Generation Revolution: On the Front Line Between Tradition and Change in the Middle East

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

“An excellent social history of Egypt’s persistent pathologies, as well as a universal story about the difficulties of changing deeply ingrained societal attitudes.” —New York Times Book Review

Generation Revolution unravels the complex forces shaping the lives of four young Egyptians on the eve and in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, and what their stories mean for the future of the Middle East.

In 2003, Rachel Aspden arrived in Egypt as a twenty-three-year-old journalist. She found a country on the brink of change. The two-thirds of Egypt’s eighty million citizens under the age of thirty were stifled, broken, and frustrated, caught between a dictatorship that had nothing to offer them and their autocratic parents’ generation, defined by tradition and obedience.

In January 2011, the young people’s patience ran out. They thought the revolution that followed would change everything. But as violence escalated, the economy collapsed, and as the united front against Mubarak shattered into sectarianism, many found themselves at a loss.

Following the stories of four young Egyptians—Amr the atheist software engineer, Amal the village girl who defied her family and her entire community, Ayman the one-time religious extremist, and Ruqayah the would-be teenage martyr—Generation Revolution exposes the failures of the Arab Spring and shines new light on those left in the wake of its lost promise.

Rachel Aspden is a former literary editor of the New Statesman and now works at The Guardian. She has written on the Middle East, India, Pakistan, and South Africa for the New Statesman, The Guardian, Observer, Prospect, and New York Review of Books. She lived in Cairo from 2003–2005 and 2012–2015. In 2010 she was awarded a yearlong travel fellowship by the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust to research activists working to counter extremism within Islam. She is currently based in London.