The most important thing to happen in the Middle East in 50 years, huh?

Last week I went to a talk at George Washington University, put on by the Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS). It was about the coming "revolution" in Tunisia -- which, we were quickly told, was not a revolution -- and featured Christopher Alexander of Davidson College and John P. Entelis of Fordham University. As an aspiring North Africanist myself, I was naturally there. And if there are American academics -- more accurately, political scientists -- qualified to really comment on Tunisia, it would be these two guys.

Any person well versed in Middle East Studies might have noted just how exceptional this was: there aren't a lot of Tunisia experts here in the States. Of course, did that stop the Middle East policy/political science community (especially here in DC) from sharing their barely-informed positions on the matter? Hardly.

But here we had two bona fide Tunisia political scientists (would've loved to hear from a historian or an anthropologist, but they generally don't get invites to these sorts of things), explaining what was going on. Some really useful stuff, too. For one, that the creation and strengthening of a real political party apparatus is, in the long run, more important than the rewriting or restructuring of the Constitution. But the one that really stuck with me, the one I wanted to go and tweet right away (I hadn't yet returned to tweeting), was Entelis' claim that the uprising in Tunisia would be "the most important thing to happen in the Middle East in fifty years."

Now this was last Tuesday at lunchtime, when the very first marchers were moving into the center of Cairo for their very first protest. We knew it was coming from word circulating online -- that so-called "Twitter Revolution" -- but there was nothing to suggest the kind of upheaval on the way.

No one's really talking about Tunisia these days though. It's been a week since Entelis made that comment, and this all raises good questions about the actual connections between Arab states. The Maghreb -- North Africa west of Egypt, loosely defined -- has long been considered peripheral to US interests in the region, at least as far as the bulk of the Beltway policy community is concerned. As it fades back to its second tier status again so Egypt can rise to the fore, I wonder how we'll remember these past events in Tunisia. I saw tweets the other day that said that history will remember the wave of democratic revolution in the Middle East beginning in Sidi Bouzid, the town where a young Tunisian worker burned himself in protest of police confiscating his illegal vegetable stand.

I tend to believe connections between countries in the Middle East are over-dramatized and overemphasized; after all, the glossing of the various cultures and societies in the Arabic-speaking world is part of the dominant narrative about the region. That is, it's a key part of inherent suspicions about Islam that allow pundits (let's differentiate between them and real experts) to condemn the Muslim Brotherhood. Instead, I often try to emphasize the multiplicities between the various countries in addition to the multiplicities within one. For example, a Muslim university professor in Tunis may differ greatly from a Muslim university professor in Alexandria or Aleppo, just as he or she may be very different than a bank clerk in any of those places. To say nothing of the ways the actual practice of Islam varies across the spectrum in these countries.

In general, we use the "Arab world" or the "Islamic world" as the subject of our analysis too uncritically. We should question the logic -- a good geographer would call it "the imaginative geography" -- that allows us to think of Tunisia and Egypt as the closely connected. How much do you care about Canadian politics? And we even share a border with them.

I still believe all that -- it rarely hurts to think critically about your most basic assumptions -- but the Tunisia-Egypt revolution question has thrown a wrench in the works. The fact that Twitter and Facebook exist and spread the word of the protests seems not so important. What does matter is how people feel and articulate the personal connection and how they see their lives and their identities in flux based on events pretty far away.