THE TIDE TURNS 343
yond all fantasies. They thrilled to the idea of an apocalypse coming that
would give them Earth and Heaven while knocking the undeserving God-
less elite off their high horses.
And yet, until the 1970s, few in the West paid much attention to this
explosive underworld of growing rage. The dominant Western narrative of
world history said these left-behind folks were vestigial elements of a by-
gone era that would gradually disappear as developing nations became de-
veloped nations, as despotisms realized the errors of their ways and became
democracies, as that universal panacea called education eliminated super-
stition and replaced it with science, as parochial emotion gave way to dis-
passionate reason. According to prevailing doctrines, the problem plaguing
the left-behinds of the Muslim world (and of other regions) was not the
social conditions in which they lived, but the wrong ideas they had. And
then-the secular modernists of the Islamic world began to fall.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was the first to go. He was the urbane, Berkeley-
educated prime minister of Pakistan, leader of the left-flavored, secular so-
cialist People's Party. In 1977, an Islamist general named Zia al-Haq
overthrew him and imprisoned him. Soon, Pakistan's Deobandis began
howling for his head. A kangaroo court tried him for vague crimes, and
sentenced him. Bhutto was hanged. Sayyid Qutb had suffered exactly the
same fate in Egypt, thirteen years earlier.
The next to fall was the shah oflran. In 1978, a coalition of secular left-
ists, Islamic socialists, and pro-Khomeini Shi'i revolutionaries drove him
out of the country and for a moment it looked as if the Mujahideen-e-
Khalq and their modernist allies would construct a progressive govern-
ment in Iran based on their new ideology oflslamic socialism.
But Khomeini craftily out-maneuvered all other factions of the Iranian
revolution. On November 4, 1979, a band of his student followers overran
the American embassy and took sixty-six Americans hostage. Khomeini
exploited the year-long confrontation with America to weaken his rivals
and consolidate his grip.^4 Then again, perhaps Khomeini's success can't be
explained entirely by his spiderlike strategizing and political gamesmanship.
Perhaps he won because he did indeed speak for the deepest impulse of the
Iranian masses at that moment. Maybe that impulse wasn't to correct the
course of secular modernism but to kill all movement in that direction and
give the Islamic Way another try. In any case, by 1980, Khomeini had