Forces of Fortune - Council on Foreign Relations - 0 views
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He reveals that there is a vital but unseen rising force in the Islamic world—a new business-minded middle class—that is building a vibrant new Muslim world economy and that holds the key to winning the cold war against Iran and extremists.
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he offers a powerful reassessment of why both extremism and anti-Americanism took hold in the region—not because of an inevitable "clash of cultures" or the nature of Islam, but because of the failure of this kind of authentic middle class to develop in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
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He seems to be in direct disagreement with Huntington's "clash of civilizations" argument here. I wouldn't call this an extension of Amartya Sen's argument though either, but rather a completely new way of framing the discussion around economic causes.
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Nasr takes us behind the news, so dominated by the struggle against extremists and the Taliban, to introduce a Muslim world we've not seen; a Muslim world in which the balance of power is being reshaped by an upwardly mobile middle class of entrepreneurs, investors, professionals, and avid consumers—who can tip the scales away from extremist belligerence.
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This is a review of a newly published book by Vali Nasr, a renowned scholar on the Middle East and recently hired adviser to Richard Holbrooke (representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan).
