336 DESTINY DISRUPTED
was discovered. With power distributed throughout society in these coun-
tries, 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 infrastruc-
ture 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 organi-
cally nor could they afford to let their people find their way to modern-
ization at their own pace and in their own way. Islamic societies were
falling behind by the minute, and they needed the full physical infra-
structure 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 accu-
mulated obscene wealth and squandered it as jetsetters frolicking in the re-
sorts 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 "de-
velopment," true to the secular modernists creed: that's really the bigger
story. In country after country, governments installed national school sys-
tems, built power plants and skyscraping office towers, established na-
tional 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 edu-
cated technicians and bureaucrats to operate the machinery of the new
modernism. This "technocracy," as some have called it, was a salaried em-
ployee class: its money came from the state, and the state got it from for-
eign 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 that productive.