The “Arab Street”
Asef Bayat
In the tense weeks between the September 11 attacks and the first US bombing raids over Afghanistan, and continuing until the fall of the Taliban, commentators raised serious concerns over what the Wall Street Journal later called the “irrational Arab street.”1 If the US attacked a Muslim country, the pundits worried, would the “Arab street” rally behind Osama bin Laden and other radical Islamists, endangering US interests in the region and rendering George W. Bush’s “war on terrorism” a troublesome, if not doomed, venture from the outset? As US troops prepared to deploy in Afghanistan, some officials in Washington implored Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to exercise restraint in his campaign to crush the Palestinian uprising by force. Should Israeli incursions into Palestinian territory continue during the US assault on the Taliban, they feared, the simmering rage of the Arab masses might “boil over,” leaving the local gendarmes powerless to prevent the furious crowds from attacking Americans, trashing US property, and threatening the stability of friendly Arab regimes. Senator Joseph Biden broached the possibility that “every US embassy in the Middle East [would be] burned to the ground.”2
Beginning with the war in Afghanistan, and continuing through the major Israeli offensives in the West Bank and the build-up to Bush’s war on Iraq, the “Arab street” became a minor household word in the West, bandied about in the media as a subject of profound anxiety and an object of withering condescension. The “Arab street,” and by extension, the “Muslim street,” became code words that immediately invoked a reified and essentially “abnormal” mindset, as well as a strange place filled with angry people who, whether because they hate us or just don’t understand us, must shout imprecations against us. Arab or other Muslim actions were described almost exclusively in terms of “mobs, riots, revolts,”3 leading to the logical conclusion that “Western standards for measuring public opinion simply don’t apply” in the Arab world. At any time, American readers were reminded, protesting Arab masses might shed their unassuming appearance and “suddenly turn into a mob, powerful enough to sweep away governments”—notably the “moderate” Arab governments who remained loyal allies of the US.4
Worries about the Arab street notwithstanding, US forces did move into Afghanistan, US bombs did kill Afghan civilians in their thousands, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict cooled off only briefly, and Bush moved full speed ahead with plans to attack Iraq. But, though numerous protests in the Muslim and Arab worlds did occur, no US embassy was burned to the ground. Nor did the Arab and Muslim masses rally behind bin Laden. Only when Israel invaded the West Bank in the spring of 2002 did ordinary people in the Arab world collectively explode with outrage. The millions of Arab citizens who poured into the streets of Cairo, Amman, Rabat, and many other cities to express sympathy with the Palestinians stirred memories of how Arab anti-colonial movements in the postwar period were driven from below. But because the “Arab street” had not erupted at the possible US bombing in Afghanistan during Ramadan, this very real example of latent popular anger in the Arab world was airily dismissed. Abruptly, the image of the “Arab street” shifted from an unpredictable powder keg to a “myth” and a “bluff,” somehow kept alive despite the fact that Arab countries were filled with “brainwashed” people trapped in “apathy.”5 The implication for US policymaking was clear: Arabs do not have the guts to stop an attack on Iraq or any other unpopular US initiative, and therefore the US should express “not sensitivity, but resolution” in the face of remonstrations from Arab allies.6 Neither the slogans of the actual demonstrators nor the insistence of Arab governments that they faced unbearable pressure from their populations needed to be taken at face value. The Economist declared the “death” of the Arab street, once and for all. It was not long before National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice concluded that because the Arab peoples were too weak to demand democracy, the US should intervene to liberate the Arab world from its tyrants.7
STREET POLITICS AND THE POLITICAL STREET
In the narratives of the Western media, the Arab street is damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t—it is either “irrational” and “aggressive” or it is “apathetic” and “dead.” There is little chance of its salvation as something Western societies might recognize as familiar. The Arab street thus becomes an extension of another infamous concept, the “Arab mind,” which likewise reifies the culture and collective conduct of an entire people in a violent abstraction.8 It is another subject of Orientalist imagination, reminiscent of colonial representation of the “other,” which sadly has been internalized by some Arab selves. By no simple oversight, the Arab street is seldom regarded as an expression of public opinion and collective sentiment—as its Western counterpart often is—but is perceived primarily as a physical entity, a brute force expressed in riots and mob violence. The Arab street matters only in its violent imaginary, when it is poised to imperil interests or disrupt grand strategies. The street that conveys the collective sentiment is a nonissue, because the US can and often does safely ignore it. Such perceptions of the “Arab street” have informed Washington’s approach to the Middle East—flouting Arab public opinion with its increasingly unequivocal support for Israel as it proceeded to dismantle the Palestinian Authority, and simultaneously with the determination to wage war on Iraq.
But street politics in general and the Arab street in particular are more complex. Neither is the street a mere physicality or brute force, nor is the Arab street simply inert. The Arab street is an expression not simply of street politics in general, but primarily of what I like to call the “political street.” Street politics represents the modern urban theater of contention par excellence. We need only to remember the role the “street” has played in such monumental political upheavals as the French Revolution, nineteenth-century labor movements, anti-colonial struggles, the anti–Vietnam War movement in the US, the Velvet Revolutions in Eastern Europe, and, perhaps, the global anti-war movement of the early 2000s. The street, in this sense, is the chief locus of politics for ordinary people, those who are structurally absent from the institutional positions of power—the unemployed, casual workers, migrants, people of the underworld, and housewives. It serves as a key medium wherein sentiments and outlooks are formed, spread, and expressed in unique fashion.
But “street politics” enjoys another dimension. That is, it is about more than just conflict between the authorities and the de-institutionalized or informal population over the active use of public space and the control of public order. Streets as spaces of flow and movement are not only where people protest, but also where they extend their protest beyond their immediate circles to include also the unknown, the “strangers” who might espouse similar grievances, real or imagined. That is why not only the de-institutionalized groups such as the unemployed, but also actors with some institutional power, like workers or students, find the street to be a useful arena for the extension of collective sentiments. It is this pandemic potential that threatens the authorities, who as a result exert a pervasive power over public spaces with police patrols, traffic regulation, and spatial division. Students at Cairo University, for example, often staged protest marches inside the campus in the Mubarak era. The moment they came out into the street, however, riot police were immediately and massively deployed to encircle the demonstrators, push them into a corner away from public view, and keep the protest a local event. Indeed, this heavily guarded actual street pointed to the fact that the metaphorical street was not deserted so much as it was controlled.
Beyond serving as the physical place for “street politics,” urban streets also signify a different but crucial symbolic utterance, one that transcends the physicality of the street, to convey the collective sentiments of a nation or community. This I call the political street—a notion that is distinct from “street politics.” The political street signifies the collective sensibilities, shared feelings, and public judgments of ordinary people in their day-to-day utterances and practices, which are expressed broadly in the public square—in taxis and buses, in shops and on sidewalks, or more audibly in mass street demonstrations. The Arab street (and by extension the “Muslim street”) should be seen in such terms as the expression of collective sentiments in the Arab public sphere.
THE SHIFTING ARAB STREET
How does the Arab world fare in terms of its “political street”? Arab anti-colonial struggles attest to the active history of the Arab street. Popular movements arose in Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Lebanon during the late 1950s after Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. The unsuccessful tripartite aggression by Britain, France, and Israel in October 1956 to reclaim control of the canal caused an outpouring of popular protest in Arab countries in support of Egypt. Although 1956 was probably the last major pan-Arab solidarity movement until the pro-Palestinian wave of 2002, social protests by workers, artisans, women, and students calling for domestic social development, citizens’ rights, and political participation have been documented.9 Labor movements in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Yemen, and Morocco have carried out strikes or street protests over both bread-and-butter and political issues. Since the 1980s, when the era of IMF-recommended structural adjustment programs began in earnest, Arab labor unions have tried to resist cancellation of consumer commodity subsidies, price rises, pay cuts, and layoffs. Despite no-strike deals and repression of activists, wildcat stoppages have occurred. Fear of popular resistance has often forced governments, as in Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco, to delay structural adjustment programs and retain certain social policies.10
When traditional social contracts are violated, Arab populations have reacted swiftly. The 1980s saw numerous urban protests over the spiraling cost of living. In August 1983, the Moroccan government reduced consumer subsidies by 20 percent, triggering urban unrest in the north and elsewhere. Similar protests took place in Tunis in 1984 and in Khartoum in 1982 and 1985. In the summer of 1987, the rival factions in the Lebanese civil war joined hands to stage an extensive street protest against a drop in the value of the Lebanese currency. Algeria was struck by cost-of-living riots in the fall of 1988, and Jordanians staged nationwide protests in 1989, over the plight of the Palestinians and economic hardship, forcing the late King Hussein to introduce cautious measures of political liberalization. Lifting subsidies in 1996 provoked a new wave of street protests, leading the king to restrict freedom of expression and assembly.11 In Egypt in 1986, low-ranking army officers took to the streets to protest the Mubarak regime’s decision to extend military service. The unrest quickly spread to other sectors of society.
While the lower and middle classes formed the core of urban protests, college students often joined in. But student movements have had their own contentious agendas. In Egypt, the 1970s marked the heyday of a student activism dominated by leftist trends. Outraged opposition to the Camp David peace treaty and economic austerity brought thousands of students out into urban streets. Earlier years had seen students organizing conferences, strikes, sit-ins, and marches, and producing newspapers for the walls, the “freest of publications.”12 In 1991, students in Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Jordan, Yemen, and Sudan demonstrated to express anger against both the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the US-led war to drive Iraq out of Kuwait. Starting in 1986, Palestinian students were among the most frequent participants in actions of the first intifada, often undeterred by the Israeli army’s policies of arresting or shooting students and closing down Palestinian universities.
Things changed drastically for the Arab street during the 1990s. The pace of cost-of-living protests slowed, as governments enacted structural adjustment programs more slowly and cautiously, deployed safety nets such as social funds (Egypt and Jordan), and allowed Islamic NGOs and charities to help out the poor. Indeed, the Arab world showed the lowest incidence of extreme poverty in the world’s developing regions.13 Meanwhile, the discontent of the impoverished middle classes was channeled into the Islamist movements in general, and the politicization of professional syndicates in particular.
During this period, the more traditional class-based movements—notably, peasant organizations, cooperative movements, and trade unions—seemed to be in relative decline. As peasants moved to the city from the countryside, or lost their land to become rural day laborers, the social basis of peasant and cooperative movements eroded. The weakening of economic populism, closely linked to structural adjustment, led to the decline of public-sector employment, which constituted the core of state-sanctioned trade unionism. Through reform, downsizing, privatization, and relocation, structural adjustment undermined the unionized public sector. New private enterprises linked to international capital were largely union-free. Although the state bureaucracy remains weighty to this day, its underpaid employees are unorganized, and a large proportion of them survive by taking second or third jobs in the informal sector. Currently, much of the Arab workforce is self-employed. Many wage earners work in small enterprises where paternalistic relations prevail. On average, between one third and one half of the urban workforce is involved in the unregulated, unorganized informal sector.
Although the explosive growth of NGOs since the 1980s heralded autonomous civic activism, NGOs are premised on the politics of fragmentation. NGOs divide the potential beneficiaries of their activism into small groups, substitute charity for principles of rights and accountability, and foster insider lobbying rather than street politics. It was largely the advocacy of NGOs, involved in human rights, women’s rights, and democratization—not wealth and income gaps—which offered different and new spaces for social mobilization during the 1990s in the Arab world.
As people relied more on informal activities and their loyalties were fragmented, struggles for wages and conditions lost ground to concerns over jobs, informal work conditions, and affordable cost of living, while rapid urbanization increased demands for urban services, shelter, decent housing, health, and education. Under such conditions, the Arab grassroots resorted not to politics of collective protest but to the individualistic strategy of “quiet encroachment.” Individuals and families strove to acquire basic necessities (land for shelter, urban collective consumption, informal jobs, and business opportunities) in a prolonged and unassuming, though illegal, fashion. Instead of organizing a march to demand electricity, for example, the disenfranchised simply tapped into the municipal power grid without authorization.
Thus, in the Arab world, the political class par excellence remained the educated middle class—state employees, students, professionals, and the intelligentsia—who mobilized the “street” in the 1950s and 1960s with overarching ideologies of nationalism, Ba‘athism, socialism, and social justice. Islamism has been the latest of these grand worldviews. With its core support coming from the worse-off middle layers, the Islamist movements succeeded for two decades in activating large numbers of the disenchanted population with cheap Islamization—moral and cultural purity, affordable charity work, and identity politics. By the mid-1990s, however, it became clear that the Islamists could not go very far with more costly Islamization—establishing an Islamic polity and economy and conducting international relations compatible with the modern national and global citizenry. Islamist rule faced crisis where it was put into practice (as in Iran and Sudan). Elsewhere, violent strategies failed (as in Egypt and Algeria), and thus new visions about the Islamic project developed. The Islamist movements were either repressed or became resigned to a revision of their earlier outlooks.
Anti-Islamic sentiment in the West following the September 11, 2001 events, and the subsequent “war on terrorism,” have undoubtedly reinforced a feeling that Islam is under global attack, strengthening the languages of religiosity and nativism. Several Islamist parties that, among other things, expressed opposition to US policies scored considerable successes in national elections. The Justice and Development Party in Morocco doubled its share to forty-two seats in the September 2002 elections. In October 2002, the Islamist movement came in third in Algerian local elections, and the alliance of religious parties in Pakistan won fifty-three out of 150 parliamentary seats. In November, Islamists won nineteen out of the total forty parliamentary seats in Bahrain, and the Turkish Justice and Development Party captured 66 percent of the legislature. These electoral victories, however, pointed less to a “revival of Islamism”14 than to a shift of Islamism—from a political project with national concerns, into a more fragmented language concerned with personal piety and the global menace of antipathy toward Islam. If anything, we are on the threshold of a post-Islamist turn.15
Whatever its merit, a major legacy of Islamism has been to change the Arab states. It rendered the Arab states more religious (as they moved to rob Islamism of its moral authority), more nativist or nationalist (as they moved to assert their Arab authenticity and to disown democracy as a Western construct), and more repressive, since the liquidation of radical Islamists offered states the opportunity to control other forms of dissent. This legacy of the Islamist movements has further complicated the politics of dissent in today’s Arab world.
A RENEWAL
The revival of the “Arab street” in 2002 in solidarity with the Palestinians was truly spectacular. For a short while, states lost their tight control, and publicly vocal opposition groups proliferated, even within the “Westernized” and “apolitical” student body at the American University in Cairo. The Palestinian solidarity movement showed that there is more to Arab street politics than Islamism, and spurred the renewal of a political tradition.
In January 2003, as the US moved closer to attacking Iraq, one million Yemenis marched in Sana‘a, chanting, “The declaration of war is terrorism.” Over 10,000 protested in Khartoum, thousands in Damascus and Rabat, and hundreds in the Bahraini capital of Manama.16 Twenty thousand Christians in Jordan staged a prayer for the people of Iraq, condemning Bush’s war.17 One thousand Yemeni women demonstrated in the streets to protest the arrest of a Yemeni citizen mistaken for an al-Qaeda member in Germany.18 Large and small protest actions against war on Iraq continued in Egypt and other Arab countries, amid massive deployments of police. And with the US–British invasion of Iraq, street protests throughout the Arab world assumed a new momentum.
At least with regard to Palestine, the tremendous rise of the Arab street occurred with the tacit approval of the Arab states. The extremity of Israel’s violence during the 2002 invasions and the later invasion of Iraq by US forces brought the politicians and the people together in common nationalist sentiments. In addition, street dissent was directed largely against an outside adversary, and protesters’ slogans against their own governments were voiced primarily by ideological leaders rather than ordinary participants.19 Only in the later Cairo rallies of 2005 and 2006 did crowds demand the repeal of the thirty-year-old Emergency Law that continued to hamper public assembly, as well as an end to Husni Mubarak’s presidency. These rallies then evolved into an explicitly pro-democracy movement led by Kifaya and other political groupings.
These movements came up against the state’s intolerance of independent dissent. Since 2000 the authorities had ignored demands for collective protests against the US and Israel, while unofficial street actions faced intimidation and assault, with activists being harassed and detained.20 On February 15, 2003, the day that over ten million people throughout the world demonstrated against the US war on Iraq, thousands of Egyptian riot police squeezed some 500 demonstrators into a corner, separating them from the public.
Faced with formidable challenges to expression in the street, Arab activists developed new means of articulating dissent, mostly in the form of civic campaigns encompassing boycotts, cyber-activism, and protest art. As the Arab states exercised surveillance over the streets, activism was pushed inside the confines of civil institutions—college campuses, schools, mosques, professional associations, and NGOs. Given the lack of a free political climate, professional associations offered venues for political campaigns, to the extent that they often assumed the role of political parties where intense competition for leadership prevailed. Their headquarters served as sites for political rallies, meetings, charity work, and international solidarity campaigns. Other civil associations, chiefly the new advocacy NGOs, began to promote public debates on human rights, democratization, women’s and children’s rights, and labor rights. In the early 2000s, some ninety to a hundred human rights organizations operated in the Arab world, along with hundreds of social service centers, and many more social service organizations that began to employ the language of rights in their work.21
Innovations in mobilization, styles of communication, and organizational flexibility brought a breath of fresh air to stagnant nationalist politics in the early 2000s. The Egyptian Popular Committee for Solidarity with the Palestinian Intifada represented one such trend. Set up in October 2000, the Committee brought together representatives from Egypt’s various political trends—leftists, nationalists, Islamists, women’s rights groups, and others. It set up a website, developed a mailing list, initiated charity collections, organized boycotts of American and Israeli products, revived street actions, and collected 200,000 signatures on petitions to close down the Israeli embassy in Cairo. The Egyptian Anti-Globalization Group and the National Campaign Against the War on Iraq, as well as the Committee for the Defense of Workers’ Rights and some human rights NGOs, adopted similar styles of activism.22 These organizations and their brand of mobilization served as the precursor for the emergence of a new kind of politics in Egypt, later galvanized by Kifaya and other pro-democracy movements.23
Grassroots charity, boycotts, and product campaigns became new mediums of political mobilization. Collecting food and medicine for Palestinians involved thousands of young volunteers and hundreds of companies and organizations. In April 2002, students at the American University in Cairo gathered thirty 250-ton truckloads of charitable products from factories, companies, and homes in the space of four days and nights, bringing them to Palestinians in Gaza. Millions of Arabs and Muslims joined in boycotting American and Israeli products, including McDonald’s, KFC, Starbucks, Nike, and Coca-Cola. The remarkable success of local products caused Coca-Cola to lose some 20 to 40 percent of its market share in some countries, while fast-food companies also lost sales.24 The Iranian Zamzam Cola captured a sizable Middle Eastern market; within four months, the company exported 10 million cans to Saudi Arabia and Persian Gulf states. Alongside Zamzam, Mecca Cola appeared in Paris to cater to European Arabs and Muslims who boycotted the US beverages. It sold 2.2 million bottles in France within two months. Mecca Cola allocated 10 percent of its revenue to Palestinian children.
Information technology was also increasingly employed to mobilize political campaigns. “Small media” has a long history in the Middle East. The sermons of Islamic preachers like Sheikh Kishk, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Sheikh Fadlallah, and the popular Egyptian televangelist ‘Amr Khalid had been disseminated on a massive scale through audio and videocassettes. Followers of ‘Amr Khalid, banned from preaching in late 2002, gathered over 10,000 signatures in his support via websites. Later, activists used emails to publicize claims and mobilize for rallies and demonstrations. These mediums proved instrumental in disseminating news, calling for rallies and street mobilization. In February 2003, the Egyptian Coalition in Solidarity with Palestine and Iraq planned to send 1 million petitions to the UN and the US and British embassies in Cairo, via the Internet.
Alternative news websites, social networking tools, and satellite television emerged as the most important means of forming networks of critical and informed constituencies. The increasing use of Facebook allowed Egyptian youth in 2008 to build what came to be known as the April 6 Movement. The “movement” mobilized some 70,000 mostly educated youths who called for free speech, economic welfare, and an end to corruption. Activists succeeded in organizing street protests and rallies and, more spectacularly, in initiating a general strike on April 6, 2008 in support of striking textile workers. Social networking has gained considerable ground in most Arab countries, where Facebook is among the ten most visited sites on the Internet.25 In addition, satellite TV has been rapidly spreading in the Arab world, bringing alternative information to break the hold of the barren domestic news channels. The skyline of Damascus, bristling with satellite dishes, helps to explain the desolation of the street newsstands where the ruling party’s dailies are displayed.
While cyber-campaigns still remain limited to the elite (despite increasing Internet use), the politics of the arts reaches a mass audience. The Israeli reoccupation of the West Bank in 2002 revived the political legacy of Egypt’s Umm Kulthoum, Lebanon’s Fairouz, and Morocco’s Ahmad Sanoussi. Arab artists, movie stars, painters, and especially singers became oracles of public outrage. In Egypt, major pop stars such as ‘Amr Diab, Muhammad Munir, and Mustafa Qamar produced best-selling albums that featured exclusively religious and nationalist lyrics. Muhammad Munir’s high-priced single, “Land and Peace, O Prophet of God,” sold 100,000 copies in a short period. Other singers, including ‘Ali al-Hajjar, Muhammad Tharwat, and Hani Shakir, joined together to produce the religio-nationalistic album “Al-Aqsa, O God,” which cornered Arab marketplaces.
The scope and efficacy of these new spaces of contention initially seemed modest. Yet attempts by most Arab governments to control them—closing NGOs, banning publications or songs, arresting web designers—offered a hint of their potential to overcome impediments facing the Arab street. The street remains the most vital locus for the audible expression of collective sentiments, so long as the local regimes or the global powers ignore popularly held views. As the revolutions of 2011 demonstrated, the Arab street was neither “irrational” nor “dead” in the preceding decade. Instead, it underwent a major transformation, caused both by old constraints and the new opportunities brought about by global restructuring. As a means and mode of expression, the Arab street shifted, becoming once more a powerful vehicle for the expression of collective grievances.