During a discussion that I attended yesterday a prominent Islamist with Palestinian connections (who unfortunately I can't name) was asked if Islamist movements in the Middle East are growing or declining. He replied that the movements themselves are declining but that the influence of religion is growing in less formal, more unstructured ways.

This struck me as an important observation – look at the Amr Khaled phenomenon, for example – but I think it goes much wider than religion. Disaffected Arabs these days are not, on the whole, looking to opposition parties or mass movements to solve their problems. What we are seeing is the growth of  small-scale activism, often based around single issues, or people simply trying to escape the system and do their own thing.

Rami Khouri makes a similar point in an article for today's Daily Star, discussing Arab youth:

New research being conducted throughout the region by local scholars suggests that many, perhaps most, young Arabs feel unnecessarily constrained by the social, political, religious, security or economic controls that confine their lives. 

If they cannot move elsewhere to build a more satisfying life, they often create new lives for themselves in their own home environment – on-line, in shopping malls, at mosques, in volunteer charitable societies, or on the street and in the neighborhood. Their second lives allow them to express their multiple identities and manifest their full personalities and values, in domains such as politics, sexuality, ideology, religion, anti-colonialism, ethnicity, culture, resistance, consumerism, and art.