Reading Ben Wilson's "The Making of Victorian Values" has provided some striking similarities between the change in values that transformed Britain in the early nineteenth century and the current disturbances within the Arab world. Britain in the eighteenth century was a rugged, brutal island where entertainment was violent, cruel, witty and drunk. By 1820, all of these fairs and bawdy traditions were erased by a conformist middle-class that wished to erase its own connections with the gin-sodden success of its ancestors. The swift revolution in values was enhanced by a rapid demographic turnover; by 1830, most of those living in Britain were children of the nineteenth century: intoxicated by progress, thankful for victory and confident of British superiority. Their values were to remain strong, if changing over time, till another demographic turnover in the 1960s.
The combination of economic change, demographic revolution and political instability afflicts the Arab world. The protestors that have dominated the Arab Spring are the youth: students, graduates, the unemployed and dispossessed. It is not clear if there is a consensual set of values as Britain enjoyed, or that a number of competing value systems jostle for attention. These range from westernised secularism to the salafist fundamentalism financed by Saudi Arabia. Whichever value system wins is likely to maintain a dominant position in Islamic regions for a number of decades whilst the current demographic runs its course.
The adoption of values within the younger generation has been favourable to originalist versions of Islam like Salafism and Wahabism. The simplicity and clarity of this doctrine has led to the abandonment of regional forms of Islam such as the Sufi movement in Pakistan or the syncretist traditions of Indonesia. Even the fundamentalists are deformed by compromising with modernity, but on current trends, the dominant value system is likely to be religious, populist, democratic, maybe technocratic and tempered by a strong secular minority. This depends upon the balancing of Islamic identity, participatory notions of representation, and music, that are currently underpinning the crisis in North Africa.
