Thursday's Read: Life as Politics

Asef Bayat. Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East. (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009)
 


Urban social theorist Asef Bayat’s Life as Politics (2009), a collection of independent essays written throughout the past decade, is remarkably prescient, reading almost like a primer on the still unfolding revolutionary movements in the Middle East and North Africa. Bayat begins his discussion with what he coins “social nonmovements,” a word denoting unconventional forms of activism and agency that are often ignored in scholarship because they do not fall within normative social science categories. Instead of the “Middle East exceptionalism” model – long acknowledged as inadequate if not vaguely orientalist – Bayat proposes what he calls “quiet encroachment” to describe the urban grassroots activism of the global South. Bayat describes how the urban poor act “to acquire the basic necessities of life in a quiet and unassuming illegal fashion” (67). This is a “power of presence” through which the urban poor, particularly women, discover “new spaces of freedom to make oneself heard, seen, felt and realized” (112). Moving to the second part of the book, Bayat describes the street as political arena, offering examples of parks, squares, alleys, and thoroughfares from Cairo, Tehran, and Istanbul. As a space of public political performance, local actors can engage in protest with authorities and simultaneously form networks among their fellows. Bayat is, moreover, dubious of the relationship often painted between Islamism, poverty, and radicalization as though it were a foregone conclusion. Rather, he points to the relationship between Copts and Muslims within Egypt as an example of the obvious ability of individuals to “transcend” their divisions and “associate with agonistic others in everyday life” (187). Bayat concludes with a section on “post-Islamism” in which he suggests that we are asking the wrong question with “Is Islam compatible with democracy?” The right one is, rather, how can Muslims reconcile the two through daily life.