Only Twelve People in China

The Qurʾān uses this idea. They are called the malaʾ: the people up, the high people, the elite, the elect of the world.

There is a film in which a conversation is going on at a table, and one of the women is a sinologist and there is a banker there. The banker asks how many people there are in China, according to her statistics. And she said: oh, about a billion. And he said: no they are not; there are only twelve people in China, and I know all of them. The idea there was that here is a banker whose way of viewing the world is that the only significant people in China are his friends, who are also bankers. So the idea is that one gets to a certain level in societies where people really do view things that way.

There is the account of Cindy Crawford, the model, who was up flying when the helicopter she was in crashed. They were at Aspen or somewhere, going up to ski the powder, and they were looking down, and somebody said to her: oh, look at all the little people. And right then the helicopter just went into this spin. She picked up the connection and made something of it: be careful about thinking how special you are, because we are all in the hands, in the protecting care, of God. And there are people who really do think in these terms — Helmsley, who did not pay: only little people pay taxes. Only little people pay taxes. There are people who really do think like that.

And the Qurʾān is really constantly bringing this up, and even goes into their inner discourse, which is fascinating. One can literally hear what they talk about among themselves: he is telling his malaʾ, listen, we have got to get rid of this man, Mūsā, because he is going to corrupt our people. He sees this as a corrupting element, because he is going to teach them not to worship us — not to say the pharaoh is god, not to give me the authority that I am entitled to. That is a disrupting element to the power elite, when you have a teaching that is literally challenging the very foundations of that structure. And this is something very powerful in the Qurʾān; there are many examples of it.