In a recent speech about British foreign policy, Tony Blair claimed in typically grandiose style that the wars in Lebanon and Iraq were part of a struggle for ‘the soul of the Middle East’. Pronouncing on the region’s troubles, he argued that the main crisis centred on a struggle between a moderate version of Islam and the fundamentalist worldview. Such quasi-spiritual talk just goes to show how much symbolic importance has been invested in the region by world politicians.

But this prolonged gaze has not necessarily led to a better understanding of the complexity of this region’s politics; either among politicians or the general public. As writer on international politics, Nick Frayn, points out, ‘Commentators tend to divide Middle Eastern societies into black-and-white categories of traditionalists and modernisers, ideologues and pragmatists, or pro- and anti-Western. But the reality is more complicated’.

It is this complex mix of culture, religion and politics in the Middle East that Allegra Stratton has set out to explore in her fascinating book Muhajababes. This witty, perceptive and fascinating travelogue charts her encounters with the young, middle class population of Beirut, Amman, Cairo, Dubai, Kuwait and Damascus. In describing her various adventures, she combines the journalist’s lightness of touch with the anthropologist’s eye for quirky detail. What she uncovers is a messier scene than Blair’s paradigm of moderate versus fundamentalist, Western versus anti-Western. Here, youth culture, as in the rest of the world, has its own unusual and specific contradictions that defy easy stereotypes.

In the first part of her journey in Beirut, she comes across the counter-intuitive world of Arabic pop culture, replete with MTV style video-clips of half naked women dancing to cheesy music. In search for a more ‘authentic’ underground scene, she stumbles into a bohemian artist’s house where she meets young hippy-ish men grumbling about social apathy and commercialised television. But they too seem out of touch with popular culture, part-spiritual and part-trendy. On car journeys, in interviews, at university campuses, Stratton talks to anyone and everyone who is willing to give their view. At the centre of this youth culture are two initially contradictory players: Prince Alwaleed, an entrepreneur television network owner who keeps the population fed on a diet of video-clips; and a dynamic sheik called Amr Khaled, who dominates with his own television shows and websites, combining Oprah Winfrey-style advice with religious sermonising.

Making sense of the mix, Stratton comes across the living embodiment, as she sees it, of the region’s contradictions: the ‘muhajababe’, a type of devout, hijab-wearing girl who wears tight-fitting jeans, follows religious practices and yet loves the stream of pop video-clips appearing on Arabic television. Neither dour conservatives, nor full-on hedonists, these girls seem to represent the unpredictable fusion of Western commercialism with new-style spirituality. To be sure, she also meets the skeptics, who despise such religious sentimentality, and women who reject the veil either because it is conservative or too stylised. Contradictions exist within the individuals she meets - the young boys who praise Hizbollah yet hate Al-Qaeda’s self-aggrandising, the Palestinian businessman who votes for liberal politics in Palestine but is attracted to more conservative politics in neighbouring Jordan, and so on.

To her credit, Stratton doesn’t attempt to force her material into convenient categories but instead allows the reader to be absorbed by the range of articulate and intelligent views she comes across on the free market, religion, and politics. Whilst this means the book does not conclude with clear theoretical analysis, it does offer rich material and her journey does throw up some interesting, if implicit, trends.

The first is that the Middle East is not as unified as often presented in the Western media. When Stratton interviews a television producer about Superstar, the Arab version of Pop Idol, he tells her that it is pure Arab television because it pits countries against each other. He scornfully reproaches her for thinking that all Arabs just watch Al-Jazeera without any sense of the rivalries and differences between countries and regions. Even the Palestine-Israel issue needs deconstruction, as one savvy woman tells her: ‘All young Arabs say that they care about the Israeli-Palestinian question - that that is why they hate America and the West - but really they care because it is the one straightforward thing in their lives. It’s like environmentalism for you or anti-globalisation - a very simple political cause’.

Second, the wearing of the veil (which even Stratton gets bored of as a topic) is a dominant issue, but far from straightforward. Some girls choose it out of piety, others out of fashion, others because it is a political statement - and a very large number despite their parents’ wishes. ‘You’re talking about people who veil because of religion,’ says one young woman to Stratton, ‘We’re talking about some of our friends veiling because it is now - how you say? - trendy.’ These veiled girls giggle about sex and smoke cigarettes, hardly conforming to the stereotype. It is a significant issue though, judging by the number of times people mention it to her.

Third, the disillusionment with politics and the older parties means that political reform is often tied up with religious revivalism and a search for meaning. The rise of religion is not solely tied up with jihadists’ dream of the international Caliphate (as Ahmed, a translator from Cairo says, ‘Who else wants that? Hardly anyone. Egypt is difficult enough to sort out as it is’) but a desire to join the modern world with a religious twist. As in America, where the protestant work ethic combined piety with individualism, the Middle East looks like it is creating its own cultural traditions to cope with industrialisation and global commerce.

The book is littered with funny, often charming moments, and as a writer, Stratton has a candid style, not only with the reader, but with her respondents, who clearly open up to her in confidence. Whilst she herself admits she has only focused on the young middle classes, this is a group that is open and engaged with ideas, not the monolith conjured up as ‘the Muslim world’. What she does most successfully is unpick some weighty myths and humanise a world that is often presented as alien.