Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes (56 page)

This sudden gush of wealth might have had a very different impact if only democratic institutions had emerged in the oil-rich
nations before oil was discovered. With power distributed throughout society in these countries, with avenues of participation available to people of all classes, the wealth might have empowered the creative energies of millions and sparked a cultural renaissance.

But time and circumstances had permitted no such institutions to arise. These Muslim societies were haunted by memories of greatness lost. Their ruling elites were obsessed with developing the modern infrastructure they deemed indispensable to recovering that grandeur. They were desperate to catch up to the West and believed that only centralized states with a monopoly on power could do what needed to be done. They didn’t think they could wait for the necessary infrastructure to emerge organically nor could they afford to let their people find their way to modernization at th
eir own pace and in their own way. Islamic societies were falling behind by the minute, and they needed the full physical infrastructure of modernity right now!

With oil, they could have it just that quickly. They could sell the oil and use the money to drop the desired infrastructure into place, boom. The wealth accumulated by the ruling elite of oil-rich countries is the stuff of legends, and it’s true that a tiny minority of Arabs and Iranians accumulated obscene wealth and squandered it as jetsetters frolicking in the resorts and casinos of the world, but the ruling elites of these countries did not merely pocket the money. They also directed vast sums of it into “development,” true to the secular modernists creed: that’s really the bigger s
tory. In country after country, governments installed national school systems, built power plants and skyscraping office towers, established national airline companies, set up national television stations, radio stations, and newspapers. . . .

In one country after another, large scale development of this kind was carried out by the state and its functionaries, spawning a new class of educated technicians and bureaucrats to operate the machinery of the new modernism. This “technocracy,” as some have called it, was a salaried employee class: its money came from the state, and the state got it from foreign corporations that were pumping and selling the country’s oil. The state still collected taxes from farmers, herders, artisans, merchants, and others working in the traditional economy, but those revenues didn’t amount to much. The
traditional economy just wasn’t tha
t productive. Certainly, governments could not depend on
that
tax base to fund their ambitious development programs.

Once the ruling elite stopped depending on the traditional economy for tax revenues, they no longer needed allies in that world. Even in totalitarian dictatorships, the power elite have to propitiate some domestic constituency. But in these oil-rich Muslim states, they could diverge from the masses of their people culturally without consequence. The people they did need to get along with were the agents of the world economy coming and going from their countries. Thus did “modernization” divide these “developing” societies into a “governing club” and “everyone else.”

The governing club was not small. It included the technocracy, which was not a mere group but a whole social class. It also included the ruling elite who, in dynastic countries, were the royal family and its far-flung relatives and in the “republics” the ruling party and its apparatchik. Still, in any of these countries the governing club was a minority of the population as a whole, and the border between the governing classes and the masses grew ever more distinct.

People in the club were part of an exciting project, working to transform their country. Those outside the club were passive beneficiaries of a modernization that was simply happening
to
them. Suddenly a hospital might go up nearby: good, now they could get better health care. Suddenly a paved highway might appear nearby: good, now they could get to the city quicker. But people outside the governing club had no role in modernization for good or ill, no share in decision making, no voice in how the new money flowing into the country would be spent, no political participation in their country’s
transformation.

They also didn’t get, as a by-product of modernization, enhanced power to realize their personal dreams and goals, whatever those might have been. In fact, even as oil-exporting nations got richer overall, those outside the “governing clubs” grew relatively poorer.

For most people, the only hope of claiming a stake in their own country was to go to a government school, do well, go abroad (ideally), get a degree, preferably in some technical field, and then break into the technocracy. Anyone who took this route probably ended up wearing a suit to work and living a life resembling that of people in the West. Their time was regulated by clocks, their family tended to be “nuc
lear,” their entertainment tastes might run to alcohol, nightclubs, opera. Their children might listen to rock and roll, date members of the opposite sex, and choose their own spouses.

Anyone who didn’t take this route probably ended up wearing the traditional garments of the society:
pehran-u-tumban
,
shalwar kameez
,
sari
,
jelabiyyah, keffiyeh
—whatever was traditional in a given country. Their daily schedule was shaped by religious rituals, and when they spoke of their family they would tend to mean a large network of relatives to whom they were bound by intricate obligations. Their spouses would probably be chosen for them by others, possibly a committee of relatives from which they themselves might be excluded.

Diplomats, businessmen, and other functionaries of the Western world would feel comfortable dealing with the folks who wore suits to work; they were culturally familiar. They might rarely interact with denizens of the other culture.

Those who wore suits to work had a good chance of living in houses with modern kitchens and bathrooms equipped with electricity and plumbing. Those who didn’t, ended up in houses with kitchen and bathrooms like those of their ancestors with informal plumbing and possibly no connection to a public sewage system. As an energy source, instead of electricity, they might use charcoal, wood, or some other fuel burned directly for heat and light.

The people within the nation’s governing club made money on a scale corresponding to that of the world economy. People in the left-behind, domestic economy generally had much smaller incomes, adequate perhaps to their needs in a village or an urban slum, but not enough to let them move out of poverty.

This whole dynamic was not limited to the oil-rich nations. A similar process was taking place in countries without oil, if they had strategic value as Cold War chips, and who didn’t? Egypt, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and many other countries that fit this definition got torrents of money from the superpowers as “development aid” designed to tilt them toward whichever side was doing the giving. Roads and hospitals, schools and airports, armaments and police equipment, whatever the ruling elite of a country needed, they could get the money for it in the forms of grants or loans from outsid
e. It wasn’t oil money, but compared
to the revenues generated by the traditional economies of these countries, it was
lots
of money. Aid like this relieved ever-more centralized states from depending on domestic taxes and their elites from having to please or appease domestic constituencies. It was money enough to spawn technocracies and divide societies into separate worlds.

The division into separate worlds was indeed so sharp that in many places it was visible to the naked eye. Every major metropolis from Casablanca to Kabul had in essence two downtowns: one was its Old City, perhaps dubbed its “casbah” or its “medina,” a downtown for citizens of the left-behind economy. Everybody there dressed quite differently from people in the other downtown, the modern one, where business was transacted with the world at large. The two downtowns smelled different; they had different styles of architecture; there was a different feel to the social life. All coun
tries once colonized by Europeans had some such division perhaps, but it may have been most palpable in Muslim countries.

Of course it’s true that in Europe, too, the sudden changes wrought by the industrial revolution had divided societies into sharply separate classes. London had its sleek business center and its Cheapside, its posh neighborhoods and its slums, but there the division derived more strictly from the economic gulf: the rich ate better, dressed better, lived more comfortably, went to better schools, and used a more educated diction when they spoke, but they were just a richer version of the poor.

In the Muslim world, the difference was not just economic but cultural and therefore the gulf between the worlds fed alienation and produced a more anti-colonialist flavor of resentment, but against the nation’s own elite. This resentment led to occasional civil unrest. Since these culturally divided countries had no democratic institutions to mediate disputes, governments casually resorted to force to suppress disorder. The native elites took over the role of the one-time foreign colonialists. From Morocco through Egypt to Pakistan and beyond, prisons filled up with political diss
enters and malcontents. Nowhere was the cultural and political tension more palpable than in Iran. Shah Reza Pahlavi, who had profited from Mosaddeq’s ouster, was a secular modernist in the Atatürk mold, but where Atatürk had been a fundamentally democratic man with an autocratic streak, the Shah of Iran was a fundamentally autocratic man with a totalitarian streak. He built a secret
police outfit called SAVAK to consolidate his grip on the country, and as if just to salt his countrymen’s wounds, he signed a treaty with the United States giving American citizens in Iran complete immunity from Iranian laws—an astounding giveaway of sovereignty.

The shah’s tyranny energized a resistance movement that harkened back to the spirit of Sayyid Jamaluddin. Its leading theoretician, Dr. Ali Shariati was a Sorbonne-educated Muslim socialist intellectual. He crafted a vision of Islamic modernism that rejected what he called “Westoxification” and sought a basis for progressive socialism in Islamic tradition. Shariati said, for example, that Islam’s insistence on the unity of God expressed the need for human unity on Earth. In the modern era, the “polytheism” forbidden by Islam was embodied in the division of society into classes by wealth and r
ace. According to Shariati, the three idols that Muslims pelted with stones during the Hajj pilgrimage represented capitalism, despotism, and religious hypocrisy. He tapped Islamic stories and traditions as fuel for revolutionary fervor, pointing for example, to Hussein’s uprising against Mu’awiya as a symbol of the human struggle for liberation, justice, and salvation: if Hussein could inspire a group of seventy-plus against a massive state, then a small underground revolutionary group of just a few hundred members had no reason to hold back from declaring war on the shah of Iran and the super
power that supported him.
³

The Islamic socialist resistance incarnated as an underground group called the Mujahideen-e-Khalq. From the midfifties until the Iranian revolution of 1978, this small group led the struggle against the Shah and fought a secret war against SAVAK. These Mujahideen-e-Khalq (sometimes called Islamic Marxists) bore the brunt of the executions, imprisonment and torture by which the shah hoped to crush resistance, and the cruelties these men and women endured beggar description.

At the same time, however, a very different sort of religious resistance movement was gathering steam in Iran, one that came out of the orthodox religious establishment as embodied by the grim cleric Ayatollah Khomeini.

Like the Wahhabis of Sunnism, Khomeini claimed that Muslims had fallen away from “true” Islam as understood from a literal reading of the Qur’an and the traditions of the prophet and (because these were Shi’is) the imams who succeeded him. Khomeini attacked the Shah not for
his despotism but for his modernism—for promoting the western dress code, favoring women’s rights, allowing nightclubs to be built in Iran, and so on.

Khomeini also tapped Shi’i tradition to construct a novel political doctrine: that government power properly belonged in the hands of the world’s single chosen representative of the Hidden Imam, a chosen one who could be recognized by his immense religious learning and the reverence that other learned scholars had for him. Such a man was a
faqih,
a leader with authority to legislate, and in the modern world, Khomeini suggested,
he
was that man.

The Shah deported Khomeini in 1964, but the stern cleric ended up in neighboring Iraq, from which base he directed a growing army of Iranian religious zealots loyal to
him
.

 

The Six Day War of 1967 had reinforced a Muslim belief that the United States headed a new imperialist assault on Muslim civilization with Israel as its beachhead. After all, Israel’s strength depended on U.S. arms and support. This conclusion was underscored in 1973, when Nasser’s successor, Anwar al-Sadat, started a fourth Arab-Israeli war by attacking Israel during Yom Kippur, a solemn religious holiday in Judaism. This time, Egyptian arms and troops scored sweeping early gains, but Israel received a sudden massive shipment of weapons from the United States and this turned the tide; so I
srael triumphed again.

As it happened, during this Arab-Israeli War, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries was meeting to conduct its routine business of coordinating production and pricing policies. OPEC was founded in 1960, and of its twelve member nations, nine were Muslim countries. At the very moment that OPEC leaders were gathering to confabulate, the masses in their countries were marching and raging about the military humiliation Israel and the United States were dealing the Arabs. OPEC had not been particularly political up to this point, but at the 1973 meeting, its members decided
to use oil as a weapon for striking back. They announced an embargo on shipments to countries that supported Israel.