Asef Bayat is the Catherine and Bruce Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies and Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn (Stanford, 2007).

Life as Politics

HOW ORDINARY PEOPLE CHANGE THE MIDDLE EAST

By Asef Bayat

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-8327-9

Contents

Preface…………………………………………………………..ixAcknowledgments……………………………………………………xiii1 The Art of Presence………………………………………………1PART 1 SOCIAL NONMOVEMENTS………………………………………….2 The Quiet Encroachment of the Ordinary……………………………..333 The Poor and the Perpetual Pursuit of Life Chances…………………..564 Feminism of Everyday Life…………………………………………865 Reclaiming Youthfulness…………………………………………..1066 The Politics of Fun………………………………………………129PART 2 STREET POLITICS AND THE POLITICAL STREET……………………….7 Battlefield Tehran……………………………………………….1538 Streets of Revolution…………………………………………….1759 Does Radical Islam Have an Urban Ecology?…………………………..18810 Everyday Cosmopolitanism…………………………………………20211 The “Arab Street”……………………………………………….226PART 3 REVOLUTIONS…………………………………………………12 Is There a Future for Islamic Revolutions?…………………………24113 The Post-Islamist Refo-lutions……………………………………25914 The Green Revolt………………………………………………..28415 The Coming of a Post-Islamist Democracy……………………………305Notes…………………………………………………………….317Index…………………………………………………………….369

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

THE ART OF PRESENCE

THE ARAB SPRING NOTWITHSTANDING, powerful views, whether regional or international,suggest that the Middle East has fallen into disarray. We continueto read how the personal income of Arabs is among the lowest in the world,despite their massive oil revenues. With declining productivity, poor scientificresearch, decreasing school enrollment, and high illiteracy, and with healthconditions lagging behind comparable nations, Arab countries seem to be”richer than they are developed.” The unfortunate state of social developmentin the region is coupled with poor political governance. Authoritarian regimesranging from Iran, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco to the sheikhdoms ofthe Persian Gulf and chiefly Saudi Arabia (incidentally, most with close ties tothe West) have continued to frustrate demands for democracy and the rule oflaw, prompting (religious) opposition movements that espouse equally undemocratic,exclusive, and often violent measures. These conditions have at timescaused much fear in the West about the international destabilizing ramificationsof this seemingly social and political turmoil.

Thus, never before has the region witnessed such a cry for change as itdid in the late 2000s. The idea that “everywhere the world has changed exceptfor the Middle East” assumed a renewed prominence, with different domesticand international constituencies expressing different expectations as to howto instigate change in this region. Small (Marxist and militant Islamist) circleshope for a revolutionary transformation through a sudden upsurge of popularenergy to overturn the unjust structures of power and usher in developmentand democracy. If the Iranian Revolution, not so long ago, could sweep aside along-standing monarchy in less than two years, why couldn’t such movementbe forged in the region today? This indeed did happen. The Arab world witnesseda most momentous wave of revolutions in 2011. Yet, as usual, these revolutionscame as a surprise. It is doubtful that revolutions can ever be planned.Even though revolutionaries do engage in plotting and preparing, revolutionsdo not necessarily result from prior schemes. Rather, they often follow theirown intriguing logic, subject to a highly complex mix of structural, international,coincidental, and psychological factors. We often analyze revolutionsin retrospect, rarely engaging in ones that are expected or desired, for revolutionsare never predictable. On the other hand, most people do not particularlywish to be involved in violent revolutionary movements. People often expressdoubt about engaging in revolution, whose outcome they cannot foresee.They often prefer to remain “free riders,” wanting others to carry out revolutionson their behalf. Furthermore, are revolutions necessarily desirable?Those who have experienced them usually identify violent revolutions withmassive disruption, destruction, violence, and uncertainty. After all, nothingguarantees that a just social order will result from a revolutionary changeunless revolutions turn into a prolonged process of social struggle to achieveoriginal goals. Finally, even assuming that revolutions are desirable and canbe planned, what are people under authoritarian rule to do in the meantime?

Given these constraints and the uncertain futures of revolutions, an alternativeview would postulate that change should be instigated by committingstates to undertaking sustained social and political reforms. Such a nonviolentstrategy of reform requires powerful social forces—social movements (ofworkers, the poor, women, youth, students, and broader democracy movements)or genuine political parties—to challenge political authorities and hegemonizetheir claims. Indeed, many activists and NGOs in the Middle Easthave already engaged in forging movements to alter the current state of affairs.However, while this may serve as a genuinely endogenous strategy for change,effective movements need political opportunities to grow and operate. It ishoped that postrevolutionary states in Egypt, Tunisia, or Yemen may offersuch opportunity. However, indications already point to certain intoleranceby these new regimes, most of which are likely to assume electoral democracyof an illiberal type. How are social and political movements to keep up whenauthoritarian polity exhibits a great intolerance toward organized activism,when the repression of civil-society organizations has been a hallmark ofmost Middle Eastern states? In addition, what is the subaltern to do whenthe states, even if respecting electoral democracy (as in Turkey or Indonesia),fall short of providing an effective mechanism to respond to economicdeprivation, social exclusion, gender imbalance, or violation of individualrights?

It should not, therefore, come as a surprise that until recently growing segmentsof people, frustrated by the political stalemate, lamented that althoughmost people in the Middle East suffered under the status quo, they remainedrepressed, atomized, and passive. Popular activism, if any, went little beyondoccasional, albeit angry, protests, with most of them directed by Islamistsagainst the West and Israel, and less against their own repressive states to committo a democratic order. Since there was slight or no agency to challenge theossified status quo, the argument went, change should come from outside, byway of economic, political, and even military pressure. Even the Arab HumanDevelopment Report, arguably the most significant manifesto for change inthe Arab Middle East, was inclined to seek a “realistic solution” of a “western-supportedproject of gradual and moderate reform aiming at liberalization.”Still, the perception that the Middle East remained “unchangeable” had fargreater resonance outside the region, notably in the West and among policycircles, the mainstream media, and many think tanks. Indeed, a strong “exceptionalist”outlook informed the whole edifice of the “democracy promotionindustry” in the West, which pushed for instigating change through outsidepowers and did not exclude the use of force.

The idea of Middle Eastern exceptionalism is not new. Indeed, for a longtime now, change in Middle Eastern societies has been approached with alargely western Orientalist outlook whose history goes back to the eighteenthcentury, if not earlier. Mainstream Orientalism tends to depict the MuslimMiddle East as a monolithic, fundamentally static, and thus “peculiar” entity.By focusing on a narrow notion of (a rather static) culture—one that is virtuallyequated with the religion of Islam—Middle Eastern societies have beencharacterized more in terms of historical continuity than in terms of change.In this perspective, change, albeit uncommon, may indeed occur, but primarilyvia individual elites, military men, or wars and external powers. TheGeorge W. Bush administration’s doctrine of “regime change,” exemplified in,for instance, the occupation of Iraq and the continuous inclination to wage awar against Iran, represents how, in such a perspective, change is to be realizedin the region. Consequently, internal sources of political transformation,such as group interests, social movements, and political economies, are largelyoverlooked.

The Arab Spring shook the foundations of such perspectives somewhat,although without terminating them. These perspectives continue to prevail,particularly in the mainstream media, getting a boost from the ascendancy ofreligious parties in the postrevolution general elections in the region. But ahistorical outlook gives a different picture. In fact, the Middle East has beenhome to many insurrectionary episodes, nationwide revolutions, and socialmovements (such as Islamism), and great strides for change. Beyond these, certaindistinct and unconventional forms of agency and activism have emergedin the region that do not get adequate attention, because they do not fit intoour prevailing categories and conceptual imaginations. By elaborating on andhighlighting these latter forms, or what I call “social nonmovements,” I wishalso to raise a number of theoretical and methodological questions as to howto look at the notions of agency and change in the Muslim Middle East today.Indeed, conditioned by the exceptionalist outlook, many observers tend toexclude the study of the Middle East from the prevailing social science perspectives.For instance, many narratives of Islamism treat it simply in terms ofreligious revivalism, or as an expression of primordial loyalties, or irrationalgroup actions, or something peculiar and unique, a phenomenon that cannotbe analyzed by the conventional social science categories. In fact, Islamismhad been largely excluded from the mode of inquiry developed by social movementtheorists in the West until recently, when a handful of scholars have attemptedto bring Islamic activism into the realm of “social movement theory.”This is certainly a welcome development. However, these scholars tendlargely to “borrow” from, rather than critically and productively engage withand thus contribute to, social movement theories. Indeed, it remains a questionhow far the prevailing social movement theory is able to account for thecomplexities of socioreligious movements in contemporary Muslim societies,in particular when these perspectives are rooted in particular genealogies, inthe highly differentiated and politically open Western societies, where socialmovements often develop into highly structured and largely homogeneousentities—possibilities that are limited in the non-Western world. Charles Tillyis correct in alerting us to be mindful of the historical specificity of “socialmovements”—political performances that emerged in Western Europe andNorth America after 1750. In this historical experience, what came to beknown as “social movements” combined three elements: an organized andsustained claim making on target authorities; a repertoire of performances,including associations, public meetings, media statements, and street marches;and finally, “public representations of the cause’s worthiness, unity, numbers,and commitment.” Deployed separately, these elements would not make “socialmovements,” but some different political actions. Given that the dominantsocial movement theories draw on Western experience, to what extent can theyhelp us understand the process of solidarity building or the collectivities ofdisjointed yet parallel practices of noncollective actors in the non-Western politicallyclosed and technologically limited settings?

In contrast to the “exceptionalist” tendency, there are those often “local”scholars in the Middle East who tend uncritically to deploy conventional modelsand concepts to the social realities of their societies, without acknowledgingsufficiently that these models hold different historical genealogies, and maythus offer little help to explain the intricate texture and dynamics of changeand resistance in this part of the world. For instance, considering “slums” inlight of the conventional perspectives of urban sociology, the informal communitiesin the Middle East (i.e., ashwaiyyat) are erroneously taken to be thebreeding ground for violence, crime, anomie, extremism, and, consequently,radical Islam. There is little in such narratives that sees these communities asa significant locus of struggle for (urban) citizenship and transformation inurban configuration. Scant attention is given to how the urban disenfranchised,through their quiet and unassuming daily struggles, refigure new lifeand communities for themselves and different urban realities on the groundin Middle Eastern cities. The prevailing scholarship ignores the fact that theseurban subalterns redefine the meaning of urban management and de factoparticipate in determining its destiny; and they do so not through formal institutionalchannels, from which they are largely excluded, but through directactions in the very zones of exclusion. To give a different example, in early2000 Iranian analysts looking uncritically at Muslim women’s activismthrough the prism of social movement theory—developed primarily in theUnited States—concluded that there was no such a thing as a women’s movementin Iran, because certain features of Iranian women’s activities did notresemble the principal “model.” It is perhaps in this spirit that Olivier Roywarns against the kind of comparison that takes “one of the elements of comparisonas norm” while never questioning the “original configuration.”A fruitful approach would demand an analytical innovation that not onlyrejects both Middle Eastern “exceptionalism” and uncritical application ofconventional social science concepts but also thinks and introduces fresh perspectivesto observe, a novel vocabulary to speak, and new analytical toolsto make sense of specific regional realities. It is in this frame of mind that Iexamine both contentious politics and social “nonmovements” as key vehiclesto produce meaningful change in the Middle East.

CONTENTIOUS POLITICS AND SOCIAL CHANGE

A number of remarkable social and political transformations in the regionhave resulted from organized contentious endeavors of various forms, rangingfrom endemic protest actions, to durable social movements, to major revolutionarymobilizations. The constitutional revolution of 1905–6 heraldedthe end of Qajar despotism and the beginning of the era of constitutionalismin Iran. The Egyptian Revolution of 1952, led by free officers, and the IraqiRevolution of 1958 terminated long-standing monarchies and British colonialrule, augmenting republicanism and socialistic economies. In a major socialand political upheaval, the Algerians overthrew French colonial rule in 1962and established a republic.

The Islamic Revolution of 1979 galvanized millions of Iranians in a movementthat toppled the monarchy and ushered in a new era, not only in Iran,but in many nations of the Muslim world. Some twenty-five years earlier, anationalist and secular democratic movement led by Prime Minister MuhammadMossadegh had established constitutionalism, until it was crushed by acoup engineered by the CIA and the British secret service in 1953, which reinstatedthe dictatorship of the Shah. In 1985 in Sudan, a nonviolent uprising bya coalition of students, workers, and professional unions (National Alliancefor National Salvation) forced President Jaafar Numeiri’s authoritarian populistregime (born of a military coup) to step down in favor of a nationaltransitional government, paving the way for free elections and democraticgovernance. The first Palestinian intifada (1987–93) was one of the mostgrassroots-based mobilizations in the Middle East of the past century. Triggeredby a fatal accident caused by an Israeli truck driver, and against thebackdrop of years of occupation, the uprising included almost the entire Palestinianpopulation, in particular women and children, who resorted to nonviolentmethods of resistance to the occupation, such as civil disobedience,strikes, demonstrations, withholding taxes, and product boycotts. Led mainlyby the local (versus exiled) leaders, the movement built on popular committees(e.g., women’s, voluntary work, and medical relief ) to sustain itself, whileserving as an embryonic institution of a future independent Palestinianstate. More recently, the “Cedar Revolution,” a grassroots movement of some1.5 million Lebanese from all walks of life demanding meaningful sovereignty,democracy, and an end to foreign meddling, resulted in the withdrawal of Syrianforces from Lebanon in 2005. This movement came to symbolize a modelof peaceful mobilization from below that could cause momentous changein the region. At almost the same time, a nascent democracy movement inEgypt, with Kifaya at its core, mobilized thousands of middle-class professionals,students, teachers, judges, and journalists who called for a release ofpolitical prisoners and an end to emergency law, torture, and Husni Mubarak’spresidency. In a fresh perspective, this movement chose to work with “popularforces,” rather than with traditional opposition parties, bringing the campaigninto the streets instead of broadcasting it from headquarters, and focusedon domestic issues rather than international demands. As a postnationaland postideological movement, Kifaya embraced activists from diverse ideologicalorientations and gender, religious, and social groups. This novel mobilizationmanaged, after years of Islamist hegemony, nationalism, and authoritarianrule, to break the taboo of unlawful street marches, and to augment anew postnationalist, secular, and nonsectarian (democratic) politics in Egypt.It galvanized international support and compelled the Egyptian governmentto amend the constitution to allow for competitive presidential elections.More spectacularly, the nonviolent Green wave mobilized millions of Iraniansagainst the Ahmadinejad’s hard-line government (accused of fraud in thepresidential elections of June 12, 2009) pushing for democratic reform. TheGreen movement was to become a prelude to the spectacular Arab uprisingsof 2011, reminiscent of the revolutionary waves of 1848 and 1989 in Europe.The monumental revolts in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and Libya toppled longstandingdictators; and those in Syria, Bahrain, Morocco, Jordan, and Algeriashook the foundation of autocratic regimes or compelled political reforms(see Chapter 13).
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