Hazem Saghiyeh,
February 8, 2011
 

Opposites attract, or at least this is true theoretically. Feudal regimes bring peasant movements to the fore, and the regimes of the owners of industry call forth labor movements. In the same way, aging regimes produce youth movements.

The youth in Tunisia chanted “We are the solution,” and this chant became a rap song there. It is no secret that this slogan implicitly challenges the famous party and ideological slogan.

The youth – in Tunisia, and in Egypt – are reclaiming their dignity from aging regimes and from aging ideologies, too. The role of these ideologies and their parties shrank during these two uprisings. It was left to the globalized media – the Internet, Facebook and Twitter – to play the role that these parties used to play. Thus we saw the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt distancing themselves from the political forefront of the uprising, just as we heard their leader in Tunisia, Rashid al-Ghannoushi, announcing that Shariah is not on the Tunisians’ agenda.

The central presence of the youth is manifest, from another angle, in the tremendous demographic transformation and material expansion of the cities that has taken place over the last three decades. It suffices to say that between two-thirds and three-fourths of our societies’ inhabitants are under the age of 25. The Middle East region has been called the “kindergarten” for this reason.

These youth want work of course, but they want dignity too. In our backward societies and cultures, the two do not meet because the concept of “work” is still closer to the concept of “charity”: whoever provides another with an opportunity to work gains mastery over him and perhaps even enslaves him.

These youth did what they did not because of hostility to the West, but because they were influenced by the West. Beside the fact that the West was the origin of their tools of communication, globalization also gave them wider and more plentiful fields through which to become acquainted with what is going on in advanced societies – how their youth are living, how they are enjoying their leisure time, what songs they are singing, etc. In Tunisia in particular, proximity to Europe, the spread of modern education, the crystallization of a wide middle class, and the freedoms acquired by women since Bourguiba played an important role in the transformation. It is likely that the progressive stance that Obama’s administration took on Egypt will help push in this direction.

This, of course, does not cancel out the existence of centers hostile to the West. However, these centers of hostility were not decisive or foundational in the two uprisings.

It is therefore advisable that those in their fifties or older stop holding back the youth generation and its experiment, although hope is weak that they will actually do so. Past generations and ideologies – nationalist, Islamist and the like – will keep trying and will continue their search for openings in the process of producing alternatives, seeking to pounce on the young democratic alternative.

This perhaps constitutes the most important meaning of the current Arab moment: how to defend the dignity of the youth, their right to own the initiative, and their ability to do so.

This article is a translation of the original, which first appeared on the NOW Arabic site on February 7