The idea that the Middle East is becoming more liberal may sound counterintuitive. Nearly 50 years ago, a revolution in Iran dismantled the country’s secular order and ushered in an absolutist clerical regime grounded in Shiite fundamentalism whose battle cry was “Death to America.” The region has since been an incubator for numerous terrorist attacks in Europe and North America, insurgent movements committed to authoritarian theocracy, and repressive regimes that subjugate women, crush free expression, and marginalize minorities. By now, it might seem easy to conclude that Middle Eastern societies are simply less interested in liberalism—that they are governed by a fundamentally different, more religiously oriented “regime of truth,” as the philosopher Michel Foucault declared in 1978 about the uprising in Iran.…