The New World Order of Islam — Page 5
New World Order 5 class. Again, the residences of the rich and the poor today exhibit much more emphatically the difference between their conditions than they did in the past. So long as the principal article of furniture was carpets, however rich the stuff or varied the design, the poor could imitate the rich with cheap varieties of their own. Today furnishing and apartments have assumed a standard and a variety which the poor cannot hope to imitate, however cheaply. In the past a rich man’s carpets could be matched by a poor man with a drugget or even with a cotton print, but today there is so great a variety of sofas, chairs, tables, cushions and curtains that a poor man cannot hope to attempt even a cheap imitation of them. In short, the distinctions between the rich and the poor have become wide and emphatic, and make for sharp contrast, resentment and bitterness. The spread of knowledge, on the other hand, has made the common man more sensible of these differences and more sensitive to them. In the past, people used to adopt a more resigned attitude towards these matters. The common idea was that all wealth proceeded from God. If one was rich, it was because God had made him rich; and if the other was poor, it was because God had made him poor. This idea no longer holds. It is now felt that the poor are poor because they have been deprived of their share by the