Book of the month

Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World

By Vali Nasr
(New York: Free Press, 2009)
Reviewed by Dale F. Eickelman

Dale F. Eickelman is the Ralph and Richard Lazarus Professor of Anthropology and Human Relations at Dartmouth College. His books include Muslim Politics, co–authored with James Piscatori (new ed., 2003). He is currently a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin.

Dale F. Eickelman Forces of Fortune has one theme with several variations: that the “power of commerce” — the title of the first chapter — can do more to transform the Muslim–majority world than politics, military force, or religious fundamentalism. In the Middle East according to Vali Nasr, economics, not “the region’s miasmic tumult of feuds, wars, and saber rattlings,” determines the “pecking order” (p. 5). Islamic fundamentalism, a continuing “worry,” has not toppled a government since 1980, although it challenged Algeria in the 1990s and remains a threat to Pakistan and Afghanistan (p. 10).

As for the Taliban as a threat, “this rag–tag army of religious zealots and tribal warriors amounted to no more than an incomplete insurgency in a broken corner of the Muslim world — an antique badland even before decades of war ravaged it” (p. 10). Nasr may here be underestimating Afghanistan. Its drug lords, “religious zealots,” and tribal leaders continue to adapt well to the modern world and exploit the shortcomings of the government in Kabul and the foreign military. The Taliban and other “tribal warriors” have a formidable ability to learn from their adversaries. Like al–Qaeda, they remain a key factor among the forces Nasr seeks to understand, even if they do not fit into his category of the “rising middle class.”

Nasr writes that it is not just any commerce that will change the Muslim majority world, but “business with a small ‘b’” (p. 11) — a new middle class drawn partially from the old elite but largely “from the provincial and lower social classes” (p. 22). These emerging capitalists are, in Nasr’s view, Islamic conservatives. They take their personal piety seriously and are the avatars of moderation and global engagement. Nasr acknowledges that violent extremism has footholds in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Palestinian territories, but insists that extremism does not appeal to commerce–minded Muslims who want to do “vigorous business even while staying true to their Islamic faith” (p. 146). Invoking Adam Smith and David Hume, Nasr explains that commerce, even if it does not reliably breed secularism, encourages moderation and gives “voice to the aspirations of the rising commercial classes” (pp. 168, 254).

Secularism in the Middle East has generally failed, he writes, because of the “perverse effects of a harsh, authoritarian imposition of so–called Western style modernity” (p. 85), as in Kemalist Turkey and Pahlevi Iran. Kemalist Turkey relied primarily on a large and unwieldy state–based industrialism. In the 1970s, the Shah launched many large industrial projects, although small businessmen also prospered on the margins of these projects. Still, state–led projects and returns reforms failed to take hold because they were top–down transformations. In Iran, where Nasr was a “teenage witness,” the regime had, by the 1970s, thoroughly lost the loyalty of the secular middle class.

In contrast, the economic transformation now underway comes from below. Nasr observes that the textile and furniture–manufacturing center of Kayseri, Turkey, has prospered since the Turkish economic liberalization of the 1980s. Its key businessmen affirm an Islamic Calvinist ethic that combines “strict piety with raging entrepreneurship” (p. 247). Nasr’s examples are fast–paced; although many provoke discussion, they are often insufficient to persuade. Algerian shopkeepers in the early 1990s, increasingly stifled under the stagnant corruption of the ruling National Liberation Front (FLN), may have turned to the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS). However, attributing the movement’s waning popular support primarily to shopkeepers’ tiring of “chaos” is no more convincing than applying the same argument to Shi‘a “shopkeepers, traders, and merchants” in today’s Iraq (p. 168).

For his primary examples — Iran and Turkey — Nasr offers a more solid argument that resonates with the observations of his predecessors. For example, Fariba Adelkhah has argued in Being Modern in Iran (2002) that a second revolution in Iran began in the 1990s with rising levels of education and the coming of age of a generation with no personal experience of the 1979–1980 Iranian revolution. Nasr similarly argues that merchants and traders, including those active in the informal economy and the black market, project Iranian influence beyond its own borders more powerfully than radical religious forces. Yet a powerful exception to Nasr’s argument, as he acknowledges, is that the Iranian state’s actual influence abroad is stronger where state authority has broken down, as it has in Afghanistan, Somalia, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories — and perhaps in some of the more precarious states of sub–Saharan Africa.

Nasr’s style invokes autobiography, personal experience, weblogs, scholarly books, op–eds, magazines, newspaper articles, and YouTube videos. These eclectic sources advance the book’s central theme: it is more important to look at economic developments, especially the increasing weight of a new and expanding middle class, than it is to postulate a clash of civilizations (p. 27). The Mayor of Kayseri tells the author that he has read Max Weber and maintains that the pious businessmen of Kayseri are doing exactly what the German sociologist attributed to the European Calvinists of an earlier era in Europe. Just like their counterparts in China, India, and soon possibly Iran, Nasr argues that pressures from this emerging, business–oriented middle class are forcing improvements in the rule of law and advancing moderation.

Sometimes Nasr’s argument goes out of focus, as when he claims that the schools established by Turkey’s Fethullah Gülen, who began his career as a government preacher, teach a “Turkish–style” Islam (p. 182). The movement, which began in the 1980s and has grown into one of the “media–savvy new voices of Islam,” has captured the imagination of the new middle class in Turkey and elsewhere in the world. Part of being “savvy” — and law–abiding in Turkey (and many other places) — is the Gülen–sponsored schools not illegally teaching a Turkish style, or any other form, of Islam. The schools’ funders and teachers may be motivated by personal piety, but their leadership is through the example of personal conduct without explicit reference to Islam.

The argument of Forces proceeds in a spiral, with impressions added at each turn of the coil. The first chapter establishes that what’s good for business is good for Islam. Pope Benedict, on leaving Istanbul’s Blue Mosque in November 2006, asked for the translation of a tile at the main exit, “A merchant is the beloved of God,” an incident again invoked several pages later (pp. 11, 24). In the Muslim world according to Nasr, it is merchants and not religious reformers who are doing more to shape the Muslim majority world, just as commerce transformed Europe in the eighteenth century and more recently China, Singapore, and India. Trade and commerce took hold in unlikely backwaters of Europe such as Scotland, where “the likes of Adam Smith, David Hume, and Sir Walter Scott” gave voice to the new industrial entrepreneurs.

The second chapter deals with impressions of Dubai. Central to Nasr’s portrait of the city–state is Dubai’s role as the back door to Iranian commerce and smuggling: “the strong web of social and economic ties that binds Dubai to Iran . . . holds out great promise for loosening the Islamic regime’s grip on the economy” (p. 49). Dubai is where the Iranian private sector “breathes and prospers” and where America can engage the “all–important” Iranian part of “the emerging Muslim middle class,” presumably notwithstanding the increasing control that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have exerted on the “invisible piers” of the Emirates, especially since 2005 (p. 74).

Where some see Hizbullah dominating south Lebanon, Nasr sees the region’s “uncanny ability to churn out entrepreneurs who generate wealth and sustain the rising local middle class” (p. 54). Writing in the 1960s, Emrys Peters first noticed the growing international influence of the south Lebanese Shi‘a, including émigré communities in West Africa and Latin America, who used their newfound wealth and influence as a force for change in Lebanon itself. “If history is any guide,” Nasr reassures us, “peace and progress, stability and democracy will have a better chance when commerce is vigorous and expanding” (p. 55). Without commerce, Iran’s influence has “no economic legs of its own” (p. 56). In Afghanistan, Iraq, south Lebanon, West Africa, and elsewhere, it is businessmen (and sometimes businesswomen) who extend Iranian influence — although the intricate economic ties that bind the ruling clerics and increasingly the Revolutionary Guards to major economic opportunities in Iran presumably blur this picture. Regarding Iraq, Nasr’s view is that the Iranian regime’s ties with that country’s “trigger–pullers and their leaders” are its weakest link: “Business holds greater promise” (p. 53).

In Egypt, it was the moderates of the Muslim Brotherhood who responded to victims of the 1992 earthquake in Cairo long before the “bloated and ineffectual public bureaucracy” came to their assistance. The same was true for relief efforts after the earthquakes near Istanbul in 1999 and in Kashmir in 2005. Governments may fail their people, but even so on “the broader Middle Eastern street,” the great hope of the “new middle class” — a phrase that perhaps unintentionally evokes Manfred Halpern’s The Politics of Social Change in the Middle East (1962) — is that “business–minded shopkeepers, traders, craftsmen, and civil servants have little or no interest in extremism . . . The Islam they respect is moderate” (pp. 172–73).

Whether Nasr is strolling along the Bosporus with a Turkish friend, dining with a colonel in Ankara, enjoying an Iranian watermelon with Iraqi soldiers in Basra on a hot summer day in 2008, visiting the Jamkaran Mosque outside of the clerical city of Qom in Iran, speaking on the telephone with an old friend in Lahore, recounting his grandfather’s pride at being selected in 1928 by Reza Shah to study in the West, or surfing the Web for signs of “prophets of change” and music that appeals to the “youth bulge,” he sees signs that the rising middle class increasingly looks to tradition, even if unwittingly invented, “to help navigate the currents of change” (p. 184).

Forces is America–centric in its policy recommendations; in style it falls somewhere in between an extended op–ed and a scholarly monograph. Nasr scans the horizon of the Muslim–majority world looking for promising signs of the rising middle class. Sometimes his facts are wrong. Iran’s Ali Khameini could not have declared in 1997 that the Taliban’s destruction of the Buddha statues in Bamiyan, Afghanistan was “an embarrassment to Islam” (p. 149) because they were only destroyed in March 2001. The growth in Islamic banking may well be due to the desire for small–scale Islamic investors, often from the “rising classes,” for shari‘a–compliant banking products and the promise of “ethics in finance.” Yet Islamic banking has had its own share of swindles for decades. The assassination of the Egyptian satirist Faraj Foda in June 1992 may in part have been a response to his biting satire on Islamic banking frauds being perpetrated at the time in Egypt.

Nasr’s metaphors sometimes get out of hand — “slingshot Islam onto the fast track” — but here he is only emulating the language of the Facebook generation of “lipstick jihadis” and “babes in hejab.” Sentences such as “Youth are a restless bunch” fall flat, but Nasr rightly draws attention to the important fact that half of the region’s population is under twenty–five years of age and that this generation has different perspectives than their elders. For these young people, images and non–verbal cues — such as an Iranian professional soccer player wearing an undershirt with an image of the Hidden Imam (p. 200) — are as important as structured print arguments were for the elite of an earlier generation.

The growing number of youth with higher levels of education who can read the Qur’an on their own and talk back to clerics is perhaps also the sign not just of the economic forces that Nasr wants to prevail, but also of the way in which mass higher education has taken hold throughout the region. Education, even if uneven in quality, cuts across the lines of social class and economic opportunity. A new middle class may be rising, but in my view, the spread of mass higher education and the varieties of networking and information–sharing made possible by new media are just as important for Turkey and Iran as they are for North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and everywhere else.

Forces of Fortune is impressionistic and rushed, but it succeeds in getting beyond invocations of extremism and violence that often divert attention from longer–term changes occurring in the Middle East. Nasr is not the first to aver that “a whole new economy is rising” and that “this trend is not only every bit as powerful and important as the threat of fundamentalism, it is more so” (p. 12). His comparisons of the paths taken by Iran, Turkey, and Pakistan are good food for thought, even if incompletely developed. For instance, he sees the growth over the last 30 years in Turkey of commercial classes not tied to the state–sponsored elite of an earlier era as a major reason that Turkey has had no coup d’étât since 1980. Others would also see the rising levels of education and the growing voice of a European–based Turkish emigré community with close ties to their country of origin as playing a major role.

The final chapter, a prescription for the U.S. national policy community, begins with Nasr traveling to Istanbul to attend a 2006 event sponsored by the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy. The idea of democracy, he writes, is not alien to the Middle East but “the practice has never taken root” (p. 253). Indonesia falls off the map in this chapter although its own path to democracy, not significantly aided by U.S. initiatives, might have been mentioned. The U.S. claims to support democracy in the region, Nasr argues, but in practice has done the opposite and has also forgotten what “Western history clearly shows, that fundamental changes follow on the evolution of commerce” (p. 254). Rather than encouraging the reform of Islam — “trying to reform other people’s religions is a fool’s game” — the U.S. should do what it is good at and unleash “the transformative power of business” (p. 257). In its engagement with Turkey, the European Union and the International Monetary Fund did not preach democracy, Nasr writes, but they insisted on long–term reforms that gave Turkey a thriving economy and “freed commerce from suffocating state control” (p. 257). This rising business class is pragmatic and does not necessarily stand with the West, and “at least in the short term” is going to be Islamic and conservative — an argument that Graham Fuller and others have made since the 1980s. Over time, however, “the profit motive will be our [the U.S.’s] strongest ally” (p. 261), for the “growing middle class” will push for business–friendly economic reform, good government, and the reliable rule of law. Unlike China, India, and Latin America, this “great transformation” is just beginning in the Middle East (p. 261).

Forces of Fortune focuses our attention on the main currents of the long–term trajectory of change in the Middle East and the Muslim–majority world and refreshingly away from U.S. military engagement in the region. It is monochromatic in its emphasis on economics and commerce to the exclusion of other factors. It remains, however, indispensable and timely. Although the tone is sometimes evocative of Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt — born again as an upwardly mobile, pro–business Muslim — the book nonetheless charts a bold and thoughtful course.

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