THE TIDE TURNS 339
erated by the traditional economies of these countries, it was lots of money.
Aid like this relieved ever-more centralized states from depending on do-
mestic taxes and their elites from having to please or appease domestic
constituencies. It was money enough to spawn technocracies and divide
societies into separate worlds.
The division into separate worlds was indeed so sharp that in many
places it was visible to the naked eye. Every major metropolis from
Casablanca to Kabul had in essence two downtowns: one was its Old City,
perhaps dubbed its "casbah'' or its "medina," a downtown for citizens of
the left-behind economy. Everybody there dressed quite differently from
people in the other downtown, the modern one, where business was trans-
acted with the world at large. The two downtowns smelled different; they
had different styles of architecture; there was a different feel to the social
life. All countries once colonized by Europeans had some such division
perhaps, but it may have been most palpable in Muslim countries.
Of course it's true that in Europe, too, the sudden changes wrought by
the industrial revolution had divided societies into sharply separate classes.
London had its sleek business center and its Cheapside, its posh neighbor-
hoods and its slums, but there the division derived more strictly from the
economic gulf: the rich ate better, dressed better, lived more comfortably,
went to better schools, and used a more educated diction when they spoke,
but they were just a richer version of the poor.
In the Muslim world, the difference was not just economic but cul-
tural and therefore the gulf between the worlds fed alienation and pro-
duced a more anti-colonialist flavor of resentment, but against the
nation's own elite. This resentment led to occasional civil unrest. Since
these culturally divided countries had no democratic institutions to me-
diate disputes, governments casually resorted to force to suppress disor-
der. The native elites took over the role of the one-time foreign
colonialists. From Morocco through Egypt to Pakistan and beyond, pris-
ons filled up with political dissenters and malcontents. Nowhere was the
cultural and political tension more palpable than in Iran. Shah Reza
Pahlavi, who had profited from Mosaddeq's ouster, was a secular mod-
ernist in the Atatiirk mold, but where Atatiirk had been a fundamentally
democratic man with an autocratic streak, the Shah of Iran was a funda-
mentally autocratic man with a totalitarian streak. He built a secret police