314 DESTINY DISRUPTED
Britain decided to make no grand decision about Palestine at all, but to
deal with events de facto as they came up and just see how things went.
How on earth could secular modernist leaders use nationalism to
bind together their dubious nations, especially since some of their own
were calling for an Arab nation transcending existing boundaries-while
at the same time Islamists and Wahhabis were saying to hell with na-
tions; to hell with ethnic identity politics; we're all Muslims; let's rebuild
the khalifate?
Ultimately, in this environment, the success of secular modernism
hung on two things. First, since the secular modernists kept waving the
banner of "development," they had to develop something and deliver the
prosperity they evoked. Second, since they sought legitimacy through na-
tionalism, they had to gain actual independence for their nations.
In the decades after World War I, however, they failed to achieve either
goal. They failed because, despite the thrilling rhetoric ofWilson's Four-
teen Points, there was never any real chance of the Western powers loos-
ening their grip on the core of the Muslim world.
No chance of it because at this point every Western power was racing
to outindustrialize every other. The Western powers were moving toward
an apocalyptic showdown fueled by ideologies, communism, fascism,
nazism, democracy. The stakes were absolute. Victory depended on indus-
trial strength, industrialism now depended on petroleum, and most of the
world's petroleum lay under Muslim-inhabited soil.
The first big pools of petroleum oil had been discovered in the late
nineteenth century in Pennsylvania and Canada but at the time these dis-
coveries had sparked little excitement because the only product really made
from petroleum back then was kerosene, and kerosene was used only to
light lamps, for which purpose most consumers preferred whale oil.
In 1901, the first of the big Middle Eastern oil fields was detected in
Iran by a British prospector named William Knox D'Arcy. He promptly
bought exclusive rights to all oflran's petroleum from the Qajar king of the
time, in exchange for a sum of cash stuffed immediately into that shah's
pockets, and a 16 percent royalty payable to the Iranian treasury later, a roy-
alty to be calculated on "net profits" realized from Iran's petroleum, not on
the gross, which means that D'Arcy's lease made no guarantees about how
much money Iran ever stood to make from its oil.