic rule would be best, regardless of whether the parties in power are secular or moderate Islamists on the Turkish model, but soft authoritarianism is acceptable so long as the governments are reasonably competent. Local sore spots may exist, and this or that country may still be overtly dictatorial, but the rest of the region should be doing okay.

Let's use contemporary Latin America and South-East Asia as benchmarks. This alternate Middle East should be doing about as well.

Now the POD has to be after 1918, and ideally after 1948. And Israel has to be around, in the same location as in OTL.

I got the idea for this challenge from reading this article by Lawrence Wright in The New Yorker, and especially the following paragraph:

I went to the office of the Brotherhood to talk to Essam el-Erian, a prominent member of the movement. He is a small, defiant man with a large prayer mark on his forehead. I reminded him that when we last spoke, in April, 2002, he had just got out of prison. He laughed and said, “I’ve been back in prison twice more since then!” We sat in our stocking feet in the dim reception room. “From the start until now, the Muslim Brotherhood has been peaceful,” he maintained. “We have only three or four instances of violence in our history, mainly assassinations.” He added, “Those were individual instances and we condemned them as a group.” But, in addition to the killings of political figures, terrorist attacks on the Jewish community in Cairo, and the attempted murder of Nasser, members of the Muslim Brotherhood took part in arson that destroyed some seven hundred and fifty buildings—mainly night clubs, theatres, hotels, and restaurants—in downtown Cairo in 1952, an attack that marked the end of the liberal, progressive, cosmopolitan direction that Egypt might have chosen.
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