THE TIDE TURNS 331
worshipping nationalism. After the Six Day War, disgruntled army offi-
cers flooded into this new Ba'ath, giving the already unhealthy nationalist-
socialist mixture a militaristic cast. What had started out as a fairly liberal,
modernist movement, dedicated to women's rights, equality for religious
minorities, freedom of speech, civil liberty, democracy, literacy, and other
such progressive ideals, now skewed sharply toward nationalistic develop-
mentalism with totalitarian overtones. The Ba'ath credo boiled down to a
shout of, "Our Nation! Our nation must develop factories, industry,
bombs!" Even before the Six Day War, the Ba'ath Party had taken control
of Syria; after the Six Day War, a second branch of the party seized power
in Iraq and began to build a police state soon to be headed up by that
take-no-prisoners dictator Saddam Hussein. Both Ba'ath parties had pop-
ular support at first, because the Arab citizens of their countries were
frightened by Israel and wounded by the debacle of 1967; they were des-
perate for someone to restore their pride. But the glow faded as the middle-
class masses in Syria and Iraq tasted life under the boot of an ideology
that had nothing at its core but power. And this was a second consequence
of the Six Day War.
The third consequence was the most ominous. The Six Day War
marked a turning point in the general struggle between the secular mod-
ernists of the Islamic World and adherents of those other currents of Is-
lamic thought and action coming out of the nineteenth century:
Wahhabism and the various strains of political Islamism.
In Saudi Arabia, Wahhabis already had a state of their own. Though
Egypt had a long claim to being the center of the Arab world, Saudi Ara-
bia could bid for that status too, in part because it controlled the holy
cities of Mecca and Medina. Any weakening of Egypt added to Saudi Ara-
bia's power-and what power it was! Oil gave the Wahhabis wealth, and
U.S. arms gave them military strength. With Egypt in disarray, Wahhabi
clerics quietly began using their resources to fund missionary activity
throughout the Muslim world, setting up religious schools, building
mosques, appointing imams, and establishing charities that extended
their reach into the lives of poor and rural Muslims everywhere, extended
south into sub-Saharan Africa and east to the southern Pushtoons of
Afghanistan, and on into Pakistan, where Wahhabi ideology already had
millions of adherents.