Quiet Progress in the Arab World

Algeria is the classic case of the malaise infecting the Arab world: A former European colony brutalized by years of civil war, a brutish oil-funded military kleptocracy, and a recent wave of militant Islamic fundamentalism. But the New York Times reports that something extraordinary is happening:

Women make up 70 percent of Algeria’s lawyers and 60 percent of its judges. Women dominate medicine. Increasingly, women contribute more to household income than men. Sixty percent of university students are women, university researchers say.

Evidently, this radically positive phenomenon has been sneaking up on the country for generations. How did it happen?

Algeria’s young men reject school and try to earn money as traders in the informal sector, selling goods on the street, or they focus their efforts on leaving the country or just hanging out. There is a whole class of young men referred to as hittistes — the word is a combination of French and Arabic for people who hold up walls.

The trend is a long way from producing a wholesale revolution in the country. Any fleeting glance at history, however, illustrates how these power shifts can begin to grow organically, and just how powerful a liberalizing and liberating force this creeping modernism can become. Algeria’s story, like those of hundreds of other countries around the world, demonstrates that the best critique of the Iraq democratization project is the simplest one – modernity doesn’t to need to be force-fed to any society, even (gasp) Arab societies. It has an unseen but ultimately unstoppable force all its own, and that force operates most genuinely and most determinedly when left to own devices. In the truly short course of just two and a half centuries, that force has managed to overturn millennia of despotism and ignorance, and completely re-conceive and re-constitute the bases of legitimacy in human society. And it begins quietly – when, for instance, women slowly come to dominate the most influential and lucrative vocations.

We hardly even need patience. We live in the most revolutionary time in human history.