310 DESTINY DISRUPTED
outgrew even its identity as a political movement and became more of a pan-
demic low-level insurgency-seething against secularism and Western influ-
ence, seething against its own modernist elite, against its own government,
against all nationalist governments in Muslim countries, even against the ap-
paratus of democracy to the extent that this reflected Western values.
By the late thirties, then, secular leaders throughout the Muslim world,
whether they held state power or spearheaded independence movements,
found themselves squeezed between two sets of forces: European imperial-
ists still pressed down on them from above; meanwhile, Islamist insurgents
were pushing up from below. What was a leader to do?
Under this kind of pressure, politicians typically try to associate them-
selves with some popular passion to shore up support; and often the pas-
sion they tap into for this purpose is religion. But religion was the one
passion secular modernists could not appeal to, because it was the very
thing they were trying to move their societies away from. So they waved
two other banners instead. One was "development" and the material pros-
perity it would bring; and the other was nationalism, which they claimed
to represent. In Iran, for example, the Pahlavi regime tried to invoke a con-
nection to pre-Islamic Persia. In Afghanistan, the Nadir Shah regime in-
sisted on declaring Pushto a national language, even though only a
minority spoke it at home. Everywhere, the glories of the nation, the
splendor of its culture, and the proud history of its people were trumpeted.
Nationalist sentiment was not in short supply; lots of that was sloshing
around in the Middle World at this time. The trouble was, most of the new
nation-states were rather artificial. Afghanistan, for example, had been cre-
ated by Russia and Britain. Iran, until recently, had been a loose conglomer-
ation of disparate parts, an empire, not a country. Turkey was a nation-state
because Atati.irk said so. As for India, where does one even begin?
But the most problematic region for nationalism was the Arab heart-
land. Here's why.
After World War I, the victors had met at Versailles, France, to reshape
the world. As a prelude to that conference, U.S. president Woodrow Wilson
had given a speech to the U.S. Congress laying out a "fourteen point" vision
of a new world order that most colonized people found inspiring. To Arabs,
the most thrilling ofWilson's Fourteen Points was his declaration that every
people's right to self-rule must be respected and accommodated. Wilson had