Homeland Elegies(46)
“What would you have us do?”
“For starters? Spend less time dreaming about the Golden Age and more trying to understand how we fell so far behind. Because that’s the problem. We’re caught in this awful cycle of belatedness and inferiority. It’s made us feel weak. For generation after generation. And being weak has made us angry—”
“And how is what you’re saying any different from Bernard Lewis?”
“Bringing up Bernard Lewis is not an argument.”
“He did a lot of damage to the world with that ‘clash of civilizations’ stuff.”
“He called us angry and made us look bad. So what? So now we’re supposed to say, ‘We’re not angry’? Even if we are? Are blacks supposed to go around pretending not to be enraged about the shit they go through in this country every day? Just because it makes them look bad to white people? They’re angry, and they’ve got damn good reasons to be. And maybe we do, too. So maybe if we spent a little more time trying to understand what we’re carrying—instead of complaining about Bernard Lewis—maybe if we did that, we wouldn’t be dealing with this death cult that calls itself a religion and that’s eating us alive.”
He stared at me now with the strangest look. It was a mute gaze, consumed and inhuman, the way a river boulder might have stared back at you if it had eyes. And then, all at once, the expression was gone, and in its place was a childlike smile. We’re back on the same side again, I thought, watching him take another sip, clearly pleased. In denouncing ISIS—I surmised—I’d pronounced a reassuring shibboleth. He could be sure now I was not the worst of what he feared: an intellectual apologist for Muslim violence. He signaled to the bartender that he wanted to settle up.
“I can tell you why we fell behind,” he said with an almost cheery tone. I wondered if he was starting to feel the liquor.
“What?”
“I said: I can tell you why we fell behind. I’ve actually thought a lot about this.”
“That wasn’t what I was getting at—”
“Didn’t you just say we should be spending more time trying to understand why it happened?”
“…I mean, sure.”
“That isn’t what you said?”
“No, it is.”
“And I’m saying: I can tell you why.”
Just then, the bartender dropped the check into an empty glass before us. I reached for my wallet. Riaz stopped me, placing his black Amex card on the bar. “Thank you,” I said, certain, now, there was no way to avoid the rest of this conversation: “So tell me. Why’d we fall behind?”
“The corporation. Plain and simple.”
“The corporation?”
“The Romans created the corporation. It enabled them to protect assets from being redistributed after an owner’s death. Which meant money could have the time to really grow, take on its own center of gravity. We had no way to do that. Muslim inheritance laws are very clear. After death, the estate has to be divided among the wives and heirs. Because there was no loophole to get around it, businesses didn’t outlive their founders. Everyone wrote short-term contracts with each other, because you were always afraid parties in a deal would die, and you’d have to go to the wives and kids to be made whole. One-off deals were the rule, as there was no good way to shelter long-term ventures. Which meant no path to long-term material investments.”
“We didn’t have any correlate for the corporation? I didn’t know that.”
He shook his head: “Complete liquidation of assets in every generation until the late eighteen hundreds. Do you have any idea what that meant for private enterprise? And it only changed once we finally took a page from the Europeans and built a corporate concept of our own. But at that point, their money’d been growing for six hundred years! That’s banks and industries with a half millennium of accrued capital. That’s why we’re behind. Because Muslim laws were trying to take care of wives and children! We’re behind because we cared more about what happened to people than money! What about getting that message out there!”
I laughed. “That’s a good one.”
“And the best part? It’s all true. Even though almost nobody knows it.”
“I’m surprised you haven’t already hired a writer to script the film.”
“Why do you think I’m paying for your drink?” he said, laughing, as he signed the check.
On our way to Gotham Hall, I noticed the tension between us had given way to something light and playful, our banter lubricated, no doubt, by the liquor and—at least in me—relief, a sense that the conversation I’d dreaded had been worth risking after all. Whether we’d agreed or not, the exchange felt enlivening. I felt myself hoping our time together wouldn’t—like one of those medieval Muslim business deals he mentioned—end up being a one-off encounter.
At the corner of 36th Street, I spied the sheikha emerging from around the corner. She was tough to miss. Poised on the sidewalk, regal in her marigold robe and a dark conical sikke, her chin nobly tilted to the towering facades around us, she looked every bit the European-gone-native in some unwritten Bellow novel of Eastern Anatolia. Then, all at once, like a rarely sighted bird easily spooked, she turned and hurried for the entrance. As she scurried away, I pointed her out and commented about the opulence of her robes. “I mean, it is hard to make a case for giving her money when we all know how much she’s already got.”