342 DESTINY DISRUPTED
ended with an odd or even number. I remember getting up long before
dawn every other day that winter to secure my place in line at a local gas
station for a chance at the scarce commodity. Sometimes, the gas had run
out by the time I got to the pump. I thought I was seeing the end of civi-
lization, and perhaps I was getting a foretaste of it; perhaps we all were.
That OPEC embargo sent the price of oil skyrocketing from $3 a barrel to
$12. As I write, oil is selling for about $130 a barrel.
Media backlash soon began constructing the now-familiar stereotype of
Arabs as rich, oily, evil men with long noses, conspiring to rule the world.
That stereotype closely, even eerily, matches the one constructed a hun-
dred years early by European anti-Semites as a depiction of Jews, particu-
larly an imagined secret Jewish cult called the "elders of Zion," who were
supposedly conspiring to, yes, rule the world.
The oil embargo did give the OPEC nations an intimation of their po-
tential power. Although it lasted only a few months, it ended up increas-
ing the oil-producing nations' mastery of their own resource. Thereupon,
the elites of these nations got even richer-which only exacerbated the di-
vision of Muslim societies into separate worlds, as described earlier.
Throughout this time, secular forces in Dar al-Islam went on struggling
to "modernize" their countries while coping with international forces. But
the submerged, even suppressed "other" currents of Muslim revival-the
political Islamists, the Salafis, the Wahhabis, the Deobandis, the jihadists,
et al-continued to thrive among the excluded people of the left-behind
economies. There, they went on preaching that the world was divided into
two distinct, mutually exclusive parts, a realm of peace and a realm of war,
a realm of Muslim brotherhood and one of violent pagan greed.
The people they were preaching to could look about and see that, yes
indeed, society was divided into whole separate worlds; it was palpable;
you'd have to be blind not to notice. And when the jihadists went on to
predict that an apocalyptic showdown was coming up between those who
remained faithful to the letter of the revelations received by Mohammed in
seventh century Arabia and those who had joined Satan in his quest to
draw people away from God, people who lived in these blatantly divided
societies knew what they meant: they woke up every day to the reality of
their own growing impoverishment, even as their television screens showed
them people just across town but living in a whole other world, rich be-