The kids are all right: a testament to the optimism of youth

What young Arabs, or young Muslims in general, are thinking and doing is a subject of great interest to governments both in this region and in the West, which is why The National has launched a series that looks at the issues affecting them.

For the West in particular a large and restless youth cohort is often viewed as a potential terrorism threat, but it is unfair to young people that their complicated problems – which they have little or no power to address – should be viewed only through the prism of security. Many of them feel that they fall into two categories: those who may turn to religious extremism and have to be contained, and those who do not so can safely be ignored.

One expert I spoke to summed it up nicely when he said that, although Islamic radicalism is a problem, the real war is a “war for aspiration”: he meant that finding a good job is difficult unless you have family connections, and even if they do have jobs, most young people do not earn enough to save for a wedding and begin their lives as adults.

Addressing the underlying causes of these problems is impossible because political participation under authoritarian regimes can land you in jail, or worse. It is a grim picture.

Many times I heard from young people that they felt a sense of betrayal from older generations. Their parents benefited from the great investments in education in the 1960s and 1970s, but today a university education is pretty much useless because it does not prepare graduates for the global job market.

So it was surprising how many still seemed eager to change the world for the better in whatever way they can. In Egypt, I spent time with young people who had signed up to volunteer, helping the poor. The biggest volunteer organisation is Resala, with 65,000 members, nearly all in their early 20s: they distribute food to the needy, teach blind children how to read, and clear rubbish from the streets. Remember, this is Egypt, better known for its virulent strain of Islamism.

The volunteers, all nice middle-class kids, were surprised that I had bothered to speak to them: most outsiders, they said, were interested only in meeting members of the Muslim Brotherhood or Islamic Jihad.

One of the most compelling statistics I came across is that university-educated young people are much more likely to be unemployed than those with only an elementary education. The popular assumption is that semi-literate, rural young people or the working class find it tough to find work, but that is not true.

@body arnhem:In Egypt, for example, young people with secondary education or better comprised 95 per cent of unemployed young people in 2006, up from 87 per cent in 1998. This is partly because of high expectations. If you hold a university degree in engineering you do not want to take a job in a factory. Unfortunately the region’s economies are not creating enough jobs to absorb this educated cohort, and many will have to take what they consider undesirable jobs if they want to earn a living.

I grew up in Toronto as a first-generation Afghan immigrant, and the traditions of my culture played a strong role in how my parents raised me. Part of that tradition was that Afghan girls do not leave home until after they are married. Ever.

I was one of the first to break this taboo when I moved to London in my mid 20s, and later to Afghanistan, to work as a journalist. It caused my parents a great deal of stress.

I am sure Arab readers will be familiar with some of the anxieties: What will people think of us? What if no one marries you because they suspect your morals? In the end, they decided that life in the West was different from what they had known back home, and in their new homeland they would have to adapt, as so many immigrants do.

I had this in mind when I met the young and single Arab girls who are living on their own in Abu Dhabi and Dubai to pursue interesting careers in property development, the media, the arts and marketing.

To do this in the West, where nearly everyone moves away from home as a singleton, is one thing: to live away from your parents in the Arab world, with all its baggage of gossipy neighbours and the chauvinist attitudes of men, is quite another.

It is also difficult considering the bad press that Western expatriates get for decadence. At the risk of social death, no Arab woman who eventually wants to get married would want to be identified with a lifestyle associated with loose morals. One of the girls did admit that she felt like “an outcast”, but obviously not enough to convince her to move back home.

These girls – clever, ambitious and well educated – are the real trailblazers of the region.