The intersection of four trends is going to have a dramatic impact on the 21st Century: the youth bulge, a religious revival, the breakdown in traditional socio-economic structures and accelerated interaction between people from different backgrounds.
The New York Times is launching a series on this issue called “Generation Faithful”. The first article, which ran last Sunday, focused on young people in Egypt.
“I can’t get a job, I have no money, I can’t get married, what can I say?” said a 28-year old Egyptian man interviewed for the article. His engagement was broken off by the family of the bride-to-be because he couldn’t come up with the money for the couple to buy an apartment and start their own life.
In Egypt, like other traditional societies, adulthood and independence begin when you get married. The live-on-your-own-and-explore culture of Western 18-30 year olds doesn’t exist in those countries. But the economies in Middle Eastern and North African countries are simply not producing enough living-wage or career-track jobs for young adults to start their lives. The young adult unemployment rate in Egypt is 27%, and in Algeria it’s nearly 50%. And that doesn’t count the number of people who are working but in horrible conditions and for low wages.
As The New York Times reports: “In their frustration, the young are turning to religion for solace and purpose, pulling their parents and their governments along with them … More than ever, Islam has become the cornerstone of identity, replacing other, failed ideologies: Arabism, socialism, nationalism.”
Identity questions – who am I deep down, what is my purpose, why am I here, what should I do with my life – are not only being asked by underemployed Egyptian youth, they are also being asked by overpaid Ivy League grads in New York City and London.
Sociologists like Anthony Giddens point out that one of the hallmarks of our era is people from different backgrounds interacting more frequently and intensely than ever before, facilitated by air travel and communications technology. This interaction widens and deepens the identity questions these young adults are asking. It’s not just, “I am a young Egyptian who can’t get a good job and therefore still live with my parents, what is my purpose?”
It is now, “I am a poor Arab Sunni Muslim in a world of increasingly powerful Iranian Shias, Indian Hindus, Israeli Jews and American Christians – what is my purpose?”
The energy gathering at this intersection of youth, religiosity, changing socio-economic patterns and increased interaction can go multiple directions. It can be a generation of angry young people with a faith-based oppositional stance towards modernity, or it can be a generation of business and social entrepreneurs who reimagine and remake their region, their religion and the world.
Which direction will it go?
Whoever best understands and speaks to the identity issues that these young people are facing as (to borrow from David Bowie) “they try to change their worlds”, will be shaping the lives of a generation, a region, and maybe the world.
There is a lot of hope here. These young people, I believe, will respond to a call to go beyond themselves, to live for a higher purpose, to connect their deepest selves to matters transcendent.
That is the same energy that led to the founding of the Peace Corps and the Civil Rights movement. That’s what happens when it is a Kennedy or a King shaping the energy.
Who is speaking to this volatile energy - this restless generation - in the Middle East?
The answer … in my next post.
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