From the moment he stepped off his jet in Cairo Tuesday night to find thousands of Egyptian fans shouting “God is great,” this was far more than a routine visit by a foreign leader.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish Prime Minister, toured the newly liberated capitals of Egypt, Tunisia and Libya this week with the sort of popularity usually reserved for pop stars. He is polling as the most popular politician, by far, in virtually every country of the Middle East, and for the revolutionary generation who turned to the Middle East’s only Muslim democracy for inspiration, he is a conquering hero.

Read article in The Globe and Mail

Not since the Kurdish sultan Saladin recaptured Egypt, Syria and Jerusalem from the Europeans in the 1100s, some commentators remarked as Mr. Erdogan filled TV screens across the region, has a non-Arab held such widespread popularity and uncontested influence in the Arab world.

But it is exactly those sort of imperial analogies that have Westerners worried about Turkey’s new assertiveness. It has become popular to call Mr. Erdogan’s tactics “neo-Ottoman,” after the Turk-led Muslim empire that conquered much of Europe, the Middle East and north Africa between the 14th and the 19th centuries. The worry is that Turkey is now turning away from its European roots – after being shunned by the European Union in its bid for membership – and using the power vacuums to its south to link up with the region’s Islamist parties and form a network of Islamic power to threaten the West.

It is a misleading analogy, mistaking Mr. Erdogan’s bold but self-interested mission for some sort of Islamic imperialism, but it is a popular and understandable one.

After all, Mr. Erdogan, a former Islamist and devout believer, launched this tour after turning a minor spat with Israel, Turkey’s traditional staunch ally, into an outright conflagration. After Israel refused to apologize earlier this month for its army’s killing of nine Turkish civilians aboard the controversial aid flotilla to Gaza in May of 2010, Mr. Erdogan responded furiously by withdrawing Turkey’s ambassador, suspending its military co-operation with Israel, and freezing all trade ties with the Jewish state.

His Arab tour has been laced with fiery criticisms of Israel, glowing support for the Palestinian cause, and macho statements suggesting a military showdown: “Israel will no longer be able to do what it wants in the Mediterranean,” he told an audience in Tunis on Thursday, “and you’ll be seeing Turkish warships in this sea.” That was only one of several such alarming sabre-rattling statements, suggesting that the spat with Israel is in large part intended to send a message of solidarity to his country’s Arab neighbours.

That, combined with the warm mutual embrace between Mr. Erdogan and leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood (who tend to tell Western reporters that they see Turkey as their role model), has led some to fear that Europe’s largest Muslim state is turning to the dark side. It’s an alarming prospect, given that Turkey has Europe’s largest standing army and has become wealthy enough, from gas pipelines and industrial exports to Europe, to become a major power.

Yet most informed observers of Turkish diplomacy would say that’s a serious misreading.

“Yes, Turkey has been engaging its neighbourhood, and not just in the Middle East, and building its influence with Muslim states,” said Joshua W. Walker, a Turkey specialist who is a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, “but it would be a mistake to think that this is a move away from the West or from democracy or secularism. They’re making a shift from a French style of secularism to an American one, where you’re allowed to be religious and still be in government, but there’s no sign that Turkey is moving away from the West.”

Indeed, many Western diplomats, including those from the United States, quietly say that Mr. Erdogan’s eastern turn is a welcome and beneficial development – in good part because it could herald the eclipse of Saudi Arabia’s and Iran’s much more dangerous influence over the Arab states, but also because what Mr. Erdogan is doing is hardly imperial or Islamist.

His key message to Egyptians, delivered in a national TV interview, is that they should get rid of their old sharia-based constitution and become a secular state. “In Turkey, constitutional secularism is defined as the state remaining equidistant to all religions,” he said. “In a secular regime people are free to be religious or not.”

And if there was any ambiguity, he then told Egyptians that the most important thing Arabs should learn from Turkey is secularism – a word that is close to unmentionable in Egypt these days.

“I recommend a secular constitution for Egypt,” he said. “Do not fear secularism because it does not mean being an enemy of religion. I hope the new regime in Egypt will be secular. I hope that after these remarks of mine the way the Egyptian people look at secularism will change.”

That message was heard loudly across the Arab world, and provoked angry responses from the Brotherhood and other Islamist groups (who nevertheless still sought to associate themselves with the Turkish leader).

And it came alongside a number of other signs that Turkey is far from turning eastward. Just as he was falling into his feud with Israel, Mr. Erdogan struck a bold deal with the United States to use his country as the staging ground for a missile defence system that uses huge radar installations to protect against Iranian missile attacks. A senior U.S. official told the New York Times that it is “the most significant military co-operation between Washington and Ankara since 2003” and it was widely seen as part of a major boost in the country’s 59-year-old membership in NATO. At the same time, Turkey joined a major antiterrorism initiative with the United States. And its trade and political relations with European states have been growing strongly.

“If you actually examine what is happening,” says Fadi Hakura, head of the Turkey Project at London’s Chatham House, “you realize that this is the best possible situation for the United States and Europe – you have a strongly allied country that can exercise a tough position with Israel without promoting the kind of violence that other regional actors like Iran did.” In other words, Turkey may play the bad cop with Israel, but unlike Tehran, it won’t be interested in bankrolling terrorists groups like Hezbollah.

Mr. Ergdogan’s eastern thrust, accompanied by large aid expenditures across the Middle East, North Africa and Somalia, is part of a strategy engineered by Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu to build Turkey’s regional influence in order to avoid the multiple crises Turkey faced before 2000 when it was surrounded on all sides by menacing, unstable authoritarian states.

Mr. Davutoglu’s strategy is based on what he calls a “zero problems” relationship with Turkey’s neighbours, designed to minimize expensive confrontations. Given the bellicose standoff with Israel this week, and Mr. Erdogan’s own drift back into military conflict with his own Kurdish minority (whom he’d previously spent a decade granting impressive minority rights), it’s obvious that the problems with Turkey these days are far from zero. But they might be a lot fewer than you’d think.

Original Article

Like most people, Mohammed Abdel Rahman remembers exactly where he was when the Twin Towers fell. He was in Afghanistan, holding a rifle, among the men who ordered and backed the Sept. 11 attacks. While he says he didn’t cheer that day, people around him were rejoicing.

The bearded Egyptian, who was later captured and tortured by U.S. forces, was a pioneering member of the al-Qaeda generation – the frustrated and pious men, mainly middle class and Middle Eastern, who took up arms, bombs and sometimes jetliners against Western governments starting in the 1990s.

Read column in The Globe and Mail

His father, Omar (known as the “blind sheik”), had organized the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and had been a founding leader of al-Qaeda. The younger Mr. Abdel Rahman was one of thousands of young Egyptians, Saudis and other Arabs whose preferred political outlet consisted of pursuing martyrdom in what they saw as a struggle against the West.

Yet, when he sat down to speak this week in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, Mr. Abdel Rahman had a different message. “My vision hasn’t changed, but the political agenda has,” he says. “Egypt now has become a free and democratic country, so I would advise young people to engage in political activities rather than taking up arms – everything has changed.”

While al-Qaeda remains an organized threat in Pakistan, Yemen and a few other corners, all indications are that the zealots who would have joined a decade ago are now turning in droves to the new democratic movements. They might want to impose a religious government on their country (an idea rejected by a majority in Egypt), but they want to do so by the ballot. A poll this year by the Pew Research Center showed that admiration for Osama bin Laden has plummeted across the Middle East in the wake of the Arab Spring, dropping by 40 per cent in Jordan and the Palestinian territories and by 20 per cent in Egypt.

There’s good reason to believe that international Islamic terrorism is a generational phenomenon, just like the wave of left-wing terrorism that swept across North America and Western Europe in the 1970s. While jihadists (mainly Pakistani now) may still have some attacks left in them, I’d be surprised if their movement exists at the end of this decade.

Al-Qaeda and its cousins were not an inevitable development. They were born out of the struggle for control of the new countries created with the dissolution of the British and French empires after the Second World War. Strongman dictatorships and tribal oligarchies became the dominant force in the region, and their rival postcolonial opponents – at first both Marxist and Islamic – were violently crushed.

A great many of the Islamists, who might otherwise have become a conservative but essentially harmless part of the domestic political spectrum, were silenced, tortured and exiled into violent extremism – directed at first against the governments of their own countries (such as the 1981 assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat), then against the Western nations that seemed to be keeping those governments in power.

“When you were blocked, as we were in Egypt, you develop an attitude – you feel that your only useful means are violence, and that your enemies are those who are supporting the regime that is killing you,” says Usama Rushdy, another Egyptian ex-jihadist (he was a founder of the group that killed Mr. Sadat) who has long since renounced violence and has now joined the democratic revolution – in his case, even more dramatically, by becoming a democratic pluralist and providing backing to non-religious candidates as well as moderate Islamists.

The postcolonial years destroyed the valour of specific identity. People no longer saw any pride in identifying themselves as “Egyptian,” and even “Arab” seemed a humiliation. After 9/11, the long-discredited medieval idea of a distinct and monolithic “Islam” and “West” took hold. North American leaders bought it, and so did thousands of men who had no other useful identity.

Now, suddenly, they’re seeing themselves as Egyptians again, and as Tunisians and Libyans and Syrians. Their ideas remain alarming. But, 10 years on, they’re fighting for them in the bear pit of national politics, not in the isolated netherworld of bullets and box cutters.

Original Article

Cairo

The Egyptian revolution has returned in force to central Cairo, with the same huge crowds of young protesters, the same overnight encampments and rhythmic slogans of February’s historic protests, but with none of the violence and danger, and little of the euphoric optimism.

Almost five months after the crowds in Cairo’s Tahrir Square succeeded in driving president Hosni Mubarak out of office, the protest organizers on Friday decided to retake the square out of frustration and rage at the military-dominated transitional government that is meant to hold power until elections to be held this autumn, but has shown little will to oust the old regime or prepare for democracy.

Read article in The Globe and Mail

“We made a mistake when we left the square in February – the regime is still in control. This was not a revolution,” said Waleed Rashed, one of the original organizers of the demonstrations that began on Jan. 25 and ended shortly after the Feb. 11 departure of Mr. Mubarak.

“This time we’re going to stay here. Today the sit-ins begin, and we’re not leaving until things have changed.”

Behind him, thousands of people took part in chants, led by an Arabic rapper, that were similar to January’s anti-Mubarak slogans except that this time they denounced the Egyptian army, which had been considered a trusted ally of the protesters in January.

But in the months since then, trust has declined. Many mid-ranking regime officials and some Mubarak-era cabinet ministers remain in power, and some protesters are demanding a lustration process similar to those in Eastern Europe, in which the government is cleansed of the old dictator’s adherents.

Others are furious with the army for its sexual harassment of female protesters earlier this year, for the fact that police who killed protesters have gone without punishment, or for its generous treatment and slow-paced trial of Mr. Mubarak, who is imprisoned in the resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh, as is his family.

On the eve of Friday’s protests, the military council announced that 25 officials would be charged with assault, attempted murder and manslaughter, and Interior Minister Mansour al-Eissawi promised a large-scale purge of the police. Protesters denounced these as token moves.

Impressive numbers of people filled Tahrir Square all day and late into the night, approaching the crowds that packed the square in February, though not quite the million that came at the revolution’s peak.

The mood, most agreed, was decidedly different from the February demonstrations that provoked the moniker “Arab Spring” and inspired other uprisings currently under way across the region. Beyond the sense of accomplishment at getting a huge crowd out again, there was a darker sense that Egypt would not be changing so quickly or easily.

“I was there every day in January, and this time there just isn’t the spirit, none of the optimism – I just can’t feel it,” said Suzan Fayea, a student.

This was a far safer repeat of the Egyptian Revolution: Not a single police officer could be found in the huge square, and the only soldiers were well outside the square, guarding the U.S. embassy. There was a carnival, holiday-weekend feel to the day, and in contrast to the dark violence that overtook the square at night in January, this time thousands of families flooded in at sundown, taking advantage of the cooler night air.

But the politics were decidedly different this time – beneath the façade of unity, the factions here were far less united. For the first time, the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s formerly outlawed moderate Islamist party, took a major and visible role in the protests Friday, dominating the largest of the square’s two stages until its adherents departed in the early evening.

And there were clusters of radical-Islamist Salafists, some of whom protested for the release of Omar Abdel-Rahman, the Egyptian “blind sheik” imprisoned in the United States for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

“Yes, I am a Salafist, but today none of us are here for our political beliefs, we are here as Egyptians, with the same message,” said Muhammad Pathy, who wore traditional Islamic dress and had brought his young sons with him.

The Muslim Brotherhood has become the most organized political faction in Egypt and seemed to have overtaken the liberal-democratic secularists, known as the April 6 Movement, who organized the demonstrations.

This in good part is because the April 6 youth, despite their bold ambitions and their success in ousting Mr. Mubarak, have failed to produce a single leader with the charisma and authority to become a household name – something the Brotherhood has exploited to its advantage.

The movement’s most famous figures, such as diplomat and former nuclear watchdog Mohamed ElBaradei or former Google executive Wael Ghonim, have not shown the interest or the ability to seize the political heights (though Mr. ElBaradei is a presidential candidate), and there are signs of political schisms between the left-wing and more conservative branches of the movement.

At the peak of the protests Friday, the new tensions seemed to show their face when one of the speakers from the liberal April 6 movement tried to speak and was drowned out by an impassioned speech taking place on the far-larger stage occupied by the Muslim Brotherhood. He tried to silence them by singing a mock call to prayers – minutes before the Brotherhood launched a genuine call to prayers, descending finally into worshipful silence. It seemed a microcosm of the conflicts to come.

Original Article

London

The moment when the new politics of the Middle East first revealed its face may well have occurred three years ago when an Iranian Canadian found himself screaming in pain in a fluorescent-lit room shortly after his torturer had repeated, over and over, the angry demand: “Who is Pauly Shore?”

Maziar Bahari, the journalist and filmmaker who had come to Iran to cover the 2009 election, was halfway through his 118 days of solitary confinement in Tehran’s Evin prison when the Revolutionary Guards decided to devote a day of pain and humiliation to extracting as much information as possible about his links to the American B-movie comedian.

Read column in The Globe and Mail

Those links consisted of Mr. Bahari’s membership in the ironic Facebook group The Pauly Shore Alliance. The Guards’ senior elite had decided, using the espionage tool known as Google, that this must be some sort of Zionist spy ring. This became a small but brutal part of an elaborate attempt, by all appearances directed by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei himself, to use torture and intimidation to prove that the mass democracy uprisings that summer were the work of a small circle of foreign agents. Mr. Bahari was made out to be a linchpin of this plot, until it collapsed under the weight of its own absurdity.

Mr. Bahari’s ordeal, which he has chronicled in his moving and at times very funny book Then They Came for Me, is more than just a random event in Iran’s spiral from authoritarianism into totalitarianism. His arrest in June of 2009 was one of the first organized government responses to a wave of grassroots protest movements that would soon sweep across most of the Middle East and North Africa.

Because of Mr. Bahari’s superb personal knowledge of Iran’s government, he was able to produce an account of exactly how, and why, he was tormented, and the larger context of a fast-changing regime. It offers a number of lessons about the way Middle Eastern politics work.

Regimes will risk everything, including their own survival, to prove that their critics aren’t authentic. We can laugh at Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi’s claim that his country’s democracy movement was the product of Israeli-financed al-Qaeda agents putting LSD into the Nescafé of the nation’s youth. Or Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s claims that the thousands of people his forces are shooting or imprisoning are part of a conspiracy. But this marks their greatest point of weakness.

The Middle Eastern states were not born as Soviet-style totalitarian governments. They are mostly paternalistic regimes, built on the belief that a majority of the population will naturally be attracted to the great ideas and natural beneficence of the leader. Their legitimacy depends entirely on this sense of paternal respect.

If a sizable group of people become unhappy, they can’t be confronted as legitimate domestic voices, because that would undermine the regime’s raison d’être. So dissenters must be shown to be outsiders, or actually driven outside, or eliminated – even if this effort undermines legitimacy even further. This, as we’ve seen over and over again, can tear apart a regime.

Information is a grenade that’s hard to toss back over the wall. Iran’s Green uprisings were the first to use social media in a significant way. And their bloody aftermath marked the first time a regime used this technology aggressively in crushing protests. Bloggers had been locked up before, but Mr. Bahari was among the first in the region to be tortured on the basis of Facebook “likes.”

It’s become a cliché to say that free-flowing online information is good for democracy activists, but even better for spy agencies and the secret police. This is true to a point. But beyond monitoring people and locking them up, it’s actually much harder for authoritarian regimes to use this information to build support for their own cause: It looks forced, it looks fake, and it achieves the opposite of its intended effect.

So the only solution becomes the removal of all information. Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak managed to shut off the entire internet. Mr Gadhafi shut off mobile data services. This week, the Revolutionary Guards began raiding homes across Tehran and removing the near-ubiquitous backyard satellite dishes Iranians use to get foreign news. In the Guards’ newsletter Sobhe Sadegh this week, they explained why it is important to shut down free internet hotspots: Because “accessing information is the main and most important method used by the enemies of the establishment.”

These regimes prefer to respond with bold scripts and big-budget productions. But, as Mr. Bahari says, it resembles the making of Waterworld.

Original Article

It is the little-noticed force behind the revolutions in the Arab world, the new protests in China and the economic booms in India, Turkey and South America: The largest population shift in human history, currently at its peak, is probably the most significant, and misunderstood, global event of our time.

Read essay in the Los Angeles Times

In Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, hundreds of millions of people are rapidly moving from rural areas, where they practiced peasant agriculture, to cities — a shift that makes itself felt in the rough-and-tumble transitional neighborhoods where rural migrants first land, both in their own countries and in places like the United States, where they are make up the largest group of immigrants.

We need to pay attention to these neighborhoods, and to the huge demographic shift that is shaping them, for they are where either the next great economic opportunity or the next wave of violence and conflict will be born.

Never in human history have so many people changed their locations and lifestyles so quickly. Each month, there are 5 million new city dwellers created through migration or birth in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. China alone has an estimated 200 million “floating” citizens with one foot in a village and the other in a city. If current trends continue as expected, between 2000 and 2030, the urban population of Asia and Africa will double, adding as many city dwellers in one generation as these continents have accumulated during their entire histories. Between now and 2050, the world’s cities will add another 3.1 billion people.

This will be matched by an almost as dramatic decline in rural population. The United Nations Population Division predicts that the population of the world’s villages and rural areas will stop growing around eight years from now and that, by 2050, the rural population will have fallen by 600 million due to migration to cities and urban encroachment on villages.

We need to remember our own history here. This is the same shift that transformed Europe and North America from peasant to urban life in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. That transition gave us both the violent revolutions and teeming slums of that period, but it also triggered, in the West, the end of starvation as a mass phenomenon, a vast rise in living standards and the end of uncontrollable population growth.

The shift began in the developing world during the decades after World War II, and it is now at its peak: The world has gone from being more than 70% peasant in 1950 to 50% urban today. By 2025, 60% of the world will live in cities; by 2050, more than 70%; and by century’s end, the entire world will almost certainly be as urban as we are in the West.

How is this massive migration being felt? Take a look in the chaotic Cairo neighborhood of Boulaq el Dakrour, home to 650,000 people, most of them families of rural migrants from Upper Egypt. This slum’s frustrated residents formed the first crowd to storm Tahrir Square in January, driving a rebellion that ultimately forced President Hosni Mubarak from power. Or look at Guangdong, the sprawling industrial province in southern China, where thousands of rural-urban migrants rioted for three days this month in anger at their mistreatment by officials, in the most serious uprising China has seen in years. China’s first-time apartment owners, typically the children of village migrants, have also become political activists, directing their anger not at Beijing but at municipal or neighborhood officials. The ex-peasant is increasingly the most potent political actor in the world.

Or look at Brazil and Turkey, two successful countries that have experienced a decade of democratic stability, open borders and economic growth after parties representing rural-urban migrants came to power. The “arrival city” neighborhood is increasingly producing the political leaders who can unite communities and end divisions: Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa are all children of rural-urban migrants who grew up in bottom-rung urban neighborhoods.

These neighborhoods want to succeed. They can be the birthplace of a new middle class, as many of America’s immigrant neighborhoods have been. But they can also spiral into violent failure and threaten entire countries when barriers are placed in the way of migrants’ natural inclination to succeed.

The barriers can be physical: the isolating absence of infrastructure or transportation links. They can be bureaucratic: the use of zoning, licensing or security regulations to prevent new-immigrant neighborhoods from becoming teeming mixes of industry, commerce, restaurants and homes. And they can be citizenship barriers. Around the world, there is nothing more damaging to a nation than the presence of a large population of residents who have no pathway to legal citizenship. Without a permanent legal stake, migrants’ networks of self-support are forced to become hidden, illegal and often violent, a huge lost opportunity and a threat to a nation’s security.

This is a population shift that will affect almost everyone, in every country. Never before have so many people reached for the bottom rung of urban success. Our challenge is to make sure there is a second rung waiting for the next wave of brave ex-villagers.

Original Article

London

When we think of foreign aid, we tend to think of something rudimentary being delivered to a village: a well, some mosquito nets, a school building. Or of something big being delivered to a government: a harbour, a generating station, a prison.

And we tend to be disappointed with foreign-aid spending these days, because after years of investments on wells and mosquito nets and school buildings, we still have famines and disease outbreaks and illiteracy in some countries, and after dumping hundreds of millions into harbours and generating stations and prisons, we still have corrupt economies, dictatorships and violent Mafias dominating too many aid-recipient countries.

Read column in The Globe and Mail

But such politically focused projects should be moved to the centre, rather than the fringes, of foreign aid. As U.S. President Barack Obama finally acknowledged in his important speech Thursday, pouring billions of humanitarian and military aid into the dictatorships of the Middle East without financing a better political system was a self-defeating mistake. Good politics leads to better lives far more efficiently than foreign-funded infrastructure does.

Financing a think tank is more radical than it seems: It implies paying for change, debate and risk rather than for stability and certainty. It may well end up helping political parties we find disagreeable, such as the Muslim Brotherhood – but it also increases the odds of those elected parties becoming more moderate and effective; isolating them does the opposite. Besides, we have learned what happens when we pay for stability at all costs. Well-informed dissent is good aid. It is time to let a thousand political arguments bloom.

Original Article

It was never difficult to find fans of Osama bin Laden. You ran across them almost daily if you spent time in the Middle East, the Persian Gulf or Pakistan. T-shirts and garish wall hangings bearing his image have always done a brisk trade. He was a rock star.

But it’s been almost impossible, in recent years, to find anyone who subscribes to his ascetic and medieval view of the role of religion in politics, who has any interest in installing his endlessly touted Islamic caliphate in their country. The ideas died long before the man.

Read column in The Globe and Mail

See also my obituary of Osama bin Laden.

If you talk to the kids wearing him on their T-shirts, you find they admire him as an Arab who took on the United States, who ran his own show, and who wouldn’t bow to anyone else’s agenda. It’s the way many blacks admire Malcolm X, as an icon of self-sufficient resistance, without any interest in the Marxist-tinged racial separatism he sought. Mr. bin Laden will long be remembered, but bin Ladenism is already forgotten.

And so we saw small protests on Friday in the squares of Cairo and in his final hideout in Pakistan, but those protesters were expressing formulaic anger at Americans, not support for al-Qaeda.

Al-Qaeda has played no significant role in Afghanistan for at least half a decade, and none of the Taliban factions likely to take power there appear interested in working with this foreign Arab movement again. And, most significantly, al-Qaeda failed to take any role, even an inspirational one, in the Arab revolutions that swept across Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain and Syria.

This has led to a crucial question of the moment: What is the authentic voice of Muslim frustration? In the early weeks of the revolutions, it was popular to exclaim that the movements in the city squares had rendered al-Qaeda obsolete. “Osama bin Laden died in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, months before he died in Abbottabad,” several scholars said this week.

“The demand for freedom and democracy in a national context has displaced the imaginary umma, the world community of Muslims, in its struggle with the West,” Olivier Roy, the French scholar who’s probably the world’s most reliable chronicler of Islamic politics, writes in an essay to be published this weekend. “Charismatic authoritarian personalities such as bin Laden no longer exert any fascination on an individualistic and rather pragmatic younger generation.”

Al-Qaeda was a post-colonial movement: It spoke to the anger of communities that had won their national independence in the years after the Second World War but that still had a relationship of dependence and ugly subordination to their former colonial masters in the West. The African and Arab dictatorships, with their attempts to withdraw from the world into a closed economy of one man’s personality, were one post-colonial response. A retreat to a mythic past of theocratic purity, and a grandiose theatre of martyrdom, were another.

Al-Qaeda, according to studies of its membership, was almost exclusively a movement of disenchanted Muslim men from the educated upper-middle classes. Osama bin Laden’s warriors were the angry children of prosperous Muslim families who found themselves without the opportunities or hopes of their fathers, forced to the periphery or to foreign migration by the corrupt regimes and growth-starved closed economies of post-colonial countries that had fallen into the shadow of the West.

But what we’re seeing this year is the emergence of post-post-colonial movements: members of a new generation trying to unseat the people, institutions and classes born of the post-colonial era. The results of these movements are hard to guess – they could certainly incorporate religion or anti-Western sentiment into their vocabulary – but it’s clear that al-Qaeda is part of what they’re relegating to the past.

“There is an element of morbid and narcissistic elitism in al-Qaeda’s terrorism,” Mr. Roy writes, “which explains both its appeal for the ardent young and its political failure.”

The mistake for many of us was believing that “Muslim” had become the sole identity of the angry Middle Easterner. People everywhere are capable of having multiple identities and loyalties, often contradictory in nature. Osama bin Laden, in his efforts to fit the world into a single identity, was a man of a previous era.

Original Article

When Cairo rose up against dictator Hosni Mubarak in January’s Tahrir Square protests, the unsung hero of the moment was not an individual but rather a rough-and-tumble neighborhood. Bulaq al-Dakrour, a haphazard labyrinth of narrow streets and jerry-built buildings on the city’s western edge, provided the main crowd of protesters who stormed into Tahrir Square, risking their lives against angry security forces, on Jan. 25, and a large part of the vast crowd that stayed there afterwards.

Read article in The Wall Street Journal

The protest organizers knew that Bulaq’s young residents would take up their cries for democracy: The poor district, unknown to most better-off Egyptians and isolated by canals and railway lines from the core city, has a history of angry disenchantment with the ruling regime. It was where the revolution of 2011 began.

We should get used to seeing places like this in the news: They’re the neighborhoods built on the premise of change and progress, not static complacency. Bulaq is known to Egyptians as an ashwaiyyat (“chaotic or haphazard place”)—a neighborhood that does not officially exist. Home to a third of Cairo’s population, the ashwaiyyat are products of one of the world’s most dramatic rural-to-urban shifts, one that has turned Egypt from a mainly village-based to a very urban country in a generation.

Along with more than 70 other such self-built districts across Cairo, it rose spontaneously as masses of people migrated from the rural villages of Upper Egypt into the city’s unused land beginning in the 1970s, drawn to an explosion of employment and small-business opportunities that promised to end the starvation and tedium of peasant rural life. The government has tried over and over to demolish it, and transfer its residents to planned high-rise communities in the distant outskirts. But its economy, tied to consumer markets in the city, has kept it alive, if angry.

People here have saved for years to obtain their raw cement dwellings, whether legally or (more often) informally, and speculate on their property value, using it to invest in rudimentary business. They don’t want to lose that value. Better-off Cairo denizens, and the ruling regime, tend to view these districts as cancerous tumors on the city, breeding grounds for crime and poverty.

Yet the demonstrations cast a light upon the real function of such places. These ashwaiyyat are aspirational neighborhoods, populated by families who arrived with very specific plans for self-improvement, attempting to build links through small business and higher education into the established city life. I call these bottom-rung urban neighborhoods “arrival cities,” to draw attention to their dynamic, transformational nature. They include a great many of the slums of Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, gecekondu outskirts of Turkey, bidonvilles of North Africa, favelas and barrios of Latin America.

It’s within arrival cities that the flashpoints of conflict and change occur—not always for the better. They produced the Iranian revolution, the Hindu-nationalist violence of India and much of the revolutionary violence of Latin America. But they also, if they are supported and allowed the to flourish, the starting point for a new, dynamic middle class and the next wave of entrepreneurial growth (it was the arrival-city enclaves of Europe and North America that brought us democracy and modern industry in the last two centuries).

Turkey and Brazil, both of which experienced two decades of violence in their rural-migrant outskirts and saw military dictatorships arise in response, have both been governed for the past decade by political parties—and, frequently, leaders—drawn from the arrival city, leading to a decade of growth, democratic stability and economic openness in both countries. China’s fast-growing arrival-city middle class, the children of peasants who are buying their first, tiny apartments on the fringes of the major cities, is producing pressure for democratic change.These are places of poverty, but still an order of magnitude better than village poverty, and they are built on elaborate networks of mutual support for their originating villages and on economies of rudimentary capitalism. Many are troubled or violent. All began with dreams of a better life and well-thought plans for its attainment; when things go wrong and gangs or destructive politics take over, it is usually because some barrier (physical, bureaucratic, legal or citizenship-related) has been placed in the way of those ambitions.

As junctions between village and city, between deadly poverty and the beginnings of prosperity, these neighborhoods are the focal points of the largest shift of population in human history—the great rural-to-urban migration of the Eastern and Southern hemispheres, a historic shift that began in earnest after the Second World War, is at its peak right now, and will be largely complete long before this century’s end.

This final period of transition, in which peasant-based rural economies become commercial and the largest cities grow, will be tumultuous and full of peril, as governments repeat the errors that led to decades of crisis in South America, Turkey, Iran and other early-urbanizing regions. It will also be the greatest hope for humanity’s future: the end of the food crisis, and the end of continuous population growth, will be products of the arrival city. These in-between districts were the places that transformed Europe’s and North America’s economies from subsistence, starvation-prone economies into middle-class stability; there is every reason they can accomplish the same in the East and South. Rather than squashing the arrival city, we need to give it support and resources.

Original Article

London

In China, the second Tiananmen Square was smothered at birth, the planned “Jasmine Revolution” democracy protests quashed discreetly by police before they could even reach the pavement. But another sort of movement, possibly even more potent and world-changing, is emerging not from the streets but from the thousands of highrise apartment towers that loom above them.

In a hundred cities across China, movements have sprung up among first-time apartment-owners to expel the management companies and replace them with homeowners’ committees — not the old-style committees that were loyal branches of the Communist Party, but new ones that are often opposed, and that push both developers and the local government for more accountability. If democracy emerges in China, it is more likely to begin at the municipal, or even neighbourhood, level.

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Who are these new activists? They are almost all people whose parents lived on dirt floors, but who have struggled to reach the very bottom of the property market. In the past few years, tens of millions of Chinese have moved out of state-owned dormitories, peasant shacks and urban-slum shanty towns into the forests of privately owned highrise apartments that encircle every city. The largest cities have introduced property tax for the first time, and these new, still-poor property owners are demanding something in return for their money.

Are these people middle class? Not in the old sense. A decade ago, anyone in China who would be considered “middle class” — that is, whose family earned more than $10 a day, which actually put them in the top 5 per cent of earners — inevitably worked for the government or in the top ranks of a state-owned company. Their parents were probably members of the same class. They supported the Beijing regime, and depended upon it; their lives were defined by stability.

This new class, a lower middle class whose parents were workers or peasants, has no such loyalties. Its members bled and scraped to get their tiny cement-block apartments, and received little help from any government: Their lives are defined by change.

This is the same class who occupied Tahrir Square in Egypt last month and pushed out president Hosni Mubarak. They were the first generation to have internet and telephones, but also the first generation to think about buying a home, however small; they are the products of one of the world’s most rapid rural-to-urban transitions in Cairo and Alexandria, and they are desperate for a place in the economy.

Egypt’s old, established middle class worked for state-controlled or military-owned companies, if not for the state itself, and were generally loyal to the regime. If this old middle class rebelled — as many did when the nationalized economy opened up to competition in the 1990s — it was often by backing al Qaeda: Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian who masterminded the Sept. 11 attacks, was a quintessential child of this class.

Egypt’s new, bottom-rung middle class, much like its Chinese counterpart, had nothing to gain from supporting either the regime or its hardcore-Islamist opponents. What it wants are open business conditions, fair and honourable contracts, and a route to employment unclotted by corruption.

This week I sat down with the Washington economist Nancy Birdsall, head of the Centre for Global Development, and she told me that she has called this group the “catalyst class” — the precarious strivers who need government to work for them.

“They’re the people who want rules of the game, they want a level playing field,” she says. “They want contracts honoured; they might want collective bargaining rights - - they create, when there’s enough of them, democracy from the ground up - - with enough of these people with common interest, that’s when you get better economic policies, more open political systems.”

I document this class in its move from rural poverty to urban transition neighbourhoods in my book Arrival City, in which I argue that their marginal urban neighbourhoods are the sites of change worldwide. Dr. Birdsall examines them with an economist’s eye — as the people angered by the lack of pathways into a genuine, sustainable, formal-employment middle class.

We should know these people. They were the ones who brought democracy to North America. “In the United States, the middle class came form 60 acres and a plough,” Dr. Birdsall says. “These were not well-educated people. They formed that class, and they created local democracy, and they demanded local public schooling.”

Is the catalyst class big enough in Egypt or China to create similar change? We don’t know yet. In Egypt, it was big enough to expel a dictator. And it is changing the world: Turkey, Brazil, and much of Latin America are now dominated and governed by this class and its own political parties and leaders, whose demands for transparency and competition have created a decade of democratic stability, economic growth and shrinking inequality in those countries. It is a worldwide revolution of angry apartment owners.

Original Article

The word “revolutionary” is so frequently used today, its coin debased by the easy currency of journalistic clichés and marketing slogans, that we’ve lost track of its true meaning. On Friday, we learned what the real thing feels like.

It’s a joyous moment, one we should never forget no matter what follows. The unstoppable force of human resilience met the immovable object of one of the world’s most entrenched autocrats and, after 18 days of obstinate determination, the pharaoh dissolved into the sand.

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Nobody can take this moment from the Egyptians. They’ve done it themselves, without violence or fanaticism, without celebrity leaders or overweening ideologies, without any help or funding or guidance from outside – certainly, to our shame, without the backing of our government.

Friday’s freedom-mad street dance in Cairo was watched by the world, but authorities in Beijing, Tripoli, Damascus and especially Tehran did everything they could to prevent their citizens from watching it: National TV in those countries was notably quiet; Iran scrambled the broadcast signal of the Persian-language BBC in advance of its own Monday demonstrations. And no wonder: If it can happen in Egypt, it can happen anywhere.

“To dare: That is the whole secret of revolutions.” The words of Antoine de Saint-Just, who was part of the crowd that drove another tyrant out of power, are becoming part of our currency again. But as the euphoria fades to exhausted self-scrutiny, it’s not those words we’ll remember but rather what Saint-Just was doing when he uttered them: making use, with fellow post-revolutionary leader Maximilien Robespierre, of the policy instrument known as the guillotine – and following that other great revolutionary tradition in which the glorious popular uprising leads to chaos, extremism and, sometimes, more tyranny.

Revolutions tend to defy hopes and expectations, of both the men on the balcony and the people in the square.

Sometimes, the crowd’s grab for popular power is seized by ideologues or confiscated by those who control the military, or caught in a violent oscillation between the two. These scenarios, in their extreme versions, don’t appear likely in Egypt, but all possibilities are present.

The first modern revolution, in England in 1640, set the template: a joyous uprising against the king, the first popular trial and execution of an autocrat, but then Oliver Cromwell’s bloody republic, followed by the restoration of the monarchy. Then, after a surprisingly successful American example in 1776, came France in 1789: revolution, popular sovereignty, then the Terror, the authoritarianism of the Directory, then Napoleon’s coup.

Many of the multihued uprisings of recent decades have suffered this fate. In some cases, the seizure is lengthy. It’s been many decades since the liberal-democratic aspirations of Cuban and Iranian revolutions were hijacked by shallow autocrats; but, beneath the surface, their original aspirations remain frozen in amber.

And that’s what we must remember: Even when they’re sidetracked or seized, the seeds planted by a democratic revolution remain in the ground.

My favourite statement about revolutions is Karl Marx’s pamphlet The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in which he looked back bitterly on the uprisings that swept across Europe in 1848. His followers, after all, were meant to have been the ones who’d seize those popular revolutions and use them to further their own ideological ends. Instead, the people wanted the old bad guys gone but weren’t so interested in the dictatorship of the proletariat. They were just democrats, not utopians – much like the kids in Cairo on Friday.

Marx accused the peasants and merchants in the streets of misunderstanding themselves. But they understood themselves all too well. “Men make their own history,” Marx concluded, “but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances.” And that’s just as well.

The joy of revolutions is that they make ordinary life interesting. Suddenly, the streets glow with importance; anything seems possible. But this is also their great flaw. For revolutions are about the state, and we generally don’t want the state to be interesting. We want our lives to be interesting, and the state to be the safe and neutral background against which our lives unfold. When revolutions really succeed, the state is able to fade into the background – perhaps governed by those who are weak or disagreeable or incompetent or somewhat corrupt, but in an ordinary and banal way, until the next election.

I’ve always thought that the great thinker of revolutions wasn’t Marx but his fellow German, Max Weber, who saw history not as a march toward utopia but as a succession of moments of “charismatic authority” – the exciting leader who seizes the day after the revolution, the bold new set of governing ideas – followed by periods of “routinization” and bureaucratic management of the formerly charismatic ideas.

The sooner that routinization of charismatic authority happens, the better. Egyptians will soon pass through a period of charisma, and its opposite, and possibly further struggles, but what they’ve won is the right to be quietly ordinary.

Original Article