INDUSTRY, CONSTITUTIONS, AND NATIONALISM 275
by docks; yet the fundamental core of Muslim life, the prayer ritual that
must be performed five times daily, is situated in a framework of natural
time markers: the position of the sun was what determined the times of
prayer. Here, then, was another way in which industrialization pitted pro-
duction against spiritual practice. (Europe would have faced the same con-
tradiction had industrialization emerged in feudal times when events such
as matins and vespers framed people's schedules.)
Besides all this, industrialization required that a society organized uni-
versally as large networks of interconnected clans with tribal loyalties su-
perseding most other affiliations rethink itself overnight as a universe of
atomized individuals, each one making independent economic decisions
based on rational self-interest and responsible only to a nuclear family. It
wasn't going to happen; not easily. And it couldn't happen suddenly. It as-
serted a crosscurrent against the whole river oflslamic civilization since the
700s. Muslim societies needed time to let the social preconditions of in-
dustrialization evolve in their world. But that wasn't going to happen ei-
ther; even less so. For one thing, no one thought in terms of developing
"social preconditions." They thought in terms of acquiring products, tech-
nologies and their underlying scientific principles.
That is, no one looking at machine-made consumer goods said, "Gee,
we, too, should have a Reformation and develop a cult of individualism
and then undergo a long period of letting reason erode the authority of
faith while developing political insitutions that encourage free inquiry so
that we can happen onto the ideas of modern science while at the same
time evolving an economic system built on competition among private
businesses so that when our science spawns new technologies we can jump
on them and thus, in a few hundred years, quite independently of Europe,
make these same sorts of goods ourselves." No, people said, "Nice goods,
where can we get some?" Because it's pointless to reinvent the wheel when
the wheel is already sitting on the shelf, priced to move.
Marx and Engels, among others, documented that industrialization had
some undesirable side effects in the West, but it caused even greater social
and psychological disruption in the Islamic world. Yet the mere existence of
industrially produced consumer goods made an argument that no pam-
phlet could refute and no religious harangue undercut. "We're nice stuff;
you should get some," they whispered, triggering a widespread sense that