The greatest wave of empowerment in the early 21st century has produced a new political chic. It has been shaped by conditions conspicuously ripe for unrest. A youth bulge altered the generational balance of power. Rising literacy spurred aspirations beyond daily survival, especially among women. And new technology tools—cheap cell phones with video capabilities, Internet access, social media, and some 500 independent satellite channels launched since 1996—gave ordinary Arabs a larger sense of the world and then allowed them to connect at a crucial juncture.

The new chic has been fashioned by a yearning for change that is at once democratic and indigenous. The restless young chafe at old ways and old leaders, but many who turned out in Cairo’s Tahrir (“Liberation”) Square this year do not aspire merely to imitate the West. They reject militant jihad and the rigid formulas of the Salafis, yet they fervently embrace their faith as a defining force in their future. They want new systems that are both fully representative and true to their religious values. Their quest, which began quietly long before the so-called Arab Spring, also helps illuminate what lies ahead.

The 21st-century believers are establishing their voice in hip-hop lyrics and bold comedy, subversive poetry and satirical plays. The cultural uprising is as critical as the political upheaval. The young in particular have been encouraged by a new generation of popular televangelists who preach a softer and more flexible form of Islam. The militant Muslim Brotherhood and its allies may play a powerful role in the new Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world, but they will face strong countercurrents among young Muslims who have their own ideas. They will encounter people like Dalia Ziada.

Dalia Ziada was 29 when she joined the revolt against President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. She had a particularly long journey to Liberation Square. It started when she was a little girl.

“I am a survivor of female genital mutilation,” Ziada told me as she stirred a steamy espresso in a Cairo café. “In 1990, when I was eight years old, my mother told me to put on my best party dress. It was supposed to be some kind of surprise, a celebration. I found myself instead in a doctor’s office. I shouted and refused, but the doctor gave me a shot. I woke up in terrible physical pain.”

Ziada’s first protest was within her family. As a teenager, she tried to prevent the genital mutilation of her sister and cousins. No female in her family had ever fought back. “And mostly,” she conceded, looking up from her coffee, “I failed.”

In Egypt, the practice of female genital mutilation spans millennia, dating back to the pharaohs. In 2005, a United Nations report found that 97 percent of Egyptian females between the ages of 15 and 49 had undergone one of four types of genital mutilation—clitoridectomy, excision, infibulations, or the miscellaneous pricking, piercing, incising, scraping, or cauterizing of the genital area. The practice is cultural rather than religious in origin, more African than Middle Eastern. Many Christian girls in Egypt have also been genitally mutilated.

In 2006, when she was 24, Ziada had a long debate with an uncle about her seven-year-old cousin Shaimaa, the family’s youngest female child.

“We talked most of the night. He was shocked at the blunt discussion,” she recalled. “I told him that he had no right to circumcise her. I said I’d cut off Shaimaa’s finger if he went through with it. He looked at me with surprise and said that would ruin her life—and I said, ‘Now you get it.’ I thought I’d lost. But he called me the next day and said I’d convinced him. That’s when I realized I could do things, because I had been able to save someone,” she said. “I decided to see what else I could do.”

Ziada, who comes from a traditional family, does not look the part of sex educator. She is doe eyed and wears no makeup, so her pale, chubby cheeks and colorless lips make her appear younger than she is. In public, she wears hijab coverings in bright florals, rich patterns, or fake designer prints; she changes her scarf daily. She is an observant Muslim, so not a wisp of hair shows. Judging from her eyebrows, her hair must be dark brown.

“Hijab is part of my life,” she told me. “I would feel naked without it.” She often jokes, with a robust laugh at herself, that her scarves are the most interesting part of her wardrobe. Yet her religious commitment defines her life.

Her goal, she wrote when she began her new blog in 2006, “is derived from the ultimate goal that any Muslim seeks; which is to please Almighty Allah.”

Ziada soon became a leading activist among the pink hijab generation, young women committed to their faith, firm in their femininity, and resolute about their rights. With three college classmates, she launched a campaign to educate women about genital mutilation and domestic violence. Then she moved on to human rights. And she ended up at Liberation Square.

“When I grew up,” she explained on her blog, “my personal interest in having more equal rights as a woman expanded to my country.”

Her first big project was translating a comic book called 

, which recounts Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil disobedience campaign against racial segregation in 1955. King famously mobilized a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white man. Dozens of the boycott’s leaders were arrested; a bomb was thrown into King’s home, narrowly missing his wife and child. Yet the movement remained nonviolent. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled that bus segregation was illegal.

“When I read this story, I learned that someone must take the risk for others to follow,” Ziada told me. “I wanted to be the Martin Luther King of Egypt!”

, originally an educational tool to promote civil rights among the young or mildly literate, ends with tips on nonviolent activism. One of several groups Ziada worked with distributed copies of her Arabic version across the Middle East.

“Finding a way to explain civil disobedience was very exciting. It was something new for ordinary people,” she said. “Then I started looking for other ways to use nonviolence and civil disobedience for my own campaigns.”

Her next major project was organizing the first human rights film festival in the Arab world. The Mubarak regime tried to block her. “The government reacted as if we were planning a terrorist attack,” she said.

The authorities imposed a stiff fee for showing each film, which Ziada and her backers could not afford. So she cut back from dozens of films to seven. Then government censors denied approval of the films, even though she had avoided movies about Egypt. Undeterred, Ziada went to the censorship board’s offices, waited by the elevator for its director, then rode up with him to plead her case.

“I think he was shocked that I would dare stop and question him,” she told me with a chuckle. “We talked all the way up the elevator. In the end, he was laughing and he gave me approval. Security didn’t believe it.”

The harassment was not over, however. The authorities shut down the theater that had agreed to show the films. Ziada then hastily arranged for various nongovernmental organizations to host a different film and panel discussion every night for a week. “We stopped letting them always tell us no. We started making decisions for ourselves,” she said.

In 2009, facing the same obstacles, Ziada managed to sneak in 20 movies for the second Cairo human rights film festival. To get around official obstacles, she provided the wrong schedule and imaginary venues. In a country with one of the region’s most autocratic regimes, Ziada showed films such as 

, about the 2004 uprising in Ukraine, and, most daringly, four Egyptian films. One dramatized a well-known incident in which police used a broomstick to sodomize a young man who had intervened when his cousin refused to pay the police a bribe. Another was a Romeo-and-Juliet tale about a young Christian boy who falls in love with a Muslim girl he can never marry. The most potent movie, however, was also the shortest. 

 is a one-minute film about female genital mutilation that shows ragged pinking shears slowly snipping off the tops of dozens of beautiful flowers, one by one by one, just as they’re blooming—each producing a piercing scream from an unseen girl child or baby.

As the pink hijab generation gradually chisels away at centuries of restrictions, the young women are also redefining what it means to wear hijab—as a declaration of activist intent rather than a symbol of being sequestered. The change is visible in virtually every Muslim country. The young are shedding black and gray garb for clothing more colorful and even shape-revealing, albeit still modest. Pink is the most popular hue. Women in their teens, twenties, and thirties also flavor their faith with shades of pastel blue, bright yellow, and rustic orange, occasionally trimmed with sparkles, tassels, or even feathers. Hijab stores from Gaza to Jakarta now carry everything from long denim dresses with rhinestone designs to frilly frocks with matching scarves.Hijab Fashion,an Egyptian monthly magazine, was launched in 2004 for the pink hijab generation. It has nothing to do with religiosity. But it is also not just about fashion or vanity.

The Veiled—or al-Motahajiba—is one of Cairo’s new fashion centers combining Islamic feminism and cool. When I visited the shop in 2009, hijab ware was as elegantly displayed on the glass shelves as designer scarves at Nieman Marcus. Shaimaa Hassan, a 20-year-old salesclerk, told me that her favorite color was turquoise. She handed me a booklet of fashionable new hijab styles. The latest fad was the Spanish wrap, so called because the scarf is tied with a large knot at the back, in an allusion to the hairstyles worn by flamenco dancers. As she demonstrated how to wrap it, Hassan explained that she had just finished vocational school in commerce and intended to open her own business someday.

Sabaya, which means “young girls” in Arabic, is a salon, boutique, and café in Cairo’s trendy Heliopolis district. It was launched in 2008 by Hanan Turk, a famous Egyptian ballerina who was recruited for the cinema in 1991. The glamorous young actress appeared in more than 20 major films, both comedies and dramas, in which she often wore racy dresses or exposed ample décolletage. In 2005 she starred in the controversial film 

 (“World”), about a young dancer who explores her sexual identity and resists pressures to hide her femininity. The director struggled to get it past Egypt’s censorship board.

Shortly after finishing the film, however, Turk opted to don hijab. The reaction in Egypt’s arts world was electric. “She must have gone crazy,” said Youssef Chahine, the director who gave Turk her early break in cinema.

For many young women, hijab is now about liberation, not confinement.

Turk was unfazed. “I had intended to take this step a long time ago,” she declared, “but I never had the guts before.” A year later, she announced plans to launch a religious magazine with a noted singer. They called it 

, after the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. Two years later, she opened Sabaya for fashionable hijabis. A sign in neon lights outside called it a place of “veiled beauty.”

Turk remained a fashion plate, devising ways to dramatically drape her curves in stunning colors—and replicate them for other women. In many pictures, she looked even more exotic than she did before hijab. The wares in her store reflected her style.

“There’s a tendency among people who don’t know Islam to think of the veil as a sign of conservatism, ignorance, or backwardness,” Nagwa Abbas, the store manager, told me over lattes at Sabaya’s café. “It’s just identification. Underneath, we wear what everyone else wears. We’re all for women having every opportunity. Our aspirations don’t change just because our clothing is different.”

For many young women, hijab is now about liberation, not confinement. It’s about new possibilities, not the past. It provides a kind of social armor that enables Muslim women to chart their own course, personally or professionally. For Ziada, hijab provides protective cover and legitimacy for campaigns she considers to be the essence of her faith—human rights and justice.

“Families feel much more comfortable allowing their girls to be active, to get higher education, or jobs, or even to go out alone at night when they are wearing hijab,” she told me. “It’s a deal between a Muslim girl and society. I agree that I will wear hijab in order to have more space and freedom in return.”

In its many forms, hijab is no longer assumed to signal acquiescence. It has instead become an equalizer. It is an instrument that makes a female untouchable as she makes her own decisions in the macho Arab world. It is a stamp of authenticity as well as a symbolic demand for change. And it is a weapon to help a woman resist extremism’s pull into the past. Militants cannot criticize or target her for being corrupted by Western influence.

“The veil is the mask of Egyptian women in a power struggle against the dictatorship of men,” explained Nabil Abdel Fattah, author of 

 (2003), when I stopped to see him at Cairo’s al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies. “The veil gives women more power in a man’s world.”

And Muslim women are increasingly assuming those powers as basic rights.

Education has been a key to the transformation. A 2008 Gallup poll not only found that literacy is the rule rather than the exception among Muslim women, but that they are a growing proportion of university students even in countries with strong religious sentiment. In Iran, 52 percent of women told Gallup they had at least some postsecondary education, while in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Lebanon about one-third did. Surprisingly, Gallup also reported that more women had postsecondary educations in Pakistan (13 percent) and Morocco (eight percent) than in Brazil (four percent).

“Now, it’s hardly something worth noting that in Egypt, universities are filled with women, in some cases more than men, and they are excelling,” one highly educated Egyptian woman told the Gallup researchers. “The valedictorians of Cairo’s elite medical school are famously known to almost always be female.”

Attitudes about female education have shifted markedly across the Muslim world, according to a 2009 Pew Global Attitudes survey, apart from obvious exceptions such as Afghanistan. In Egypt, 71 percent of those surveyed said it is as important to educate girls as it is boys (and to educate both sexes equally). In Lebanon, 96 percent agreed. One result of this broad change in attitudes is that young women entering universities across the Islamic world are no longer necessarily English-speakers or the children of Westernized families. Young women in their pastel hijabs are highly visible on every Egyptian campus, including the prestigious American University of Cairo.

Like many of the pink hijabis, Ziada has little taste for Islamist politics. She rejects the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic movement founded in Egypt in 1928 that now has more than 80 offshoots around the world. She considers the group hypocritical for promising to improve life for all Egyptians while also issuing a draft manifesto that said women and Christians should not be allowed to seek the presidency.

“So the only person who can run is a Muslim man,” she told me angrily. “What the hell is this? They talk about democracy all the time, but look at the party’s own structure. They don’t have elections for leaders. There are no women, except in a women-only branch. And when people make petitions to challenge them on something, they don’t get answers.

“You know, ordinary people are not stupid,” she said. “We discovered that they’re working for their own goals, not our interests. They don’t understand the duality of young people who want to be faithful to their religionandlive a modern life.”

Last year, Ziada started organizing workshops for young Egyptians to encourage civil disobedience rather than confrontation. “Debate, don’t hate,” the promotion poster advised. Working with a Muslim civil society group, she coached activists from other Arab countries on moving from online activism to on-the-street action. Among the trainees were two Tunisian bloggers who, only months later, played critical roles in flashing the story of Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation in Tunisia across the Internet and beginning the Arab Spring.

“You can see,” she told me in a phone call later, with great excitement, “it’s paying off!” Ziada continued her campaign at Liberation Square earlier this year. After protesters set up a permanent camp there, she walked around the vast plaza distributing copies of 

“It was a good time,” she told me, “to remind people of the techniques—and to remind them that there were people who did it before us, and we can do it too.”

In every country, the message of the Arab street movements has been the same. “We want democracy. We want freedom,” said a Libyan protester shortly after the uprising began against Moammar Qaddafi. “I want to go on the street feeling like nobody is looking after me, not looking over my shoulder.”

But in Arab countries where rebellion has succeeded in ousting leaders (or will), painful makeovers still lie ahead. None will get through the change quickly. Most will stumble over daunting political and economic challenges. Some may fail. All will grapple to find the right blend of freedom and faith. Globalization—or the traumatic transition to it—may also intensify personal affiliations with faith, and backward-looking groups may profit from the change. Yet the uprisings are among the many signals that the Islamic world is no longer an exception to history’s forces. A new generation is taking the helm. And the vast majority of Muslims are not attracted to the three major models that until recently defined political Islam’s spectrum: Al Qaeda’s purist Salafism, Iran’s Shiite theocracy, and Saudi Arabia’s rigid Wahhabism. All three have a singular vision. All three have no room for anything else.

The new movements are about pluralism and tolerance. The alternatives they create over time—perhaps a great deal of time—may not be liberal in the Western mode. Alcohol and pornography, for example, are not on the list of freedoms endorsed even by liberal Muslims (though hypocrisy is hardly unknown). But most of those who swept away the old order do want to end political monopolies and open up space—to play whatever music they want as well as to have a genuine choice of political parties.

“I’m worried about our future. There are not enough signs that tell you liberalism will be achieved or freedom is guaranteed,” Ziada said shortly after she returned from a “protect the revolution” rally at Liberation Square six weeks after Mubarak’s ouster.

“But I’m not afraid. I know now that I have power,” she told me. “And I know what to do with it.”

, the U.S. Institute of Peace-Woodrow Wilson Center Distinguished Scholar, is a journalist who has reported from abroad of 

 and many other publications. This article is drawn from her new book, 

Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion Across the Islamic World

Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle Eas

The Iran Primer: Power, Politics, and U.S. Policy

6444263899_3382108d6b_b.jpg

The Arab revolts of 2011 have transformed the image of the Islamic world. One young Egyptian woman’s struggle reflects the scope of change—and shows how long it has been in coming.

The Pink Hijab

The most haunting images from the Syrian warfront are the kids. 

These are a collection of my favorite pictures of children as they fled the Middle East’s messiest conflict, which has no end in sight after almost four years.

I met one little boy with limited sight. He had just walked across the border, from Syria into southern Turkey, at the Kilis checkpoint. He was probably no more than four years old. He could see, barely, through a pair of borrowed (adult-size) glasses that were badly scratched and held together at the corners with chunks of tape. They had clearly once belonged to a woman. The boy had a grimaced scowl because of the struggle to see, and he could barely keep the glasses on his nose. His mother kept running her hand over his head as she told me the story. He was, nevertheless, a very patient child.

Many of the kids were traumatized — from the war, or from being uprooted from homes and schools and friends, and, most of all, from a very uncertain future. The little girls crossing at Kilis — including one in pigtails — had such innocence, even as they had just escaped the evil of both extremists in the Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham (ISIS) and the government troops of President Bashar al Assad. Syria’s war has many sides.

Another little boy was wearing a home-made knit cap of the Syrian opposition flag. I was struck by how often the children have to take care of each other as their parents try to fend for their families. At three different places along the warfront, I found children comforting or taking care of other kids — siblings, friends or smaller tots in neighboring tents at refugee camps.

I found the trick with the traumatized children was to ask to take their picture and then show it to them on my camera playback. They suddenly had something else, something personal, to absorb their attention. The expressions on their faces would often change from the strains of war to tentative smiles; sometimes they even became playful. So I'd snap them again with very different expressions. It was a lovely human experience.

Syria now has the makings of a lost generation. After almost four years of strife, roughly half the population — 10 million out of Syria’s roughly 22 million people — are now either refugees or displaced people inside Syria. More than half are children.

Some 1.55 million child refugees have fled Syria to Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Egypt. Another 3 million children still inside Syria have been displaced from their homes by the war, according to a September report by UNICEF. Boys as young as twelve have been recruited for the dozens of militias across the country.

I visited one of four refugee camps just across the border from Kobani, the Kurdish town besieged by militants of the Islamic State. At the Arin Mirxan camp, more than 3,500 people were crammed into some 400 tents. Little kids ran down the dusty alleys toward the wire mesh fence to talk. A little girl and her brother really moved me, as they squatted on the ground. There is so little for the kids to do. I kept thinking about how they were trapped in a hell not of their own making.

Most of the refugees at this camp were Kurds. Many of them liked to flash a V for victory as I took their picture. One little boy — who wore a "Cars" t-shirt, from the kids movie — struggled to make two V signs with his fingers. He was probably not yet three. A mother and her child both flashed V’s. The mother was pregnant. I could only imagine the challenges that baby will face.

Already, more than three million Syrian children — both inside and outside Syria — either have no school or have dropped out due to the war. Even if the war were to suddenly end, the destruction of homes, businesses, institutions and schools is extensive country-wide.

As I photographed the kids, I kept thinking about what Syria’s adults have done to the next generation — and what it will mean for the fate of a nation.

 is a joint fellow at the Wilson Center and the U.S. Institute of Peace. 

read more of Robin’s reporting on the Syria crisis in 

Syrialostgen.png

After almost four years of strife, roughly half the population — 10 million out of Syria’s roughly 22 million people — are now either refugees or displaced people inside Syria. More than half are children.

Syria: Faces of the Lost Generation

I’ve always been fascinated by faces — how much the shape, the smiles, the cheekbones, especially the eyes, and even the wrinkles, can tell about people in various parts of the world. I’ve photographed close-ups of faces on five continents over the past 40 years. Expressions capture an essence, especially in collections, that no words can describe.

These are some of my favorite faces from a trip to Kurdistan this year. The Kurds of Iraq have been on the frontlines of history for a century, beginning with the moment they almost got their own state after World War I — and then didn’t. Kurds are now divvied up into four countries, Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran, with smatterings elsewhere. They’re now the world’s largest minority without a state.

They were on the frontlines against Saddam Hussein for decades too. The former Iraqi president used chemical weapons against his own people in 1988, killing more than 5,000 civilians, including many women and children. He also razed more than 1,000 villages and engaged in deadly repression against hundreds of thousands.

In Sulaymaniyah, the Kurds have their own Holocaust museum chronicling that period, including torture chambers with sculptured figures replicating Saddam’s torture techniques. In a large room for silent reflection, the walls and ceiling are covered with tiny pieces of mirror, each representing one life lost during Saddam’s rule.

After the Kurds rose up against Saddam in 1991, he physically cut off their territory — about twice the size of New Jersey — from the rest of Iraq. The Kurds, already the poorest part of the country, were also isolated by the international community because they were legally part of Iraq.

But the Kurds are tough. They held their own elections — the first democratic vote ever in Iraq — and had the first real parliament. They survived off taxing smuggling routes. They created their own currency and education curriculum. And they worked hard.

After the 2003 U.S. intervention, the Kurds became part of Iraq again — and thrived as never before. They also suffered less violence than the Arab parts of Iraq. Kurdistan became the most stable part of Iraq.

But today, the Kurds are on the frontline again — this time against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria that, since June, has conquered vast chunks of Iraq. ISIS has marched right up to the border of the Kurdish territory. The legendary Kurdish militia, the Peshmerga, is deployed along a tense border to hold off ISIS. Unlike the Iraqi Army, the Peshmerga have held together — and have fought hard.

My faces of Kurdistan all come from a day walking through the streets of Sulaymaniyah. I didn’t know any of these people. But all of them were willing to let me take their pictures — two aged Shoe repairmen with vintage sewing machines on the street, a little girl in a Tinkerbell T-shirt, a welcoming grandma, a young man getting his hair trimmed, and several cheerful matrons or mamas.

With no language in common, I’d point at my camera and then at them—and they were all uninhibited, even as I got up very close. I loved the shy little girl with bangs, a money-changer sitting on the sidewalk, the walnut and pomegranate peddlers, a young man selling yogurt cones, and several old men with fabulous wrinkles and well-crafted turbans. (I even found the Kurdish Kim Kardashian.)

Together, the faces spoke to me of the Kurds’ spirit and wholesomeness, their determination and industriousness, their engaging character and, most of all, their endurance. For them, the battles are not yet over.

Robin Wright