It's important to remember that Islam has been a major world religion for quite some time, so the term resurgence does not really refer to membership, or even the mainstream beliefs of the vast majority of Muslims. The term generally refers to the resurgence of radical Islam, especially along Wahhabi lines such as al-Qaeda.
The impact on world history is most obvious in the military conflicts in the Near East, most notably in Afghanistan, and to a lesser degree in Iraq. Radical Islam provoked the invasion of Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks, the pursuit of bin Laden and al-Qaeda around the globe, and that conflict widened to include attacks on US forces in Iraq as well. The impact then, in these cases, was to force or provoke Western society into investing massive military and financial resources into responding directly to some elements of the Muslim Resurgence.
The West has been largely unable to cope with this radicalization because, and this is a matter of opinion, it has fundamentally misunderstood or even ignored the root causes of the Resurgence. It has essentially declared war on a set of ideas. Terrorism has no military solution, and probably no diplomatic one. The roots and recruiting grounds of radical Islam are economic, and depend on crushing poverty to be successful. This is both inconvenient and complicated, with no short term solution, something the West, and the US in particular, does not typically handle well in recent years.
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