WHAT'S GOIN' ON:

Two books help make sense of what's going on in the Arab world. They describe the foundations on which a new order might be built -- economic and socio-political. They're both contrarian, in that they challenge the pessimism of the moment, when democrats seem to be on the run and demagogues are back in the saddle.

The first is "Startup Rising: The Entrepreneurial Revolution Remaking the Middle East." It's written by Christopher M. Schroeder, a former colleague at The Washington Post Co. and a longtime friend. Chris is a startup guy, and over the last three years he has traveled the Arab world looking for kindred spirits.

What Schroeder found will startle even the most jaded observer. Despite the turmoil of the last few years, a new generation of entrepreneurs is inventing products, getting them funded and bringing them to market. Even the dead weight of repressive government and religious intolerance hasn't stopped this new breed.

Schroeder offers compelling illustrations to buttress his case: He wanders around a "celebration of entrepreneurship" in Dubai and finds a Saudi woman who has designed and marketed a line of iPod accessories, a Syrian who has created a computer-animation venture and a Kuwaiti who created a mobile game application that has been downloaded by more than a million users.

These Arab startup kids may be buffeted by political events, but they are tightly connected to the global technological base that Karl Marx woodenly described as the "means of production." Schroeder tours the business landscape like an open-air bazaar: altibbi.com is an Arab version of WebMD; souq.com is the biggest online retailer in the region with 500 employees and 8 million customers; namshi.com is an online shoe retailer, like Zappos, that sells 12,000 different styles of shoes. A third of the Arab tech startups are founded by women, says Schroeder, a figure unheard of in Silicon Valley.

The base for rapid economic growth is there, in embryo, across the Arab world. 

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