Review: Asef Bayat,Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East

Life as Politics is a collection of essays and fieldwork articles originally published by Asef Bayat in a range of academic outlets between the years 2001 and 2009. It is a prophetic work. Published a year before the Arab uprisings, it tells much about how some of the Arab uprisings were launched through leaderless social nonmovements. The second edition of the book was updated and reprinted in 2014 with more two chapters and a foreword about his new writings about the Arab uprising and Iranian Green Movement.

Throughout this book, Bayat makes a double criticism: a critique of the Eurocentric vision that looks at the Arab world as exceptional, and a critique of approaches that are incapable of reading the historicity of Middle Eastern societies and the political actions of their actors. Considering only a classical form of formal social movements (e.g., labor and trade unions, student organizations, political parties) is an example of the Eurocentric approach to the Arab world in Bayat’s critique.

This exceptionalism is embedded in the Orientalist view that overemphasizes Islam as a cultural script that is incapable of coping with democracy and modernity. The most insightful chapter in our reading of Bayat’s book is that of ‘politics of fun’ (Chapter 6). Bayat provide us with two broad approaches that can explain the battle against fun. For him, it is not only religious reasoning that focuses on the diversion from God or faith and constitutes the principal cause for the suppression of fun, but also reasoning that revolves around modernist sensibilities, including bourgeois rationality, according to which modernity discards collective fun because of the latter’s counterdiscipline. Bayat also debunks the correlation between Islamism and violence and provides a subtle analysis of the post-Islamist trajectory in the region (Chapters 12 and 15).

By ‘nonmovements’ Bayat means the collective actions of noncollective actors such as the unemployed engaged in the informal economy, the urban poor taking over public spaces for informal housing, housewives empowered through engagement in neighborhood and informal social services, and young people aspiring to normal life by seeking fun. For us, Bayat’s major insight is that protest in the Middle East comes with the concept of ‘quiet encroachment.’ This is indeed different from survival strategies – this is everyday resistance, because the grassroots struggles have immediate consequences in terms of the redistribution of social goods in the form of the acquisition of collective consumption (e.g., land, shelter, water, electricity), public spaces, and opportunities. For him, this form of social nonmovement can have far-reaching implications for social change. The author provides an in-depth example from Egypt about illegal shelters and street workers. He shows that the police and the government cannot stop such illegal activities, though by sending mixed signals about quiet encroachment they are obliged to extend living amenities or collective consumption to the neighborhoods (where there is illegal construction).

Part I (Chapters 3–6) is the object of the analysis of ‘social nonmovements’ and the ‘quiet encroachment’ of daily life by the young, the urban poor, social activists, and women. The complexity of Bayat’s thinking appears rather in Part II (Chapters 7–11) of his book (street politics and the political street) and in Part III (Chapters 12–15), especially Chapter 12, in which he discusses whether there is a future for (Islamic) revolutions.

If there is no social movement then society is fixed and immobile, and the only hope for democratization can come from a state that is capable of reforming its apparatus. This is wrong. Chapter 2 is important in its debunking of the 2002 UN Arab Human Development Report, a manifesto that envisages economic freedom as the main form of freedom, an ‘elitist’ approach that is not only derived from a distrust of ‘politics from below’ but also a liberal imagining of the state as a neutral apparatus representing public interests (p. 39).

Through his analysis Bayat demonstrates his talent as an outstanding sociologist who is capable of reading the micro and the macro events that shape social movements. Yet, Bayat’s prophesy will explain only partially the Arab uprisings. Indeed, social nonmovements are capable of toppling regimes, like in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen, but seem incapable of engaging with the transitional period toward democracy. It may be this point that demonstrates the limits of the capacity of social nonmovements and the quiet encroachment of ordinary people to provide an alternative to a dictatorship. Islamists, such as the Muslim Brotherhood or Salafists, were the best organized in different forms (social movements and nonmovements), which allowed them to become influential in mobilizing the population for the revolution and for voting for them later on. Life as Politics seems to be a reading of Middle Eastern societies that overtheorizes the social and undertheorizes the politics. In any case, it is better to overtheorize the social than to undertheorize it. Indeed, this has been the trend for scholarship about the Arab uprisings: many writings emphasize geopolitics rather than internal social and political dynamics. What is worse is instead of looking to the ordinary taking shape in popular politics and resistance, scholarship focuses on the extra-ordinary (e.g., military action, extremism, al-Qaida).

However, to be fair, Bayat’s work is theoretically informed and engaged. The limitation of his paradigm and the inability of social nonmovements to accompany the revolution on its second day are discussed in his other writings (Bayat, 2013a, 2013b). The issue of the limitation of his paradigm in this book will be the object of my reading to Bayat’s work after 2011. In our work about who frames the academic writing about the Arab uprisings (Hanafi et al., forthcoming), we analyzed 520 articles in Arabic, English, and French. Bayat was the second most cited author (24 times) after Samuel Huntington (31 times). What qualifies Bayat as a ‘theoretically’ alternative author are two aspects. First, his work is often based on deep, longstanding empirical knowledge of two Middle Eastern societies (Egypt and Iran). Second, the complexity of his arguments reflects the complexity of the Arab uprising and connects the political to the social and economic with historical depth. For instance, he argues that the contrasting reactions of authors of the revolution – lauding and lamenting – reflect the paradoxical reality of the Arab ‘revolutions.’ Although they are considered ‘movements,’ which has been the predominant narrative, their capacity to bring about ‘change’ has been seen as less than commendable, although little, according to him, has been written about how to deal with these challenges (Bayat, 2013b: 48; reprinted as Chapter 13 of this book). Bayat argues that ‘a world in need of revolutions does not mean that it has the capacity to generate them, if it lacks the means and vision necessary for a fundamental transformation’ (Bayat, 2013b: 49). Indeed, what happened was that ‘few Arab activists [and I would add, intellectuals or scholars] had really strategized for a revolution. . . . In general, the desire was for reform, or meaningful change within the existing political arrangements’ (p. 58). This is evident in how little knowledge has been produced outside of the ‘normative’ ideology of reform. In other words, although many authors have responded positively to the revolutions, none of them have approached the issue in a truly ‘revolutionary’ way.

In light of this, Bayat refers to the Arab revolutions as ‘refolutions,’ which he describes as ‘revolutions that aim to push for reforms in, and through, the institutions of the existing regimes’ (Bayat, 2013b: 53). He argues that this is occurring in an intellectual climate dominated by the global advance of neoliberal ideology informed by the spirit of individual self-interest and accumulation. Bayat saw, until the 1990s, the predominance of three major ideological traditions that offered strategies for fundamental change in the Arab world: anti-colonial nationalism, Marxism, and Islamism (p. 54). What is obvious here is significant: that social change in local contexts is invariably influenced by global ideological shifts. Former anti-colonial revolutionaries ‘turned into administrators of the post-colonial order, they largely failed to deliver on their promises; in many instances nationalist governments devolved into autocracies, were saddled with debt, then pushed into neoliberal structural adjustment programs, if they had not already been overthrown by military coups or undermined by imperialist intrigues’ (Bayat, 2013c: 55), whereas after the 1990s, we saw the advent of what he calls the ‘post-Islamist’ trends (e.g., Tunisia’s Nahda Party), which ‘aim to transcend Islamist politics by promoting a pious society and a secular state, combining religiosity with rights, to varying degrees’ (Bayat, 2013c: 57). Bayat, like François Burgat (2010), witnessed the demise of the Arab left and the predominance of two political ideologies, neoliberalism and post-Islamist, both of which share the narrative of reform. In brief, the connection between the politics and the social was rarely well articulated by influential figures of social science. My colleagues and I demonstrated that although many think tanks (e.g., Freedom House, Economist Intelligence Unit, Arab Reform Initiative) investigate formal indices (which are helpful in tracking the micro-transformations of the Arab world), and determine which state has undergone governance change and moved towards the rule of law, they fail to consider the potential for real social and political restructuring (Hanafi, 2012).

Finally Life as Politics, and later writings by Bayat, provide an insightful voice of hope that sociopolitical alternatives to silence and violence are taking place in the region (what he called the ‘art of presence’). It is well worth reading not only by scholars but also by activists who struggle against the tyranny of the neoliberal market, the repressiveness of dictatorships, and the conservatism of moral religious entrepreneurs.