Pop democracy in the Middle East.

• Author: Cavanaugh, Tim
• Position: Follow-Up

In the cover story of reason's March 2002 issue, "In Praise of Vulgarity," Charles Paul Freund assessed the notion of a twilight struggle between fundamentalist Islam and a supposedly decadent West, an idea captured in the title of a much-cited book by the political scientist Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld. Drawing on a variety of pop sensations--including Soviet zoot suiters, Kazakh Tolkien enthusiasts, eighth-century erotic Arabic poetry, and the late Algerian singer Cheikha Rimitti (who memorably declared, "People adore God; I adore beer")--Freund endorsed lowbrow culture as a challenge both to establishment tastes and to totalitarian credibility. He also argued that "it is modern censorious Islamist pietism that is the newer development in the Muslim world, and that the celebration of 'vulgar' pleasures predates it."

The revolutionary wave sweeping the Middle East and North Africa has recently forced Western media outlets to reconsider the extent to which the popular will in the Islamic world is truly democratic, demotic, Islamist, or something else. Dictators in Tunisia and Egypt justified bloody but failed crackdowns by claiming what looked like mass protest movements were acts of agitation by Islamists. At press time, Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi was pressing the same claim in his mad Gotterdammerung against his own country.

So far these...