Manji and Steyn's "Spring" Fling

In an interview on the Canadian International Council site, both Mark Steyn and Irshad Manji cite "the Arab Spring" as "the biggest international event of 2011." That's where the similarity ends, though. Whereas Irshad is giddy with "freedom" fever and enthusiastic about what the event betokens--

a series of movements, incubated over years, that could wind up changing family politics as much as governments. In May 2005, I was in Cairo to observe the biggest anti-regime demonstrations to that point. Afterwards, I hung out at a café with a bunch of democracy activists. One of them pulled me aside because she needed confidential advice. She’d fallen in love with a Jewish man and didn’t know how to tell her parents. The paradox, she pointed out, is that she was putting her life on the line to effect political change in her country, but the scarier prospect was to speak with her own father about love. If the Arab awakening spawns taboo conversations like this, then we’ll witness a cultural revolution that replaces the god of family honour with the god of individual integrity in Islam.

--Steyn views the same season far more mordantly (the perfect word, I think, to describe a scene replete with chaos and carnage). He says the so-called thaw

is best understood as part of the Western Autumn: the triumph of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist entities in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and elsewhere represents the final unraveling of the Anglo-French Middle East imposed on the region in 1922 and maintained, however unsatisfactorily, by the Americans since the Second World War. Along with an assertive post-Kemalist Turkey and a nuclearizing Iran, it’s part of the general retreat of the American order.

Exactly. And for that reason Steyn proffers MuBro philosophe/infidel-loather Sayyid Qutb as last year's "biggest international influencer" (egad, what an uneuphonius way to put it, CIC), while Manji thinks it was Mohamed Bouazizi, "the young Tunisian street vendor who self-immolated as a protest against police harassment and other injustices."

Thereby setting in motion the Islamist Ice Age.