by Bruce Feiler
“Everything in my life seems to revolve around my children,” said Ghada Shahbender, forty-nine, a filmmaker, human rights activist, and divorced mother of four. We were sitting in Tahrir Square on a relatively quiet Friday morning when a mere ten thousand people had gathered to express displeasure over the progress of the revolution. An unexalted public space, Tahrir Square is as much a roundabout as it is a glorious invitation to reimagine urban life. It was created in the early twentieth century when modern Cairo took its current form, and the place earned its name, Liberation Square, after the Nasser revolt in 1952. Only with the protests of 2011 did Tahrir Square assume the sacred stature of, say, Tiananmen Square. Within weeks, young protestors in other Arab cities were nicknaming their otherwise undistinguished meeting spots “Liberation Square.”
“I was sitting with my daughter on the night of the twenty-fourth,” Shahbender said, her voice slow and artful, as if directing a pivotal scene in a film. “She’s twenty-seven, a psychologist, and she says to me, ‘Are you going tomorrow?’ I told her I didn’t want to have my heart broken again, but she looked so heartbroken herself, I said, ‘Okay. Better be a good role model.’ ”
The following morning they dressed in practical shoes, baggy pants, and loose-fitting sweaters. Shahbender, like everyone else, has a dedicated wardrobe for fighting dictators. “My main concerns are ease of movement and modesty,” she said. They drove to the Syndicate headquarters, and Shahbender instantly noticed that something was different. “There were all these young people, particularly in their teens,” she said.
I asked her why she thought they had come. “Over the past few years, many parents were complaining their children were not going out,” she said. “They were spending all their time in Internet cafés. But now we know what they were doing there: They were practicing freedom. On the Net, they could chat with anyone they wanted, express any opinion they wanted, explore themselves sexually. They had a space to do that—cyberspace—and now they wanted to have it on the streets.”
January 25 would be their day, Shahbender realized, so after a few hours of marching, when she saw her daughter slip past the barricades and into Tahrir Square, she returned home. But by 10 p.m., when she could no longer reach her daughter or sons by mobile phone, she decided she needed to return. She grabbed some woolen shawls and went to the market to pick up painkillers, tangerines, bananas, juice, and water. She paused in front of the candy section, carefully picking out a Kit Kat for her daughter and Galaxy bars with hazelnuts for her sons.
“Wait,” I asked her. “You were about to go back into the violence of Tahrir Square, and you had the wherewithal to stand in front of the candy bar section and say, ‘This child wants one with hazelnuts and this one wants one without’?”
“Mommy is going over to the square where her kids are demonstrating,” she said, “so Mommy better take food for her kids. They need energy!”
History, I was reminded, is made by people, and these people have mothers and fathers.
Shahbender arrived in Tahrir Square just as the riot police had lost patience and were launching a vicious counterattack. Sound bombs were exploding; volley after volley of tear gas was flying. “Suddenly the ten thousand people on the square started running in my direction,” Shahbender said. “People were pushing and shoving and everyone was scared.” She found herself shoved into a building with a dozen young people. “They were all suffocating, crying, scared. I gave them all baby wipes and told them to cover their noses and mouths and breathe. Then I started handing out the tangerines, the bananas, the juice, and the water. I probably provided some comic relief.”
The group sought refuge on the roof, and a young man came and sat down next to the only mother figure in sight. “I work as a butcher,” he told her. “And I’m just looking for a better life. I’m not political. Everyone told me this would be a peaceful demonstration. Had I known it would be so violent, I would have come with knives.”
After a while, Shahbender decided she should go out and see if it was safe for everyone to leave. “I’m an older woman,” she said. “They won’t harass me.” The young butcher volunteered to accompany her, to keep her safe. “If they ask, I’ll just tell them you’re my mom,” he said.
As soon as they stepped out of the building, a police officer hurried over and pushed Shahbender aside. “I’m small, so it doesn’t take much effort to fling me across the sidewalk.” She ended up at the base of building. “Then he took the young boy from me, threw him to the ground, and started kicking him. Soon five other soldiers appeared and started beating him on the head with batons and kicking him all over. And I could not speak. I could not utter a word. I got up off the ground and starting staring at the officers. The only thing I could say was ‘Why? Why? Why are you doing this?’ I just kept saying, over and over, ‘Why? Why? Why? Why?’ ”
The officers started screaming, “Lady, get out of here!” and chased Shahbender away. She never heard what happened to the boy. She never learned his name. He could easily be among the 850 people killed in Egypt between that night and the fall of Mubarak.
Shahbender wandered in a daze toward the square. She didn’t know where her children were or if they were safe. This was the satanic hour, the time when Noor Ayman Nour and many others were rounded up in paddy wagons and whisked off to the covert shadows of Arab repression. “The square was nightmarish,” Shahbender said. “Every few meters there was a boy, lying on the ground, and five, six people kicking at him, beating him. The lights in Tahrir are quite yellow, and there was a lot of tear gas.”
Her voice was deliberate and drenched with emotion. She described the scene as a screenwriter would—the visual display of a society being ripped open. A slight, imperceptible breach between what was and what just might be. The birth pangs of a newborn world. “There was fog in all of downtown Cairo,” Shahbender said. “And the only sound you could hear were the batons—they make a very ugly clacking sound when they hit bones or skulls—and the screams from the boys on the ground.”
Why? Let’s turn Shahbender’s question on its head. Not “Why would the police beat that boy?” But “Why would he—and so many like him—come out in the first place?” This was the first of three questions I came to answer: Who are these young people? What motivates them? Why did they suddenly rebel?
Let’s begin by naming them. In recent years, many in the West looked at the twenty Muslim countries across the Middle East and North Africa and tried to decipher some unifying message. What they saw was largely the portrait of anger and aggression—the coldhearted terrorist, the raging jihadist, the fuming “Arab street.” But the uprisings of 2011 generated a unifying message of an entirely different order. It’s one forged by the young out of frustration, fear, desire, and aspiration. It’s built out of an appreciation for how bad things have been and how much better they can be. It stretches deep into the well of the region’s past and reaches far into its future. It’s the common identity of an ascendant population.
It’s Generation Freedom.
So what can we say about this generation? For starters, they surprise you with what they know, and with what they don’t. One young woman in a veil quoted Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to me, but a man in a suit had never heard of World War II. With schools so spotty and much of their knowledge garnered online, they have surprising blind spots. But they are very style conscious. The West is used to inhaling endless images of monotonous worshipers in white cotton robes but that misses the mark. Arab and Persian bazaars brim with tailored leather jackets, low-cut dresses, and shining rows of knock-off products from brands as varied as Louis Vuitton and Abercrombie & Fitch. And while Western women view the veil as repressive, I’ve met many single Arab women who decorate theirs with jewels, broaches, and sparkles that would make my six-year-old daughters jealous. My wife once went to a gym with a group of young women in Tehran and said she’s never seen such elaborate preening. And in every Muslim country I’ve been in, regardless of the degree of
Islamist rhetoric emanating from the men in charge, the young people drink, sleep around, and smoke. Boy, do they smoke.
Altogether, Generation Freedom can be captured in four attributes. I call them the Four Ps.
Plentiful. Any conversation about young people in the Middle East and North Africa must begin with their sheer size. One-third of people living in the region are between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine, a total of one hundred million individuals. In the United States, by contrast, the figure is 20 percent and in Western Europe 18 percent. When you expand the range to include all people under the age of thirty, the number balloons to 60 percent. This demographic engine, while slowing somewhat, is still chugging along. Today’s growth rate in the region is 2 percent, which is 60 percent higher than the global average. The reasons for this so-called Youth Bulge are not particularly hard to identify. Beginning in the 1970s, improved medical care meant greater numbers of babies survived, even though the number of babies being conceived did not change.
Baby booms have surprising consequences. Scholars, for example, have found a direct correlation between population bulges and social unrest. A study by Population Action International found that between 1970 and 2007, 86 percent of all outbreaks of conflict occurred in countries where 60 percent of more of the population was younger than thirty. The West knows this, too. The peak of the post-World War II baby boom reached young adulthood in the 1960s, a period of vast social and political upheaval in the United States and Western Europe.
In some ways, these figures should bring comfort to the West. The country in the Middle East with by far the largest Youth Bulge is Iran, where 34 percent of the population is between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine. The Iranian baby boom is particularly pronounced because in addition to improve childhood mortality, Ayatollah Khomeini urged all Iranians after the revolution to have babies in the name of Allah. They listened, creating a huge engine for change today. The overwhelming impression I took from two trips to Iran in the last decade is that young people, fed up with the pain of the last revolution, are just waiting for the right time to act. As Ragui Assaad, a professor at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, said of these young Iranians, “These are the young people who were fueling the protests in 2009 in Iran, and they’re going to continue to fuel protests for quite some time. We haven’t seen the last of youth unrest in Iran.”
Even more important, this Muslim baby boom is not limited to the Middle East and North Africa. A United Nations study in 2009 concluded there are more than 780 million Muslims under the age of twenty-five living around the world. Expand that bracket to include people under thirty and the number balloons to more than one billion. If you want to understand the importance of religious coexistence in the twenty-first century—specifically, finding a way to integrate Muslims into a productive, cooperative relationship with non-Muslims—spend a minute contemplating this simple fact: One in seven human beings today is a Muslim under thirty. No matter what we may think of their religion, their heritage, or their culture, we must find a way to live alongside this next generation in the global economy of tomorrow.
Pinched. Any search for the underlying causes of the Arab Spring of 2011 always seems to return to the Great Squeeze: the painful gap between the enormous size of the young Arab population and the meager opportunities that await them. First among these is economic. Unemployment in the Middle East and North Africa is the highest of any region in the world. Youth unemployment is particularly acute: 26 percent in the fist decade of the 2000s, compared with 18 percent in sub-Saharan Africa, and even less in Latin America and Southeast Asia. In many countries, youth unemployment is four times the rate for people over thirty. And this problem shows no signs of abating. King Abdullah of Jordan has said the Middle East must develop 200 million jobs by 2020.
To satisfy these needs, countries in the region need 6 to 7 percent sustained annual economic growth. Excluding oil, the current rate of expansion is 3.6 percent. A core demand of the protestors has been a reworking of the basic economic equation that created this morass. As Dr. Assaad and others have noted, Arab autocrats struck an implicit bargain with their people. They would give the middle class subsidized employment (in the government or government-controlled industries), subsidized housing, and subsidized commodities. But in return, the middle class agreed not to question the authority of the dictators. Now, young people have begun saying, “If we’re not receiving our end of the bargain, we might as well have a voice in choosing the government.”
Deepening these economic challenges is the quagmire of bad schools. On the surface, school enrollments across the region have skyrocketed in recent decades, reaching the totals of the powerhouse Asian Tigers in the 1980s. Primary education is nearly universal and the crippling gap between boys’ and girls’ enrollment has shrunk to near zero in most countries. Regional literacy now stands at 91 percent. (Egypt is a marked exception to this trend, with a literacy rate of only 75 percent, placing it 164th in the world, largely because of the legacy of gender bias.) But beyond teaching basics, Middle East schools are sorely lacking in teaching problem solving, cognitive reasoning, research methods, and communication skills—in other words, all the tools needed to survive in a global economy. A similar problem extends to higher education. The region that first translated Plato and Aristotle, bringing these writers for the first time into the Dark Ages, now lives almost entirely in the dark with regards to contemporary knowledge. A U.N. study found that ten thousand books were translated into Arabic in the last one thousand years. The equivalent number is translated into Spanish every year.
The lack of opportunity also stifles the social lives of young Arabs. Who wants to marry a man with no economic future? Fifty percent of Arab men between twenty-five and twenty-nine are unmarried, compared with 31 percent in Latin America and 23 percent in Asia. The financial burden of getting married, from securing housing to purchasing furniture to paying for the ceremony, contributes to the delay. In Egypt, where the groom’s family pays for the bulk of a wedding, the average cost of a wedding equals forty-three months of the earnings of both the groom and his father. Among the poorest workers, the groom and his father must save for seven years. The bride might be expected to kick in more than the one-third of costs her father contributes, but women have been largely excluded from the private sector workforce in Egypt. In Saudi Arabia, women are not even allowed to work for themselves. The easiest way to improve the stagnant economies of the Arab world would be to eliminate the lingering stigmatization against allowing women meaningful work.
Plugged in. With such widespread cultural bias against women, up-to-date learning, and outside knowledge in general, it’s no wonder young people in the Muslim world have flocked to the Internet. Google doesn’t care what you search for. Wikipedia doesn’t care what you study. Flickr doesn’t care if you’re a woman. (In fact, it was cofounded by a woman.) Data from Nielsen shows that in 2010, just under 30 percent of the Middle East population has access to the Internet, a full percentage point higher than the rest of the world. Usage was highest in the Gulf states of Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. Evidence suggests women are particularly active users of social networking, blogging, and other services, as the keyboard doesn’t require you to cover your head or be accompanied by a man.
The best way to understand the impact of technology on the Middle East and North Africa is to draw the analogy with cell phones. Countries that bypassed traditional telephone lines and went straight to mobile phones are called leapfroggers, because they “leapfrogged” an entire century of technology. With their sudden access to the free flow of information in the early twenty-first century, the Arab world is poised to leapfrog an entire millennium of ignorance, poor leadership, and intellectual stagnation. If the current uprisings are any indication, young Arabs appear to have learned more about freedom, democracy, and equal rights before their wedding nights than their parents, grandparents, and great-gra
ndparents did in their entire lives.
But while everyone agrees new technology was a factor in this generation’s sudden change of outlook and assertiveness, did the technology actually cause the transformation? Are the popular terms that surrounded the uprisings, like “Twitter Effect” or “Facebook Revolution,” justified? Put more directly, Can technology create freedom? There is heated and important debate about this.
On one side are what’s called the “cyber-utopians.” This group, led by Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University and the author of Here Comes Everybody, argues that social networking technology was pivotal in recent uprisings, from the Philippines in 2000 to Egypt in 2011. Sites like YouTube and Tumblr helped protestors coordinate their planning, enjoy real-time, shared awareness of events on the ground, and provide a vital pipeline to the outside world. After the student-led protests in Iran in 2009, some even called for Twitter to earn the Nobel Peace Prize. As Shirky observed, “We have historically overestimated the value of access to information and underestimated the value of access to one another.” This group attracted a marquee supporter in Wael Ghonim, who said he hoped to meet Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg one day to thank him. While Ghonim is not exactly neutral (he was employed by Google, the world’s leading Internet company, after all), he memorably told CNN, “The revolution started on Facebook.”
On the other side are what’s called the “cyber-skeptics.” This group, led by Belarus native Evgeny Morozov, a visiting scholar at Stanford and the author of The Net Delusion, argues that dictators are as adept as using modern technology as protestors are. Totalitarian regimes use the digital paper trail Facebook and Twitter provide to grant them more sophisticated ways to surveil, censor, propagandize, and abuse their own people. The skeptics attracted their own marquee supporter in Malcolm Gladwell, who wrote a lengthy article in The New Yorker titled “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted.” Political activism is a “strong-tie” phenomenon, Gladwell wrote; Twitter and Facebook are “weak-tie” phenomena. He pointed out that Martin Luther King, Jr., organized a year-long bus boycott in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1954 without so much as a cell phone. Even Twitter cofounder Biz Stone threw his weight behind the doubters. Asked by an interviewer, “Do you believe Twitter overthrew the Egyptian government?” he replied, “No. People did that.”