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Life as Politics

Stanford University Press

Contents

Preface..........................................................................ixAcknowledgments..................................................................xi1 Introduction: The Art of Presence.............................................12 Transforming the Arab Middle East: Dissecting a Manifesto.....................273 The Quiet Encroachment of the Ordinary........................................434 The Poor and the Perpetual Pursuit of Life Chances............................665 Feminism of Everyday Life.....................................................966 Reclaiming Youthfulness.......................................................1157 The Politics of Fun...........................................................1378 A Street Named "Revolution"...................................................1619 Does Radical Islam Have an Urban Ecology?.....................................17110 Everyday Cosmopolitanism.....................................................18511 The "Arab Street"............................................................20912 Is There a Future for Islamic Revolutions?...................................22113 No Silence, No Violence: Post-Islamist Trajectory............................241Notes............................................................................253Index............................................................................297

Chapter One

The Art of Presence

THERE IS NO SHORTAGE of views, whether regional or international, suggesting that the Middle East has fallen into disarray. We continue to read how the personal income of Arabs is among the lowest in the world, despite their massive oil revenues. With declining productivity, poor scientific research, decreasing school enrollment, and high illiteracy, and with health conditions lagging behind comparable nations, Arab countries seem to be "richer than they are developed." The unfortunate state of social development in the region is coupled with poor political governance. Authoritarian regimes ranging from Iran, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco to the sheikhdoms of the Persian Gulf, and chiefly Saudi Arabia (incidentally, most with close ties to the West), continue to frustrate demands for democracy and the rule of law, prompting (religious) opposition movements that espouse equally undemocratic, exclusive, and oft en violent measures. Not surprisingly, the current conditions have caused much fear in the West about the international destabilizing ramifications of this seeming social and political stagnation.

Thus, never before has the region witnessed such a cry for change. The idea that "everywhere the world has changed except for the Middle East" has assumed a renewed prominence, with different domestic and international constituencies expressing different expectations as to how to instigate change in this region. Some circles hope for a revolutionary transformation through a sudden upsurge of popular energy to overturn the unjust structures of power and usher in development and democracy. If the Iranian Revolution, not so long ago, could sweep aside a long-standing monarchy in less than two years, why couldn't such movement be forged in the region today? This is a difficult position to sustain. It is doubtful that revolutions can ever be planned. Even though revolutionaries do engage in plotting and preparing, revolutions do not necessarily result from prior schemes. Rather, they oft en follow their own intriguing logic, subject to a highly complex mix of structural, international, coincidental, and psychological factors. We oft en analyze revolutions in retrospect, rarely engaging in ones that are expected or desired, for revolutions are never predictable. On the other hand, most people do not particularly wish to be involved in violent revolutionary movements. People oft en express doubt about engaging in revolution, whose outcome they cannot foresee. They oft en prefer to remain "free riders," wanting others to carry out revolutions on their behalf. Furthermore, are revolutions necessarily desirable? Those who have experienced them usually identify violent revolutions with massive disruption, destruction, and uncertainty. After all, nothing guarantees that a just social order will result from a revolutionary change. Finally, even assuming that revolutions are desirable and can be planned, what are people under authoritarian rule to do in the meantime?

Given these constraints, an alternative view postulates that instead of waiting for an uncertain revolution, change should be instigated by committing states to undertaking sustained social and political reforms. Such a nonviolent strategy of reform requires powerful social forces-social movements (of workers, the poor, women, youth, students, and broader democracy movements) or genuine political parties-to challenge political authorities and hegemonize their claims. Indeed, many activists and NGOs in the Middle East are 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. How are social and political movements to keep up when authoritarian regimes exhibit a great intolerance toward organized activism, when the repression of civil-society organizations has been a hallmark of most Middle Eastern states?

It should not, therefore, come as a surprise that growing segments of people, frustrated by the political stalemate, lament that although most people in the Middle East suffer under the status quo, they remain repressed, atomized, and passive. Popular activism, if any, goes little beyond occasional, albeit angry, protests, with most of them directed by Islamists against the West and Israel, and less against their own repressive states to commit to a democratic order. Since there is slight or no agency to challenge the ossified status quo, the argument goes, change should come from outside, by way of economic, political, and even military pressure. Even the Arab Human Development Report, arguably the most significant manifesto for change in the Arab Middle East, is inclined to seek a "realistic solution" of a "western-supported project of gradual and moderate reform aiming at liberalization." Still, the perception that the Middle East remains "unchangeable" has far greater resonance outside the region, notably in the West and among policy circles, the mainstream media, and many think tanks. Indeed, a strong "exceptionalist" outlook informs the whole edifice of the "democracy promotion industry" in the West, which pushes for instigating change through outside powers, one which does not exclude the use of force.

The idea of Middle Eastern exceptionalism is not new. Indeed, for a long time now, change in Middle Eastern societies has been approached with a largely western Orientalist outlook whose history goes back to the eighteenth century, if not earlier. Mainstream Orientalism tends to depict the Muslim Middle East as a monolithic, fundamentally static, and thus "peculiar" entity. By focusing on a narrow notion of (a rather static) culture-one that is virtually equated with the religion of Islam-Middle Eastern societies are characterized more in terms of historical continuity than in terms of change....