BEIRUT — Her voice broke. Tears overcame Zeinab Mirza, a political studies lecturer at the American University of Beirut. She was crying for Lebanon’s awakening. “In a way,” she said, “We were in a coma before.”

Something is going on in the Middle East. People from Beirut to Baghdad are in the streets clamoring for nations to replace sects. They have been met with bullets in Iraq. They have been met with bluster in Lebanon. They are still there. A new generation is tired of the old ways. The talk is of revolution. Nation here denotes unity, not nationalism.

The Lebanese flag and the Iraqi flag are everywhere, symbols of a demand for individual rights in states of law. A little more than a century ago, the Sykes-Picot British-French carve-up of the collapsing Ottoman Empire yielded weak states with arbitrary borders. Many have paid a colossal price. Syria lies in ruins. People are sick of the sectarian manipulation of politics to mask theft, corruption and state capture by oligarchical elites. They are sick of the manipulation of fear. They are sick of the life being sucked out of them.

Mirza, gathering herself, told students how extraordinary it was to see Sunni Tripoli in northern Lebanon, a bastion of conservatism, standing shoulder to shoulder with Shia Nabatiyeh in the south. “There’s a realization the same pain exists all over,” she said.