Elite-populace cultural convergence previously held Muslim societies together until Westernization split them

Evidence

In the past, rich and poor had basically worn the same kind of clothes, eaten the same kind of food, lived the same kind of life, and been held together by a complex web of loyalties and obligations. In the modern age, a Westernized elite and an un-Westernized populace live in different worlds, and the loyalties that once held them together have been broken or discredited. Such disparities did much to provoke and exacerbate the alienation and anger that destroyed the head of state in Egypt, and the entire regime in Iran. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1513

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A dense, paradigm-shifting observation: social cohesion in these societies rested not on ideology but on material sameness of lifestyle among classes, a claim that quietly overturns both Marxist and modernization-theory readings.
• XREF: Connects to complaints about immodesty/opulence panics as class signaling; and to the general theme that visible lifestyle stratification, not poverty per se, drives revolutionary anger. — connects to: Elite cultural privilege once protected critical truths that democratization destroys. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 302