Keynote presented to the inaugural conference of the Arab Council of Social Sciences, Beirut, March 2013 What does being a crit­ical social sci­ent­ist mean in the Arab world today? Or to ask the ques­tion dif­fer­ently: How can social sci­ent­ists think Arab soci­et­ies crit­ic­ally fol­low­ing or amidst the upheavals of the last few years? Such ques­tions do not demand pre­script­ive answers nor are such pre­script­ive answers pos­sible. Rather, they work to open up a space of reflec­tion that allows vari­ous social sci­ent­ists to be crit­ical in their own way in re...

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Egypt and Tunisia appear to be a laboratory of democracy as well as an example of the cul-de-sac in which the political Islam finds itself. In both countries the Islamist parties have won – more or less democratically – the elections but are still unable to govern properly. Even worse, they are losing in popularity. This impasse has two major causes: the complex agenda which numerous foreign forces are trying to implement in the region and the internal ideological dysfunctioning which a confrontation with the true practice of power brings along, since it is a mistake to think  that a soci...

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This interview was conducted with Asef Bayat  via electronic correspondence. In it, Bayat discusses the inside-out character of neoliberal cities in the Arab world and its influence on the recent wave of protests known collectives as the Arab uprisings. In addition, Bayat elaborates on the notion of urban subalterns, and the existence of social “non-movements” of the poor and the youth. Nada Ghandour-Demiri (NGD): You recently published an article in City & Society entitled “Politics in the City-Inside-Out,” where you discuss a number of themes related to the ̶...

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Idle, Nadia & Alex Nunns (ed.) (2011) Tweets from Tahrir. New York: OR Books. “History has never been recounted in this fashion” Reading these words on the back cover of Tweets from Tahrir, indicates a remarkable change in the way history is documented. Usually history is written by historians who study the past by the rules of their discipline, and sometimes they apply a public-oriented form of historiography, by which we mean the scientific study of the way normal people comment about the distant or recent past. In addition to this, there exists a special category of books that conce...

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Recently I travelled to Egypt for an International Film Festival in Cairo. I knew that there was happening a lot in the Egyptian capital, and that this festival would be different. I knew that film culture would be influenced by the many public debates: the polemic around the new constitution, the sit-in of the opposition in Tahrir Square, the full powers by which the newly elected president wants to rule, the many discussions about how a new Egypt should look like after the uprising of January 2011. In such a context, a film festival seems trivial. When film professionals celebrated ,the seve...

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In a lovely little panegyric for the distinguished European philosopher Slavoj Zizek, published recently on Al Jazeera, we read: There are many important and active philosophers today: Judith Butler in the United States, Simon Critchley in England, Victoria Camps in Spain, Jean-Luc Nancy in France, Chantal Mouffe in Belgium, Gianni Vattimo in Italy, Peter Sloterdijk in Germany and in Slovenia, Slavoj Zizek, not to mention others working in Brazil, Australia and China. ” Why is European philosophy “philosophy”, but African philosophy ethnophilosophy ” What immediately s...

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Palestine’s status has recently been upgraded to a non-member observer state in the United Nations (UN). The resolution of the General Assembly at the UN was passed with 138 votes in favour, 9 against, and 41 abstentions. Among the EU member states 14 voted for, 12 member states – including Germany and the United Kingdom – abstained, and the Czech Republic voted against. Does Europe’s divided voice implies that the EU-Israel relations are in a downward spiral, as is suggested? Despite the recent diplomatic victory of the Palestinians at the UN, Palestine as a UN member state à part en...

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It is impossible to exaggerate the significance of the momentous events that have drawn global attention to Egypt as its people continue to struggle with the unfolding drama of their revolution. There are two evidently opportunistic events that have come together to signal a dreadful attempt by the Muslim Brotherhood to claim the entirety of the Egyptian revolution for themselves, pretty much on the same model that the Shia clerics hijacked the Iranian revolution of 1977-1979 – with the crucial difference that Egyptians in their tens of thousands have poured into their streets and are fa...

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Monday 10 Dec 2012 On Friday morning, and as Egypt’s resurgent revolution was preparing to lock horns yet again with forces bent on its destruction, I received (an exceedingly) long distance call from an Australian broadcast journalist. They wanted a phone interview with me on the confrontation between “the Muslim Brotherhood and the pro-Mubarak forces,” explained the female voice on the other side of the line. Utterly baffled by the bizarre question, it took me a while to reply. Finally, with admittedly a nasty chuckle, I said it seemed that by the time Egypt’s news gets half way acro...

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In the dark of night, on 14 November, the United Nations Security Council met to discuss Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. As elections in Israel are on the horizon, the Israeli Defense Force conducted an extra-judicial assassination of Hamas’ Ahmad Jabari, who only hours beforehand had received a draft of a permanent truce agreement with Israel (according to Nir Hasson at Haaretz). Jabari’s assassination was followed by a barrage by Israeli aircraft and warships. A few rockets were fired from Gaza, but these have had a negligible impact. ” The war on Gaza is not between two armed for...

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When Fred Halliday—scholar, activist, journalist and teacher—died two years ago at the too-early age of 64, obituaries and tributes swamped the British press; the New Statesman subtitled its remembrance “The death of a great internationalist.” Halliday was a truly original thinker, a combination of Hannah Arendt (in her concern for the connection between ethics and politics) and Isaac Deutscher (in his materialist yet supple approach to history). Halliday also knew a little something about the Middle East: he spoke Arabic, Farsi and at least seven other languages, and he traveled widel...

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An incident at the Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement in Tehran in September must have confirmed the Saudis’ worst fears. Iranian state television broadcast a faulty translation of the speech made by the Egyptian president, Mohammed Mursi, who denounced the Syrian government as an “oppressive regime”. The TV version of his speech referred to Bahrain, not Syria. Entire parts of sentences were manipulated. Iran and Saudi Arabia are competing for hegemony in the Gulf region. King Abdullah and the Saudi leadership fear nothing more than Iranian dominance, and at worst one that is...

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The last century started with the discussion about The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1). In the first decades of the 20th century, cinema was seen as the new big epistemological change infecting the human representation of the world and the human thought. New technologies like social media and internet are of similar importance nowadays. ” The image plays a bigger role than ever in forming public opinion and therefore its political translation. This is particularly clear in the way the most shocking conflicts of our time were dealt with: Bosnia and the Balkans, Iraq...

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During the past one and a half years I have given many lectures on the ‘Arab Spring’. Invariably, I ask my audience whether they can remember what their image of Tunisia or Egypt used to be before the uprisings of 2011. Usually, after some hesitance, a few people are able to recollect: ‘touristy, stable, beaches’ (Tunisia) and ‘used to be dangerous, snorkeling, stable’ (Egypt). I ask this question in order to point out that most of us used to be oblivious to the fact that Tunisia and Egypt were dictatorial police states, decisively supported by the west. Neither western political l...

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The upcoming 2013 presidential election in Iran seems to be activating and deepening the fissures within the Iranian opposition. While parts of the opposition have started deliberating and discussing about participation in the election, other sections oppose participating on principle. A prominent reformist strategist, for example, suggested that election is “an opportunity for organizing and action.” Meanwhile, another famous activist journalist wrote that the only possible election in 2013 is one with the participation of regime “insiders” and no chance for pro-democracy forces to pa...

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The Middle East is facing an acute danger of war, with unpredictable and potentially devastating consequences for the states and populations of the region. A ‘shadow war’ is already being waged — by Israel and the United States against Iran; by a coalition of countries against Syria; and by the great powers against each other. A mere spark could set this tinder alight. The threat of a hot war is coming from three main directions: first, from Israel’s relentless and increasingly hysterical war-mongering against Iran; second, from America’s geopolitical ambitions in the oil-rich Gu...

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