Millennials Of The Mideast

Robert F. Worth reviews Juan Cole’s The New Arabs, which offers reasons to be hopeful about the future of the Middle East, focusing on the generation of young activists that “has already wrought deep social changes, and is likely—eventually—to reshape much of the Middle East in its own image: more democratic, more tolerant, and more secular”:

Cole describes a dedicated and influential group of Internet activists who came of age in the early years of this century in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya (his book excludes other Arab countries where uprisings took place, conceding that young people had less impact there). Focusing especially on the Internet’s liberating effect, he traces figures like Lina Ben Mhenni and Sami Ben Gharbia in Tunisia, and Wael Abbas, Shahinaz Abdel Salam, and Amr Ezzat in Egypt. These young activists were less ideologically inclined than their elders, more willing to work with Islamists, and eager to form links with labor. Ahmed Maher, the charismatic and principled cofounder of Egypt’s April 6 movement, appears frequently throughout Cole’s book, as a kind of model figure of the “revolutionary youth” who helped focus the discontents that produced the 2011 uprisings.

Cole may be right that these people will continue to press for democratization, and that “as the millennials enter their thirties and forties, they will have a better opportunity to shape politics directly, so that we could well see an echo effect of the 2011 upheavals in future decades.”

The memory of 2011, and the glimpse of unity and civility it offered, can never be taken away, and surely it will inspire many young (and old) people in years to come. One line of thinking, often heard among liberal revolutionaries, holds that the current chaos across the Middle East is the result of a doomed, desperate ploy by the various Arab anciens régimes to cling to power and forestall the inevitable triumph of a new order. Like many others, Cole invokes a parallel with the European revolutions of 1848, suggesting that something like France’s relatively liberal Third Republic, established in 1870, is around the corner for the Arab world.

Another book Worth considers, however, suggests a more fraught way forward. He looks at Shadi Hamid’s Temptations of Power: Islamists and Illiberal Democracy in a New Middle East:

The secular youth movements of 2011 seemed so powerful and prophetic largely because they managed, briefly, to unify their efforts with those of Islamists and labor movements: a synthesis made possible by the catastrophic misrule of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, Muammar Qaddafi in Libya, and Mubarak, among others. (Several young people in Tahrir Square in 2011 told me earnestly that they were grateful to Mubarak for causing them to reconcile with their ideological rivals.)

The fissures reappeared soon afterward. But many remained optimistic because of a belief—more widespread in the West than among Arabs—that attaining power would necessarily moderate political Islamists, reining in their ambitions to impose sharia. What came to be known as the “pothole theory” was famously articulated a decade ago by George W. Bush, among others: being responsible to constituents makes you focus less on ideology than on day-to-day governance.

This hopeful doctrine, Hamid argues, is largely refuted by the experience of recent years. Islamist parties in Egypt, Jordan, and Tunisia grew more moderate over the past two decades during a period of renewed government repression, not democracy. “There was never any reason to believe that this process of moderation would continue indefinitely under an entirely different set of circumstances,” Hamid writes. “Some Islamist parties, such as in Tunisia, are more willing to come to terms with liberal democracy than others. But all Islamist parties, by definition, are at least somewhat illiberal.”