The Most Europeanized State in the Arab World

Be sure to read Barry Rubin’s analysis of Tunisia’s revolution, or whatever we ought to be calling it now. Rubin is brilliant and almost always right, so I’m glad to see he and I are on the same page.

“Tunisia,” he wrote, “is a very distinctive country. It has been the most Europeanized state in the Arab world, due in part to the secular-oriented policies of the regimes. There has been an Islamist movement but the regime has kept it weak, perhaps making Tunisia the Arabic-speaking state with the lowest proportional support for Islamism among its population.”