Three years have passed since the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi on December 17, 2010 served as the pebble that launched a rockslide. Out of indignation at seeing his meager fruit cart—the only source of livelihood for his extended family of eight—confiscated by a female police officer who then slapped him and insulted his parentage, the young man lit himself aflame on the streets of Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia. Public sympathy for the despondent vendor quickly transformed into outrage at the political status quo. Protests erupted on the streets as tweets and status updates burst forth on social networks, the world watching as one of North Africa's most stable dictatorships fell within a month.

Bouazizi died from his wounds before seeing the effects of his actions. Tunisian president Ben Ali was taken by surprise; Egypt's Hosni Mubarak counteracted by attempting to shut down the Internet, but three dynamic weeks of escalating protest in Tahrir Square led to his resignation on February 11, 2011, and subsequent arrest. Across the Middle East and North Africa, governments watched anxiously as unrest stretched to Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Syria, Yemen. Governments in the Persian Gulf promised reforms as a preemptive measure. And when civil war broke out in Libya, the international community in Europe and North America was poised to contribute air support to the rebels on the ground until they bested the forces of Muammar Gaddafi.

Under the twin banners of "dignity" and "democracy," hope spread that, at long last, change was coming to a region beset with economic hardship and autocratic governments. Political élites, regional specialists, and the media commentariat dissected what had caused the uprisings and why now; whether to call them revolutions, mutinies, or civil wars; where they would lead; what democracy would look like in the Middle East and North Africa; where Islam fit into all of this; and what Western countries should do. Today fighting continues to smolder in Syria, but its president, Bashar Assad, looks stronger than ever; the first democratically elected president of post-Mubarak Egypt has been ousted in an is-it-or-isn't-it-a-coup; and protests have flared in non-Arab Turkey. Three years later, we are faced with more troubling questions about Tunisia's "Jasmine Revolution" and the region-wide calls for democracy it unleashed.

Attempts to augur the Arab Spring accompany an urge to find narratives that will explain the turn. Yet conspicuously missing from many expert commentaries are the voices of the people themselves. Shibley Telhami's The World Through Arab Eyes attends to thousands of Arab voices via a decade of public opinion polls conducted in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Amid a burgeoning cottage industry of Arab Spring analysis, Arab Eyes stands apart because it doggedly listens to uncomfortable answers to difficult questions. Polling data from six countries representative of the diversity within the region—Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—open up conversations about perceptions and disagreements that are not neatly resolvable. But the frank assessment Telhami provides offers the best way forward because it opens genuine dialogue. Although it is written for a general audience, Arab Eyes begins by getting underneath the hood to explain the methodology by which the polls were conducted, how the six countries were selected, how the wording of questions was tirelessly worked out. Telhami—who currently serves as Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland—doesn't underestimate the difficulty of getting "good" data and assessing what the results "really" mean, and he pays his readers the compliment of meeting those questions head-on at the outset. He's well aware of the urgent questions we in the West have, but he also pushes at his readership by holding a mirror to his audience as he makes a case for historicity and nuance.

Rather than beginning with the uprisings or questions on specific cultural values, Chapter 1 opens with "Arab Identities." Telhami sketches the ways in which Arabs in the six polling countries have defined their own complex identities within the last six decades of a growing "pan-Arab" movement. There is vast diversity in the Middle East and North Africa; meanings are mutable. For example, in Morocco, "Muslim" and "Arab" might almost be interchangeable, as opposed to Egypt and Lebanon, where there is a significant "Christian Arab" population. Nevertheless, when citizens of the Arab world use either "Muslim" or "Arab" to describe their core identity, they are generally identifying themselves with people outside their own countries. Therefore, there is an understood distinction between what is "good for an Egyptian" and "what is good for an Arab." From 2008 to 2010, when asked, "When your government makes decisions, do you think it should base its decisions mostly on what is best for … ?" more than 60 percent in the six-country-survey answered either "Muslims" (39 percent in 2010) or "Arabs" (23 percent in 2010). Since 2004, affinity with "country" as a top identity marker has declined, while "Muslim" and "Arab" have remained popular and "citizen of the world" is growing.

Social media and the role of the Internet have been credited with energizing the Arab Spring protests. Telhami attempts to quantify this shift in Chapter 2, "The Information Revolution and Public Opinion," while teasing out the role of traditional media in Chapter 3, "The Network Americans Love to Hate: Al Jazeera," and Chapter 4, "Incitement, Empathy, and Opinion." Between 2008 and 2012, daily Internet usage increased from 33 to 40 percent of the population; in the same period, overall access skyrocketed from 47 percent of the population in 2008 to 71 percent in 2010 according to the six-country-survey. Arabic radio stations able to reach across more than a dozen countries date to the 1950s, but it was in 1996 that the new Qatari emir launched Al Jazeera ("the peninsula" in Arabic), whose transnational success inspired the creation of other stations ranging from UAE-based Al Arabiya to BBC Arabic. For Telhami, the spectacular success of Al Jazeera and more generally the broadening of news sources for Arab citizens signal more seismic shifts than just Facebook or Twitter. Al Jazeera and other MENA-based television stations "mirror" rather than "lead" their audiences; unsurprisingly, people tend to watch stations that best reflect their strongly held views and desert those that go against them.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict serves as a prism through which Arabs view their world, a formulation Telhami gestures to earlier but fully engages in Chapter 5, "The Arab Prism of Pain." To help locate this expression, he points to two other historical events that serve as framing narratives: slavery and the history of discrimination for African Americans, and the Holocaust for Jews. "Every Arab generation since 1948," he writes, "has witnessed wars and bloodshed connected to Palestine. And every major regional political movement has made Palestine and Jerusalem a central theme of its ideology and narrative." When asked in 2011 about the prospects for peace in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, 67 percent of respondents in the six countries said they were personally "prepared for peace if Israelis were willing to return all 1967 territories, including East Jerusalem" (up from 66 percent in 2009), and the majority of Arabs supported a two-state solution, though with great skepticism about its likelihood. Moreover, Arabs largely identify Israeli power as connected to American power, such that critiques of Israel are enmeshed with critiques of the United States. Asked in the 2011 six-country-survey to name two countries that posed "the biggest threat to you," 71 percent said Israel and 59 percent said the United States. Only 18 percent said Iran.

After framing the region in terms of history, identity, and technology, Telhami turns to the Arab Spring directly in Chapter 6, "How Arabs View Their Uprisings." He was able to conduct polls in the very thick of the unrest. Queried in 2011 on what they thought drove the Arab uprisings, the majority of respondents in the six countries said it was "ordinary people seeking dignity, freedom, and a better life" (57 percent) compared to 16 percent who claimed "opposition parties or sects seeking to control governments" and the 19 percent who faulted "foreign powers trying to stir trouble in the region." And although there was widespread support for intervention in Libya, the case was different for Syria, even in the midst of a violent, full-scale civil war. Almost half of Egyptians (43 percent) polled in May 2012 opposed external military intervention of any kind in Syria. Turkey (50 percent) and France (30 percent) were most frequently named by respondents in the 2011 survey as one of the two countries that played the "most constructive role" during the uprisings, ahead of the United States (24 percent), China (20 percent), and Britain (11 percent).

Some of Telhami's most interesting findings are in Chapters 7-9, where he discusses attitudes toward the United States, democracy, women, and religion. "It was never about values," he baldly asserts, claiming that Arab attitudes toward the United States are founded on disagreement with specific policies rather than "American values," pace public rhetoric to the contrary in the United States. In 2008, when asked for the basis of their attitudes toward the United States, 80 percent replied that they were based on "American policy" compared to 11 percent who said "American values" (8 percent said "they did not know"). Claims that U.S. involvement in the region aim to spread democracy are met with great skepticism. Rather, "controlling oil" and "protecting Israel" are seen as the top two factors that determine American policy in the region (Six-Country Survey data 2009-2011). Telhami presses the point by asking what two steps might be taken to improve respondents' views of the United States most; the answers lead back to the "prism." In 2011, the top responses were for the United States to broker an "Israel-Palestine peace agreement" (55 percent) and to "stop aid to Israel" (42 percent). The next two popular choices were "withdrawal from the Arabian Peninsula" (29 percent) and "withdrawal from Iraq" (26 percent). The last three choices show a marked decline in popularity: economic aid to the region (12 percent), pushing more to "spread democracy" (11 percent), and stopping aid to Arab governments (8 percent).

The Arab community, Telhami repeatedly reminds us, is not monolithic; perhaps nowhere is this more evident than on the matter of religion in the public sphere. In 2010, respondents were asked to choose between two statements on religion and politics: either "Religion must be respected, but clergy should not dictate the political system" or "Clergy must play a greater role in our political system." The results varied widely. In Lebanon and the UAE, the absolute majority agreed with the first statement, by 64 and 78 percent respectively. And in Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco more people identified with the first statement (48, 49, 44 percent) than with the second (40, 39, 37 percent). Only in Saudi Arabia did more people agree with the second statement (44 percent), but that is still less than half of the number surveyed. Between one-third to one-half of respondents in the six countries agreed that women should "always have the right" to work outside the home while nearly 50 percent of respondents replied "only if economically necessary" (2010 six-country data). In outliers Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, more respondents supported the right of women to work "always" than any of the other options; in the UAE, only 22 percent of respondents supported the "always" choice.

Although he only uses the expression explicitly in the final chapter of the book, Telhami is concerned with "narrative control," the ability to shape impressions. Arab Eyes challenges simplistic narratives in both the Middle East-North Africa and the United States. Chapter 11, "From 9/11 to Tahrir Square: The Arabs Through American Eyes," focuses on views within the United States, a juxtaposition intended to provoke conversation. Telhami conducted polls within the United States during the Arab Spring. In 2011, when asked their views of the Arab uprisings, 33 percent of American respondents replied that they were "more about ordinary people seeking freedom and democracy," 17 percent said they were "more about Islamist groups seeking political power," and 45 percent said "both equally." That is, at the same time when a majority of Arabs were answering that the uprisings centered on ordinary people seeking freedom and democracy, a minority within the United States thought so. As has been noted elsewhere, American views on Islam continue to deteriorate: two months after the attacks of 9/11, an ABC News poll found that 47 percent of those surveyed had a "favorable" view of Islam. When Telhami asked the same question a decade later, only 33 percent of Americans surveyed said they had a "favorable" view. But, when asked in 2011 what their opinion was of "Arab people in general," 56 percent responded "favorable" and 38 percent said "unfavorable."

Based on his decades of scholarship and MENA public opinion polling, Telhami makes careful predictions. He cautions against a perspective that sees the uprisings as isolated or episodic or monolithic. Instead, he expects varying results across the region based on religious/ethnic homogeneity, economic development, and the willingness of states to initiate credible reform, and yet he sees a role for the region qua region in the outcomes of the uprisings. Moreover, he specifically urges looking to Egypt and Saudi Arabia over the next decade to gauge whether and how democracy takes hold in the region. Finally, he returns to the salience of the Israel-Palestine issue, claiming that "Arab identity and sense of threat will continue to be defined in relation to Israel and the United States" as long as the conflict remains unresolved. Peace is possible, but Telhami shows that it cannot happen unless governments on all sides take seriously the opinions and perspectives of the people in the Middle East and North Africa. Where the changes unleashed by Mohamed Bouazizi's death will lead is anything but decided—and the invitation to dig deeper, to listen better, to learn more is ever open.

Christine Folch is assistant professor of anthropology at Wheaton College.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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