Book Reviews

Book Reviews Finance & Development, December 2015, Vol. 52, No. 4

Young and Still Restless Bessma Momani

Arab Dawn

Arab Youth and the Demographic Dividend They Will Bring

University of Toronto Press, 2015, 176 pp., $21.95 (paper).

For those readers who have consumed little information about the Arab region and its youth between the Arab-Spring-Fires-up-the-Arab-Street news cycle and the ISIS-Brings-back-the-12th-Century news cycle, Arab Dawn by Bessma Momani could indeed be the uplifting, hopeful antidote she hopes it will be.

For those with a more nuanced view of the region and its youth demographic, Momani’s book is a light addition to the tiny genre of literature on the future prospects of Arab youth, which includes Christopher Schroeder’s Startup Rising (2013) and Tarik Yousef’s Generation in Waiting (2009). Schroeder’s book offers richer, more inspiring portraits of entrepreneurs grappling with the region’s problems to build the change they want to see in their societies (disclaimer: my company is profiled in the book); Yousef’s contains deeper, more meaningful policy recommendations for the region’s economic development challenges.

What Momani’s book lacks in depth, however, it makes up for in new statistics and anecdotes about the region’s youth. It may come as a surprise to some readers that despite the negative news cycles, the young people who took to the streets are still agitating for change. Their efforts do not always make the front pages in the West, but the Saudi women who post YouTube videos of themselves driving their own cars around Riyadh and the Egyptian TV personality who exposes cultural hypocrisy in hidden-camera episodes are continuing the struggle.

These stories are not as dramatic as those of demonstrators toppling dictators, but given the pace of political reform we’ve seen in most of the postrevolution countries, they could prove to have a greater impact.

On religion, Momani can be praised for not trying to use statistics to tell us that Arab youth are more secular or more moderate than older generations. She tells it as it is: it’s complicated. Yes, 35 percent of entrepreneurs are women, and 80 percent of men think that women should be able to work outside the home—but 94 percent of women in Egypt wear a head scarf, twice as many as in their mother’s generation.

Some of the surveys and polls Momani cites that were published before Facebook’s 2009 “Like” button release should probably be discarded. Joking aside...