Islam is no more timeless than any other cultural-religious order. I'm not sure about the "deep strain of violence and intolerance" -- SE Asian Islam has historically been pretty tolerant and eclectic, now increasingly less so.
Re islamic socialism -- what we see today is, I think, very much an outcome of the failures of islamic socialism and secular nationalism, not entirely the fault of those who were pushing islamic socialism and/or secular nationalism. They had some 'help'.
It's not clear that Islam is inherently hostile to socialist ideas: Iqbal, I think it was, once declared that Islam = Bolshevism+God. And there were people like Ameer Ali and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad who became independent India's first education minister (I think). The latter's Tarjuman al-Quran is, I think, a remarkable work which, sadly, isn't read anymore, I don't think.
Until fairly recently, say up to around 30 years ago, there was a continuing tussle between the conservatives who demanded that everything be based on the Koran and Hadith (more the latter than former, and with them as the interpretive watchdogs) and 'progressives', etc. who argued otherwise, and significant numbers of youth were attracted to the latter. However, Rodinson I think showed pretty convincingly that there was actually some synergy between Islam and capitalism, despite the strictures on usury and there's generally greater friendliness to capitalism than to socialism -- but that's hardly peculiar to Islam or Muslims.
The conservatives have pretty much won out everywhere -- I think the article in the NYT Sunday magazine (French or Jew) pretty much got the right reason for this, at least as far as agency is concerned: it didn't quite say so, but it is well known that Washington's recruitment of Saudi Arabia to its cause in the 1970s and 1980s (the era of Third World 'revolution') was what gave the fillip to it all, via the intermediary of foreign education in the UK, Europe and the US where relatively easy going kids from Muslim countries got inducted into one or another radical islamist group, much of them funded by the Saudi's, and then returned home to become the core of radical islamism in their own countries, although many, in the richer countries, were 'corrupted' by wealth. Then there was the Iranian revolution and the bloody defeat of the left, including the islamic left.
Still, there are people still labouring away in areas like Islamic economics arguing against landed private property, for equitable wealth distribution, generally, for arrangements that look pretty much like old social democracy.
kj khoo