The future announced by Arab youth

The tendencies and upbringing of young people are in fact among the heralds of the world of our future. We can take the subject, beyond being a matter of generations with exclusive characteristics such as X, Y, Z, as an entirely self-repeating historical subject, and what we will see from it is that throughout history differences of preference, tendency and understanding have always arisen between generations. To the extent that we perceive this as something we have newly discovered or as a most unfortunate situation that has newly befallen us, we risk falling into needless and misplaced anxiety or panic.

We need to know well that the values and principles for which we struggle today carry a value of truth that is translated into the language of every generation and finds a way to address everyone in his own language. Otherwise there would be no point in our being anxious that it will not be read or embraced by future generations.

Just as we are tested in our own era with our own language, understanding and perception, future generations too will be subject to the test before the same truths with their own perception; and just as our passing a test does not guarantee our children's success, our failure does not show that future generations will not succeed. The cause of tawhid, which has addressed every generation from the first human being to today, will come up as the most important matter of future generations as well, but this does not require us to say today whether they will succeed or lose.

WHAT IS DIFFERENT ABOUT GENERATION Z?

This is a basic truth about generations. It is certain that the generation called Generation Z today is different, but this does not show that it is more conscious, or less intelligent or deficient. It is simply a little different, that is all. Throughout history people have shown every kind of range between very different levels of religious feeling. In the past people were no less or more religious than today, and in the future they will not be either. In the past people were no less or more sensitive than today on certain matters of principle. Every generation has lived through its own test, facing more or less the same basic human questions and problems.

All the human diseases born of basic emotions and positions, such as the problem of racism and discrimination, the problem of arrogance, self-abasement, servitude to fellow human beings, theft, murder, grudge, revenge, greed, envy and ignorance, have always been diseases of a universal nature, whose variants can be seen at all times and everywhere. However far humanity advances, no final remedy that kills these diseases has been found.

This is also the basic principle regarding the historical change of generations. In fact, with a little Ibn Khaldun and a little modern sociology, this basic principle is seen clearly. Even so, that people whom we know to have read these sufficiently nonetheless claim an utterly new, original, never-before-seen generational profile deserves treatment, rather, under the heading of "suspicions that cannot be dispelled by knowledge."

THE EFFECT OF SOCIAL MEDIA IS NOT ONLY ON YOUNG PEOPLE

Of course, and without doubt, by concentrating on the new media tools that have become part of the lives of today's youth and on their lifestyles, it is possible to write stories that look truly very different. And this is what happens. Social media networks or technology do not in fact change only the youth; they bring everyone under their influence, in a sense enlisting everyone in their service and making them work toward their own over-determining purpose.

Setting aside a pile of research on how this particularly affects the youth in Türkiye, I have two newly conducted studies on Arab youth in hand.

The reason I mention them in particular is that they are interesting in showing that an identity and a will remain standing and resisting a host of factors (social media, authoritarian regimes, hedonism, popular culture) that are supposed to have zeroed out the will of the youth and substituted their own purpose and will.

FOR ARAB YOUTH THE PALESTINE ISSUE IS A CONSTANT ISSUE

Between 20 August and 19 September 2021, the research firm Feed undertook a comprehensive analysis on Twitter of the most important interests of Arab youth from 5 countries, and analyzed more than 100 million tweets (in Arabic and English) sent from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Libya and Qatar, along with 660,000 user relationships. One point that emerged from the quite detailed analyses is that these young people remain utterly indifferent to developments in their own countries because they cannot be much involved in them.

Young people, in a sense, respond with their interest in more international subjects to the cynicism they show toward their own countries' agendas. For example, a considerable number of tweets were sent in all 5 countries on the subject of Afghanistan, which was on the agenda between those dates. This was regarded as an important and cleverly guided sign of the political interest of young people.

This data is fed in another way by the data of another study. A study evaluating the combined data of 4 research firms, including the likes of the BBC and the Arab Barometer, shows that the Palestine issue is still one of the most cared-about subjects among all Arab youth. Moreover, on this issue young people are in some way strongly opposed, under the heading of "normalization," to the policies followed by their own countries or political leaders.

ARAB YOUTH AS HERALDS OF CHANGE

This indisputable data sufficiently shows that, against all the "Generation Z" labels, young people will carry a dignified stance from today into the future. Undoubtedly, among the same young people a significant drift away from religiosity has also been recorded in the level of religiosity over the last few years.

It is not at all surprising that the Arab geography has such an appearance of a kind of 28 February concerning religion, but no easy and cheap inferences can be made about where this will take society.

In the Arab world, which in total has the richest underground resources in the world, yet where 25 percent of these young people (on average twice the world average) are unemployed and poor, a significant portion of the young have a tendency to emigrate. Those who cannot emigrate make society extremely dynamic toward change, for the sake of dignity, freedom and bread, in the face of the elite strata that unjustly seize the resources all by themselves.

In other words, Arab societies are simmering inside; whatever anyone says, one must expect anything at any moment.