Chapter Twenty
The shift in United States strategy for confronting Communism was not unconnected to a seismic change in American identity caused by an immense migration from country to city. Between 1920 and 1957, the farm population shrank by almost half, and by the 1960s, barely one in five Americans worked on the land. United States power, starkly demonstrated in the Second World War, grew unmistakably from its industrial strength. Cheap food could be taken for granted. In 1961, American farmers produced a super-abundance of wheat, 1.3 billion tons, an increase of 50 percent from the crop yielded by the same acreage in the 1920s. Corn, hogs, and cotton were also in surplus. The only problem was finding a market. Farmland itself was no longer significant to the general economy.
In step with this changed economic reality, United States foreign policy, and thus the West’s strategy in the Cold War, gradually changed from promoting rural ownership to increasing rural production as a preparation for industrialization. Aid took the form of grandiose projects such as the construction of giant dams on the Indus River in India, the Nile in Egypt, and the Helmand River in Afghanistan. The buzzwords were “development” and “modernization” and industrial growth displaced agriculture at the heart of the new policy.
The godfather of the new theory of development was Walt W. Rostow. Industrialization remained his key marker for modernizing a state, but “the take-off” had been incorporated into a Darwinian, near-Marxist idea of economic evolution that led from peasant farming through five stages, including the take-off at number three, to the “high mass consumption” of the modern state. “The striking disparity between the standards of the inhabitants of the so-called developed or advanced nations of the mid-twentieth century and standards prevailing in today’s underdeveloped countries,” he wrote in The Stages of Economic Growth in 1960, “is essentially due to the fact that the former have industrialized and the latter have not.”
In the new academic discipline of economic development, land simply served as a source of cheap labor as families left the countryside, a supply of “exogenous capital” to the industrial economy. The question of ownership that so exercised Ladejinsky was no longer important. Freed from their relatives’ unproductive presence, the remaining rural inhabitants were expected to have sufficient earnings to invest and improve the land’s fertility, enabling them to produce more food for industry. Industrialization would lead the state into the market economy which could be expected to provide the employment, wealth, and free-market outlook that would attach underdeveloped countries, soon to be dubbed the Third World, to the capitalist camp.
Development theorists often cited the startling growth of the Asian tigers as examples of how the model should work but ignored the role played by the wide distribution of land ownership. Only in 1991 did the World Bank acknowledge the vital importance of land reform in sustaining stable government during the upheaval of industrialization because it had served “to demonstrate the intent that all would have a share of future wealth.” For Rostow’s followers, however, the crucial factor in maintaining social order was the dictatorial power of the U.S. military government in Japan, of the Kuomintang in Taiwan, and of Presidents Synghman Rhee and Park Chung-hee in South Korea.
This emphasis was given its most persuasive expression by Samuel Huntington, the leading academic exponent of development theory in the late twentieth century, in his 1968 study, Political Order in Changing Societies. Huntington eloquently pleaded the necessity for strong rule during this period of “authoritarian transition” until legal and parliamentary institutions were sufficiently well-established to channel the new social forces into democratic forms. Underlying his hugely influential argument was Rostow’s five-stage model that saw industrial development leading inevitably to a democratic form of government. In the words of Joseph Schumpeter, a seminal influence on Rostow’s thinking, “modern democracy is a product of the capitalist process.”
Thus in the belief that authority would lead to industry and so to liberty, the United States fostered an unholy spectrum of freedom-hating autocrats during the last three decades of the Cold War, from Diem to President Marcos in the Philippines and the Shah of Iran, by way of President Mobutu in Zaire, the Trujillo family in the Dominican Republic, a string of murderous generals in Guatemala, the Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua, and General Pinochet in Chile.
Events in Vietnam demonstrated what was lost by the change of policy. Diem’s capacity to institute massive change in the countryside was demonstrated in 1961—the year that Ladejinsky finally resigned in despair—when he instituted the Strategic Hamlets Program that forcibly resettled as many as seven million rural inhabitants in more than seven thousand fortified villages, a huge logistical operation that swept aside the traditional rights of both peasant and landlord. And the effectiveness that redistribution might have had was demonstrated in 1970 when the Green Revolution persuaded American and Vietnamese agricultural experts to prepare the ground for the introduction of newly productive strains of rice. Their reform program saw title to almost half the farmland in the Mekong delta transferred in just three years from absentee landlord to on-the-ground farmer. By 1973, recruitment to the National Liberation Front and Vietcong in the area affected had dropped by 80 percent, and rice production had increased by 30 percent. But the withdrawal of United States troops in that year showed that the opportunity to change the course of history had been seized too late.
Defeat in Vietnam induced a mood of desperation that locked the West into its new policy of backing strong rulers despite the toxic contradiction it involved. Peasants who became property owners gave stability to government, however autocratic. Without that broad base, the autocrat had to be supported by Western democracies that consequently found themselves on the wrong side of the struggle for liberty. The poisonous outcome did not end with the Cold War.
Iran in the 1960s witnessed both the final flurry of Ladejinsky-inspired redistribution and, when it ran into the sand, its replacement by western-backed dictatorial rule. The effects of both policies were still visible in the twenty-first century.
Although Iran is vast in extent, one fifth the size of the United States, its best-watered and therefore most productive land is confined to the northern and southwestern perimeters of a mountainous desert heartland that gives its geography an Australian emptiness. In both fertile rim and arid interior, once tribal holdings had morphed into feudal estates—equivalent to Latin American latifundias—each spread across thousands of acres containing several villages and ruled by an emir who also acted as judge, moneylender, and spiritual mentor. Services, rents, or crops amounting to more than half a year’s production were demanded from the peasants in return for use of the land and, more importantly in the dry valleys, for use of the water. On their side of the feudal contract, the emirs were expected to provide both protection and the means of irrigation. For centuries, the hallmark of traditional Iranian agriculture had been the elaborate, Christmas-tree pattern of underground channels, known as a qanat, that took water from a central spring or aquifer controlled by the landlord to the fields farmed by his peasants.
Fearful that the feudal rule of the emirs was leading toward a Communist revolt, the U.S. State Department began to pressure Shah Mohammad Reza in the late 1950s to undertake social and land reform in the Ladejinsky mold—officials with experience of transforming South Korea were specifically posted to the Tehran embassy to help with its execution. The plan, incorporated into a series of reforms that the shah proudly announced as the White Revolution in 1963, was to be executed by the minister of agriculture, a fiery radical economist named Hassan Arsanjani. His program set a cap of 330 acres on the size of holdings, required the compulsory sale of property above that maximum with redistribution to the peasants who worked it, and nationalized common ground, such as forests and rough pasture, amounting to 12 percent of Iran’s land surface.
Arsanjani’s reforms began in the fertile northwest, in the province of Azerbayjan. Within eighteen months, more than 270,000 families representing well over a million people had acquired their own farms, and two thousand cooperatives had been set up to market their produce and purchase fertilizer. The social transformation of a feudalized population was unmistakable. “Our landlord is dead,” one peasant reported triumphantly of the very much alive, but dispossessed, owner who had formerly subjected him to virtual servitude. The rapidity of change from deference to independence astonished foreign observers—one normally skeptical British land reformer dubbed it “a supersonic moment in history.” Nor did the new attitudes disappear. Two generations later in 2009, when the Green Movement erupted in opposition to the corruption of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government, its strongest support beyond the capital, Tehran, came from the areas where reform had taken deepest root, particularly in Azerbayjan.
However, the shah was less interested in creating property than in the intimidation of the country’s powerful landed families. He had suspended the country’s parliament, the Majlis, where their power rested, in order to push through the breakup of their estates. Once his power of confiscation had been made plain, he dismissed the increasingly popular Arsanjani, who died soon after, the victim, it was alleged, of Iran’s secret service, Savak. Although the policy of redistribution continued, it now became a threat to terrify opponents, and the land was usually awarded not to the peasants but to the shah’s cronies and his adherents in the army as a reward for their loyalty.
By the 1970s, the State Department was fully committed to the “development” strategy of backing strong rulers. Thus in 1986, on the department’s advice, Vice-President George H. Bush greeted President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, notorious for the imprisonment, torture, and murder of hundreds of political opponents, with the words, “We love your adherence to democratic principles and to democratic processes.” Bush was being neither ironic nor foolish, only expressing the dogma that authoritarian rule led to democracy. In the same way, the shah’s rule, however brutal, was judged to be creating the conditions for Rostow’s elite group of modernizers to prepare the ground for capitalism and representative government.
During the last years of Mohammed Reza’s reign, the combination of corruption and autocracy alienated all rural interest groups—aristocracy, tribal chiefs, and peasants—as well as religious and academic opinion in the cities. When his rule collapsed in 1979 and Ayatollah Ruhallah Khomeini returned as the flag bearer of Islamic fundamentalism, the adherents of western democracy had nothing to offer as an alternative.
From the perspective of the twenty-first century, the fundamental errors in “development” theory are glaringly obvious. The evidence offered by China, Russia, and Vietnam, among others, demonstrates beyond doubt that capitalism can in fact flourish very well without modern democracy. Nor did any of the despotic rulers backed by the West ever willingly give up power to a democratic assembly. What saved development strategy from its own contradictions was the spectacular success of the most effective weapon in the capitalist armory during the Cold War, the Green Revolution.
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Awarding the 1970 nobel peace prize to Iowa-born Norman Borlaug for his work on developing high-yielding strains of wheat, the nominating committee singled out the achievements of an “eclectic, pragmatic, goal-oriented scientist” who, as their citation put it, “can perform prodigies of manual labor in the fields, [and] brings to his work the body and competitive spirit of the trained athlete.” The physicality of Borlaug’s character—a typical image showed him knee-deep in wheat with a farmer’s straw hat tilted on the back of his head—went with his utterly practical conviction that hunger in preindustrial countries had a chemical origin. “In all traditional agricultures throughout the world,” he noted in the 1940s, “there is a deficiency of nitrogen.”
Dramatic results came from introducing more nitrogen to a wheat plant that traditionally produced about fifty seeds from the tiny spikelets that make up each ear—in the New Testament parable of the sower and the seed, the total ranged from as low as thirty seeds to one hundred from the best ground. For centuries manure and clover had been used to increase yields by producing the ammonia that results from the breakdown of nitrogen. But following the 1909 work of Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch in Germany, the chemical industry began to produce almost unlimited quantities of ammonia-rich nitrogen.
With an abundance of fertilizer, the bottleneck then became the capacity of the wheat plant to absorb so much nutrient since the long stalk would collapse under the weight of the heavier seed head. In the 1930s, Japanese farmers and seed developers produced a dwarf species, Norin 10, that grew barely two feet tall, half the height of normal strains, and was thus able to bear the greater load. This strain became the basis of the electrifying increase in wheat yields after the Second World War in both temperate, developed economies and the hotter, less developed world. The number of stems per plant, of ears per stem, of spikelets per ear, and seeds per spikelet, were all multiplied, until a modern plant was producing in excess of 240 seeds, and up to ten short plants could be crammed into a square foot of soil.
In 1953, Borlaug, who was already working with Mexican growers on producing disease-resistant strains, began artificially pollinating scores of different kinds of hardy Mexican wheat with Norin 10 to produce a disease-resistant, nitrogen-absorbent new wheat that could be closely planted and grown in the country’s hot regions. Within a decade, yields had increased by half to about 2.5 tons per acre, and Mexico had moved from being a wheat importer to being an exporter. But in 1965, Cold War competition shifted both the Green Revolution and Borlaug to India.
Five centuries of foreign domination by the Mogul Empire followed by the British in India had obscured the normal relationship between government and land ownership. As in China, the imperial administrations operated alongside the near-feudal rule of princes, maharajahs, and other native rulers, to ensure that taxes were paid and loyalty was maintained. Intent on introducing their own property-based legal system, the British went further than their Mogul predecessors by seeking to identify land as the property of the zamindar, the person who paid tax on it. This satisfied the common law’s need for a single owner, but hardly fitted with the Indian reality that divided possession of more than fifty million tiny unregistered plots, averaging about two acres, between the tiller of the soil, the head of the extended family who permitted its use in return for rent or part of the crop, the village elders or tribal chief who controlled access to village or tribal land, the moneylender who held a more or less permanent mortgage on the crops and sometimes the plot, as well as the zamindar responsible to the government for paying the village or region’s taxes.
Underpinning this mosaic of interests was the caste system that determined every rural dweller’s activities and obligations. A broad, fourfold division of society into priest, warrior, trader, and farmer began to become more specialized under the pressure of population growth, especially in the Ganges valley, during the Mogul Empire. By the end of the nineteenth century, more than four thousand castes were attached to a myriad of different peasant occupations, from farming and weaving to butchery and silk production. Land was not an asset to be owned but the bedrock of a social and economic structure that spread work among the multiplying millions in the country. The system was sufficiently resilient to resist British pressure, and, following independence in 1947, the determination of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s government to reform and if possible to eradicate it. But while the caste system guaranteed employment, the inefficiencies of Indian agriculture condemned the country to a permanent food deficit.
India’s Five Year Plans for the decade between 1955 and 1965 projected an annual demand for ninety million tons of grain, but a total production of only eighty milllion tons. The shortfall was even greater for wheat, with just twelve million tons of wheat being grown, while a further eight million tons had to be imported, mostly consisting of the United States’s fabulously productive Gaines variety, derived from Norin 10. With the population of 500 million expected to grow to 750 million within twenty years, the need for increased production from the country’s 328 million acres of farmland was overwhelming.
The Indian microbiologist Monkombu Swaminathan was already developing nitrogen-hungry rice in the Ganges valley by crossing Japanese varieties with Indian when he heard of Borlaug’s results with Norin 10 and Mexican wheat. His invitation, together with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, brought Borlaug to India in 1963, and Swaminathan’s practical experience of dealing with the intricacies of Indian land ownership shaped the course of the wheat experiment. Their chosen test bed was Punjab, a traditional wheat–growing area straddling the border with Pakistan that was irrigated by five gigantic tributaries of the Indus River. In general, rural families there owned about five or six acres each, twice the Indian average, but Swaminathan and Borlaug restricted supplies of the new wheat to the richest farmers among them, those who owned at least two bullocks and enough irrigated land, eight to ten acres, to produce a commercial crop.
The policy of “betting on the strong,” as Borlaug put it, offended the ruling Congress Party’s belief in cooperative, peasant production, but in 1965 Nehru, a staunch upholder of communal values, died, and the following year the hovering threat of starvation became a reality. With startling speed, rising food prices spiralled uncontrollably and local markets were suddenly bare of wheat. Lal Shastri, Nehru’s pragmatic successor, was quick to use the specter of famine as a reason for pressing forward with the new wheat. Eighteen thousand tons of the two most modern Mexican strains, Sonora 64 and Noreste 66, were distributed to wealthy farmers able to afford irrigation and purchase fertilizer. Aided by favorable growing conditions, the results were spectacular. The 1968 harvest was five times as large as the previous year, and in 1970 India produced twenty million tons of wheat, making itself virtually self-sufficient.
Around the world microbiology and nitrogen had the same striking impact. Using dwarf derivatives of Norin 10, Europe began to fill its warehouses with mountains of wheat, and in 1977 even Britain, a net importer of cereals for more than a century, produced a surplus, while traditional wheat exporters such as the United States, Canada, and Argentina scrabbled to supply the Soviet Union and other deficit countries with their unsold crops.
Rice production increased in even more dramatic fashion. Utilizing high-yielding Chinese and Filipino varieties, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) developed the miracle variety IR 8 in 1966 and transformed harvests around the tropics by lifting yields from less than a ton an acre to almost three tons, with maximum figures approaching five tons.
When an American aid official coined the phrase “Green Revolution” to describe what was happening, he explicitly contrasted it with the Red revolution promised by Communism that had left people hungry. But the analogy went further than he could have guessed. What the Green Revolution had introduced was a new, corporate way of owning the earth that made peasant farmers in the Catholic Philippines, Hindu India, Buddhist Thailand, and Muslim Pakistan and Indonesia part of the larger productive, capitalist economy.
Reviewing the results of the revolution, the Rockefeller Foundation, which had funded Borlaug’s work from the 1940s and been intimately involved with the dissemination of the new strains of both wheat and rice, came to a startling conclusion—only part of the growth in yields was due to Borlaug’s plants, the rest came from the changed attitude of the growers. “The real revolution,” the foundation concluded, “is one that has happened not to farming but to farmers.”
Quite simply, taking advantage of the Green Revolution was so expensive due to the cost of mechanization, fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation, (unless a river could be diverted, access to piped water or a well was essential), a peasant had to think like a capitalist, aiming to maximize profits from a parcel of land whose use belonged to his family. A string of anti-Communist governments, including those of Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines, favored the Green Revolution for that very reason. “Even if it wasn’t such a spectacular producer,” said Rafael Salas, the minister in charge of introducing IR 8 to the Philippines, “one would advocate pushing the miracle rice culture if only to train the Filipino farmer into thinking in terms of techniques, machines, fertilizers, schedules and experiments.”
The Green Revolution, however, offered an alternative to land redistribution. Increasing agricultural production would create capitalists out of peasants without the social upheaval of redistribution. It penalized the poorest—those with fewer than five acres or, in Ladejinsky’s phrase, “the meek and humble among the farm owners”—who did not have the money to compete, a category that in India encompassed 80 percent of all farmers, but it gave the richest 20 percent the means to become owner producers, employing labor and using the land as capital.
The miraculous yields of the Green Revolution, almost tripling grain output worldwide between 1950 and the beginning of the twenty-first century, not only enabled the population to grow by more than double, to six billion, but fed it better than before. But less obviously, it paved the way for industrial globalization by promoting a form of agricultural production whose supply chains of seeds, chemicals, and finance and whose output of wheat, rice, and exotic fruits and vegetables spanned the world.
Viewed from the twenty-first century, however, the least predictable impact of the Green Revolution was its effect on those countries in the Middle East that had once been part of the Ottoman Empire, where the land was still owned in a way that had been determined in 1858. In that year, the grand vizier, Mehmed Ali Pasha, in effect the sultan’s chief executive officer, introduced the Ottoman Land Code, the centerpiece of a prolonged campaign, known as the Tanzimat, to westernize the empire. Designed to increase tax revenues by bringing order to the mosaic of different systems of ownership that had developed from Süleyman the Magnificent’s edicts, it required all land in the empire to be registered, and, reflecting Ali’s long experience as ambassador in London, each property was to have only one owner.
Although never completed, the registration revealed that about 40 percent of the empire’s territory was owned by the state, and perhaps another third was held by religious organizations to pay for welfare services such as education and sustenance in times of famine, with the remainder in the communal possession of villages and tribes. Most of the state land in the northern parts of the empire, however, was settled semi-privately as ciftliks. The Land Code gave the holders paper title to their land and formal recognition that any unused ground they brought into cultivation could be regarded as their own, thereby creating a new landed aristocracy. Yet although this was privately owned land, legally defined as mulk, its use was determined by a web of Islamic rules, family ties, and local customs that still ultimately treated the holder as a trustee rather than a property owner.
The same constraints bounded the other great class of landowners, the tribal emirs in the southern, dryer regions of the empire. These leaders of extended families and clans were traditionally selected from the richest, most successful members of the tribe, and customarily depended for their position on their abilities as warrior, smuggler, judge, and negotiator. But, once designated as owner and taxpayer of the clan territory, the formal authority of an emir increased sharply because his tribesmen were now also his tenants. Their lands were held communally, but allocated to villages and families who paid in rent, services, and obedience to the emir’s justice.
A century later, in the 1950s, 70 percent of Iraq’s territory was still owned in large estates of more than 10,000 donums, or 6,250 acres, divided between ciftliks and tribal leaders. As late as 2003, after the invasion of Iraq, when a young British official, Rory Stewart, was appointed to be the civilian governor of a province near Basra in southern Iraq, he found that in the countryside outside the cities the government was still provided by two tribes, Aibu Muhammad and Beni Lam. His Sunni interpreter from Baghdad referred to them contemptuously as “uneducated people, tribal people, without reading and writing,” but Saddam Hussein had not been able to tame them, and no one else was capable of maintaining order. In the western provinces of Anbar and Nineveh, the alliance that American forces made with other tribal leaders, many of them linked into federations commanding as many as 250,000 followers, proved to be the crucial strategy that turned the tide against sectarian insurgents in the last years of the Iraq war.
The Green Revolution had a particular appeal for these conservative, Islamic societies, whose rulers had no liking for godless Communism, but still less desire to upset existing power structures based on absentee landlordism. Iraq’s ruling Ba’athist party learned its lesson in the 1960s when it flirted with a project for Leninist collectivization in the Tigris and Euphrates valleys where Ottoman land reforms had left more than 70 percent of the ancient farmland in the hands of an elite of emirs. The sheer ferocity of the opposition nullified the party’s apparatus of military and police power forcing it to back down.
The alternative strategy, adopted by Saddam Hussein and other autocratic rulers in Pakistan, Iran, Indonesia, Turkey, and along the North African coast from Egypt to Tunisia, was to push forward the introduction of IR 8 and Noreste 66. The Green Revolution answered all their needs. It kept rural landlords prosperous, a rapidly rising urban population well-fed and peaceful, and it offered a way of rewarding the leadership’s inner circle of generals and business cronies. As follow-up studies in India suggested, even richer farmers found that despite increased productivity, the high cost of seeds, fertilizer, and borrowing locked them into financial dependency on the banks and agribusiness corporations that senior military and political figures controlled.
In Egypt, even President Gamel Abdul Nasser, the untouchable hero of the country’s struggle for independence from Britain, who had publicly committed himself to a revolution based on redistributing land from feudal landlords to the hard-worked fellahin tilling the Nile-enriched soil, failed in the attempt. After less than 15 percent of the designated land had been expropriated, ferocious resistance from power brokers within his own military and political supporters brought the program to a halt. But, as in Iraq, Egyptian autocracy went on to flourish on the back of the fertilized agriculture that fed Cairo’s bursting slums, and filled the purses of the rural elite, many of them related to senior officers in the military.
The fix from the Green Revolution, however, revealed an awkward gap in Islamic thinking about how to deal with the capitalist intrusion into the Ottoman Empire’s land system. Significantly, when the Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile in 1979 to lead the Islamic revolution, he singled out Arsanjani’s land reforms for particular vilification. Ostensibly, he blamed them for the dismemberment of large religious estates whose rents financed Shia colleges and clergy, but the real problem, that he never solved, was that a literal reading of the Koran offered no authority for dealing with the forces unleashed by individual ownership of land.
During the 1960s and 1970s, the need to relate a seventh-century text to twentieth-century conditions provoked lively debate in Islam, both in the Shi’ite crescent that circled from Bahrain through Iraq and Syria into Lebanon, and in the Sunni majority solidly quartered in Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. Socialist Muslims, headed by the Shi’ite Ali Shariati at Tehran University, singled out the priority that the Koran attached to justice and called for the elimination of private property as a way of “fighting exploitation and capitalism.” By contrast, the outstanding Sunni scholar Mohammad Baqir al-Sadr, resident in Iraq’s holy city of Naja, asserted that Muslims could only support “a form of government which contains all the positive aspects of the democratic system.” The most able of his followers, Murtaza Mutahhari, called for Islamic economists to come to a new accommodation with private property and modern capitalism, citing as his justification the Koranic text, “We have apportioned among [people] their livelihood in the life of the world, and raised some of them above others in rank that some of them may take labour from others.”
The adventurous scope of these different interpretations of the Koran by distinguished scholars did not last. In Iraq, Mutahhari and al-Sadr fell victim to torture and execution by Saddam Hussein’s sadistic henchmen. Throughout Sunni Islam, the literalist interpretation of the Koran spread by Wahabi Muslims under the sponsorship of Saudi oil billionaires soon snuffed out any intellectual exploration. And Khomeini’s fundamentalism achieved the same result among Shi’ite scholars.
The ayatollah himself found it impossible to decide whether the Iranian economy was to be capitalist or Socialist. “Islam does not approve of an oppressive and unbridled capitalism,” he declared in his last will. “Neither is Islam opposed to private property, as [are] communism, Marxism and Leninism. Islam provides for a balanced regime.”
The consequences of Khomeini’s inability to deal with privately owned property went beyond Iran. In effect it gave credence to a globalized agricultural economy draped over a corrupted Islamic version of feudal possession of the earth. The strongman governments, supported by the West’s “development” strategy, that seized control across North Africa and the Middle East reflected that structural hollowness. Their legitimacy was based on their ability to provide security and feed their rapidly growing populations. But the absence of any moral or electoral underpinning left a void that would be filled by jihadists trying to hack back the modern world to the literal shape of society enjoined by the Koran. And it would leave the hopeful revolutionaries of 2011 with no Islamic economic model that incorporated both incentive and justice.
The fall of the strongman rulers in the Arab Spring of 2011 was triggered by a failure in food supply, the one basic claim to legitimacy that a succession of increasingly corrupt regimes had to offer. Yet it was not hunger that brought about the Arab Spring so much as a demand for social justice.
There had been disturbances in Egyptian food markets in protest at the rise in the price of a bushel of wheat from $4.30 in June 2010 to $8 in December 2010, but the predominantly middle-class crowds who first demonstrated against President Hosni Mubarack’s thirty-year-old government in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in January 2011 were not starving. What motivated them, like the demonstrators in Tunisia who had earlier brought about the overthrow of President Zinelabidine Ben Ali, ruler for twenty-six years, was the discovery of their own entitlement to protest. Hunger had simply dissolved the regime’s aura of authority. In Tunisia, the catalyst came from the desperate choice of the street-seller Mohammed Bouazizi to burn himself to death rather than tolerate more bureaucratic bullying from officials incapable even of maintaining adequate supplies of food. As the Tunisian poet Abolkacim Ashabi wrote, “If the people one day decide to live, fate must answer and the chains must break.” The Tunisians themselves named the uprising that threw out Ben Ali’s rule “The Dignity Revolution.”
In Western societies, many commentators believed that this assertion of individual worth was the beginning of a social and political journey toward the values that they personally espoused. Certainly in the social media that played such a crucial role in coordinating the movements of the young, educated demonstrators, phrases demanding freedom, justice, and democracy were widely used. But the West’s Cold War legacy had left no democratic institutions and no entitlements, only a Hobbesian capitalism whose inevitable corruption rendered it morally bankrupt. Nor could the Islamic movements that took up the call for justice and freedom offer any secular guarantees of human or property rights.