Beirut youth, who for decades often looked to the West for creative and social inspiration, are now turning to face each other, their families, their culture and their own city for creative fuel. This movement was spearheaded in 1997 by the trip-hop duo Soap Kills (Zeid Hamdan and Yasmine Hamdan), with their use of the Arabic language (especially their creative use of Lebanese slang), referencing of traditional Arabic songs, as well as incorporation of Middle Eastern sounds in their deeply Western musical style. Although young Lebanese musicians did not immediately follow suit, choosing instead to continue emulating the West, today there seems to be a current rise in Lebanese music that is rooted more in the Middle East than in the West.

Damascus

It's so very tempting to embrace the idea that this could be the Middle East's 1989—and by that I mean the 1989 experienced in Eastern Europe, not Beijing. Tunisia begets Egypt; Egypt begets...

Tempting, but not quite convincing. The Middle East dominoes are all so different, as if plucked from separate sets. Mubarak's Egypt is a squishy sort of authoritarianism, an ethnically cohesive nation at peace with its neighbors and host to civil society activism that would have long been extinguished in the less nuanced dictatorships of the region.