Generation Freedom

by Bruce Feiler

  I rented a small fishing dingy and set out onto the water with the fisherman, Kamil. Tufts of bullrushes dotted the perimeter. A handful of men in other boats were casting for their daily haul, mostly gray mullet, perch, and what the locals call “Moses fish,” a flounder that’s black on one side and white on the other and that earned its nickname from the idea that when Moses split the sea he chopped this specimen in half, thereby creating its flat shape.

  We passed under a small bridge and were suddenly in open water. No spot in Egypt better embodies the country’s complex relationship with the region and the world. About a mile in front of us was a line of enormous tankers and container ships making their way through the Suez Canal, which bisects the lake. Beyond it was a memorial to those killed in the 1973 war with Israel. The memorial was built in the shape of an AK-47 bayonet and is called a “victory monument,” even though Egypt didn’t exactly win the war. To the south was a shrine on Mary Mountain, named for a spot where the Holy Family is said to have stayed when they fled Bethlehem with their infant son Jesus. To the right was a hideaway hotel for police named “The January 25 Resort.” “I guess they’ll have to change the name,” Kamil said dryly.

  While he was speaking, a speeding pontoon police boat emerged out of nowhere and headed directly toward us. I held my breath. The officers pulled up alongside us, gripped our bow, and alternatively interrogated Kamil and barked questions over a walkie-talkie. It seems we were getting too close to the Suez Canal and were perceived as a threat. Within several minutes, they saluted us and sped off. Kamil couldn’t believe it. Normally, he said, they would have detained him, taken his catch, and generally roughed him up.

  “So after the revolution, everyone will be nice all the time?” I asked.

  “Now they even salute me!” he said.

  As he knew, this kind of harmony would not last forever, which is one of the great themes of the Moses story. When I first came to this lake years earlier, I quickly realized I had been missing a major element of the Israelites’ crossing of the Red Sea. I always viewed the story as one of exhilaration. “We’re escaping slavery! We’re becoming free!” But while the Israelites were clearly excited, they must also have been deeply afraid. They were leaving the world they knew, for a world that didn’t yet exist. Indeed, the next forty years were marked by a series of setbacks, rebellions, and counterrevolutions that amounted to a never-ending struggle between the Israelites’ better angels and their deepest demons. The clearest lesson of freedom to emerge from its earliest telling is that freedom is never easy. It does not come freely; it does not come naturally. It must be earned.

  Many people across the Middle East were already drawing the same conclusion about this generation’s rebellions. As Ethar El-Katatney told me, “I’m afraid Egyptians will lose their way. They’ll lose their clear-cut vision of change and their willingness to endure and work for it. My fear is that people will eventually start to convince themselves that it was better before the revolution, especially because economically people are going to suffer a lot before their lives improve. This attitude is something we have generally in our culture. The idea of looking back. All I can say is, ‘I hope we’re up for it.’ ”

  Given this insecurity, how should the rest of us react to these events? One reason the West’s response to the uprisings was so inconsistent—supporting regime change in some places but not in others; intervening militarily in response to some crackdowns but not to others—is that their implications for the world depend so much on their outcome. The Arab middle class wasn’t the only one to strike uncomfortable bargains with their ruling regimes; Western governments—along with Israel—did the same. In addition, the pace of reform was proving to be vastly different for different countries. The miraculous eighteen-day revolution in Egypt was never going to be the model for everyone, not least because that golden fortnight was preceded by years of underground preparation that other countries have not necessarily undergone. Also, tyrants who are prepared to fire on their own people cannot be easily dislodged, though they can’t buck history indefinitely, either. As the Egyptian pharaohs, Roman emperors, Ottoman pashas, French monarchs, and British majesties discovered over the years, no one rules these sands forever.

  But over three millennia, going back to the original Fertile Crescent, Egypt has had an outsized influence on the region. As the area’s most populous country, as well as its cultural and political heart, it still does. As one diplomat told Time, “What happens in Libya stays in Libya. What happens in Egypt affects the entire region.” Historian Mahmoud Sabit put it even more colorfully to me during our trip on the Nile. “When I lived in the States, they had these Dean Witter ads,” he said. “A Dean Witter advisor would be talking in a restaurant and everyone would stop to eavesdrop. The slogan was, ‘When Dean Witter talks, people listen.’ The Middle East is the same way. ‘When Egypt talks, people listen.’ ”

  So what exactly is Egypt saying? What messages, however preliminary, can be drawn from the Arab Spring? This was my final question: What do these uprisings—coupled with the demise of the region’s most visible terrorist—mean for the world?

  The answer, I believe, can be summarized with five lessons.

  1. THE ISLAMIC INCLUSION. In his otherwise nuanced and foresighted book The Future of Freedom, Fareed Zakaria titles his chapter on the Muslim world “The Islamic Exception.” The idea behind this term is that sixty years of thuggish, dictatorial rule across the Middle East and North Africa—enabled by the compliance of its people—raises the serious possibility that Arabs cannot handle freedom. As Zakaria noted, two-thirds of the world’s Muslims, from Indonesia to India, have lived in free societies for decades, but democracy has been stubbornly absent from the region that gave birth to civilization.

  The Arab Spring has eliminated this misconception. As David Brooks wrote in a New York Times op-ed piece criticizing Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, subscribers to this view committed the “Fundamental Attribution Error,” ascribing to culture qualities that are actually determined by context. “It seems clear that many people in Arab nations do share a universal hunger for liberty. They feel the presence of universal human rights and feel insulted when they are not accorded them.” Even before 2011, two-thirds of Muslims across the region told pollsters democracy was preferable to other forms of government, and those numbers started rising soon after the autocrats started falling. Whatever else comes out of the Middle East uprisings, they have forever shown that Islam is compatible with the deepest yearning for human freedom. The Clash of Civilizations has given way to the Convergence of Civilizations.

  2. THE NEW WAY TO FLY. When I was sitting with Ghada Shahbender in Tahrir Square, her cell phone rang. Her ringtone was the chant that went up on Tahrir Square on January 31 when F-16 fighter jets flew over the crowed of one hundred thousand protestors. “For about ten seconds, I was thinking, ‘Oh, my God, the criminal is going to bomb us.’ ” She was recalling the incident in which Hafez al-Assad of Syria bombed and otherwise savaged his own people in 1982, killing up to ten thousand. “But in Tahrir, it took about thirty seconds for the people to start chanting, ‘Hosni’s lost his mind! Hosni has gone crazy!’ And then there was an outburst of laughter.”

  For the last century, flight has represented everything bold, innovative, and futuristic about the intersection of human beings, technology, and imagination. From the Wright Brothers to Charles Lindbergh to Amelia Earhart to Neil Armstrong to Sally Ride, some of America’s most wondrous heroes have been aviators. In recent years, meanwhile, Middle Eastern aviators have been known for two things: flying their planes in circles and occasionally bombing their own people, or flying their planes into buildings and slaughtering innocent civilians. For Arab youth, these rival flight paths were the leading suitors for their imagination.

  The uprisings of 2011 were like a cockpit warning light that these strategies were failing. Autocrats were put on notice they must adapt or die, while Al Qaeda was discovering that
their appeals were falling short. In every Muslim country where polling is available, Al Qaeda had been losing support precipitously in recent years. Confidence in Osama bin Laden fell 42 percentage points in Jordan between 2003 and 2010, 34 points in Indonesia, and 28 points in Pakistan. In Turkey his approval rating went from 15 to 3; in Lebanon from 19 to 0. Hitler would poll higher. The death of bin Laden, coming in the middle of the Arab Spring, will surely hasten this precipitous drop in support for his organization and way of life.

  At their heart, extremist groups were offering Arab young people an invitation. “Come with us. We’ll improve the world together.” Terrorism has never been an end; it’s a means to an end. And that end has been a better life for your family, your country, the broader Muslim nation, and, in its wildest formulation, the entire non-Muslim world as well. “You may have to kill yourself to achieve those ends,” the recruiters say, “but you’ll get a direct pass to heaven and help the people you leave behind get one step closer to paradise on earth.”

  Though he wasn’t the only purveyor of that philosophy (and surely won’t be its last), Osama bin Laden was always its most visible and successful face. His downfall, at a minimum, makes the extremists’ invitation less appealing to young Muslims. The fact that his death came at the precise moment a rival invitation was capturing the imagination of the region’s youth makes his departure even more impactful. A decade after 9/11, both despotism and terrorism are in retreat in the Muslim World. And now Generation Freedom has offered the Arab Street a new way to fly: forward.

  3. THE FIFTH FREEDOM. On January 6, 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt delivered a State of the Union address in which he articulated “four essential human freedoms”: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. These “four freedoms” became the foundation behind the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. More than five decades later, at a town hall meeting with students in China, President Obama responded to a question submitted over the Internet—”Should we be able to use Twitter freely?”—by stressing that people should also have free, unfettered access to the Internet and that the more freely information flows, the stronger societies become. Invoking Roosevelt, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton later deemed this notion the “freedom to connect,” the idea that “governments should not prevent people from connecting to the Internet, to websites, or to one another.”

  The idea of extending human freedoms to the Internet had been around for a while, but it hadn’t exactly captured the public’s imagination. Until now. In coming decades when people single out the tipping point for the idea that access to the Internet is a fundamental human right on par with freedom of expression or freedom of religion, they will likely point to the Middle East uprisings of 2011. Regardless of whether these events are deemed Facebook Revolutions, they were clearly marquee moments for the power of social networks in political life. The Arab Spring secured a permanent place for the “freedom to connect” as humanity’s “fifth freedom.”

  4. THE WINDOW IS NOW OPEN. Dr. Iman Bibars is an economist and the vice president of Ashoka, a global organization of social entrepreneurs. Based in Cairo, she took her fourteen-year-old son to the protests, and everyone kept saying to him, “You’re part of the ‘lucky generation,’ the ones who will be around when schools are better, when entrepreneurship is encouraged, when you can get loans from banks without bending to corruption, when you don’t need to be the son of an elite to start your own enterprise.”

  For all the downsides of the Youth Bulge, there is one tremendous advantage: There’s a demographic bonus that follows the bulge. When the ratio of those who don’t work (those under fifteen or over sixty-five) to those who do work shrinks, greater productivity and income is possible. Economists call this windfall, often around forty years, the demographic “window of opportunity” for growth. Both Japan and the United States benefited from similar periods of economic expansion when their baby booms reached prime earning years. (And they’re both about to experience the backlash that follows when they reach retirement age.)

  In order to reap the rewards of this window, countries must adapt their educational, social, and political institutions to the coming needs of the population. The political changes unleashed by the uprisings are a necessary first step, but they are only a first step. School reform, health-care reform, and human rights reform must follow. So must a flourishing of the private sector, and here the region has something of a head start.

  My wife runs an organization called Endeavor that helps young business entrepreneurs around the world access the mentoring, networks, and capital necessary to build a vibrant middle class. After a decade in Latin America and Africa, Endeavor expanded to the Middle East and now runs offices in Turkey, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. “A decade ago there was no word for ‘entrepreneurship’ in Arabic,” she said. “People feared failure and had trouble thinking big.” Now a new class of entrepreneurs, most in their late twenties, is emerging, from computer gamers to fashion designers to biometric engineers. They’ve even coined a new word for themselves, riyadah, which is Arabic for pioneer. One such pioneer, from Jordan, invented eye recognition technology so powerful it’s being used to protect U.S. borders. A company based in the Middle East is providing technology to U.S. sheriffs to help protect Americans in part from . . . terrorists from the Middle East. That’s as good an emblem as I know of the post-9/11 Middle East.

  For Generation Freedom, the challenges they have unleashed are clear. Beyond the complex and ongoing process of trying to change leaders, constitutions, and political systems, the real and, arguably, greater burden they face is to take advantage of the economic opportunities their numbers provide to build a sustainable future. The window is now open. It won’t stay so forever.

  5. THE G2G MOVEMENT. And the burden is on the West, too. How will we react to this outstretched hand? In his inauguration speech, President Obama addressed the Muslim world, saying, “We will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” The Arab Spring is surely an unclenched fist. But I would go further. To me, it’s a direct plea to the Western countries to switch our allegiance from dictators who serve our need for stability to young people who share our dreams. And while it may be too much to expect Western governments to abandon long-term allies overnight—after all, many of these protestors are unknown and untested as leaders—it’s not too much to ask young people in the West to form a generational alliance with their counterparts behind the Green Curtain of the Muslim world.

  After Sputnik, Americans responded to the threat from the Soviet bloc by redoubling our efforts in math and science and generally working on our own house as well as fighting theirs. After 9/11, in response to the threat from Islamic extremists, Americans have done our share of fighting, but have we worked on our own house? This effort could mean anything from reducing our dependence on Middle Eastern oil, to advancing peace between Israelis and Palestinians, to studying Arabic, traveling to the region, or sitting down with Muslims in our own communities. In the that way Americans movingly said after 9/11, “We’re all New Yorkers now,” we need to tell young people across the Middle East on occasion, “We’re all Khaled Said, too.”

  Instead, not only do we lack a national commitment to reach out to the Muslim world, we have the opposite problem: a growing hostility toward them. A magnet school in New York City focusing on Middle Eastern studies was so roundly criticized it was forced to close; a program in Texas to give twenty minutes of voluntary Arabic classes a day was shot down after the school board was accused of brainwashing students; states across the country introduced measures to ban Sharia law, as if the two and a half million Muslims in America were at risk of overwhelming a population of 308 million. And my favorite example of post-9/11 craziness: In 2009, a twenty-two-year-old student at Pomona College in California was interrogated, handcuffed, and detained by security officials at the Philadelphia airport. The reason: The physics major was studying Arabic and
had Arabic language flash cards in his backpack. Our pioneers have become our enemies.

  It’s hard not to conclude that our leaders have failed us, too, and maybe it requires our own young people, the generation just reaching maturity now, to form an alliance with their counterparts. From business, to schools, to social networks, to sports (the Middle East will host the World Cup in 2022 and no less an authority than International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge expects the region to host its first Olympics after that), we must reboot our efforts to have people-to-people contacts with the one-seventh of humans who are young Muslims. In the same way that B2B came to describe the direct communication from business to business in commercial transactions, we could call this direction communication from generation to generation, G2G. It’s time for the G2G movement.

  On the night I arrived in Cairo, I logged onto Facebook and found a notice recommending that I “friend” a certain person with whom I had many friends in common. There was only one problem: This friend was an ex-friend with whom I had had a painful falling-out in college. That night I lay in bed thinking about whether the Facebook algorithm might be sending me a message. Was it time to salve that twenty-five-year wound? And that’s when it struck me. What a perfect analogy to what was happening out my window in Tahrir Square. The cries of those young people in squares across the Middle East were their own Facebook friend request to the rest of the world. And like all such requests, you don’t really have to be close to the other person to accept. You just have to have a positive, warmly inclined, friend-like relationship, where you wish them happy birthday, keep up with their musings, their status changes, their photos from the beach, and occasionally “like” what they have to say or offer a witty retort.