The New Arabs How the Millennial Generation is Changing the Middle East [Paperback]

Renowned blogger and Middle East expert Juan Cole takes us “inside the youth movements in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, showing us how activists used technology and social media to amplify their message and connect with like-minded citizens” (The New York Times) in this “rousing study of the Arab Spring” (Publishers Weekly,starred review).

For three decades, Cole has sought to put the relationship of the West and the Muslim world in historical context. InThe New Arabshe has written “an elegant, carefully delineated synthesis of the complicated, intertwined facets of the Arab uprisings,” (Kirkus Reviews), illuminating the role of today’s Arab youth—who they are, what they want, and how they will affect world politics.

Not all big groups of teenagers and twenty-somethings necessarily produce historical movements centered on their identity as youth, with a generational set of organizations, symbols, and demands rooted at least partially in the distinctive problems of people their age. The Arab Millennials did. And, in a provocative, big-picture argument about the future of the Arab world,The New Arabsshows just how they did it. “Engaging, powerful, and comprehensive…The book feels as indispensable to scholars as it is insightful for a more casual reader” (Los Angeles Times).The New Arabs

Preface

While my family and I were paying our respects to the boy pharaoh Tutankhamen and his gold-plated sarcophagus in a side room at the Cairo Museum, one of the guards abruptly forced us out of the room and then out of the building. Soon I learned that what I took for rudeness was desperation: something bad was coming.

That morning, August 1, 2011, my wife, my son, and I had finally found a free moment to visit the venerable museum, lSç