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Thousands of demonstrators gather in Tunis to celebrate in February: "The notion of unchanging Islam and the Muslim essence are purely intellectual constructs of the West. The tracks along which the world's various cultures and religions move are converging toward an encounter, not the battle Samuel Huntington believed would take shape," argues Todd.
A protester in Tunis in January. Emmanuel Todd and his co-author Youssef Courbage predicted the Arab revolution four years ago. The reasons they gave at the time were based on three factors: the rapid increase in literacy, particularly among women, a falling birthrate and significant decline in the widespread custom of endogamy, or marriage between first cousins. "This shows that Arab societies were on a path toward cultural and mental modernization, in the course of which the individual becomes much more important as an autonomous entity."
A girl sits with anti-government protesters during a rally in Yemen. "Even in Yemen, the most backward country in the Arab world," Todd says, "thousands of women were among the protesters."
Many have compared the Arab spring to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which heralded the collapse of communism and the disappearance of the Iron Curtain.
But Todd argues that it has a greater resemblance to the European spring of 1848. Pictured here is the Paulskirche church in Frankfurt, an important site in the March revolution that year. "The initial spark in France," he says, "triggered unrest in Prussia, Saxony, Bavaria, Austria, Italy, Spain and Romania -- a classic chain reaction, despite major regional differences."
