The Crisis of Citizenship in The Arab World (2017)

The Crisis of Citizenship in the Arab World
Social, Economic and Political

Studies of the Middle East
and Asia
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VOLUME 116
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The Crisis of Citizenship in the
Arab World
Edited By
Roel Meijer
Nils Butenschøn
LEIDEN | BOSTON
Cover image: photo anp/Omar Sanadiki. Residents arrive on foot to inspect their homes in the Wadi
Al-Sayeh district at the al-Khalidiyeh area in Homs May 14, 2014.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Meijer, Roel, editor. | Butenschøn, Nils A. (Nils August), 1949-,

editor.
Title: The crisis of citizenship in the Arab world / edited By Roel Meijer,
Nils Butenschøn.
Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2017] | Series: Social, economic and
political studies of the middle east ; V. 116 | Includes bibliographical
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Contents
Acknowledgements ix
List of Tables x
List of Contributors xi
Introduction: The Crisis of Citizenship in the Arab World 1

Roel Meijer and Nils Butenschøn
PART 1
The Arab Social Pact
1 The British Legacy in the Middle East 41

Anthony Gorman
2 Citizenship, Social Pacts, Authoritarian Bargains, and the

Arab Uprisings 67
Roel Meijer
3 Syria: Identity, State Formation, and Citizenship 105

Raymond Hinnebusch and Ola Rifai
4 The Tunisian Revolution and the Question of Citizenship 129

Sami Zemni
5 Patronage and Democratic Citizenship in Morocco 149

James Sater
6 Like but not Same as… : Arab Citizenship and the

Jordanian Experience 175
Morten Valbjørn
7 Social Contract in the Al Saʿud Monarchy: From Subjects to

Citizens? 203
Ida Nicolaisen Almestad and Stig Stenslie
8 Migration and the Marginality of Citizenship in the Arab Gulf Region:

Human Security and High Modernist Tendencies 224
James Sater
vi Contents
9 The Arab Spring and the “Iron Triangle”: Regime Survival and the
Conditions of Citizenship in the Arab Middle East 246
Nils A. Butenschøn
PART 2
Concepts of Citizenship
10 Muslim Subjects and the Rights of God 273

Knut S. Vikør
11 The Struggle for Equality and Citizenship in Arab Political Thought:

Ideological Debates and Conceptual Change 296
Michaelle Browers
12 Brothers and Citizens: The Second Wave of Islamic Institutional

Thinking and the Concept of Citizenship 320
Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen
13 The Ambiguity of Citizenship in Contemporary Salafism 338

Emin Poljarevic
14 Citizenship, Public Order, and State Sovereignty: Article 3 of the

Egyptian Constitution and the “Divinely Revealed Religions” 375
Rachel M. Scott
PART 3
Practices of Citizenship
15 The Effects of Patronage Systems and Clientelism on Citizenship in

the Middle East 409
Robert Springborg
16 Female Citizenship and the Franchise in Kuwait after 2005 435

Rania Maktabi
17 The Narrow Path: Acts of Citizenship by the Arab Youth

Lessons from Egypt and Morocco 471
Assia Boutaleb
Contents vii
18 The Bidun Protest Movement as an Act of Citizenship 488

Claire Beaugrand
19 Citizenship Studies and the Middle East 511

Engin F. Isin
Index 535
Acknowledgements
This book is the product of the cooperation between Nils Butenschøn at The
Norwegian Centre for Human Rights (nchr) at the Faculty of Law, University
of Oslo and Roel Meijer, Islam Studies, Faculty of Philosophy, Theology and
Religious Studies, Radboud University, Nijmegen. In 2012, under the impression
of the Arab uprisings in 2010–2011, they decided to initiate a project to study the
concept of citizenship and how it applies to the Middle East and North Africa
region. The Arab Uprisings exposed in our view an unprecedented crisis in the
relationship between state authorities and the citizens of the Arab countries.
There is a need for a deeper understanding of the nature of this crisis. The
citizenship approach as presented in this book is an attempt to meet this need.
A research project was set up at the nchr headed by Nils Butenschøn.
A workshop of international experts was organised in March 2013, hosted by
Sami Zemni, Director of the Middle East & North Africa Research Group, Ghent
University to discuss the academic and practical potentials of the project. It
was decided to follow up the work, and a working group headed by Roel Meijer
and Nils Butenschøn was established. Preparations for a larger international
conference commenced later that year. Maarten Danckaert joined the work-
ing group as research assistant allocated by the nchr. Generous support from
the Norwegian and Dutch Ministries of Foreign Affairs made it possible for the
project to prepare and organise the three-day international conference “Arab
Citizenship in the New Political Era,” hosted by by Université Mohammed v,
Rabat-Souissi, in May 28–30, 2014, and represented by Associate Professor Sal-
oua Zerhouni. The conference was made possible also with the support of the
Institut Néerlandais au Maroc (nimar), the Centre Jacques Berque (cjb), and
the Norwegian Peacebuilding Resource Centre (noref). We want to especially
thank the director of nimar at the time, Jan Hoogland, who played an essen-
tial role in facilitating the conference, and the Dutch ambassador in Morocco,
Ron Strikker, who enthusiastically supported the project. Ambassador Sverre
Johan Kvale at the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs encouraged us and
supported the project from the very start. Finally, in March 2015, we organised
a one-day seminar in Amsterdam with the contributors to the anthology we
had invited to contribute to the book after the conference in Rabat. This book
is based on the papers presented at the Rabat conference and the seminar in
Amsterdam. We are indebted to all the contributors who made this work pos-
sible. Alex Mallett did an excellent job with the language editing of the book.
We will also like to express our gratitude to Nicolette van der Hoek, editor at
Brill, for her advice and keen interest in the project.
List of Tables
8.1 g dp per capita in uae compared (1999–2012) 231

16.1 Proposals on women’s issues by the female MPs in all parliamentary
committees May 2009–December 2011 448
16.2 Female MPs collaborating in addressing women’s issues 451
16.3 Suggestions and law proposals presented to the Woman and Family
Committee (wfc) according to type of issue defined as related to Kuwaiti
women 2006–2013 455
List of Contributors
Ida Nicolaisen Almestad

is currently a Middle East analyst at the Norwegian Defence Staff. She holds a
ma in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Oslo, and has worked at
the Norwegian Embassy in Riyadh.
Claire Beaugrand
joined the Institut Français du Proche Orient (Ifpo) in June 2013 after working
as a Senior Gulf analyst at the International Crisis Group (icg). Her PhD the-
sis, written at the London School of Economics (lse), investigated the emer-
gence and persistence of statelessness in Kuwait, as illustrating the shift from
a sheikhly state to a national territorial one.
Assia Boutaleb
is Full Professor of Political Science at University François Rabelais of Tours.
Her research topics are social policies and political legitimacy in Egypt and
Morocco. She co-edited Le Maroc au présent : D’une époque à l’autre, une société
en mutation, Casablanca : Fondation Abdul-Aziz, cjb, 2015.
Michaelle Browers
is Professor of Politics and International Affairs and directs the Middle East
and South Asia Studies Program at Wake Forest University. She is author of
Democracy and Civil Society in Arab Political Thought: Transcultural Possibilities
(Syracuse University Press, 2006) and Political Ideology in the Arab World: Ac-
commodation and Transformation (Cambridge University Press, 2009), and has
edited and contributed to (with Charles Kurzman) An Islamic Reformation?
(Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).
Nils Butenschøn
is Professor of Political Science at the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights,
Faculty of Law, University of Oslo. He served as Director of the Centre between
1998–2004 and 2009–2014. He was a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Islamic
and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Durham, 1993–1994. His research in-
terests include theories of state formation, democracy, and nationalism with a
particular focus on the Middle East.
Anthony Gorman
is Senior Lecturer in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of
Edinburgh. Among his areas of research interest are the rise of radical secular
xii List of Contributors
politics in Egypt before the First World War, the resident foreign communities
of modern Egypt, the history of the Middle Eastern prison and the Middle East-
ern press before independence.
Raymond Hinnebusch
is Professor of International Relations and Middle East Politics and Director of
the Centre for Syrian Studies at the University of St. Andrews. He is the author
of Syria: Revolution from Above (Routledge, 2001) and co-editor of Syria: From
Reform to Revolt (Syracuse University Press, 2014).
Engin F. Isin
is Chair of International Relations at Queen Mary University of London (qmul)
in the School of Politics and International Relations (spir). He is responsible
for the establishment of a new international relations and politics department
at the University of London Institute in Paris (ulip). The chair is part of a re-
cent decision to establish ba and ma programs as well as a pioneering research
program at ulip as a strategic partnership between qmul and ulip.
Rania Maktabi
is Associate Professor in Political Science at Østfold University College in
Norway, and researcher at the New Middle East project, University of Oslo. Her
field of research is female citizenship, family law, and questions related to the
intersection between law, religion, and politics in contemporary mena states.
Roel Meijer
is Lecturer and teaches Modern History of the Middle East at the Department
of Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies, Radboud University. He has ed-
ited seven volumes on the Middle East and Islam, among them Global Salafism:
Islam’s New Religious Movement (Hurst, 2009), and The Muslim Brotherhood in
Europe (Hurst, 2012). With Nils Butenschøn he is editing a sequel to this vol-
ume, The Middle East in Transition: The Centrality of Citizenship, which will be
published by Edward Elgar in 2018.
Emin Poljarevic
is a Senior Lecturer in Islamic Studies at Uppsala University, Department of
Theology. His current research focuses primarily on the motivational dynam-
ics of strict religious practices among European and Middle Eastern Muslim
youths. He has published works on social mobilisation, Islamism, Salafism and
modernity.
List of Contributors xiii
Ola Rifai
holds an MPhil degree from the University of St. Andrews and is the author of
several articles on identity politics in Syria.
James N. Sater
is Professor of Political Science at the American University of Sharjah. He is the
author of Civil Society and Political Change in Morocco (Routledge, 2007) and
Morocco: Challenges to Tradition and Modernity (Routledge, 2010/2016) which
is now in its second edition. His research interests include political participa-
tion, political parties, constitutionalism, citizenship, and migration.
Rachel Scott
is an Associate Professor of Islamic Studies in the Department of Religion
and Culture and aspect (Alliance of Social Political, Ethical, and Cultural
Thought) at Virginia Tech. Her first book, The Challenge of Political Islam: Non-
Muslims and the Egyptian State, was published in 2010 by Stanford University
Press and she is now working on a new book project tentatively entitled The
Egyptian Constitution: The Modern State, Secularism, and Islamic Law.
is Associate Professor of Arabic and Islamic studies. He works on Islam, ulama
and media in the Arab World.
Robert Springborg
is a retired Professor of National Security Affairs, Naval Postgraduate School,
and non-resident Research Fellow of the Italian Institute of International Af-
fairs. Previously he served as the mbi Al Jaber Chair in Middle East Studies at
the School of Oriental and African Studies (soas) in London, where he was
also Director of the London Middle East Institute; Director of the American
Research Center in Egypt; and University Professor of Middle East Politics at
Macquarie University.
Stig Stenslie
is Assistant Director General/Head of Strategic Analysis at the Norwegian De-
fence Staff and Associate Professor at the Defence Intelligence University Col-
lege, Oslo. He is the author of several books on the contemporary Middle East
and China, among those, 49 Myths about China (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014),
Regime Stability in Saudi Arabia: The Challenge of Succession (Routledge, 2011)
and Stability and Change in the Modern Middle East (ib Tauris, 2011).
xiv List of Contributors
Morten Valbjørn
is Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science, Aarhus Universi-
ty. His research focuses on various dimensions concerning the study of politics
in an (un)exceptional Middle East and he is currently leading an interdisci-
plinary research project on sectarianism in the wake of the Arab revolts. His
research has appeared in, among others, Review of International Studies, De-
mocratization, International Review of Sociology, Cooperation & Conflict, Mid-
dle East Critique, Mediterranean Studies, Middle East Report, and the Journal of
Mediterranean Politics and Foreign Policy.
Knut S. Vikør
is a Professor of the History of the Middle East and Muslim Africa at the Uni-
versity of Bergen. He has published on the history of trade in the central Sa-
hara, on Sufi movements in North and West Africa (in particular the Sanusiya
movement), and is currently working on issues of interpretation and variation
in Islamic law.
Sami Zemni
holds the Francqui Research Chair and is Professor in Political and Social Sci-
ences at the Center for Conflict and Development Studies, Ghent University
(Belgium) where he coordinates and leads the Middle East and North Africa
Research Group (menarg). His area of expertise is politics within the Middle
East and North Africa region, with special reference to political Islam. He fo-
cuses mainly on developments in Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, democratization in
the Arab World as well as conflict in the Arab world. As a former director of the
Center for Islam in Europe (cie, 2002–2007), he has also written on issues of
migration, integration, racism and Islamophobia.
Introduction: The Crisis of Citizenship
in the Arab World
Roel Meijer and Nils Butenschøn
Introduction
The root causes of political instability and authoritarianism in the Arab coun-
tries of the Middle East and North Africa (mena)1 have been debated for a
long time, long before the current crisis unleashed by the Arab Uprisings in
2011. The most infamous – and pernicious – angle, Orientalism, focused on
Islam, and its perceived incompatibility with democracy and modernity, as the
explanation for the lack of democratisation in the Middle East.2 But there have
been optimistic assessments that have alternated with negative views. In the
1950s researchers believed that military regimes would be able to “modernise”
and build modern states that would lead to the creation of a “new m iddle class”
and achieve “development.”3 During the 1960s and 1970s this trend gradually
became more pessimistic. Michael Hudson, for instance, highlighted the lack
of legitimacy that regimes had and the crisis of relations between those regimes
and the people,4 while the most well-known studies of the 1990s focused pri-
marily on the lack of a civil society and placed greater emphasis on a “vibrant”
civil society as the first step towards democracy.5
Once this transition from authoritarian regime to democracy proved to be
elusive and civil society less independent, a pessimism again set in, leading
to a new trend that argued that authoritarian regimes were “resilient” and
capable of “managing,” “containing,” and “controlling” the various challenges
1 In this book the Middle East and North Africa refers to the Arab states in the region if not
otherwise stated.
2 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
3 Walter Z. Laqueur (ed.), The Middle East in Transition: Studies in Contemporary History
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958); Manfred Halpern, “Middle Eastern Armies and
the New Middle Classes,” in The Role of the Military in Underdeveloped Countries, ed. John J.
Johnson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), 277–316.
4 Michael Hudson, Arab Politics: The Search for Legitimacy (New Haven ct: Yale University
Press, 1977).
5 Augustus Richard Norton, “Introduction,” in Civil Society in the Middle East. Volume 1, ed.
Augustus Richard Norton (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 1–25; Saad Eddin Ibrahim, “Civil Society and
Prospects for Democratization in the Arab World,” in Civil Society in the Middle East. Volume 1,
ed. Augustus Richard Norton (Brill 1995), 27–54.
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��7 | doi 10.1163/9789004340985_002

2 Meijer and Butenschøn
opposition groups posed.6 Yet the Arab Uprisings proved that these regimes
were not indestructible; they could be threatened, transformed, and toppled.
It was clear that resilience theories had focused too much on the state itself
and too little on agency and means of resistance amongst the population.7
As a result, the “stability” of authoritarian regimes was less well rooted than
many had believed,8 and social movement theory, which had been applied
for the first time in the 1990s, experienced a resurgence.9 Five years after the
Arab Uprisings, the pendulum has returned to the state of pessimistic gloom
that produced resilience theories. However, whatever the state of the new
authoritarian regimes and their ability to re-assert themselves, it is clear that
the stability that was often ascribed to them has been thoroughly undermined.
The sources of the deep political, social, and cultural crisis that had been sim-
mering beneath the surface for some time are not temporary and not easily
solvable. The research on the Arab Uprisings has come up with numerous
explanations, none of which are fully convincing. These include demography
and the youth bulge; the spread of new media and the effect of Twitter and
the Internet; the introduction of a neoliberal economy in the 1980s and rising
unemployment, with the related destruction of the middle classes, mounting
division between rich and poor, and unprecedented corruption; privatisation
and mounting grievances among the working class; the interference by exter-
nal powers and the instability and misery created by regional wars; the “deep
state” or the “robustness” of the state and its greater capacity for repression
than elsewhere; gender inequality and exclusion; or a combination of some or
all of these elements.10
6 Steven Heydemann, Upgrading Authoritarianism in the Arab World (Analysis Paper No. 13,
The Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, October 2007).
7 Michelle Pace and Francesco Cavatorta, “Arab Uprisings in Theoretical Perspective,”
M
editerranean Politics 17 (2012): 125–138.
8 In the 2000s numerous books appeared on the political system in the Middle East and
North Africa with the term “stability” in their title.
9 Joel Beinin and Frédéric Vairel (eds), Social Movements, Mobilization and Contestation in
the Middle East and North Africa (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013); Jeroen Gun-
ning and Ilan Zvi Baron, Why Occupy a Square? People, Protests and Movements in the
Egyptian Revolution (London: Hurst, 2013).
10 To mention only a few: Marc Lynch (ed.), The Arab Uprisings Explained: New Contentious
Politics in the Middle East (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); Mehran Kamrava
(ed.), Beyond the Arab Spring: The Evolving Ruling Bargain in the Middle East (London:
Hurst, 2014); Rex Brynen et al., (eds), Beyond the Arab Spring: Authoritarianism and
Democratization in the Arab World (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2012).
Introduction 3
This book does not present a unified explanation for the deep political,
e conomic, and cultural crisis in the mena region; we recognise that the crisis
as an empirical phenomenon is too complex and multifaceted to be caught in
a single explanatory model. Instead, the book brings together contributions
from different academic traditions and disciplines, sharing a new approach to
the crisis as an analytical challenge. We approach the current crisis as a c risis
of citizenship, as a fundamental crisis in the relationship between citizens
and the state in its different aspects and dimensions. Thereby – we believe –
a broader and deeper, and yet more coherent, analysis emerges. Whereas the
state should be the source of services, protection, upholding the rule of law,
emancipation, and inclusion of its citizens, it has instead become the centre
of iniquity, corruption, marginalisation, and repression, working to the ben-
efit of the elite and the exclusion of the vast majority. In the mena region
citizens have almost no influence on the state, and in the rare cases they do
it is through patronage, clientelism, and informal relations, all of which un-
dermine or severely damage the notion of citizenship. On the other hand, citi-
zenship also represents a relationship between citizens themselves. Citizens
constitute a civil, social, and political community, but in the mena region
these communities have come under severe pressure for religious, econom-
ic, and p olitical reasons, often leading to sectarian strife, class struggle, and
ethnic exclusion. In many ways the authoritarian bargain that has been the
foundation of society has collapsed, and people are searching for a new social
contract with the state and between themselves. The Arab Uprisings can be
regarded as an attempt to achieve such a social pact, one that is founded on a
more inclusive and equitable basis, entailing new notions of citizenship.
The citizenship approach draws on sociology, political science, legal studies,
anthropology, history, political philosophy, and other disciplines that analyse
diverse aspects of the lives of citizens as they function in a web of relations
that regulate their conduct and affect their attitudes, while at the same time
giving them the tools to alter these relationships.11 In this dialectical rela-
tionship between subjection and contention, citizenship is constructed and
reconstructed in a constantly changing legal, social, and political process in
which power and culture play an important role.
Citizenship studies has a long history in North America and Europe, and
the introduction of citizenship studies to the Middle East should be based
on insights from these original areas, while also adapting them to the specific
conditions of the mena region. These insights are related to citizenship in
11 New ground-breaking studies have appeared in the Journal of Citizenship Studies.

general,12 comparative studies,13 minority studies,14 gender studies,15 political

philosophy,16 and migration and globalisation,17 among others.
With the exception of a few pioneering examples,18 little has been pub-
lished on citizenship in the Arab Middle East and North Africa, and these have
usually only examined very specific topics, and even then rarely systemati-
cally. This book is a renewed attempt to introduce citizenship studies and the
12 Several anthologies have been published on citizenship in its diverse forms. See Richard
Bellamy and Antonino Palumbo (eds), Citizenship (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010); Engin F. Isin
and Bryan S. Turner (eds), Handbook of Citizenship Studies (London: Sage, 2002); Bryan
S. Turner (ed.), Citizenship and Social Theory (London: Sage, 1993); Birte Siim and Judith
Squires (eds), Contesting Citizenship (London: Routledge, 2008); James Tully, On Global
Citizenship: James Tully in Dialogue (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).
13 Andreas Fahrmeir, Citizenship: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Concept (New Haven ct:
Yale University Press, 2007); Charles Tilly and Lesley J. Wood, Social Movements, 1768–2008
(Boulder: Paradigm, 2009); Roger Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and
G
ermany (Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press, 1992).
14 Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).
15 Surya Monro and Diane Richardson, “Citizenship, Gender and Sexuality,” in Handbook of
Political Citizenship and Social Movements, ed. Hein Anton van der Heijden (Cheltenham:
Edward Elgar, 2014), 60–85.
16 Quentin Skinner and Bo Stråth (eds), States and Citizens: History, Theory, Prospects
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of
Freedom and Government (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Michael J. Sandel, Justice: What
is the Right Thing to Do? (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009).
17 Christian Joppke, Citizenship and Immigration (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010); Manuel
Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 2012).
18 The few general books on citizenship in the mena region are: Nils Butenschøn et al.,
(eds), Citizenship and the State in the Middle East: Approaches and Applications (New York:
Syracuse University Press, 2000), in which see especially Nils Butenschøn, “State, Power,
and Citizenship in the Middle East: A Theoretical Introduction,” 3–27. See also Uri Davis,
Citizenship and the State: A Comparative Study of Citizenship Legislation in Israel, Jordan,
Palestine, Syria and Lebanon (London: Ithaca Press, 1999); Suad Joseph (ed.), G ender and
Citizenship in the Middle East (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2000); Valentine M.
Moghadam, Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change in the Middle East, 3rd edition
(Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2013); Gianluca P. Parolin, Citizenship in the Arab World, Kin,
Religion and Nation-State (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009); Andrew F.
March, Islam and Liberal Citizenship: The Search for an Overlapping C onsensus (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009); Rachel Scott, The Challenge of Political Islam: Non-Muslims
and the Egyptian State (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010); Roel Meijer, “Political
Citizenship and Social Movements in the Arab World,” in Handbook of Political Citizen-
ship and Social Movements, ed. Hein Anton van der Heijden, (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar,
2014), 628–660.
Introduction 5
focus on citizenship as central themes in the mena region by exploring what

this approach can contribute to the debate on the current political crisis in
the region. A problem of citizenship studies is that, similar to so many other
disciplines developed in the West and introduced into the mena region in
the past, such as modernisation theory or, more recently, civil society theory
and social movement theory,19 its overall assumptions are based on the spe-
cific liberal democratic European and/or North American political systems
and societies. Some researchers regard this as a positive, inherent feature of
citizenship studies. They argue that full citizenship can only exist in liberal
democracies, where equal opportunities exist (at least in theory), the rule of
law prevails, a political culture of mutual trust dominates, and people iden-
tify with the political community. Moreover, true citizenship presupposes the
rise of an autonomous, free subject and the erosion of kinship and other pri-
mordial bonds. When people do not enjoy the same rights and do not share
membership of a political community they should be regarded as “subjects”
rather than citizens.20 Paradoxically, the same argument has come from the
Global South, where citizenship is regarded as a typically Western concept that
is inapplicable to non-Western environments.21
This book argues otherwise. Citizenship studies has developed instruments
to analyse politics and state-society relations wherever modern bureaucratic
states that rule over a delineated territory have emerged. As a result, the state’s
power over its subjects has increased to such an extent that they are made
members of a political community, sometimes unwittingly and/or unwillingly,
as state measures directly interfere in their daily lives, forcing these citizens to
focus on the state and official political institutions in order to exert political
influence. In this model of the modern nation-state the state’s monopoly of
power is confirmed by a democratic mandate from the citizens. Consequently,
the terms and conditions of citizenship are defined by a “contract” between
citizens and the state in which the citizens’ civil, political, social, econom-
ic, and cultural rights, as well as their duties, are laid out. However, as these
forms of interaction differ from one country to another depending on state
19 Quintan Wiktorowicz, “Introduction: Islamic Activism and Social Movement Theory,” in

Islamic Activism: A Social Movement Theory Approach, ed. Quintan Wiktorowicz (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 1–36; Beinin and Vairel, Social Movements; Michel
Camau and Frédéric Vairel (eds), Les soulèvements populaires dans le monde arabe (Mon-
tréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2014).
20 Peter Kivisto and Thomas Faist, Citizenship: Discourse, Theory and Transnational Prospects
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 50.
21 Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the
World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
olicies, their implementation and range, as well as the varying responses of

p
the citizens, have produced different forms of citizenship and citizenship re-
gimes. As we will see, state policies have resulted in different degrees of in-
clusion and exclusion, leading to different combinations of rights and duties
among citizens of any particular country. These variations in inclusion and ex-
clusion of social classes, gender, ethnic, and religious groups have led to what
has been called “graded” or “differentiated citizenship,” producing “second
class citizens,” “child-citizens,” and even “non-citizens.” These trends are dis-
cernible both in Europe and the United States as well as in the Global South,
but produce different citizen regimes, making comparisons possible and even
fruitful. The focus on citizen-state relations therefore provides unique insights
into the broader political systems, cultures, and social and economic struc-
tures of societies.
There is another reason why we consider a citizenship approach to the cur-
rent crisis in the Middle East and North Africa to be important: people, po-
litical organisations, social movements, and professional organisations in the
region itself employ the notion of citizenship (muwatana) and other related
terms, something that has been particularly clear since the Arab Uprisings in
2011. In fact, many of the chapters in this volume do not directly engage with
citizenship studies and theory as such but provide crucial insights into the
concepts of citizenship in the Arab world and the way citizenship is formed.
Dignity (karama), liberty (hurriyya), equality (masawaʾ), rights (huquq), and
social justice (al-ʿadala al-ijtimaʿiyya) are all recognised as having been cen-
tral concepts in the Arab Uprisings, and terms such as the people (al-shaʿb)
and madaniyya (civility) played a central role in the huge demonstrations that
were seen throughout the region, from Morocco to Bahrain.22 The slogan “the
22 To mention only a few publications that cover several countries in the mena region:
Mouin Rabbani, “The Year of the Citizen,” in The Dawn of the Arab Uprisings: End of the
Old Order? ed. Bassam Haddad et al., (London: Pluto Press, 2012), 33–36; Mervat F. Ha-
tem, “The Arab Spring Meets the Occupy Wall Street Movement: Examples of Changing
Definitions of Citizenship in a Global World,” Journal of Civil Society 8 (2012): 401–415;
Benoît Challand, “Citizenship against the Grain: Locating the Spirit of the Arab Upris-
ings in Times of Counterrevolution,” Constellations 20 (2013): 169–187; Nils A. Butenschøn,
“Arab Citizen and the Arab State: The ‘Arab Spring’ as a Critical Juncture in Contemporary
Arab Politics,” Democracy and Security 11 (2015): 111–128; Anja Hoffmann and Christoph
König, “Scratching the Democratic Façade: Framing Strategies of the 20 February Move-
ment,” Mediterranean Politics 18 (2013): 1–22; Roel Meijer and Maarten Danckaert, “Bah-
rein: Dynamics of a Conflict,” in Arab Spring: Negotiating in the Shadow of the Intifadat, ed.
William I. Zartman (Athens ga: University of Georgia Press, 2015), 209–248; Marie Duboc,
“Challenging the Trade Union, Reclaiming the Nation: The Politics of Labor Protest in
Introduction 7
people demand the fall of the regime” expresses claims of popular sovereignty
and the right to have rights, which is the foundation of citizenship. Protests
were directed against infringement of civil rights by the emergency laws, de-
manding freedom of association, the right to establish political parties, the rule
of law and accountability of authorities and transparency of money spent.23
On a deeper level, people entertain vaguer, less defined notions of rights and
justice that feed into citizenship.24 A number of contributions to this volume
demonstrate that citizenship and terms related to notions of citizenship re-
emerged prior to and during the Arab Uprisings. For instance, certain currents
within the Muslim Brotherhood and the Wasatiyya trend in Egypt and Syria
adopted the concept of the civil state (al-dawla al-madaniyya) and equal citi-
zenship; the bidun (those without citizen documents) in Kuwait found new
ways of expressing resistance against their marginalisation; youth in Egypt and
Morocco reconnected with “the street” and demonstrated extraordinary forms
of social responsibility by educating the general public who, for the first time,
were considered to be sharing a common citizenship; while demonstrators
in Tunisia and elsewhere demonstrated a new political awareness and made
claims to rights, expressing these in various ways, including performances and
“acts of citizenship.”25
The chapters in this volume build on other studies that have identified a
general politicisation of society reflecting an increasing sense of citizen-
ship. They show that youth stood up against paternal authority; employees
denounced petty office tyrants and corruption, demanding “cleansing” (tathir)
Egypt, 2006–11,” in Beyond the Arab Spring: The Evolving Ruling Bargain in the Middle East,
ed. Mehran Kamrava (London: Hurst, 2014), 223–248; Salwa Ismail, “The Syrian Upris-
ing: Imagining and Performing the Nation,” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 11 (2011):
538–549; Charles Tripp, The Power and the people: Paths of Resistance in the Middle East
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
23 Maha Abdelrahman, Egypt’s Long Revolution: Protest Movements and Uprisings (London:
Routledge, 2015), 37.
24 These notions have been analysed by Asef Bayat in Life as Politics: How Ordinary People
Change the Middle East (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010); Diane Singer-
man, Avenues of Participation: Family, Politics, and Networks in Urban Quarters of Cairo
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Cilja Harders, “The Informal Social Pact:
The State and the Urban Poor in Cairo,” in Politics from Above, Politics from Below: The
Middle East in the Age of Economic Reform, ed. Eberhard Kienle (London: Saqi, 2003),
191–213; Armando Salvatore and Dale Eickelman (eds), Public Islam and the Common
Good (Leiden: Brill, 2004).
25 Engin F. Isin and Greg M. Nielsen (eds), Acts of Citizenship (London: Zed Press, 2008).
of the work place;26 university personnel, such as the March 9 Group in Egypt,
protested against state control of universities; Egyptian judges marched against
election fraud and state interference in the judiciary; Moroccan villagers
felt emboldened to stand up against private companies, municipal govern-
ments, and corruption;27 special favours given to policemen were refused;28
minorities, such as the Copts in Egypt29 and the Amazigh in Morocco,30 dem-
onstrated for equal legal and cultural rights; normal citizens protested against
deteriorating housing conditions, rising food prices, break down of health
care, insufficient supply of potable water, and daily injustices.31 Many of these
actions produced new forms of expression and repertoires of contention:
petitions, hunger strikes, occupations, strikes, sit-ins, public statements, sabo-
taging public facilities, Facebook group networks. Informal protests included
blocking roads, burning tyres, blocking entrances to government entrances,
and other performances such as waving flags in order to assert their loyalty to
the nation while demanding change in the political order.
These works also point out that the Arab Uprisings had a long history
and are often connected to the emergence of social movements. By nature
new social movements are focused on citizenship, liberties and rights, and
the recognition of identity and not on acquiring state power. The names
of many of these organisations reflect the struggle for rights. In Egypt, ru-
ral protest against eviction was organised by the Land Centre for Human
Rights; the Centre for Trade Union and Worker Services (ctuws) and the
Coordinating Committee for Trade Union and Workers Rights and Liberties
were crucial for the formation of Egyptian independent trade unions;32 the
Doctors Without Rights played an important role in defending the rights of
26 Anne Alexander and Mostafa Bassiouny, Bread, Freedom, Social Justice: Workers and the
Egyptian Revolution (London: Zed Press, 2014), 284–318.
27 Koenraad Bogaert, “The Revolt of Small Towns: The Meaning of Morocco’s History and
Geography of Social Protest,” Review of African Political Economy 42 (2015): 124–140.
28 Lila Abu Lughod, “Living the ‘Revolution’ in an Egyptian Village: Moral Action in a
National Space,” American Ethnologist 29 (2012): 21–25.
29 Mariz Tadros, Copts at the Crossroads: The Challenges of Building Inclusive Democracy in
Egypt (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2013).
30 Bruce Maddy Weizman, “Ethno-politics and Globalisation in North Africa: The Berber
Culture Movement,” Journal of North Africa 11 (2006): 71–84; Bruce Maddy Weizman, “Ara-
bization and its Discontents: The Rise of the Amazigh Movement in North Africa,” Journal
of the Middle East and Africa 3 (2012): 109–135.
31 Abdelrahman, Egypt’s Long Revolution, 52–72.
32 Joel Beinin, Workers and Thieves: Labor Movements and Popular Uprisings in Tunisia and
Egypt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), 47–48.
Introduction 9
doctors against the political hijacking of the professional organisation of doc-

tors by the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1990s; Mohamed ElBaradei’s National
Association for Change (nac) of 2010 demanded political rights.33 In Morocco,
over the previous decade the coordinating committees (tansiqiyyat) organised
protest against price rises. New organisations sprang up with characteristic
names such as Alternative Movement for Individual Liberties (mali) and the
different organisations of the unemployed graduates (chômeurs-diplômés)
demanding the right to work. Since their establishment in the Arab world in
the 1970s human rights organisations played a significant role in promoting the
language of rights in the region. Many human rights organisations were a ctive
in the Arab Uprisings such as the Moroccan Association of Human Rights
(amdh) or the Tunisian League of Human Rights (ltdh).34 They linked civil
society with social movements.
All these activities are reflected in new active, participatory citizenship. As
Alexander and Bassiouny make clear the Egyptian strike committees had to
organise meals, sleeping quarters, secure machinery from sabotage, negotiate
with management, inform the strikers, and self-manage production, and ward
off intimidation by state institutions.35 Their activities were democratically
decided. The establishment of independent unions, starting in 2009, required
similar skills. In her book on the Tunisian General Labour Union (ugtt), Hèla
Yousfi shows lower cadre leaders of the trade union were able to play a crucial
role in the organisation and dissemination across the country of the uprisings
and respond to the demands of their members, in contrast to its co-opted elite
leadership who had lost all contact with the normal members of the ugtt.36
In Morocco, the February 20 Movement consisted of 100 different civil society
organisations, trade unions and political parties which formed the national
committee for support.
Although it is clear from many accounts that the left played a crucial role in
the uprisings, the pressure to unify and form coalitions, joint committees and
“fronts” between highly diverse and often former opponents led to general slo-
gans and common themes that supported inclusive programs and enhanced
citizen rights. This was the case with many cross-ideological coalitions that
were formed in Egypt between 2000 and 2011. For this to happen, both the left
and the Islamic movements had to make important steps towards a centrist
33 Abdelrahman, Egypt’s Long Revolution, 38.

34 Hoffmann and König, “Scratching the Democratic Façade,” 7.
35 Alexander and Bassiouny, Bread, Freedom, Social Justice.
36 Hèla Yousfi, L’UGTT, une passion tunisienne: Enquête sur les syndicalistes en révolution
(2011–2014) (Paris: Karthala, 2015), 57–97.
position that accepted political and social pluralism, the rule of law, f reedom
of speech and organization. This process took a generation to emerge. In
Egypt, it depended on the rise of the liberal current within the Muslim Broth-
erhood and the centrist (Wasatiyya) trend to produce such groups as the Wasat
Party.37 In Tunisia, it was not until 2005 that Ennahda had become acceptable
for secularists enough to form a coalition in the Collectif.38 In Morocco, the
gradual inclusion of Party of Justice and Development (pjd) since 1992 into
the political process encouraged more liberal trends around figures such as
Ahmed Raysouni to emerge which embraced notions of citizenship and con-
cepts based on the civil state (al-dawla al-madaniyya) as opposed to the reli-
gious state (al-dawla al-diniyya) and Islam as a complete system (nizam kamil).
Notions such as “pious citizens” and the refocusing on politics instead of ap-
plying Islamic law were essential preliminary steps to form cross-ideological
coalitions.39 By 2005, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood had come to the same
conclusions and accepted equal citizenship in its new program, regardless of
one’s ethnic or religious background.40 Without these previous moves towards
an Islamic humanism and acceptance of human agency and greater space for
politics as an independent, indeterminate field for pragmatic solutions based
on equality and inclusion these coalitions would not have been possible. Their
influence was apparent during the Arab Uprisings. For instance, during the
first five months of protest against the Asad regime in Syria the opposition
stressed national unity and shared citizenship between Sunnis and Alawis
in an attempt to create a broad coalition against the regime.41 In Morocco,
February 20 Movement explicitly came up with slogans focusing on strength-
ening citizen rights and stated the right to accountability, work, and rule of law.
37 Carrie Rosefsky Wickham, “Strategy and Learning in the Formation of Egypt’s Wasat
arty,” Comparative Politics 36 (2004): 205–28; Carrie Rosefsky Wickham, “The Muslim
P
Brotherhood and Democratic Transition in Egypt,” Middle East Law and Governance
J ournal 3 (2011): 204–223.
38 Francesco Cavatorta and Fabio Merone, “Moderation Through Exclusion? The Journey of
the Tunisian Ennahda from Fundamentalist to Conservative Party,” Democratization 20
(2013): 857–875.
39 Malika Zeghal, Islamism in Morocco: Religion, Authoritarianism and Electoral Politics
(Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2009), 187–194; Eva Wegner, Islamist Opposition in Authoritar-
ian Regimes: The Party of Justice and Development in Morocco (New York: Syracuse Univer-
sity Press, 2011).
40 Roel Meijer, “The Problem of the Political in Islamist Movements,” in Whatever Happened
to the Islamists? Salafis, Heavy Metal Muslims and the Lure of Consumerist Islam, ed. Amel
Boubekeur and Olivier Roy (London: Hurst, 2012), 27–60.
41 Salwa Ismail, “The Syrian Uprisings.”
Introduction 11
Even in Saudi Arabia, a country not known for its strong participation in the
Arab Uprisings, Islamic modernists were supportive of rights of citizens versus
the privileges of the royal family, introducing a “language of rights.”42 Espe-
cially during the initial stages of the revolution, highly different ideological
groups found each other in a common struggle against police torture, arrests,
emergency laws, and in favor of accountability, legalisation of political parties,
the rule of law, and the guarantee of employment and social welfare.
This is not to say that the struggle for citizenship and the establishment of a
new social contract in the Arab world was a success. In the end, the forces sup-
porting a new citizenship regime were too weak. Tunisia was the only country
were, after considerable problems, the dominant religious party Ennahda to-
gether with the secular parties were capable, of signing a new social contract
based on equal citizenship (but guaranteeing weak social rights) when a new
constitution was inaugurated in January 2014. Elsewhere the coalitions be-
tween the secular and Islamist movements broke down, most significantly in
Egypt. After the fall of President Hosni Mubarak on February 11, 2011 the Muslim
Brotherhood quickly made a deal with the military and secular movements,
paving the way for inclusive elections and the Muslim Brotherhood as the new
dominating political force in the country. The less inclusive rule under President
Muhammad Morsi in turn created a huge backlash among the secularists who
were willing to work with the military to topple the Morsi government in a
coup d’etat in June-July 2013. In Morocco, the Islamist Justice and Develop-
ment Party (pjd) was already co-opted by the monarchy before the uprising
led by the February 20 Movement, hoping to reform it from within; it never
was part of the February 20 Movement. In Libya, the early forms of support
for a new regime based on equal citizenship failed after a dramatic and vi-
olent sequence of events bringing in massive bombing by nato countries
and the killing of President Muammar al-Gaddafi by rebels October 20, 2011.
Consequently, the country fell apart in regional and tribal divisions. In Syr-
ia, the regime succeeded in undermining any attempt to reform the politi-
cal system and base it on inclusive, common and equal citizenship, setting
in motion the most devastating civil war the Middle East has experienced
in modern times. In Yemen, the uprising failed, bringing on a nother devas-
tating civil war that involves old as well as new contenders for power, while
Algeria remained aloof from the turmoil after its own traumatic experience
with uprisings in the 1990s. Among the Gulf monarchies Bahrain was the
most affected. Massive demonstrations with demands for d emocratisation,
42 Madawi Al-Rasheed, Muted Modernists: The Struggle over Divine Politics in Saudi Arabia
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
accountability and equal rights led by Shiʿa majority groups was violently su-
pressed by the Sunni monarch with the support by troops from Saudi Arabia.
What these experiences demonstrate, apart from the political dimension
of changing ideologies, coalition formations, and political struggle, is that the
establishment of citizenship regimes based on equality and the rule of law is
severely hampered by multifaceted web of structural and systemic factors dis-
cussed throughout this volume. One of the most damaging and most i ngrained
factors is clientelism and patronage relations. Nowhere else do vertical rela-
tions of dependence have such disastrous effects on notions of citizenship and
horizontal solidarity as in the Arab region. The other is sectarianism and its
exclusionary and divisionary politics. Although the interest in sectarianism
has become the dominant trend in research on the Arab world, the fact that
sectarianism has re-emerged attests to the failure to establish inclusionary
citizenship regimes in the past, which needs explanation. The same applies
for the authoritarian regimes. The heavy emphasis on mechanisms of control
and pre-emption in resilience theories needs a historical analysis of how these
regimes came about and why they have become exclusionary. The third f actor
that has hampered the development of equal citizenship is foreign and re-
gional intervention. There is perhaps no other part in the world where foreign
intervention has had such a negative influence as in the Arab world, supporting
sectarianism, minority regimes, class differences and economic and political
dependence, thereby enhancing weak state structures, authoritarianism, and
lack of legitimacy of the political elite.
We believe that focussing on citizenship, citizen-state relations, as well as
relations between citizens is a fruitful way not only of understanding the Arab
Uprisings as a critical juncture in Arab politics and providing crucial insights
into the dramatic events that have unfolded since 2011, but they are also the key
to understanding the modern history of the Arab world.
Guiding Elements Extent, Content and Depth

Keith Faulks has made a useful distinction between three elements that cover
central aspects of citizenship and are helpful in analysing citizenship regimes
in the Arab world: extent, content, and depth.43
Extent concerns the issue of formal and legal membership of the politi-
cal community and the dialectical process between exclusion and closure on
the one hand, and inclusion and incorporation into society and the political
community on the other. It addresses the issue of who is eligible for citizen-
ship and who is denied the right to become a full member of society and the
43 Keith Faulks, Citizenship (London: Routledge, 2000), 7.

Introduction 13
olitical community and to enjoy the full rights that citizenship entails. Extent
p
thus determines one’s status. Needless to say, extent has in itself a long history
and differs from country to country. However, historically, in Europe and the
United States the general trend has been towards greater inclusion and the
expansion of political rights from just the privileged elite to larger sections of
the population.44 According to Kivisto and Faist, it is the transformation of
outsiders into citizens that has marked the process of inclusion in the West.45
It also touches upon the criteria for inclusion or exclusion, as, for instance, in
Rogers Brubaker’s famous46 but widely criticised distinction between the civic,
territorial principle (jus solis) associated with the French republican tradition,
whereby theoretically everyone under the jurisdiction of the state could be-
come citizen, and the jus sanguinis principle of German tradition that based
citizenship on ethnicity.47 The civil rights movement in the United States
marked an important step towards acquiring equal rights. “Recognition” of eth-
nic, cultural, and religious diversity was one of the means by which one could
be incorporated into American citizenry. But extent also covers new forms of
discrimination, marginalisation, and exclusion, which are becoming increas-
ingly globally connected.48 In the Arab world, extent has had a completely dif-
ferent trajectory than in Europe or the United States. The Arab world first had
to make a transition from an empire built on diversity49 to a colonial regime
that was based on exclusion and then build homogeneous nation-states out of
this diversity. Neither the nationalist movements, nor the authoritarian states,
nor the Islamist movements were able to meet the challenge of building inclu-
sionary citizenship regimes based on equality and the recognition of religious,
cultural, and political diversity.
Content is related to the mixture of rights, duties, and obligations of citi-
zenship. In contrast to extent, which relates to formal citizenship, content is
concerned with substantive citizenship. Historically, the emphasis had been
on the duties and obligations in the Greek polis because citizens (males) were
presumed to be active citizens. During the French Revolution for the first
time rights were defined in the Declaration of Citizen and the Nation and the
44 Fahrmeir, Citizenship.
45 Kivisto and Faist, Citizenship, 21.
46 Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood.
47 For a critique, see Joppke, Citizenship and Immigration, 17–20.
48 For an excellent discussion on the issue between James Tully, Anthony Lade, Bonnie
Honig, Duncan Bell, and others, see Tully, On Global Citizenship.
49 Karen Barkey, Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perpective (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008).
rinciple of equal rights supplanted privilege. The “people” as a whole emerged

p
on the historical scene as a source of legitimacy, and sovereignty was no lon-
ger vested solely in the monarch. This meant that the relationship between
state and citizen became much more complex, intensive, and intrusive. In the
new citizen regime, citizens paid taxes directly to the state, obeyed the same
state laws, were conscripted into national armies, and were asked to sacrifice
their lives for the nation. In return, citizenship rights were expanded and deep-
ened, resulting in a dialectical relationship between subject and citizen, being
objects of power and agencies to power. However, with the introduction of a
neoliberal economy these social rights have come under severe pressure and
the emphasis has been increasingly limited to civil rights or what has been
called “negative liberties,” i.e. freedom from state interference. In this respect
immigration has also influenced the mixture of rights and duties. Whereas
during the heyday of the nation-state citizens were required to adhere to the
same religion, speak the same language, and uphold the same sense of his-
tory and identity, this changed with increased migration and the emergence
of multicultural societies and new forms of identification, loyalty, and inte-
gration. Novel forms of citizenship include hyphenated nationalities, hybrid
identities, and a thin “constitutional loyalty” rather than undifferentiated loy-
alty and assimilation to a complete culture. With regard to content, the Arab
world shows similarities as well as marked differences with the European and
American models. While it also has experienced the rise of a strong nation-
alism, based on cultural, linguistic, and political homogeneity, it never gave
birth to a democratic political structure that allowed for diversity and freedom
of speech and organisation. In addition, the emphasis on social rights at the
expense of civil and political rights has laid a heavy burden on the citizenship
regimes once economic austerity measures were introduced in the 1980s and
the “authoritarian bargain” was gradually d ismantled. The main opposition,
the Islamist movement, hardly presented an alternative. It developed a weak
discourse of citizenship that was not based on rights but on a religious identity
that was culturally exclusionary and politically authoritarian. The modernist,
humanitarian current always remained a minority trend and only turned into
the Wasatiyya trend in the 1980s.
Depth is closely related to the commitment of citizens and their level of
participation in the public sphere. What is demanded of citizens, what are
their social and political responsibilities, and in what way can they contribute
to the “common good”? An important aspect of depth has been the emer-
gence of the public sphere and the right to openly discuss and participate in
matters of common interest. It is associated with the rise of civil society and
Introduction 15
independent horizontal o rganisations that individuals could join voluntarily.

In Europe the rise of the public sphere is situated in the eighteenth century
with the rise of newspapers and intellectuals. It expanded in the nineteenth
century with the rise of national newspapers, the printing press, cheap books,
salons for the middle classes and intellectuals, and the rise of trade unions
and social movements. As with d ependence/independence the dichotomy be-
tween the public and the private spheres was another way of excluding wom-
en from becoming full participatory citizens. Emancipation from the private
sphere meant greater p articipation in the public sphere. Ideologically, depth
is reflected in republican, liberal, and communitarian notions of citizenship,
with the first and last upholding a “thick” concept of active citizenship and the
latter a “thin” passive one.50 In contemporary citizenship studies, citizenship is
not only constituted by passive and active rights but must be acquired by defi-
nite and specific “acts of citizenship.” In the modern Arab world, commitment
of the citizen has fluctuated widely. While in the colonial struggle for indepen-
dence citizens were mobilised and subjected to centrally led organisations, af-
ter independence the emphasis was on passive citizenship with limited rights.
It is only during the last three decades that different forms of active citizenship
were developed and notions of “thick” citizenship emerged.
The elements extent, content, and depth are not only instruments to anal-
yse different citizenship regimes but also related to the issue of power and the
question of who determines and controls extent, content, and depth. Is it the
state that controls and regulates citizenship “from above,” or is the people, so-
cial movements, contestations, long term struggles, and interest groups that
determine citizenship “from below”? The former leads to “passive” citizenship,
the latter to “active” citizenship. But mostly the two go together. It is only at
rare moments such as revolutions, the struggle for independence, or phenom-
ena such as the Arab Uprisings that the movement from below dominates and
acquires, for a brief period, the upper hand, meaning that existing citizenship
regimes can be overturned.
Contribution
What do these general principles and dimensions of citizenship and citizen-
ship studies contribute to the study of the Arab world and the present political
crisis? How should they be adjusted to meet the specific historical, cultural,
sociological, and political characteristics of the region?
50 For an analysis of concepts of citizenship in political currents, see the authors referred to
in note 16.
We believe that the citizenship approach as outlined here allows us to

explore the essence of the current crisis of the Middle East. We do not seek
one specific explanation of this crisis, but open up for a number of explanatory
strategies for a fuller comprehension of the crisis in time and space, centered
around the concept and elements of citizenship. In this way we hope to
contribute to and improve current theories in the field. Firstly, in contrast
to the prevalent theories of authoritarian resilience that focus on the Middle
Eastern authoritarian state and its power,51 citizenship studies is better able to
take into consideration the effects state policies have on citizens and how these
policies are formulated, constructed, manipulated, and supported by policing
and surveillance. Moreover, it takes into account the responses of social actors,
their notions of themselves and the ways in which they are organised, and
the manifold forms of resistance and contestation, both passive and active,
of state power. Secondly, in contrast to civil society theorists who, in the 1990s
particularly, regarded civil society as the panacea for democratisation and
pushing back the power of the state in the Middle East,52 citizenship studies
take into account marginalised groups, informal networks that have no legal
status and do not always have clear ideas about their relations with the state
but nonetheless are significant for their actions, and “acts of citizenship”
that influence the general concept and practice of citizenship. Thirdly, it can
contribute to the transition debate.53 Daniel B rumberg, Oliver Schlumberger,
Morten Valbjørn and others have correctly pointed out that transition theory,
when applied to the Middle East, has been mistaken by taking the illusion of
a transition to democracy for reality and b eing far too optimistic, a Western
51 Heydemann, Upgrading Authoritarianism; Oliver Schlumberger, “Arab Authoritarianism:

Debating the Dynamics and Durability of Nondemocratic Regimes,” in Debating Arab
Authoritarianism: Dynamics and Durability in Non-democratic Regimes, ed. Oliver Sch-
lumberger (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 1–18; Daniel Brumberg, “Democ-
ratization in the Arab World? The Trap of Liberalized Autocracy,” Journal of Democracy
13 (2002): 56–86; Holger Albrecht and Oliver Schlumberger, “‘Waiting for Godot’: Regime
Change without Democratization in the Middle East,” International Political Science
R eview 25 (2004): 371–392; Eva Bellin, “Reconsidering the Robustness of Authoritarianism
in the Middle East: Lessons from the Arab Spring,” Comparative Politics 44 (2012): 127–149;
Morten Valbjørn, “Upgrading Post-democratization Studies: Examining a Re-politicized
Arab World in a Transition to Somewhere,” Mediterranean Politics 21 (2012): 25–35.
52 Norton, “Introduction;” Ibrahim, “Civil Society.”
53 Ellen Lust, “Competitive Clientelism in the Middle East,” Journal of Democracy 20
(July, 2009): 122–135; Lisa Blaydes, Elections and Distributive Politics in Mubarak’s Egypt
Introduction 17
perception they have labelled “democrazy.”54 The advantage of citizenship

studies is that it accepts a much broader scope of analysis, looking at a host
of concepts and notions of citizenship while not pre-supposing that they
will lead to d emocracy. Fourthly, citizenship studies can accommodate social
movement theory because it acknowledges agency and takes into account
forms of self-awareness, conscious attempts to formulate state-society
relations, and notions of social justice, all of which are directly related to
central aspects of citizenship in the mena region. It is particularly the main
forms of contentions – m aking claims and demanding rights – that dovetail
with citizenship studies.55 By recognising n on-organised networks and what
Bayat calls “non-movements,”56 citizenship studies goes deeper and recognises
that marginalised “non-citizens” can become citizens by acts of self-assertion,
such as organising their own services, demonstrating social responsibility,
and mobilisation on the local communal level, or what Engin Isin has called
“acts of citizenship.”57 Not always directly related to the state, or rights, these
initiatives do eventually affect notions of citizenship and the “common
good” or the “general interest,” although they are, perhaps, never consciously
formulated as such, and are often not the same as they are in the West. Fifth,
as citizenship studies has a special perception of citizen-state relations it also
can prove to be a fruitful way in which to analyse the authoritarian bargain and
its “unravelling,”58 which has played such a crucial role in recent debates on
political developments in the region. Sixth, as citizenship studies addresses the
historical, political, anthropological, sociological, and ideological dimensions
of citizenship regimes it also brings together these disciplines that have made
their mark in Middle East studies, as well as other disciplines such as political
philosophy, which is almost non-existent within the spectrum of area studies.
Finally, citizenship studies allows for broad comparisons with the rest of the
54 Morten Valbjørn and André Bank, “Examining the ‘post’ in Post-democratization –

The future of Middle Eastern political rule through lenses of the past,” Middle East
C
ritique 19 (2010): 183–200.
55 B. Hafiz, “New Social Movements and the Egyptian Spring: A Comparative Analysis
between the April 6 Movement and the Revolutionary Socialists,” Perspectives on Global
Development & Technology 12 (2013): 98–113.
56 Bayat, Life as Politics.
57 Engin Isin and Greg M. Nielsen, “Introduction: Acts of Citizenship,” in Acts of Citizen-
ship, ed. Engin Isin and Greg M. Nielsen (London: Zed Books, 2008), 1–11; and Engin Isin,
“Theorizing Acts of Citizenship,” in Acts of Citizenship, 15–43.
58 Mehran Kamrava (ed.), Beyond the Arab Spring: The Evolving Ruling Bargain in the Middle
East (London: Hurst, 2014).
world and t herefore acts as a corrective on the narrow focus of area studies.
Not only does it e ncourage comparisons with Europe and North America, it
also, increasingly, makes comparisons with the Global South.59
To summarise, the general purpose of introducing the citizenship approach
to studies of the current as well as long-term crisis in the mena region is not to
invalidate all existing explanatory models, but to demonstrate how the citizen-
ship approach improves and adds necessary insights into the complexities of
the political dynamics of the region.
Content of the Book

This volume builds on existing works on the Middle East and North Africa
that have focused on citizenship. There have been works on the colonial
period,60 diaspora studies,61 constitutions,62 the Muslim Brotherhood,63
59 See for instance, Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and
the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Niraja
Gopal Jayal, Citizenship and its Discontents: An Indian History (Cambridge ma: Harvard
University Press, 2013), Henk Schulte Nordholt and Ward Berenschot (eds), Citizenship
and Democratisation in Southeast Asia (Leiden: Brill, 2016), and James Holston, Insurgent
Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2008).
60 Works on the colonial period in particular have a strong citizenship angle. Surprising-
ly, the historical line between the colonial period and post-independence concerning
citizenship has never been systematically pursued. See Chapter 2 of this volume for an
attempt. For the colonial history, see Benjamin Thomas White, The Emergence of Minori-
ties in the Middle East: The Politics of Community in French Mandate Syria (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2011); Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican
Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2000); Mary Dewhurst Lewis, Divided Rule: Sovereignty and Empire in
French Tunisia, 1881–1938 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).
61 For instance, Joel Beinin, The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics and the Forma-
tion of a Modern Diaspora (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2005).
62 Abdulhadi Khalaf and Giacomo Luciani (eds), Constitutional Reform and Political Partici-
pation in the Gulf (Dubai: Gulf Research Center, 2006); Nathan J. Brown, Constitutions in
a Nonconstitutional World: Arab Basic Laws and the Prospects for Accountable Government
(New York: suny Press, 2002).
63 Scott, The Challenge of Political Islam; Chris Harnisch and Quinn Mecham, “Democratic
Ideology in Islamist Opposition? The Muslim Brotherhood’s ‘Civil State’,” Middle Eastern
Studies 45 (2009): 189–205; Carrie Rosefsky Wickham, “Strategy and Learning in the For-
mation of Egypt’s Wasat Party,” Comparative Politics 36 (2004): 205–228.
Introduction 19
Islam and citizenship,64 Arab political thought,65 migration,66 the position

of Palestinians,67 gender and citizenship,68 general theory of citizenship,69
minority rights and citizenship,70 women and civic and economic rights,71
and notions of “everyday citizenship.”72 Aside from these works that direct-
ly address the issue of citizenship, there exist many other publications that
address the same topic in an indirect way or that can easily be reinterpreted
by citizenship studies to make them useful for studies on citizenship. These
include, for example, studies on Islamic law, political Islam, personal status
law, state formation, or, more specifically, on social pacts and what has been
called the “authoritarian bargain.” The purpose of this volume is to try to con-
nect these studies and provide a broader framework to study citizenship in the
Arab world. The same applies to the Arab Uprisings. No systematic attempt has
been made to compare citizenship conditions in the different countries and to
relate the outcomes of the Uprisings, despite the fact that many scholars have
pointed out the centrality of citizenship.
64 March, Islam and Liberal Citizenship.

65 Michaelle L. Brower, Political Ideology in the Arab World: Accommodation and Transforma-
tion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
66 Laurie A. Brand, Citizens Abroad: Emigration and the State in the Middle East and North Af-
rica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Peter Seeberg and Zaid Eyadat (eds),
Migration, Security, and Citizenship in the Middle East (New York: Palgrave MacMillan,
2013).
67 Davis, Citizenship and the State.
68 Joseph, Gender and Citizenship; Moghadam, Modernizing Women.
69 Butenschøn et al., (eds), Citizenship and the State in the Middle East.
70 The issue of minorities has particularly attracted the citizenship approach: see, for
instance, Mariz Tadros, Copts at the Crossroads:The Challenges of Building Inclusive
Democracy in Egypt (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2013); Bruce Maddy
Weizman, “Ethno-politics and Globalisation in North Africa: The Berber Culture Move-
ment,” Journal of North Africa 11 (2006): 71–84; Will Kymlicka and Eva Pföstl (eds), Multi-
culturalism and Minority Rights in the Arab World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014);
Anh Nga Longva and Anne Sofie Roald, Religious Minorities in the Middle East: Domina-
tion, Self-Empowerment, Accommodation (Leiden: Brill, 2012); and Roel Meijer and Joas
Wagemaker, “The Struggle for Citizenship of the Shiites in Saudi Arabia,” in The Dynamics
of Sunni-Shia Relationships: Doctrine, Transnationalism, Intellectuals and the Media, ed.
Sami Zemni and Brigitte Maréchal (London-New York: Hurst/Columbia University Press,
2013), 119–140.
71 Rania Maktabi, The Politicization of the Demos in the Middle East: Citizenship between
Membership and Participation in the State (PhD diss., University of Oslo, 2012).
72 Salwa Ismail, “Authoritarian Government, Neoliberalism and Everyday Civilities in Egypt,”
Third World Quarterly 32 (2011): 845–862.
Part 1 of this volume focuses on the different ways extent, content, and
depth have been combined in several Arab countries during the Arab Upris-
ings, depending on external influences, state formation, social formations, and
ethnic and religious fissures. Insofar they traces the historical development of
the practice and concept of citizenship they show how convoluted and diverse
were the trajectories of citizenship in countries in the Middle East and North
Africa. Citizenship regimes were often imposed by foreign countries, blocked
by sub-national or supra-national loyalties, subverted by sectarian and class
interests, or manipulated by authoritarian regimes “from above,” r esulting in
unstable state-citizen relations, with the rights of citizens r emaining undefined
and conditional. Historically, several phases can be discerned in the emer-
gence, control and suppression, and re-emergence of notions of citizenship.
The chapters show that the Arab Uprisings have been crucial in the formation
of new definitions of extent, content, and depth of citizenship.
In Chapter 1, Anthony Gorman analyses the mixed British legacy. On the one
hand, the British interference in the region made an important contribution
to citizenship in the region by supporting democratic procedures laid down
in constitutions, the establishment of political parties, recognition of trade
unions, and the introduction of the rule of law. On the other hand, its support
for reform was undermined by its imperial economic and political interests that
led it to seek local intermediaries who could guarantee stability. It is especially
on the level of extent and formal citizenship and the drawing up of boundaries
that exclusionary politics had long-term adversarial effects. The recognition
of minorities in Iraq, Palestine, and Trans-Jordan did not always work out well
and often actually deepened existing communal divisions, thereby blocking a
“genuine civil spirit” of shared citizenship. The British contribution to extent,
content and depth remained limited, as voting rights were restricted and con-
stitutions skewed to the advantage of the ruler and the executive.
In Chapter 2, Roel Meijer analyses the long-term development of citizen-
ship regimes from the colonial period to the present crisis and the sequence
of social contracts, each of them falling apart when its specific citizenship
regime was undermined. In this way the colonial regime was supplanted by
the citizenship regime of the “authoritarian bargain,” which broke down with
the introduction of neoliberalism and the demand for a new social contract
based on civil, political, social and economic rights based on new concepts of
citizenship among different interest groups in society. Meijer argues that the
re-emergence of notions of citizenship based on rights is characteristic of the
Arab Uprisings. Where uprisings could sweep away the previous regime and
establish a consensus on a common concept of the citizen, such as Tunisia, a
new citizenship regime was established. Where they were incapable of doing
Introduction 21
so and a pact had been made, such as Morocco in 1992, or a separate deal was
made with certain sections of the opposition and the previous regime, such as
between the Muslim Brotherhood and military in Egypt, or no deal at all was
made, the regime remained intact, or collapsed. In all cases, extent, content,
and depth were heavily affected.
In Chapter 3, Raymond Hinnebusch and Ola Rifai analyse the difficulties
Syria encountered in the transition from being part of an empire to becoming
a nation-state after World War i. They contend that citizenship is based on the
dual processes of state formation and nation building and that this was difficult
in Syria because of the artificial boundaries drawn up by the European imperial
powers and the ethnic and religious diversity of the population. C itizenship
presupposes state centralisation and mass political participation, but this was
hampered on the one hand by supra-national ideologies such as pan-Syrianism,
pan-Arabism, and pan-Islam, and on the other hand by sub-national identi-
ties, such as millets, city affiliations, and regional attachments. Moreover, Syria
suffered from deep class divisions and strong sectarian loyalties. In its early
stages, Baʿathism was able to overcome these obstacles and create a “populist
social contract” based on reform, social equality, sectarian inclusion, and the
emergence of a distributive state. Gradually, however, it b ecame a patrimo-
nial state dependent upon patronage, co-optation, and vertical relations of
dependency. With the introduction of neoliberal economic measures in the
1990s, and especially after the death of Hafiz al-Asad in 2000, the coalition of
forces began to fall apart, leading to the rise of crony capitalism, growing in-
equality, widespread regional poverty, and the deepening of sectarian fissures.
The second part of the chapter deals with the call for “inclusive citizenship”
during the Damascus spring in 2001, the Damascus Declaration of 2005, and,
particularly, the uprisings in 2011, which first centred around notions of equal
citizenship and a cross-sectarian civic identity, and was aimed at promoting
new citizen-state relations, regardless of sectarian background.73 Yet Syria de-
generated into a sectarian war that has merely served to deepen the primordial
allegiances, precluding attempts to find a new consensus on extent, content,
and depth of citizenship.
In Chapter 4, Sami Zemni analyses the relationship between citizenship
and the Tunisian revolution through the emergence of the concept of “the
people.” As in the case of Syria, a general feeling that the regime had broken
the “unwritten contract” between ruler and ruled by being captured by a “gang
of thieves” who ran the state for itself was widespread. It was the collapse
73 See also Salwa Ismail, “The Syrian Uprising: Imagining and Performing the Nation,”
S tudies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 11 (2011): 538–549.
of the right to social mobility and social and economic advancement through
education that particularly enraged the population. Previous social rights
had been transformed into “favours” dependent on personal loyalty and de-
pendency, while the arbitrariness of the regime insulted the people’s sense of
dignity. Zemni’s main argument is that after the revolution the nation was, for
the first time, confronted with its divisions along class and identity lines and
that it had to define a new national consensus based on a new definition of
citizenship in order to redraw the meaning of the principles of extent, content,
and depth. However, the newly found concept of “the people” did not suffice
and a new consensus had to be reached. Tunisianité became the lynchpin of
the new social contract, laid down in the new constitution. It was based on
the acceptance of pluralism and the resolution of differences through debate,
and recognised civil and political rights as well as gender equality, although it
excluded the Salafis from being part of the new consensus and restricted politi-
cal participation to voting in elections, thus limiting the inclusionary character
of the revolution and the notion that the people as a whole could determine
the extent, content, and depth of citizenship.
In Chapter 5, James Sater focuses on those elements that impeded the
emergence of citizenship and limited the effects of the demonstrations of
the February 20 Movement, the movement that emerged in Morocco during
the Arab Uprisings in 2011. Adopting Springborg’s concept of instrumental cli-
entelism (Chapter 15), he shows how pervasive the patronage system of the
monarchy is and how it dominates the Moroccan polity and civil society, and
how co-optation into the makhzen effectively impedes and absorbs the possi-
bilities of contestation and formal political opposition, thus making it difficult
to mobilise crucial sections of society on the basis of a rights discourse. In a
manner detailed in resilience theories, the king controls extent, content, and
depth of citizenship by hollowing it out and absorbing its potential threats.
Sater builds on Springborg’s analysis by pointing out that de-politicisation is
an important aspect of patronage; the notion of Morocco as one big family
with the citizens as the monarch’s children, whose relations with the king,
based on “punishment” and “clemency,” does little to enhance independence,
self-awareness, and the rights central to citizenship.
In Chapter 6, Morten Valbjørn argues that, theoretically, citizenship has the
advantage that it is both universal and specific, and therefore goes beyond the
dominant authoritarian-democratisation paradigm. He compares the gen-
eral outline of citizenship as it has been developed by Nils Butenschøn and
Roel Meijer in republics with that in the monarchy in Jordan, arguing that it
is comparable but not the same. The fact that Jordan was created by Europe-
an powers and did not emerge out of a nationalist movement, and that King
Introduction 23
Abdallah had wider regional ambitions, hampered the development of citi-

zenship in the form of rights and common identity. As in Syria, sub-national
loyalties to tribes, sects, and often foreign advisors and administrators created
a weak level of national identity. However, in the 1950s Jordan started to see
developments similar to the general trends of the region. Indirectly benefit-
ing from oil rents in the Gulf, it was able to compensate for the repression of
political parties and political rights with the expansion of the public sector,
offering social rights, and becoming a “monarchical version of the authoritar-
ian bargain.” As in other countries in the region, this came to an end with the
austerity measures of the 1980s, when a brief period of liberalisation occurred,
followed by two decades of what Valbjørn has called a “transition to nowhere.”
He acknowledges that the Arab Uprisings were about rights, but they were also
very diverse, and often conflicting and contradictory, reflecting different inter-
ests. The demand for political rights therefore remained weak in comparison
to other countries, and consequently the monarchy could continue its game
of divide-and-rule. Jordan’s continuing difficulty in determining its boundar-
ies and the status of its inhabitants, including what civil, political, and social
rights they should have, was compounded by the Palestinian issue, which
impeded the establishment of an inclusionary state, equal citizenship, and
broad political participation.
In Chapter 7, Ida Almestad and Stig Stenslie analyse one of the main prob-
lems of state-citizen relations in the region, which is especially marked in
oil-rentier states such as Saudi Arabia where the authoritarian bargain has
acquired a specific conservative Islamic and paternalistic flavour. Citizen
rights are laid down in the Basic Law, Saudi Arabia’s constitution, where, in
exchange for a pledge of allegiance to the ruler, the citizen is entitled to health
care, job security, unemployment fees, and pension funds. These are, however,
not rights, in the sense of abstract citizen rights, but are beneficences, “gifts”
(makrama), given at the discretion of the ruler and dependent on personal
loyalty to him; they can, therefore, be withdrawn at his whim. Furthermore,
the country upholds a “graded or differential citizenship” of privileges in a
hierarchy that has the ruling family and tribal aristocracy at the top, and wom-
en and minorities at the bottom. Extent, content, and depth are determined
by a mix of tribal, monarchical, and conservative Islamic notions of loyalty. It
is against this rampant inequality that increasing resistance has arisen among
the population, and particularly the Shiʿi part of it, which has been formulat-
ed in the rights discourse of citizenship. That the demand for equal civil and
political rights is not limited to liberals, Shiʿis and women, but also includes
Salafis, signifies a revolution in Saudi political thought and the emergence of
new pressures “from below.”
In Chapter 8, James Sater analyses how the high percentage of migrants

in the Gulf states has led to a differential citizenship regime that not only
affects relations between full citizens and non-citizens, but also the relation-
ship between full members of the community. The Gulf states experience a
“citizenship hierarchy” between citizens themselves, based on tribal, familial,
economic, sectarian, and gender bases, as well as between citizens and the mi-
grant expat community, based on work permits, rights of abode, investment
opportunities, and so on. The state benefits the most from this citizenship re-
gime because on the one hand it initiates plans that need migrants and drive
up the numbers of expats, while on the other it forces full citizens to seek sup-
port from the state in order to protect their culture and wealth against the mi-
grants who form the overwhelming majority of the population in most Gulf
states. In this monopolistic situation the state determines the extent, content,
and depth of citizenship for its own citizens as well as the status of migrants.
Citizens wage a rear-guard battle for cultural authenticity and extent – closure
of citizenship rights, or what Sater calls the “hardening of the core” – seldom
demanding political rights. This is the case in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Qatar,
but this is seen to a lesser extent in Kuwait, which has less migrants and a
more powerful local merchant community that has political rights, and Saudi
Arabia, which has a larger local population. In all cases, naturalisation is al-
most impossible and mixed marriages are discouraged as they jeopardise full
citizenship rights.
In Chapter 9, Nils Butenschøn discusses different explanations for the lack
of regime legitimacy, democratic reform and the exceptional resilience of au-
thoritarian regimes in the region. While recognising the importance of many
such contributions from the 1960’s onwards, focusing as most of them do rel-
evant to the citizenship approach, he suggests that an analysis of the strategic
environment of ruling elites and their opponents should be added to enhance
our understanding of obstacles to dynamic changes in the political order. Giv-
en the peculiar patterns of power politics in the mena region we need an ap-
proach that includes analyses of the interaction between actors on the local,
regional, and international levels. The challenge is that we are confronted with
an extremely complex strategic environment: The combination of regimes
that generally speaking are characterised by a weak level of legitimacy and
a contested power-base, on the one hand, and being located in a politically
polarised region subjected to exceptionally intense geopolitical rivalries, on
the other. The main argument is that the combination of these factors creates
political dynamics that work against citizenship-based policies and societal
trust. At best, reforms from above are introduced securing stability for a while,
but not the kind of stability that opens up the political system for its citizens.
Introduction 25
The picture that emerges is a complex multi-level pattern of interdependen-

cies. Thus an “iron triangle” of counterforces on local, regional, and global lev-
els will, if necessary, be mobilised to protect the status quo.
Part 2 focuses on the concepts of citizenship. The first chapter deals with
the ideational notions and legal aspects of citizenship, especially in Islam. The
chapters make clear that the notions of citizenship and concept of rights have
always existed in Islam, but it is also clear that these have expanded over the
past years. As the Muslim Brotherhood became integrated into the political
process but at the same time became object of repression the concepts of rights
were rethought and strengthened and the notion of rights associated with citi-
zenship (muwatana) more thoroughly anchored in the overall ideology of the
movement, demonstrating that Islamism is quite flexible. The same also is the
case with Salafism. There as well, the Arab Uprisings have forced quietist Salafi
movements, not just in Egypt but from Morocco to Yemen, to a ccept politics
and therefore to rethink the position believers within the political context of
the constitutions of the nation-state and the parliamentary system, as citizens
with rights and obligations. From the changes in the constitutions, however,
we can observe that these rights have a communal rather than an individual
dimension and that the rights versus the state are weak, a tendency that is
supported by secular ideologies and is only more recently being challenged by
new libertarian trends in Arab political thinking. These chapters make clear
the state’s ability to determine the extent, content, and depth of citizenship
has been challenged by Islamic and secular movements. The results, however,
have been deeply ambiguous.
In Chapter 10 Knut Vikør argues that as far as content is concerned Islamic
law protects the subject from arbitrary rule and instead gives a normative set
of rules and admonitions that the ruler has to abide by if he wants to gain
legitimacy. These belonged to the “rights of God” (interpreted as the “rights of
society”), the “general good” (masalih), and the five “necessities” (maqasid).
According to Vikør, the ruler could not easily overstep the limits of these
rights, which protected the believers’ religion, life, intellect, lineage and prop-
erty, religion, and society. On the whole, it seems that the ruler accepted the
restrictions laid down in Islamic rule (al-siyasa al-sharʿiyya), which allowed
for a considerable degree of freedom while demanding his rule would com-
ply with the “spirit of the sharia.” The need for the sovereign to legitimate his
rule in Islamic terms sets limits to arbitrariness. State courts, too, could not
easily contravene Islamic law. Other practices, such as hisba, also seem to
have worked to the benefit of the common good and upheld a “balance” in
society. Extent in Islamic law was determined by gender, freedom (slave/free),
and religion (Muslim/non-Muslim), and was not based on equality, but on the
whole it did have rules and regulations that were predictable and can there-
fore be called the rule of law. The notion of “fairness” also guarded against
arbitrariness.
In Chapter 11, Michaelle Browers analyses the ideological history of citizen-
ship from Rifaʿa Rifaʿi al-Tahtawi in the early nineteenth century through to the
Arab Uprisings of 2011. She shows how concepts and notions of citizenship and
the projected relations between citizens and the state have constantly adapted
themselves to specific Arab ideologies, being integrated into Islamic law by
al-Tahtawi, adapted by Arab nationalist thinkers during the second half of the
twentieth century to Arab authoritarianism – constituting the basis of the au-
thoritarian bargain under Nasser – to recent the Arab Uprisings in 2011. Unsur-
prisingly, in the 1950s and 1960s, whether formulated by secular nationalists or
Islamists, social and economic rights were stressed at the expense of political
rights and pluralism, which were often seen as divisive and Western. Social
justice, often seen as a moral, distinct element of Islamic civilisation, was
regarded as the touchstone of citizenship. Intellectual musings on citizenship
also reflected the failure of the building of the nation-state and the common
interest, which, after the 1967 defeat, immediately fell under the “spontane-
ous sway of the tribal,” in the words of Sadiq al-ʿAzm. The increased interest
in Islam, citizenship, and equal rights of non-Muslims, was expressed by the
Wasatiyya group in the 1980s. The innovation of the Uprisings is marked by
the adoption, for the first time, of “the people” and people’s sovereignty, as ex-
pressed in the graffiti on a wall in Cairo, “We are the leaders we have been wait-
ing for.” Self-assertion, sit-ins and claim-making themselves became means of
expressing solidarity and citizenship.
In Chapter 12, Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen analyses the concept of citizenship
in the Muslim Brotherhood and affiliated ʿulama, such as Yusuf al-Qaradawi,
and the Wasatiyya intellectuals Tariq al-Bishri and Salim al-ʿAwwa, among
others. He demonstrates that citizenship as a concept did not really figure in
the Brotherhood’s discourse until the movement became tenuously integrated
into the political system after the 1970s and had to rethink the relationship
between subject and state and address the issues of extent, content, and depth
seriously for the first time. A whole range of concepts on the political level were
introduced to underscore new political rights of the citizen including the intro-
duction of the “civil state” (as opposed to the Islamic state), the a cceptance of
the originally secular term “citizen” (muwatin), the notion of political equality
between Muslims and non-Muslims, and the downgrading in the political field
of terms such as “unbelievers” (kuffar). This change in thinking was reflected in
the political platforms and programmes of the Muslim Brotherhood from the
1990s onward, which also became more critical of the power of the executive,
Introduction 27
enhancing the political rights of citizens. They found their way into the Justice
and Freedom Party established after the fall of Mubarak, whose charter states
the “The State is based on the principle of citizenship, where all citizens enjoy
equal rights and duties guaranteed by law in accordance with the principles of
equality and equal opportunities without discrimination because of religion
or race.” The acceptance of the sovereignty of the people also meant a shift
in asserting citizenship. Its stand on content, mostly formulated in conserva-
tive moralistic terms, however, stressed its communalistic dimension based on
“family values” and “public morality,” which directly affect depth. Moreover, as
Skovgaard-Petersen argues, reform is mostly based on “justice,” not “freedom,”
and privileges the state, in a sense, presenting an “Islamic-lite” authoritarian
bargain. A new generation will have to emerge to further develop citizenship
as a concept.
In Chapter 13, Emin Poljarevic analyses the Salafis’ notions of citizenship.
Unlike the Muslim Brotherhood, which has been influenced by external con-
cepts, as Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen demonstrated, Salafism is broadly based
on the “purity” of Islam and orthopraxy, and thinks in terms of friends and
enemies and has developed means by which to keep a distance from all sourc-
es of “pollution.” It is based on exclusion and maintaining sharp borders with
the “other,” who represents the “evil” and “corrupt” out-group, while limiting
inclusion to their own religious community, most succinctly expressed in
the principle of al-walaʾ wa-l-baraʾ (loyalty to Muslims and disavowal of non-
Salafis). Nevertheless, there are important differences between various Salafi
groups, primarily with regard to their mobilising strategies. Citizenship in
these pre-modern and even pre-political terms can only mean membership of
the umma, and that the hadith and Qurʾan in all their transparency determine
extent, content, and depth. Citizenship in the Salafi sense is based on duties,
rather than rights. One becomes member of the “saved sect” by fulfilling one’s
duties and obligations. This apolitical attitude, however, became difficult to
maintain once the Arab uprisings forced Salafis to become involved in politics.
Several notions helped them to make this step, such as the flexible notions of
“necessity” and the “general interest,” and to adopt stances that have compro-
mised their highly exclusionary notions of citizenship. In Egypt, this meant
taking part in elections under “alien” constitutions that recognise the equal
rights of citizens. That Salafism is clearly influenced by political circumstances
is further underlined in Saudi Arabia, where the duty of “obedience” (taʿa) to
the ruler (wali al-amr) is central to the religious sanctioning of the authoritar-
ian bargain based on royal benevolence (makrama), or in the Islamic State in
Iraq and Syria (isis), where, due in part to the escalation of sectarian animosi-
ty, the most rigid communal, exclusionary, and discriminatory form of S alafism
is u pheld as an alternative to the failed attempts to construct nationalist, pan-

Arab, or even briefly in 2011 liberal citizenship regimes in Syria.
In Chapter 14 Rachel Scott analyses the citizenship regime that resulted
from the uprisings in Egypt, as laid down in the constitution of 2014. In con-
trast to earlier chapters on citizenship and activism, or performance, she fo-
cuses on the disciplining power of the state that crushes these movements
from above. She traces tensions in the conceptualisations of citizenship to the
history of dhimmi status, and the millet, which coincided with the nation and
were based on communal self-rule and the expansion of the power of the secu-
lar state from the nineteenth century onwards, which encroached on the millet
and finally took over the nation, restricting the religious law to the p ersonal
status law. In this way, the determination of extent, content, and depth, which
were partly determined by the millet, were gradually transferred to the state.
Rather than assuming a dichotomy between the so-called secular liberal and
the authoritarian and the more Islamist periods, Scott argues there has been
a continuous, state-managed citizen regime in Egypt since the nineteenth
century, in which the state increasingly came to define religious categories
and the relation b etween religion and politics, laid down the boundaries be-
tween majority and minority, and determined the nation’s accepted religions
and national culture. The ability of the state to determine extent, content, and
depth is reflected in its claim to uphold the “public order” and regulate what
is and is not acceptable, and who can be excluded and persecuted. This is es-
pecially manifest in Art. 3 of the constitution of 2014 that recognises “heavenly
religions,” that is, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, but excludes other r eligions,
such as the Bahaʾi faith. The notion of the public order has also been taken up
by intellectuals who invoke it to restrict civil rights in the public sphere. It has
also been supported by the Coptic church, whose power over its followers as
their representative is based on the recognition of the state, and as such goes
directly against the demands for equal citizenship rights that a number of Cop-
tic youth movements demanded during the uprisings.
Part 3 deals with the practices and specific claims to citizenship. The first
chapter deals with the main practices in the Middle East that obstruct, ham-
per and undermine claims to objective and abstract rights: patronage and
clientelism. These have appeared throughout the book and in many ways the
emergence of a discourse of rights and equality over the past decades leading
to the Arab Uprisings is a revolt against the vertical relations of dependence
and submission. Most of this part is therefore taken up by research of the dis-
criminated, marginalised, the socially, ethnically, and religiously excluded,
youth, and women, and how they formulate claims to dignity and organise
contentious actions. This struggle is fought on the ideological level and the
Introduction 29
performative level. The emphasis is on expressions, actions, symbolism, per-

formances, signs of solidarity, claim making, and enactments. The chapters
focus on the Arab Uprisings of 2011, but also include other, earlier citizenship
manifestations. For a brief period, these manifestations claimed the exclusive
right to determine the extent, content, and depth of citizenship, encompassing
an unbounded inclusivity, an undefined consensual content, and a limitless
depth and commitment to the general good. As such, they exceed the reformist
aspect of the Arab Uprisings.74 It would, however, be a mistake to overlook the
legal dimension. At some point action has to be translated into formal political
measures, i.e. laws and constitutions. Neither would it be wise to ignore the
regressive side of the Uprisings, as the last two contributions describe.
In Chapter 15 Robert Springborg argues that clientelism is the primary
obstacle to the introduction of a democratic polity based on equal citizen-
ship. He makes a distinction between “dense clientelism,” which is culturally
embedded and emotionally loaded, and “instrumental clientalism,” which is a
modern means to build political alliances and divide resources. However, even
in the latter both culture and “path dependence” play a major role and the dif-
ference with dense clientalism is less obvious than is often assumed. Research
confirms that the strong sense of hierarchy and the predominance of author-
ity over autonomy in Muslim countries point to persistent cultural roots and
“survival strategies” that preclude self-expression and self-decision making.
The prevalence of linguistic, ethnic, and religious cleavages in the Middle East
have enhanced these tendencies. In the end, clientalism hampers the spread of
a rational-legal, programmatic, and democratic culture and has severe a dverse
economic and political effects, enhancing dependence, inequality, and un-
derdevelopment. Patronage, rather than citizenship, provides the “glue” that
holds polities together and determines the extent, content, and depth by build-
ing vertical, exclusive, segmented loyalties that undermine horizontal, broad,
inclusionary entities built on a sense of individual rights.
In Chapter 16, Rania Maktabi takes us to the other spectrum of Kuwait
politics, i.e. the exclusion of Kuwaiti women from full civic rights, mainly be-
cause male kin have guardianship over female family members. She analyses
the impact of the enfranchisement of women in 2005 on the articulation and
raising of women-specific issues in parliament, such as strengthening Kuwaiti
women’s autonomy in obtaining a passport; improving their chances on the
labour market; increasing their access to public housing; and s trengthening
74 See Asef Bayat, who stressed the reformist and the non-revolutionary character of the
uprisings.
the civil and social rights of the children of Kuwaiti women married to non-
citizens, including stateless bidun men. While the demonstrations of the
Arab Uprisings were spectacular events, incremental and piecemeal formal
improvements in the civil and economic rights of Kuwaiti women reflect the
changing content and depth of gendered citizenship in an authoritarian Gulf
state with limited albeit deliberative parliamentary processes. Claims raised
by both male and f emale MPs for strengthening Kuwaiti women’s citizenship
rights reflected pressures for bolstered female citizenship. At the same time,
the reformist dimension of the Arab Uprisings had a gendered face that deep-
ened internal social divisions in Kuwait. Increased focus on female citizenship
in parliament, in court, and in the media shored up the privileged status and
position of Kuwaiti women as holders of Kuwaiti citizenship documents in
contradistinction to segments of the bidun population with no affiliation to
Kuwaiti women.
In Chapter 17, Assia Boutaleb, continues this approach and explains the
role of youth in the Uprisings but employs the anthropological perspective
of the practice rather than the ideational. She argues that youth was not the
only social group protesting in 2011, but that it expressed a general critique
of society and “was the best in analysing and explaining the political game.”
But perhaps more importantly than content and extent of citizenship was
the dimension of depth as it was expressed in practice. The two groups she
analyses in Egypt and Morocco show an extraordinary degree of commitment
and sense of social responsibility. In both cases they engaged in explaining
their rights to citizens, for instance by explaining the workings of the electoral
system, the importance of the new constitutions, and providing information
on the economic or international situation. Rather than imposing ideas from
above, they organised debates, dialogues, and public training. In this way they
disseminated a sense of civic engagement and active citizenship, in the sense of
citizens sharing joint responsibility for their future. These “acts of citizenship”
are not heroic transgressions of the political order or radical disruptions of
civic norms but, as Boutaleb states, “[T]hey are minor, everyday acts, such
as discussing or arguing issues of public interest, but through them a civic
relationship is produced between ordinary citizens.” Their main purpose is to
break down the predominant sense of apathy and culture of subordination.
In addition, in contrast to the classic ruling bargain, these acts of citizenship
were expressed in terms of a suspicion of the state, which was no longer seen
as the source of rights and a provider of services. In response, the state has
waged a propaganda campaign to exclude the youth by linking it with drugs,
criminality, and the disruption of the public order.
Introduction 31
In Chapter 18, Claire Beaugrand analyses the position of the people without
rights in Kuwait, the bidun, and how they “by virtue of their acts, c onstitute
themselves as legal and political subjects.” The bidun have, over the years,
become the quintessential victims of what Sater calls the “hardening of the
core” of citizenship in the Gulf. Victims of a bureaucratic mistake in the 1960s,
they were excluded from the welfare provisions citizens obtained and from
having any rights at all, and increasingly were regarded as total outsiders,
aliens, who posed a security, cultural, and economic threat, and consequently
are not recognised as beings. As such, the bidun are a good example of the
politics of citizenship of the state. Their status as “non-existent” beings was
underlined in the marginal spaces they inhabited. Although the bidun case
goes back several decades, as was typical of the Arab Uprisings they no lon-
ger relied on patronage but developed innovative forms for promoting their
case. The protests in 2011 were led by a new generation of young leaders who
were not members of civil society and were independent. Their protests were
spontaneous, innovative, and public, and adopted new forms, such as organis-
ing public demonstrations or days of commemoration, handing out flowers to
parliamentarians, and outright defiance of the authorities, forcing the latter
to take the case of the bidun into account. Regardless of the outcome, through
these acts of citizenship the bidun managed to assert their right to have rights.
In the Chapter 19 and the conclusion of the book, Engin Isin gives an exposé
what citizenship studies can contribute to the study of the Middle East. He
points to new developments in citizenship studies such as the sexual and
environmental rights. Moreover it is clear that in a globalised world citizenship
is no longer confined to nation-states. Isin also argues against the trope that
subjects are turned into citizens. Instead citizens are both: they are s ubjects
and citizens, subject to power, control, and discipline, reduced to obedience
and submission on the one hand and empowered to contest those forces and
change them through contestation and subversion on the other. Following
Etiènne Balibar, Isin accepts the dual nature of the modern citizen-subject
who is a “subject to power” and a “subject of power.” In the first the state works
on the citizen, who is legislated and acted upon, while in the second the citizen
contests this power, alters it, and acquires agency. In the words of Isin: “What
distinguishes the citizen from the subject is that the citizen is this composite
subject of obedience, submission, and subversion.” Citizenship is confirmed in
performances, rituals and acts. Citizenship in this universal form is shorn of its
European bias. In terms of extent, content, depth, this raises important ques-
tions which Isin does not explore but can be asked on the basis of this volume.
These are: How does the subject-citizen work out in the Middle East from the
colonial period to the present? How does it apply to Islamist movements, or

other social movements or transnational movements in the region, and how
has the authoritarian state determined the citizen-subject in the region, and
how has it since the Arab Uprisings tried to put the citizen jinn back in the
subject box? The questions that Isin throws up underline the complexities of
applying insights of citizenship studies to the Middle East.
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part 1
The Arab Social Pact
∵
chapter 1
The British Legacy in the Middle East

Anthony Gorman
From the middle of the nineteenth until the mid-twentieth century, Britain
played a significant role in determining the development of political insti-
tutions and practices of citizenship in the Middle East that was to leave a
substantial legacy thereafter. Articulated in different ways according to the par-
ticular needs of the situation, the British imperial project engaged with local
regimes and traditions, the requirements of the contemporary international
context, and, where necessary, popular demands, in order to lay a foundation
of public culture and practice based on conceptions of nationality, citizenship,
and democratic institutions as the basis of a body politic, even as it qualified
the scope and authority of such institutions. In so doing it sought to establish
its own priority of establishing stable states sympathetic to its imperial inter-
ests. The result was a mixed legacy that provided a legal framework of citizen-
ship and constitutional rule but limited rights and a basis for authoritarian rule
with which to curb opposition that would readily be taken up by local elites.
In exploring the evolution of these conceptions and practices of citizenship
during this period, this chapter will focus on the cases of Egypt, the mandates
of Iraq, Palestine and Transjordan, and the Gulf states of Kuwait and Bahrain.
Background
From the beginning of the nineteenth century Britain came to exercise an in-
creasingly significant and at times dominant role in Middle Eastern political
affairs. While its role in the defeat of the French in Egypt in 1801 announced
its presence in the region it did not take up a more specific authority until the
second half of the century. With the occupation of Egypt in 1882, which con-
tinued in various guises, from the initial so-called veiled protectorate to the
formal protectorate of 1914–1922, and on until its withdrawal in 1956, Britain
embarked on the first of a number of major imperial commitments. In the
mandatory administrations of Iraq (1923–1932), Palestine (1923–1948), and
Transjordan (1923–1946), constructed from the former Arab provinces of the
Ottoman Empire, Britain played a more formal role in mentoring these new
states under the authority of the League of Nations. In Kuwait, Bahrain, and
other Trucial states a series of treaties signed by Britain with local rulers d uring

42 Gorman
the nineteenth century and maintained until its formal withdrawal from the
Gulf at the beginning of the 1970s formed the basis of British imperium, guar-
anteeing its control in matters of defence and foreign affairs in return for sup-
porting the position of the traditional ruling families.
These particular political circumstances afforded Britain an environment
in which it exercised considerable authority in erecting the constitutional
architecture and influencing the culture of citizenship. This was done in dif-
ferent ways. In Egypt the British agent and consul-general exerted consider-
able influence on the workings of government through a network of British
advisers, particularly during the time of Lord Cromer (1883–1907). The man-
datory administrations in Palestine, Transjordan, and Iraq served as a direct
instrument of British authority but, in the case of Iraq, British influence con-
tinued well after formal independence in 1932 through a series of advisors.1
The device of bilateral treaties, in Egypt with the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of
1936, in Jordan with the Anglo-Transjordan Treaty (1928), and in Iraq with the
Anglo-Iraqi Treaty (1930) and the Portsmouth Treaty (1948), served as the basis
through which Britain formalised relations between itself and the respective
states and legitimated its interference in domestic affairs.2 During World War
ii, Britain invoked its rights under these treaties to reassert control over Egypt
and reoccupy Iraq after the rise of a pro-German government in 1941 until the
end of the war. The arrangements with the Trucial States provided similar legal
sanction.
Throughout this period the British government presided over a process of
constitutional change in which governing institutions were defined, terms
of nationality formulated, and the rights of citizens, whether explicitly or
implicitly, delineated. In promoting this course the British authorities invoked
the virtues of democracy, constitutional government, and an active citizenry.
This was particularly the case in the mandatory administrations where Brit-
ain was entrusted by the League of Nations with the role of laying the basis
of representative institutions, legal and social rights, and the protection of
minorities.
Despite these claims and commitments, in shaping institutions of gov-
ernance and a culture of citizenship British policy was not driven primarily
by such ideals but was characterised by a pragmatic and flexible approach,
1 Stephen Longrigg, Iraq, 1900 to 1950: A Political, Social, and Economic History (London: Oxford
University Press, 1953), 342.
2 The declaration of February 22, 1922, in which Britain granted Egypt self-government though
reserved to itself certain important powers, while not mutually agreed, can be similarly
characterised.
The British Legacy In The Middle East 43
largely qualified by concerns about political stability and calculations made

to maintain a continuing British presence and ensure its future influence. This
was also moderated through competing demands of the local population that
involved negotiation with the local elites and an engagement, whether of ac-
commodation or resistance, with popular calls for the recognition of particu-
lar political, economic, social, and cultural rights. The results of this political
project and the dynamics of the relationship that it established would play a
significant part in determining the trajectory of citizenship as a practice in the
post-colonial period.
Constitutional Rules
Constitutional reform was a central pillar of British rule in both Egypt and
the mandates. In 1883, soon after the occupation of Egypt, a new constitution
(organic law) was promulgated that would lay the basis for government and
administration for the next 40 years. Following a sustained nationwide protest
against its continued presence in 1919–21, the British government unilaterally
granted Egypt self-government and authorised the drafting of a new consti-
tution. Written by a committee appointed by the Egyptian government but
undoubtedly under some British influence, the 1923 constitution was strongly
influenced by European and particularly Belgian constitutional practice.3 It
established a constitutional monarchy drawn from the family of Muhammad
ʿAli with a bicameral parliament. The king as executive was accorded very con-
siderable powers, including the right to appoint the Prime Minister, dismiss
the cabinet and the parliament, and declare martial law. The popular will was
represented by the House of Representatives, which was elected by popular
vote along with three-fifths of the membership of the Senate, while the king
appointed the remainder.
In the mandates of Iraq, Palestine, and Transjordan the establishment of
a system of government and definition of citizenship required deference,
in principle at least, to the provisions of the Covenant of the League of Na-
tions. Composed of the former Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, the
Class A Mandates (the category that included both British and French man-
datory administrations in the Middle East) were states whose independence
was provisionally recognised but which were deemed to require a period of
tutelage before being granted full status. This period therefore necessitated
3 Abdeslam M. Maghraoui, Liberalism without Democracy: Nationhood and Citizenship in Egypt,

1922–1936 (Durham: Duke University Press 2006), 130.
44 Gorman
deliberation, negotiation, and occasionally insistence on the part of the man-

datory power, in the process of the codification of an institutional basis of gov-
ernment, the powers of the state, and the legal definition of nationality and
rights of citizenship.
Each of the British mandates offered particular challenges in this respect.4
The state of Iraq, composed of the former Ottoman provinces of Basra, Bagh-
dad, and Mosul, was both an expression of the international ideals of self-
determination but also of British imperial design. Initially founded on the
agreement of the League of Nations and the Treaty of Lausanne, its principal
constitutional document was the Organic Law of Iraq (1925), first drafted in
1921 by British officials and subsequently revised after extended Iraqi consul-
tation.5 As with its 1923 Egyptian counterpart, the Iraqi constitution provided
for a strong monarchy, with the Hashemite King Faysal, a newcomer to Iraq,
paradoxically serving as a figure of national unity. Like Egypt, Iraq possessed a
bicameral parliament but with the Senate wholly appointed by the King and a
Chamber of Deputies elected by universal male suffrage of all Iraqis of 20 years
of age and over. The election process set up an indirect system with primary
electors voting for secondary selectors (in a ration of 250:1), who in turn would
elect deputies.6 In Transjordan a similar two-stage election process was pre-
scribed (here the ration was 200:1) by the Organic Law of 1928, where all males
of 18 and over were entitled to vote for secondary electors for the 14 elected
members of a 21 member Legislative Council, which acted as an advisory body
to Emir Abdullah, brother of Faysal.7
In contrast to the monarchies of Iraq and Transjordan, in Palestine the Order
in Council of 1922 that served as the constitution set the British High Commis-
sioner as the chief executive and established a Legislative Council as a national
representative body.8 From the beginning, however, Palestinian politics was
riven with the struggle between Arab and Jewish nationalism and the Council
4 Norman Bentwich, “Mandated Territories: Palestine and Mesopotamia (Iraq),” British Year-
book of International Law 2 (1921): 48–56.
5 One of the chief points of discussion had been the powers given to the king that the Iraqi
committee had thought excessive in the original draft; Majid Khadduri, Independent Iraq
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951), 15.
6 Majid Khadduri, The Government of Iraq (Jerusalem: New Publishers Iraq, 1944), 15. Direct
election was not employed until the elections of January 1953.
7 Mary C. Wilson, King Abdullah, Britain and the Making of Jordan (Cambridge: Cambridge
8 Palestine, The Palestine Order in Council, August 10, 1922 http://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL
.NSF/0/C7AAE196F41AA055052565F50054E656 (accessed August 30, 2015).
foundered with the boycotted elections of 1923.9 In 1935 a new British proposal
for a legislative body again came to nought with only the system of municipal
government offering any official avenue for political representation.10 Without
an effective constitution and representative institutions, politics in Palestine
was therefore largely determined by the contest between Arab and Zionist na-
tionalisms and offered little space for citizen involvement at a national level.
The National Citizenry
Integral to the process of setting up the constitutional basis for these states
was a legal definition of nationality and citizen rights. In the case of Egypt this
seemed less urgent. Although the 1923 constitution contained a section On the
Rights and Duties of Egyptians stating important principles, until the passing
of a new nationality law in 1928 Egyptian nationality still relied on nineteenth-
century Ottoman legislation.
In the mandates, the general principle of the nationality laws was that
former Ottoman subjects would automatically acquire the nationality of the
state in which they were now resident.11 This was most clearly the case in the
Iraqi Nationality Law of 1924, while a similar provision applied in Transjor-
dan. In Palestine, where the terms of the mandate had specifically required
the establishment of a citizenship law, the Palestinian Citizenship Order of
1925 included the same provision and thus immediately accorded citizenship
to the majority Arab population in Palestine.12 More particular were the condi-
tions for the acquisition of Palestinian citizenship: the applicant had to have
been resident for a certain period of time, demonstrate a good character, and
possess an “adequate knowledge” of English, Arabic, or Hebrew. The last point
clearly referenced the promise of the British government to support Palestine
as a Jewish national homeland (which had been formally incorporated into the
9 Palestine Royal Commission [henceforth Peel Commission]: Report, 1937, 56.

10 Peel Commission, 347–352.
11 Norman Bentwich, “Nationality in Mandated Territories Detached from Turkey,” British
Yearbook of International Law 7 (1926): 97.
12 Norman Bentwich, “Palestine Nationality and the Mandate,” Journal of Comparative Leg-
islation and International Law 21 (1939): 230–232. The term “citizenship” in the legislation
seems distinctive to Palestine; elsewhere in Iraq and Transjordan the term nationality
is favoured in the legislation. For a detailed discussion of the period 1917–25 see Lauren
Banko, “The Creation of Palestinian Citizenship under an International Mandate. 1918–
1925: Legislation, Discourses and Practices,” Citizenship Studies 16 (2012): 641–655.
46 Gorman
terms of the mandate), and provided a legal support for Jewish immigration
and settlement.
Definitions of nationality were much more exclusive in the Gulf States. Ku-
waiti nationality was only defined in law in 1948 and was restricted to a nar-
rowly defined group made up of members of the ruling family, those who had
been permanently resident in Kuwait since 1899 (a date which referenced the
agreement between Britain and Mubarak the Great), and children of Kuwaiti
fathers or of Arab or Muslim men born in Kuwait after that time. Naturali-
sation was allowed after 10 years’ residence but was also conditional on pro-
ficiency in Arabic.13 A decade later, in 1959, the law was amended with 1920
(the year of the war between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait) now set as the date by
which permanent residence had to be established, while the requirements for
naturalisation became more restricted.14 With the withdrawal of the British
and subsequent independence in 1961, citizenship was soon extended to many
Bedouin in return for military service, which was used effectively to break
down loyalties to tribal sheikhs and to secure electoral loyalty.15
These changing legal definitions of the national citizen stood in contrast to
the foreign national. Here, the long tradition of the Ottoman Capitulations,
a regime of legal and economic privileges enjoyed by foreign nationals that
dated back to at least the sixteenth-century, had emphasised the advantages
of foreign nationality over the comparative disadvantages of local citizenship.
Indeed, for this reason the extrajudicial rights enjoyed by foreigners became
an increasing target of nationalist criticism from the late nineteenth-century
for compromising local sovereignty and reinforcing the hierarchy of the co-
lonial order. With the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire the Capitulations
were abolished in Palestine, Transjordan, and Iraq, presumably as contrary to
the principles of the mandate. In Egypt, the state with the most established
historical identity, they paradoxically remained in force until their abolition
in the Treaty of Montreux in 1937. The regime of Mixed Courts, created in 1875
to deal with legal disputes between Egyptians and foreigners, lingered on un-
til their dissolution in 1949, even if some of the practices if not rights given
13 Jill Crystal, Oil and Politics in the Gulf: Rulers and Merchants in Kuwait and Qatar (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 79, 186n.
14 Anh Nga Longva, “Citizenship in the Gulf States, Conceptualization and Practice,” in Citi-
zenship and the State in the Middle East: Approaches and Applications, ed. Nils A. Buten-
schøn et al., (Syracuse, ny: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 185.
15 Crystal, Oil and Politics, 88. In the same year, a nationality law granted Qatari citizenship
to those who had been resident in Qatar prior to 1930 (Crystal, Oil and Politics, 149–150).
to those with foreign nationality continued in some form, particularly in the

justice system.16
Minority Rights
The Ottoman Empire had been governed by a Muslim political elite that ac-
commodated different religious communities through the millet system that
delegated authority to the community on matters of property and personal
status. While this system had been significantly eroded under the impact of
the Tanzimat, religious and ethnic identity still remained important social
markers in Middle Eastern society at the end of the First World War. The dis-
memberment of the Empire after the war, with the consequent dislocation of
different ethnic and religious communities, called for new political arrange-
ments which took account of this pluralism. The British solution was to grant
limited recognition to the rights and claims of certain minorities, in part be-
cause it had the virtue of winning the support of these communities, but also
because it satisfied the requirements of the League of Nations.
In Iraq this religious and ethnic diversity, which comprised the three large
communities of the Shiʿis, Sunnis, and Kurds, along with smaller groups such
as the Turkomen, Yazidis, and various Christians sects, offered particular chal-
lenges to the project of nationhood and national citizenship. To accommodate
this diversity the British authorities allocated specific sectarian representation
at different levels of government. At the local level the Provincial and District
Councils provided for representation of non-Muslims, with dedicated seats for
Christian, Jewish, Sabaean, and Yazidi communities. At the national level the
Chamber of Deputies included four Jewish and Christian deputies each, out
of a total of 88 members during the mandate period. The principle if not the
same figures continued into the 1950s.17 In Transjordan, where the population
was more homogeneous, minority communities were also granted specific rep-
resentatives. The first Transjordanian Legislative Council (1928–31), made up
of 16 elected members (and 22 members in all), allocated five seats to minori-
ties (two Circassian and three Christian representatives).
16 Anthony Gorman, “Regulation, Reform and Resistance in the Middle East Prison,” In Cul-
tures of Confinement: A History of the Prison in Africa, Asia and Latin America, ed. Frank
Dikötter and Ian Brown (London: Hurst, 2007), 114–115.
17 These consisted of two Christian and one Jewish representative in Mosul; two Christians
and two Jews in Baghdad, and one Christian and one Jew in Basra province; Khadduri,
Government of Iraq, 15, 305.
48 Gorman
Such provisions in part were designed to provide specific communities with

a guaranteed voice in the new political system but they also offered the po-
tential for distortion of the principle of equal representation. In Transjordan
Circassians enjoyed representation more than fivefold that of the mainstream
Muslim population in proportion to their numbers, a policy likely to have been
prompted by the generally pro-palace sentiment of that community.18 The le-
gal recognition of tribal rights both in Jordan and Iraq demonstrated a similar
strategy of working within existing social hierarchies in order to win support.
In Transjordan two tribal representatives (one each from the north and south)
were appointed to the Legislative Council by a local commission of ten mem-
bers while tribal sheikhs in Iraq were granted the right to adjudicate disputes
and collect taxes.19
In addition to political representation, the religious and cultural right to
maintain separate education systems was recognised.20 In Iraq, Kurdish pri-
mary schools were established in the north of the country and there were soon
demands for Kurdish secondary schools and a Training College. The Local
Languages Law of 1926 provided for the use of Kurdish in administration and
primary schools in the north but Arabic remained the principal language of in-
struction in secondary and higher education.21 With the failure of the creation
of genuine civil spirit these divisions could take on political implications. In
Palestine the recognition of English, Hebrew, and Arabic as official languages
and the constitutional right for different communities to maintain their own
schooling system in their own language saw the separate development of edu-
cation and civic ideals, a fact later bewailed by the Peel Commission.22
18 Notionally one elected member represented 5000 Circassians, 7000 Christians and 27000
Muslims. The first post-independence constitution of 1947 which replaced the Organic
Law continued this practice with the 20 elected members of the Assembly being made
up of 12 Muslims, four Christians, two tribal representatives and two representatives for
Circassians and Chechens; see Abdo Baaklini, Guilain Denoeux and Robert Springborg,
Legislative Politics in the Arab World (Boulder CO-London: Lynne Rienner, 1999), 135, 137.
19 Kamal Salibi, The Modern History of Jordan (London-New York: i.b. Tauris, 1993), 115;
Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002), 37.
20 For Palestine, see Peel Commission, 48, 52–53.
21 Orit Bashkin, The Other Iraq: Pluralism and Culture in Hashemite Iraq (Stanford ca: Stan-
ford University Press, 2009), 44, 182–183.
22 Peel Commission 36–37: Articles 15 and 22 recognise different languages and that each
community is entitled “to maintain its own schools for the education of its members in
its own language.” See also Peel Commission, 333–334.
Formal recognition was only one way in which rights for minority groups
might be acknowledged. Just as Copts had been favoured in the Egyptian bu-
reaucracy before the First World War so the British policy of favouring Sunnis
(only about 20 per cent of the total population) in the Iraqi administration
at the expense of the Shiʿis and Kurds also undermined a genuine sense of
national community that could be exploited later by politicians.23 In Iraq this
would have great implications in the immediate post-independence era. The
Assyrians, a Christian refugee community from Anatolia, who were favoured
by the British in the recruitment of the Iraqi levies during the 1920s, were left
exposed as perceived allies of the British after independence was granted in
1932. Despite the guarantees that had been offered by the Iraqi government to
respect minorities, too readily accepted by the British, the violent suppression
of the Assyrians in 1933 demonstrated fractures in the new national commu-
nity.24 The potential for tension between the concepts of national citizen and
community member has continued until the present in various forms.
In its dealing with the issue of minority representation, British policy never
institutionalised sectarian identity to the extent that the French administra-
tion did in Lebanon. However, the formal recognition of ethnic identity, osten-
sibly contrived to be inclusive, could also serve as an effective divide-and-rule
strategy that arguably undermined the concept of a single national citizenry.
In Egypt, a country which had the longest tradition of political and social con-
tinuity, British machinations at times fed social tension between religious and
ethnic groups. Jews and Copts, as well as many foreigners, had been favoured
by the British in government employment in the years before the First World
War. In the Unilateral Declaration of Independence of 1922, the notion of a
national community was further undermined by the British insistence on re-
serving to itself the right of protection of the minorities, a position that ran
the risk of implicating Copts and Egyptian Jewry within the colonial order.
The subsequent discussion and rejection by the Egyptian constitutional com-
mittee of a provision for separate parliamentary representation for Copts was
significantly preoccupied with how the British government might exploit this
issue.25 While the majority decision to reject such a provision was later styled
as a statement of the integrity of the national citizen body, the ongoing issue
of Coptic representation in parliament demonstrates the continuing political
sensitivity of the religious dimension of Egyptian citizenship.
23 Tripp, History of Iraq, 31.

24 Ibid., 80.
25 B.L. Carter, The Copts in Egyptian Politics, 1918–1952 (Cairo: American University in Cairo
Press, 1986), 133–142.
50 Gorman
The Citizen and Political Rights
In presiding over a process of codification of nationality laws and constitutions,

and the recognition of various minority rights, the British sought to lay the
foundations of and win support for its programme of state-building. National-
ity laws served to define citizen status but specific rights were often undefined
or circumscribed by law and, in any case, were conceived from the top down.
The restrictive nature of these legal formulations and the constraints of local
practices severely inhibited the growth of an active and genuine citizenship.
This was particularly the case with political rights and representation. In
Egypt, the British occupation of the country in 1882 and the defeat of Ahmad
ʿUrabi’s movement had represented, among other things, a setback for Egyp-
tian constitutionalism. Now under British occupation, the new constitution
of 1883 laid down provisions for a consultative body although with weak pow-
ers. Subsequent developments, the setting up of a Legislative Council, General
Assembly, and Provincial Councils, put in place a complex system of indirect
elections that in theory were popularly elected but which in reality were domi-
nated by the notability. This strategy became characteristic of British policy in
the Middle East. Writing in his annual report presented to the British parlia-
ment, Cromer drew deeply from the well of orientalist imagery and made clear
the paternal principle at work, that the majority of the Egyptian population
was not yet qualified, and not even willing, to exercise full political rights,
…the interests of the masses must continue to a great extent to be repre-

sented by European officials or by Egyptian officials who have assimilat-
ed European ideas. No paper constitution, however ably conceived, can
suddenly give voice and representation to a people who have for centu-
ries been voiceless and unrepresented, and who have not as yet given any
practical proof that they wish to be represented, although the opportu-
nity for expressing the wish is afforded to them.26
This self-serving position of a restricted political class was further exemplified

in the attitude towards political parties. The first formal political parties in
Egypt were established in 1907, the same year Cromer was writing, predomi-
nantly as vehicles for nationalist sentiment. Before long they were dissolved
amidst British concerns of mounting political opposition and social unrest.
26 Parliamentary Papers, Egypt. No. 1, Reports by His Majesty’s Agent and Consul-General
on the Finances, Administration, and Condition of Egypt and the Soudan in 1906, No. 1
(1907), 29.
The rise of the Wafd after the First World War, followed by a number of smaller
parties under the constitutional arrangements of 1923, demonstrated that po-
litical life was dominated by elements of the traditional landowning elites with
limited input from the party membership, even if it did at times attract a mass
following.
In Iraq during the 1920s party political life was similarly restricted in scope,
programme, and levels of participation. As early as 1922 the late Ottoman pro-
Arab groups of al-ʿAhd al-ʿIraqi and Haras al-Istiqlal had given way to a series of
new political organisations formed largely in response to the question of Iraqi
independence and its ongoing relationship with Britain, but they offered little
diversity in their domestic programmes.27 Moreover, the scope for political op-
position was limited, a point made clear by the banning of political parties and
the dissolution of parliament in 1922 by the British High Commissioner, Percy
Cox, following public protest against the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty.28 When p arty life
resumed later on in the decade it once again revolved around an elite circle
of notables and their personal followings. New political parties, such as the
ʿAhd Party of Nuri al-Saʿid, formed at the beginning of the 1930s on a com-
mon platform of ending the mandate, demonstrated the weakness of party
life by dissolving themselves soon after Iraqi independence was recognised
in 1932; they had lost their raison d’être.29 The emergence soon after of the
Ahali Group, a coalition of intellectuals and professionals, signalled a new and
progressive vision that articulated a democratic programme based on liberal,
even socialist, ideas such as freedom of speech, human rights, equality, and
justice. Hemmed in by repressive government, these ideals were compromised
by Ahali’s relationship with the military after the coup in 1936.30 Not until after
the Second World War did organised political life revive but the pattern estab-
lished in the 1920s of personalised organisations subsequently suppressed by
government seemed set. A number of parties were closed down in 1948, then,
after a period of relative freedom, were again dissolved in 1954 in response to
their opposition to the Baghdad Treaty. The potential for a citizenry actively
engaged in political life suffered accordingly.
In Palestine, party political life was also limited. Up until the early 1930s Arab
political activity centred around the Arab Executive Committee, an umbrella
27 Khadduri, Independent Iraq, 29–30.

28 Tariq Y. Ismael, The Rise and Fall of the Communist Party of Iraq (Cambridge-New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2008), 13.
29 Khadduri, Independent Iraq, 29–30.
30 Tripp, History of Iraq, 84–86.
52 Gorman
body that convened a series of congresses.31 The establishment of the Istiqlal

Party in 1932 marked the beginning of a period of more formal party organisa-
tions, but those that followed again served more as vehicles for the traditional
elites and their followers rather than of any real ideological programme.32 In
the mid-1930s all but the Istiqlal Party united to form the Higher Arab Com-
mittee, but were subsequently banned by the British in October 1937 following
the outbreak of the Arab Revolt. Zionist party life represented a greater range
across the political spectrum on the left and right but all ultimately shared an
exclusive nationalism.
In the Gulf participatory politics was governed as much by a restricted fran-
chise as by political space. Municipal government provided the forum for the
exercise of political rights, at least for the local merchant class. In Bahrain this
was established at the beginning of the 1920s and progressively acquired au-
thority from the British political agent.33 In Kuwait, the establishment of the
municipality in 1930 and biennial elections provided a regular platform for a
political contest among the mercantile notability. This political momentum
culminated in the Majlis movement of 1938 where elements of the merchant
class sought to challenge the authority of the ruling family and speak in the
name of the people.34 The formation of the National Bloc as the first political
party in Kuwait, and the convening of an Assembly in July over the next six
months, saw the drafting of a basic law. Ultimately, however, the movement
collapsed, after initial British encouragement was withdrawn when it felt its
interests threatened.35
One important exception, where a political organisation emerged from be-
yond the traditional ruling class circles – or, in Palestine, outside of the contest
between Jewish and Arab nationalism – was the communist movement, first
formalised with the establishment of the Egyptian Communist Party in 1922/23.
Here, the movement was quickly repressed as Egyptian nationalists who, al-
though critical of the British suppression of political life before 1914, were
quick to show that they were just as willing to suppress the challenge of radi-
cal reform that they perceived in the Bolsheviks. The trial and imprisonment
31 Peel Commission, 176.

32 Ibid., 87. Among these parties were the Palestine Arab Party (Husseini family); the Na-
tional Defence Party (Nashashibi family) and the Arab Reform Party (Khalidi family), all
set up in the 1934–35 period.
33 Nelida Fuccaro, Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2009), 124–125.
34 Crystal, Oil and Politics, 46–47.
35 Ibid., 48–51.
of communist leaders in Cairo in 1924 was the first significant blow in the
campaign that continued throughout the decade and drove the movement
underground until its reappearance during the Second World War.36 A similar
phenomenon occurred in Iraq and Palestine during the 1930s, with the Iraqi
elites in the former and British authorities in the latter case, imprisoning or
expelling communist activists.37
The Press and Freedom of Speech
If party political life was tightly circumscribed by law and dominated by elite
factions, freedom of speech and particularly of the press offered greater poten-
tial as a forum for the promotion of new political and social ideas, the criticism
and debate of government policies, and the demands for citizen rights. Here
Britain showed itself willing to maintain and consolidate the Ottoman strategy
of restricting the acceptable spectrum of free speech.
By the middle of the nineteenth century the press in the Middle East had
begun to emerge as a medium for more than just government notices and to
carry public news and political opinion. The promulgation of the Ottoman
press law of 1865 launched a tradition of press regulation that would seek to
control this outlet by stipulating certain qualifications for newspaper owner-
ship (30 years of age and no criminal record) and in time increasingly con-
strain the freedom to express political opinion. In Egypt the Publications Law
of 1881 placed greater restrictions on freedom of speech and introduced im-
prisonment as a judicial punishment for transgressors. By contrast, the British
occupation the next year was followed by a period of relative freedom until the
reinstatement then reinforcement of the press laws in early 1909 formed part
of a general crackdown on the insurgent nationalist movement.38
Yet, while the virtues of a free and open press were regularly intoned, and
indeed, often endorsed by constitutions, the banning of newspapers and other
publications that were (usually) deemed to have exceeded the limits of appro-
priate criticism of government policy or figures was common. The Ottoman
press laws were carried over in large part into the interwar period but man-
datory administrations and their successors readily added to this regulatory
36 Anthony Gorman, “Containing Political Dissent in Egypt before 1952,” in Policing and Pris-
ons in the Middle East ed. L. Khalili and J. Schwedler (London: Hurst, 2010), 162–163.
37 Ismael, Communist Party of Iraq, 23–24.
38 Gorman, “Containing Political Dissent,” 161.
54 Gorman
and increasingly punitive regime.39 Press freedom may have been guaranteed
explicitly in the constitution but it was also restricted by official concerns
about safeguarding the “public order.”40 During the interwar period in Egypt
the changing press law regime required greater financial guarantees for news-
paper ownership and afforded less press freedom under an increasingly repres-
sive penal code. The practice of suspending or banning newspapers became a
regular practice during the 1920s and 1930s, one that was focused not only on
opposition party newspapers deemed to be a danger to the fundamental safety
of the state but also on journalists themselves who were imprisoned for criti-
cising in print the government or king.41
In late Ottoman-era Iraq and Palestine a press had also begun to forge a
tradition of public comment and discourse of rights.42 After the end of the
First World War, as new state boundaries were drawn this tradition continued
and with greater energy. In Iraq, newspapers in English, Arabic, Turkish, and
Kurdish published from 1918–19 engaged with the pressing political issues of
the day.43 Beside the sober Government Gazette a series of dailies presented a
range of opinions on the political future and constitutional basis of Iraq. Al-
Istiqlal, for example, launched in September 1920, proposed a Hashemite mon-
archy, while al-Djila called for a republic; all called for democracy in which the
importance of freedom of speech should be clearly recognised. The authori-
ties thought otherwise when, for example, after carrying an editorial hostile
to King Faisal, al-Djila was banned.44 The practice of state regulation of the
press was maintained thereafter and indeed codified in the Iraqi constitution
of 1930.45 The policy continued into the independence era. A Press Bureau was
established and the press law of 1954, issued following the hostile response to
the Iraqi government’s signing of the Baghdad Pact, made clear the limitations
of the freedom of speech.46
39 For a discussion of Ottoman press laws, see Ami Ayalon, The Press in the Arab Middle East
(New York-Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 65–66, 92–93.
40 See, for example, the Egyptian constitution of 1922, Art. 14 (“Freedom of opinion
shall be ensured.”) and Art. 15 (“The press shall be free within the limits of the law.
Censorship of newspapers shall be prohibited….”) http://www.constitutionnet.org/
files/1923_-_egyptian_constitution_english_1.pdf (last accessed August 30, 2015).
41 Gorman, “Containing Political Dissent,” 165.
42 Longrigg, Iraq, 44–45.
43 For details, ibid., 110.
44 Bashkin, Other Iraq, 21–23.
45 Ayalon, Press in the Arab Middle East, 260 n. 25. This was also true of the constitutions of
Lebanon (1926) and Syria (1930), and the Organic Law of Jordan (1928).
46 Bashkin, Other Iraq, 107.
In Palestine likewise an increasingly regulated and restrictive press regime

developed in response to growing political agitation. The Shaw Commission’s
recommendation of “the curtailment of the mischievous activities of the Press”
was formalised with a Press Ordinance in 1933 which required a licence for the
publication of a newspaper and allowed for the suspension of a newspaper
that was “likely to endanger the public peace.”47 In the following years both
Hebrew and Arabic language papers suffered suspension and prosecution.48
In 1936 alone Arab newspapers were suspended 34 times and warned officially
on 11 other occasions. Responding to what it saw as the continuous negative
tone of much of the Arab press (“The Arab Press excelled itself in denunciation
of the Government and the Jews”49), the Peel Commission recommended a
further extension in the powers of the press laws, a policy that assisted in sup-
pressing the Arab Revolt and was facilitated by the introduction of the Emer-
gency Regulations.50 The press played a similar role of a representative voice
for an increasingly articulate citizenry in the Gulf. In Bahrain, from at least the
1940s, it served as an important forum for the discussion of democratic values
and the rights of the individual, and, in the 1950s, became a place where pro-
Arab nationalist ideas could be disseminated, despite the attempts of the Brit-
ish Agency to curb criticism and maintain the political status quo.51
The Citizen as Worker
If party political rights remained limited and the right to freedom of expres-
sion was often curbed, the demand for social and economic rights could come
from other quarters. The labour movement provided one important locus for
this struggle where (usually) male workers used the threat or actual withdraw-
al of their labour to secure an improvement – in their working conditions, par-
ticularly regarding pay, hours of work, and safety conditions – from employers
and legal recognition from state authorities within a broader framework of
workers’ economic rights.
The emergence of an organised modern labour movement in the Arab
world began in Egypt with industrial action and the establishment of workers
47 Peel Commission, 83, 190.

48 Ibid., 193.
49 Ibid., 88.
50 Ibid., 132; Ayalon, Press in the Arab Middle East, 100.
51 Fuccaro, Histories of City and State, 178–180.
56 Gorman
associations at the end of the nineteenth century.52 Initially the movement

was predominantly led by foreign workers but, even before World War i, the
cause of workers’ rights had been taken up by the nationalist movement and
represented as part of a broader programme of citizen rights. During this stage
the state authorities took little action beyond a policing role during violent
confrontations between workers and employers, or at times facilitated negoti-
ations. However, as the movement gained in support and confidence it became
a more significant expression of social forces, especially after World War i.
In 1919 the labour protests in Egypt, part of a campaign of widespread re-
sistance to continued occupation, prompted the government to create the La-
bour Conciliation Board in August 1919, which recognised the principle of the
rights of workers and the need to provide official avenues of redress while at
the same time offering a means of containing an unpredictable and occasion-
ally unruly social movement.53 However, largely siding with the employer, the
Board proved ineffective at dealing with labour disputes and was replaced by
the Labour Office in 1930 (later the Labour Department in 1936), ominously
a part of the Public Security Department and drawing on staff from security
agencies that suggested a tone of repression over conciliation.54 It was not
until September 1942 that the pro-British Wafd government granted the first
legal recognition to trade unions, which had to be registered by the Ministry
of Social Affairs.55 This state strategy of co-optation and control of the labour
movement that had already been established would characterise the post-1952
approach to state-labour relations.56
In Iraq, where the extent of industrialisation and the size of the workforce
was smaller than in Egypt, an organised labour movement was later in emerg-
ing. Even at the end of the 1920s, the oil companies (Iraq Petroleum Com-
pany and the Khanaqin Oil Company), which employed about 3000 workers
between them, and the railways, with about 5700 workers, provided the only
significant mass workforces.57 From the last emerged probably the first genu-
ine labour union, the Artisans (or Mechanics) Association (Jamʿiyyat Ashab al-
Sanʿa), established in 1929 under the leadership of Muhammad Salih al-Qazzaz
52 For a discussion of this, see Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman, Workers on the Nile: Nation-
alism, Communism, Islam, and the Egyptian Working Class, 1882–1954 (London: i.b. Tauris,
1988), 48–82.
53 Beinin and Lockman, Workers on the Nile, 116.
54 Ibid., 194, 206.
55 Law 85, Ibid., 293.
56 Marsha Pripstein Posusney, Labor and the State in Egypt, Workers, Unions and Economic
Restructuring (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 52.
57 Iraq Administration Reports 1914–1932 (vol. 10, [Slough]: Archive Editions, 1992), 245.
during a campaign of strike action calling for better conditions and labour
laws. Railway workers also launched strikes in 1930–31, calling for a reduction
in working hours.58 In the last full year of the mandate the potential for labour
to serve as an expression for the social rights of citizens became manifest. In
response to an increasingly difficult economic climate, exacerbated by the im-
position of a municipal tax, the union organised a general strike in Baghdad
in July 1931. The authorities responded by dissolving the Artisans Association,
while the workers reacted by setting up the Workers Federation of Iraq the fol-
lowing year. Following an organised boycott against the British-owned Bagh-
dad Electric Light and Power Company in 1933–34, the Federation was banned
and the labour movement was suppressed for the next decade, even if labour
disruptions continued.59
This series of strikes had it made clear to some Iraqi politicians that there
needed to be a degree of recognition of the rights of workers. In December
1931 a proposal was put before the Chamber of Deputies calling for the limita-
tion of working hours, provision of holiday pay, and preference for local over
foreign labour in foreign companies. After considerable debate, the proposal
was passed and forwarded to the government for consideration.60 This was the
beginning of a formal if limited recognition by the state of the importance of
labour and indeed may have been prompted by the establishment of a De-
partment of Labour Affairs, one of the conditions of joining the League of
Nations.61 The Labour Code of 1936 marked another step in workers’ protec-
tion, even if it appears not to have been fully implemented.62 That same year,
with the coup of Bakr Sidqi, the military took on the leading role in dealing
with industrial disputes.63 Workers’ rights remained on the agenda. In 1940
an attempt to amend the electoral law and provide for specific trade union
parliamentary representation was blocked by the Minister of Justice, acting
on advice of his British advisor, Sir Edwin Drower.64 In 1942 an amendment to
58 Iraq Administration Reports, 1920–31, vol. 10, 243, and Ismael, Communist Party of Iraq, 312,
give slightly differing accounts of these events.
59 Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (Princeton
nj: Princeton University Press, 1978; reprint. London: Saqi, 2004), 297.
60 Iraq Administration Reports, 1920–31, vol. 10, 245.
61 Philip W. Ireland, Iraq: A Study in Political Development (London: J. Cape, 1937), 449.
62 Longrigg, Iraq, 246.
63 Marion Farouk-Sluglett and Peter Sluglett, “Labor and National Liberation: The Trade
Union Movement in Iraq, 1920–1958,” Arab Studies Quarterly 5 (spring 1983): 149–150.
64 Drower had been one of the authors of the initial draft of the Organic Law in 1921 and
continued as an advisor in the Ministry of Justice until 1946; Majid Khadduri, Independent
Iraq (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951), 14–15, 302; Longrigg, Iraq, 166.
58 Gorman
the Labour Code of 1936 legislated better conditions for female workers and
a range of other measures, including paid holidays, workers’ compensation,
and a mechanism for arbitrating labour disputes. Before the end of the war
various trade unions had been formed and Labour Exchanges established by
the government to deal with problems of unemployment. The formation of a
“Rights of Workmen” movement during this period showed the labour move-
ment embracing a broader political strategy.65 The immediate post-war years
witnessed greater union activity while the government sought to respond to
workers’ demands with the aid of a British labour expert.66
In Palestine the struggle for workers’ rights was reflected in the contest be-
tween the Zionist and Arab nationalist movements. The Histadrut, a federa-
tion of Jewish labour established in 1920, defended the cause of Jewish labour
and was one of a number of proto-state Zionist institutions that would form
part of the state of Israel. Arab labour began to organise itself during the 1920s
with the establishment of the Palestine Arab Workers Society (paws) by rail-
way workers in Haifa in 1925, partly as a response to the Histadrut’s hostile atti-
tude to the establishment of a non-Zionist union.67 A nationwide Arab labour
conference held in January 1930 brought together a broad spectrum of labour
activists calling for an eight hour day, the right to strike, and the formation
of a Palestinian Arab federation, criticising at the same time the British use
of Jewish contractors and the anti-Arab character of the Histadrut policies. In
response, the Histadrut established an Arab section in May 1932, called the Pal-
estine Labour League, which continued as a separate organisation until 1959
when Israeli Arabs were finally allowed to join Histadrut as full members.68
In Palestine, as in Egypt, the British administration sought to recognise and
co-opt workers’ claims by setting up a Labour Department in 1942, charged
with responsibility for the investigation of working conditions, the regulation
of trade unions, and labour legislation.69 In the critical period after the Sec-
ond World War a number of organisations merged to form the Arab Workers’
Congress and continued to agitate for workers’ rights, sometimes in collabo-
ration with members of paws and the Histadrut, but ultimately the looming
65 Longrigg, Iraq, 312.

66 Ismael, Communist Party of Iraq, 15–16; Longrigg, Iraq, 386.
67 Jane Power, “‘Real Unions’: Arab Organized Labor in British Palestine,” Arab Studies Quar-
terly 20 (Winter 1998): 15.
68 Zachary Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906–1948
(Berkeley-London: University of California Press, 1996), 197.
69 Power, “‘Real Unions’,” 18. R.M. Graves, who had served as the director of the Labour De-
partment in Egypt, was appointed to the equivalent position in Palestine; Lockman, Com-
rades and Enemies, 283.
confrontation of 1948 would see nationalist terms of reference trump common

workers’ demands.
The demand for the rights of workers in Egypt, Palestine, and Iraq emerged
out of a broader political struggle, at times nationalist, at times class-based,
which brought attention to various social and economic claims. In the Gulf,
workers also fought for social rights but the different relation between na-
tionality and worker led to variant outcomes. In Bahrain during the 1940s and
1950s workers played an important part in seeking to establish a public space
for a genuine and engaged citizen body.70 By contrast, in Kuwait, where the
relationship between worker and national was rather different, other consid-
erations came into play. Here Kuwaiti legislation was used to pre-empt the
danger of cooperation between the local and growing foreign work force by
separating the Kuwaiti workforce from foreign labour by offering the former
specific privileges.71 In 1959 a labour law gave nationals priority in the hiring of
workers in the Kuwaiti Oil Company and legislation regarding the formation
of unions provided Kuwaitis, then Arabs, with certain privileges over foreign
workers. In 1965 two labour federations were formed and subsequently merged
in the General Federation of Kuwaiti Workers, now co-opted by the state. Simi-
lar tactics were used in government employment when the Civil Service Law of
1960 reserved senior posts and pensions for Kuwaitis only.
British Legacies
British power in the Middle East oversaw a process governed by the interplay
between its imperial policies, calculated compromises between British au-
thorities and local elites, and a range of responses to popular action which
determined the forum for the contestation of citizen rights. The constitutions
laid down in Egypt, Palestine, Transjordan, and Iraq employed the language of
nationality, of representative institutions, of the rights of freedom of associa-
tion and freedom of speech, and so raised the expectations for an active citi-
zenship. However, the exercise of political rights through the ballot box and of
freedom of speech through publications and legal recourse were marginalised
and neutralised, often by the very legal system itself. The constriction of party
political life, the use of imprisonment to curb opposition voices, and censor-
ship of the press had become a feature of Egyptian political life even before the
First World War and would be taken up elsewhere.
70 Fuccaro, Histories of City and State, 176–190.

71 Crystal, Oil and Politics, 79–80.
60 Gorman
In Iraq, the British vision of creating a new state and citizenry rested on the
legal foundation of a constitution, nationality law, and the recognition of mi-
nority rights. Yet the effectiveness of these legal instruments was encumbered
by British imperial purpose and its compromise with local elites. Political,
social, and economic rights often remained abstract without sufficient local
engagement or support for them to be sustained and developed. As Khadduri
noted, “The form of the Iraq Government was determined […] under the im-
pact of Western ideals; the forces which affected its working were to be found
in existing local conditions.”72 Nor was there an adequate local institutional
basis for their implementation.73 According to Abu Jaber the situation in Jor-
dan was not much different,
The Organic Law [of 1928] was not meant to advance the cause of de-
mocracy, nor did it encourage the Jordanian people along the path of ex-
perimentation with democracy. If anything, even the less-than-average
voter became cynical and disinterested. The mandatory power, in its pre-
occupation with stability and its shortsighted self-interest prevented the
growth of a healthy opposition.74
State institutions were unable to support the emergence of a participatory

citizenship, resulting in a general failure to nurture a genuine civic spirit and
allegiance to the state. Commenting on developments in Iraq in the late 1930s,
some years after the end of the mandate, Ireland noted
An even greater obstacle was the lack of social consciousness embracing

the State. Not yet had a sense of loyalty and duty to the nation arisen to
surmount the differences between tribesmen and townsmen, between
Sunni and Shiʿi, and between Muslims and minority communities or to
replace personal opportunism. Patriotism still denoted independence
without obligations to the State.75
72 Khadduri, Government of Iraq, 22.

73 “The mandate had left Iraq with a democratic form of government on paper, but without
the institutions to implement it in practice.” Stefanie K. Wichhart, “During the Second
British Occupation of Iraq, 1941–5,” Journal of Contemporary History 48 (2013): 535.
74 Kamel S. Abu Jaber, “The Legislature of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan: A Study in
Political Development,” Muslim World 59 (1969): 225.
75 Ireland, Iraq, 424–425.
In Palestine the attempt to construct a state and citizen body rested on the
obvious tension, if not contradiction, of British support for a Jewish national
homeland and Arab claims of self-determination. By the mid-1930s the idea
of Palestinian citizenship had proved a manifest failure and the British vi-
sion of a common citizenship open to both Arab and Jew was not shared
widely.76 Instead the aspirations of citizenship were largely mediated through
the contest between Arab and Zionist for political sovereignty in Palestine.
As the Peel Commission stated in 1936: “[…] to maintain that Palestinian citi-
zenship has any moral meaning is a mischievous pretence. Neither Arab nor
Jew has any sense of service to a single State.”77 Its recommendation of parti-
tion recognised the impasse and subsequent events made the failure utterly
apparent. With the triumph of the Zionist movement in 1948, this legacy of
mutually exclusive visions laid the basis for the differential citizenship that
has since operated in Israel, where Arab citizens have been accorded second
class status.
The legal protections and the constitutional guarantees notwithstanding,
the range of strategies employed by the British government, often with will-
ing local elites, to undermine citizen rights were embraced by their local suc-
cessor governments to even greater effect after the departure of the British.
Martial law was the favoured means to suspend the civil code readily taken
up by the post-independence governments to deal with political disorder. Ap-
plied in Egypt by the British from 1914 until 1923, it was later proclaimed by
Egyptian governments on a number of occasions, such as in 1947, in May 1948
and again in January 1952, to facilitate state repression without being impeded
by legal safeguards.78 Under the post-1952 regime it became a standard instru-
ment in the guise of the State of Emergency Law, applied through much of the
period 1967–2011. In Palestine, a range of security regulations developed dur-
ing the mandate period qualified or suspended legal rights, such as after the
Wailing Wall incident in 1929, and with the introduction of Emergency Regula-
tions during the Arab Revolt of the late 1930s.79 In Israel martial law was intro-
duced among the Arab population from the foundation of the state until 1966.
76 In 1936 only about 57 percent of all Jewish residents entitled to Palestinian citizenship
had claimed it, Peel Commission, 332.
78 Anthony Gorman, “Containing Political Dissent in Egypt before 1952,” 165–166.
79 The introduction of martial law had been one of the central recommendations of the
Palestine Royal Commission, Peel Commission, 368.
62 Gorman
In Iraq it was employed frequently to deal with episodes of civil unrest from
1935, again in 1948, 1952 and 1956.80
With the constraints on the practice of citizenship rights, progressive social
forces sought various means to articulate, demonstrate, and remonstrate their
claims for rights. In this, political organisations (if not formally recognised par-
ties), the press, and social movements such as the labour movement played
an important part in seeking to counter an increasingly authoritarian state in
liberal dress. The record of the freedom of the press and labour activism across
these states shows that these avenues of expression and spaces for an engaged
citizenship, while active, were seriously impeded by political, social, and eco-
nomic obstacles, while claims for rights were often compromised, ignored, ma-
nipulated, or modified. The press as an oppositional voice was often strangled
and social actors such as the labour movement were co-opted or forced under-
ground. Similar battles were fought by other civil society organisations, such as
youth groups and women’s associations.81
At a rhetorical level British policy claimed to be laying the foundations of a
democratic polity and enfranchised citizenry, but in practice this was compro-
mised by its priority for political stability and the defence of its interests. The
record of British rule shows that security concerns outranked citizen rights
and constitutional freedoms gave way to reasons of state when required. In
certain circumstances citizen freedoms were brutally qualified, most dramati-
cally with the violent suppression of the Arab Revolt in Palestine, the toppling
of the al-Gaylani government and reoccupation of Iraq in 1941, and the Febru-
ary 1942 incident in Cairo when King Faruq was forced to install a pro-British
Wafd government, all of which demonstrated that the reality of an indepen-
dent, democratic country governed by its citizens was far from being the case.
In due course this pattern of privileging political stability and defending a hold
on power practiced by the British authorities was embraced and extended by
local elites.
80 See, for example, for the 1930s, Longrigg, Iraq, 242.

81 For a discussion of the issue of women’s suffrage in mandate Palestine, see the chapters
of Ruth Abrams, “‘Pioneering representatives of the Hebrew people’: Campaigns of the
Palestinian Jewish Women’s Equal Rights Association,” in Women’s Suffrage in the British
Empire, Citizenship, Nation and Race, ed. Ian Christopher Fletcher et al., (London-New
York: Routledge, 2000), 121–137,and Ellen Fleischmann, “Nation, Tradition and Rights: The
Indigenous Feminism of the Palestinian Women’s Movement, 1929–1948,” in Women’s Suf-
frage in the British Empire, Citizenship, Nation and Race, ed. Ian Christopher Fletcher et al.,
(London-New York: Routledge, 2000), 138–154.
Conclusion
In negotiating its imperial interests, international obligations, and engagement

with local elites, the British government oversaw the emergence of a model
of citizenship in the Middle East that was both limited and qualified. While
in principle based on a model of some form of participatory democracy, Brit-
ish policymakers favoured government controlled by a strong executive head,
most often a monarch, in which appointed officials and indirect representation
through a secondary voting system muffled the potential impact of the popu-
lar electorate. Political parties, where permitted, often reflected the interests of
traditional elites and rarely represented a broader public interest. In nurturing
this type of political system and citizenry, Britain was more easily able to main-
tain its control, at least in the short term. Where new organisations or groups
sought to challenge the status quo, as did the communist movement, liberal
intellectuals, and the labour movement, they were marginalised, repressed or
co-opted by the regime. In this environment, the recognition of formal rights
or of policies favourable to minority communities risked the emergence of a
unified citizen body and provided political opportunities that were both ex-
ploited by the British themselves and had the potential to be employed by ele-
ments among the indigenous elites to scapegoat or favour particular groups.
Whether formally bound by the obligations of the mandate as in Palestine,
Transjordan, and Iraq, or elsewhere where they were less accountable to the
international community, British policies nurtured a calculated compromise
between the promotion of a flawed constitutional democracy and its own im-
perial purpose. In Iraq, balancing the support of the local elites and the ethnic
configuration of the state sustained British geopolitical interests, at least for a
time, but resulted in an unstable state with an uneven regime of political, so-
cial, and economic rights. In Palestine, the attempt to construct a stable polity
foundered on the incompatibility of two (or three) conflicting national visions
where no general sense of common national citizenship developed between
Arab and Jewish communities. As the Peel Commission noted in 1937, Pales-
tine had become not a unified state and society but a land of three flags and
three governments where “[…] instead of being drawn together by the com-
mon forms and symbols of a single citizenship [the two communities] have
adopted the forms and symbols of separate nationhood.”82 In the Gulf states
the longstanding treaty arrangements between Britain and the local ruling
families provided the latter with the ability to constrain the participation of
an active citizenry. The political contest between the ruling families and the

64 Gorman
merchant class that marked much of the interwar period was, with the arrival
of oil revenues, reconfigured so that with British compliance the largesse of
the state was able to underwrite a generous social entitlement for an exclu-
sive citizenry even as the exercise of political rights and freedom of speech
were circumscribed. These different arrangements and the strategies adopted
to counter challenges to them had a clear impact on the development of the
body politic and the political culture that would inform the subsequent devel-
opment of citizenship in the post-colonial age.
Ultimately, the British legacy resided in illiberal democracy where limited
citizen rights appeared more rhetorical than real and where the institutions
set up to service them were not properly rooted in indigenous society but
rather compromised by imperial design and elite interest. The local political
classes themselves were willing to effectively constrain any sense of dynamic
citizenship, often using the authority of the law to contain opposition, curb
criticism, and limit activism. In the post-colonial period, the weakness of these
liberal institutions and their failure to implant a genuine sense of citizenship
and empowerment among the population continued to undermine the state
as a genuine vehicle for the expression of the popular will. The undignified
British withdrawal from Palestine in May 1948 demonstrated its most dramatic
failure in constructing a common citizenship but the toppling of the monar-
chies by the military of Egypt and Iraq in the 1950s showed that the basis for
the authoritarian republican state had already been laid.
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chapter 2
Citizenship, Social Pacts, Authoritarian Bargains,

and the Arab Uprisings
Roel Meijer
This chapter is based on insights from citizenship studies and the idea that
state-citizen relations are based on a covenant or social pact between citi-
zens on the one hand, and between citizens and the state on the other. This
agreement, either open or tacit, produces a citizenship regime, one which
comprises the totality of civil, political, social, economic, and cultural rights
and duties, social formations, ideological constructions, legal structures,
political systems, daily practices, and foreign relations that support, evade, or
contest such regimes. Citizenship in this view is not static but a constantly
changing concept and practice that is a reflection of these forces within a spe-
cific citizenship regime.
My main argument is that the present crisis of citizenship in the Middle East
is the result of an accumulation of problems that have been caused by three con-
secutive citizenship regimes over the past two centuries. In the first part of the
chapter I will argue that citizenship started off on the wrong foot in the region
because under colonial rule it was initially a mark of discrimination and for-
eign privilege, and later, when local-colonial alliances were made, citizenship
worked to further the interests of the indigenous elite. These alliances were
swept away – and with them the political entities closely associated with
them – after it became clear that the colonial bargain was unable to meet the
emerging social and economic demands of the nationalist movements of the
1930s. In the second part of the chapter I will analyse the replacement of the co-
lonial alliance with the so-called “authoritarian bargain” between the newly in-
dependent states and the “people.” According to this social contract, one which
produced a specific citizenship regime, the state would provide social services
(education, health care, pensions) in exchange for a reduced level of civil and,
especially, political rights for the people. In the third phase, this bargain started
to “unravel” when the state was forced to retreat from its “developmentalist”
promises in the 1970s and a Pandora’s Box of demands was opened. The new
wave of demands covered the full panoply of civil, political, social, economic,
and cultural rights which had been contained during the heyday of authori-
tarianism. The depth of this crisis became manifest during the Arab Uprisings,
analysed in the last part of the chapter. In almost all countries they led to a new

68 Meijer
citizenship regime, but in only a few cases, such as Tunisia, were they based
on a political consensus. In others, they led to a deepening of the authoritar-
ian bargain, or to a collapse of the social order and a consequent civil war. It is
doubtful if the stability pacts countries such as Egypt are now making can meet
the earlier demands for a new, more equitable social contract.
The Colonial Citizenship Regime
Citizenship as an Instrument of Exclusion

Citizenship as a formal status in its modern form was introduced into the Mid-
dle East and North Africa (mena) region as a source of exclusion and discrimi-
nation, and did not function there as it had in Europe during the first cycle
of expanding inclusion that encompassed new rights and new social classes.
Citizenship in the mena region therefore had a completely different history
and trajectory from that it had had in Europe. Rather than a sign of emanci-
pation and inclusion, from the standpoint of the indigenous population the
citizens/citoyens were the “Other.” During the colonial period citizens were the
“legally privileged,”1 while non-citizens were the majority of the population,
who were themselves mostly Arab Sunni Muslims.
Historically, the status of Europeans in the Middle East was based on the
Capitulations. This extraterritorial status had, from the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, been regulated in specific bilateral agreements between the Otto-
man Empire on one side, and France, England, and other European countries
on the other, in order to protect the rights of the personnel working in their
consulates and merchants from their countries who were working in the Mid-
dle East. With the increasing power of Europe in the nineteenth century these
rights were gradually expanded, extending to members of minority commu-
nities working with European powers, indigenous merchants, and even local
tribal leaders, all of whom came under foreign consular jurisdiction, allowing
them to evade local taxes and conscription, thereby undermining the sover-
eignty of the local rulers.2 For instance, in Morocco the two Anglo-Moroccan
conventions of “friendship, navigation, commerce,” signed in 1856, ended the
1 Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman, Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam, and
the Egyptian Working Class, 1882–1954 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 9.
2 Capitulations were treaties of commerce and protection between Muslim rulers and
European Christian princes and republics that guaranteed the lives and property of foreign
subjects during their stay in Muslim territory. Foreigners were excluded from Islamic jurisdic-
tion and taxation and could practice their religion freely.
Citizenship, Pacts, Bargains, and the Arab Uprising 69
sultan’s trading monopolies and drastically decreased custom duties (and

thus the income of the sultan) while at the same time expanding trade with
England and extending legal protection to some Moroccans, who became
foreign protégés.3 In 1880 the Treaty of Madrid recognised the right of foreign-
ers in Morocco to own land and in 1906 the Treaty of Algeciras even gave the
French the right to police the ports of Morocco. Likewise, the Anglo-Tunisian
Convention of 1863 gave British citizens the right to work, acquire property,
and organise their own courts, as well as being judged under their own legal
system.4 The foreign protection of entire minority groups, such as the Maroni-
tes in Lebanon by the French and the Greek Orthodox in the Ottoman Empire
by the Russians, further undermined local sovereignty.
The result was a mosaic of numerous foreign jurisdictions and privileges.
The multitude of citizenship regimes backfired when European countries
were themselves confronted by other European privileges, as was the case with
Tunisia after it had become a protectorate of France in 1881.5 The introduction
to Egypt in 1875 of the Mixed Courts, which were based on the Code Napoléon,
was meant to establish a degree of order amidst the chaos of consular courts,
each of which applied its own laws. However, in many countries the Capitula-
tions remained intact until the mid-twentieth century. For minority groups,
foreign nationality and citizenship rights were a means of escaping local gov-
ernment control. In response to this foreign threat, local rulers tried to impose
a uniform, standardised citizenship regime, in which foreign privilege was
abolished. For example, the Tanzimat reform introduced by Ottoman rulers
in 1856, as well as the Tunisian Security Covenant of 1857, recognised equal
rights between the followers of different religions in order to regain their loy-
alty as full citizens.6 The Tunisian constitution of 1861 and that of the Ottoman
Empire of 1876 had the same purpose. These measures proved, however, to be
ineffective and new ideas of loyalty to the Empire, such Ottomanism, did little
to prevent the fragmentation of the region.
The most extreme case of the legal privileging of foreigners and installing
a colonial citizenship regime based on discrimination and civil and political
3 Susan Gilson Miller, A History of Modern Morocco (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2013), 23 and 43.
4 Kenneth J. Perkins, A History of Modern Tunisia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004), 46–47.
5 Mary Dawhurst Lewis, Divided Rule: Sovereignty and Empire in French Tunisia, 1881–1938
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 32–33, 125.
6 Perkins, Tunisia, 18–19.
70 Meijer
exclusion was the colonial settler state of Algeria. Because Algeria was con-
sidered to be part of France after the first conquest in 1830, citizenship was, in
theory, extended to all Muslims, who could acquire the status of citoyens and
become “indigènes français d’Algérie.” In practice, though, equal rights through
assimilation were denied to them as long as they remained Muslim and held on
to the legal personal code based on the Shariʿa and did not accept the French
code civile.7 Algerian Muslims would thus remain second-class citizens until
well into the twentieth century. This meant that whereas the French colons
in Tunisia and Algeria paid less tax, or none at all, and through state policies
acquired the best lands and benefited the most from state expenditure and
services such as investment in transport and communications, the indigènes
(Muslims) worked on marginal lands and were excluded from state benefits
and subjected to discriminatory laws.8
Differences in citizen status had social and economic consequences at all
levels of society, leading to graded or differentiated citizenship. It meant that
in the colonial economy and administrative hierarchy both privilege and an
ethnic and religious communitarian division prevailed. In French colonies and
protectorates French civil servants earned, in principle, a third more than lo-
cal employees, known as the “colonial third.”9 In the workplace, skilled foreign
workers held the highest and best paid jobs as foremen and inspectors. They
alone enjoyed benefits, such as paid leave, medical care, fixed wage scales, and
pensions. Below them were the indigenous workers, who enjoyed almost no
rights but had permanent jobs, while below them were temporary workers.10
European economic penetration of the region further deepened local
divisions and exacerbated differences in wealth. The introduction of a market
economy buttressed by European military force reduced the majority of the
local population to pecuniary. A large percentage of Egyptian peasants and
Algerian tribesmen had, by the end of the nineteenth century, been evicted
from their land, becoming contract workers on the land or migrating to towns.
7 According to the sénatus consulte issued in 1863, in order to become French citizens
Muslims would have to renounce their Muslim civil status and agree to live under French
law, which would be tantamount to apostasy. John Ruedy described the sénatus consulte
as “the cornerstone of a legal edifice that consigned Algerians to a status of permanent
civil and political inferiority.” See John Ruedy, Modern Algeria: The Origins and Develop-
ment of a Nation (Bloomsbury: Indiana University Press, 1992), 75–76; See also Benjamin
Stora, Histoire de l’Algérie colonial, 1830–1954 (Paris: La Découverte, 1991), 23; Pierre Verme-
ren, Maghreb: Les origines de la révolution démocratique (Paris: Pluriel, 2011), 75.
8 Perkins, Tunisia, 56–60; Ruedy, Modern Algeria, 90.
9 Lewis, Divided Rule, 143.
The Egyptian fellahin, deprived of all rights, were completely dependent on

contractors who, as moneylenders, kept them in debt peonage and could hire
and fire them at will.11 By 1907, 37 per cent had become landless. In 1914, 92.6
per cent owned 5 acres or less. In Algeria mass-evictions from the land led
to a decline in the Muslim population of 600,000 between 1861 and 1872. In
times of economic crisis the indigenous population was the hardest hit. For
example, during the crisis of the 1930s in Tunisia measures were taken to sup-
port wheat and wine growers while olive growers, the majority of Tunisians,
were neglected.12 In Egypt per capita income declined by 10 per cent between
1913 and 1939, and the British embassy estimated that by the outbreak of the
Second World War 93 per cent of the rural population was living “below the
line of health and decency.”13
Attracted to the southern shores of the Mediterranean by the privileged
colonial citizenship regime, the numbers of foreign citizens grew exponen-
tially. In 1927 their numbers in Egypt had reached 220,000, of which the Jewish
community numbered 75,000, the Greeks 76,000, and the Italians 51,000 (com-
pared to 14 million Egyptians). In 1947 there were 130,000 French citizens in
Tunisia (4 per cent of the population), while in Algeria 125,963 Europeans had
settled as early as the end of the 1840s. A century later French citizens there
had grown to number around a million, compared with around eight million
Algerian Muslims. In Morocco the number of foreigners grew from 60,000
in 1918 to 162,000 in 1931 and 415,000 in 1951 (against 8.4 million Muslims and
Jews). Many of these foreign communities, such as the Greeks in Egypt, were
more interested in their own politics back home than in those of their country
of residence.14
New, cosmopolitan cities arose and grew beyond recognition, including
Casablanca, Tangier, Algiers, Tunis, Alexandria, Cairo, Beirut, and Smyrna. The
most cosmopolitan of these cities had their own citizenship regimes. In the
words of Reimer, “Extraterritoriality was the mechanism that did the most to
advance European colonial domination in Alexandria.”15 Alexandria had its
11 Ibid., 25.
12 Perkins, Tunisia, 93.
13 Robert L. Tignor, State, Private Enterprise, and Economic Change in Egypt, 1918–1952 (Princ-
eton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 217.
14 Alexander Kitroeff, The Greeks in Egypt, 1919–1937: Ethnicity and Class (Oxford: Ithaca
Press, 1989), 37–54.
15 Michael J. Reimer, Colonial Bridgehead: Government and Society in Alexandria, 1807–1882
(Cairo: The American University Press in Cairo, 1997), 87.
72 Meijer
own foreign-run municipality between 1867 and 1927.16 Tangier, as an inter-

national zone, was run by foreign consuls between 1923 and 1956.17 In most
countries, foreign citizens owned the transport system (railways, tramways,
shipping), banks and insurance companies, land development companies, local
industries, building companies, real estate, import-and-export companies,
department stores, the best schools, and exclusive clubs. In colonial cities, the
health facilities, circulation of traffic, street planning, and building regulations
imposed Western standards and notions of space and human interaction.
Orientalism and the Divide between Citizen and Non-citizen

Orientalism is most associated with Edward Said’s Orientalism and cultural
stereotypes of Muslims characterised as “essentialist” in order to better exploit
them, but perhaps more fundamentally it is related to European civilisation,
concepts of civility, and citizenship. “Natives” were those who did not have a
nationality and citizenship rights and, moreover, did not deserve them.
That colonial regimes were aware of the tensions between European
claims to the theory of universal rights versus colonial practice is clear from
the following examples. The colon newspaper La Tunisie française criticised
French administrators who believed that “Arabs are men like any others and
ought to have the same rights equal to those of the French.” According to the
paper, they failed to understand that “they constitute a race that a depressing
religion and a long atavism of laziness and fatalism have rendered manifestly
inferior.”18 Their status as “natives” was based on their total want of the quali-
ties and responsibilities of citizens who have a “notion of time” and a “feeling
of responsibility.”19 In Algeria the colons argued that the “relatively barbarous
state” of Muslim society made Muslims unsuitable for “assimilation” and to
become full French citizens. To underline their inferiority, they imposed the
code de l’indigénat on the Muslim Algerians in 1863, which Ruedy calls a “hu-
miliating regime of exception.” This code enumerated a list of thirty-three
infractions that only applied to Muslims, and which included offences such
as defaming the French Republic and failing to answer a French official.20
16 Robert Ilbert, “Une certain citadinité,” in Alexandrie 1860–1960: Un modèle éphémère de

convivialité; communautés et identité cosmopolitie, ed. Robert Ilbert and Ilios Yannakakis
(Paris: Éditions Autrement, 1992), 20–47.
17 Iain Finlayson, Tangier: City of the Dream, 3rd edition (London: Tauris Parke, 2015), 54.
18 Citation in Perkins, Tunisia, 66.
19 Beinin and Lockman, Workers on the Nile, 41–42.
20 Ruedy, Modern Algeria, 89. For Egypt, Abdeslam M. Maghraoui states that “to become eli-
gible for the ‘privilege’ of modern citizenship in a liberal society, the Egyptian individual
had to be appropriated, transformed, controlled and alienated from his or her identity.”
On the other hand, British colonial rule in Egypt introduced reforms that
claimed to “humanise” the indigenous population, by abolishing the use of the
whip on peasants, fixing tax rates, abolishing or rather regulating the corvée,
monitoring the work of rural administrators, protecting prisoners, and reduc-
ing or “regulating” corporal punishments.21 But being “human” did not mean
that the Arab non-elite were citizens. In both British and French colonies edu-
cation was deliberately limited to prevent the local population from acquiring
European notions of rights.22
The Colonial Alliance

Yet colonial power in most countries was not absolute and its citizenship re-
gime was also influenced by indigenous political forces, especially in colonies
experiencing indirect British rule, or French and British protectorates, which
affected the local citizenship regimes. In many cases this alliance was built on
an agreement between an indigenous, often Westernised elite and the colonial
power. In Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Egypt, the colonial powers were dependent
on these so-called “notables” (ʿayyan).23
What can be called the colonial alliance had several far-reaching conse-
quences for local citizenship regimes. Firstly, the local elite often adopted the
discourse of privileged citizenship that the colonial powers upheld and the
idea that the indigenous people would have to be gradually educated in order
to be able to become full citizens. Its leaders considered themselves as “those
who have real interests” (ashab al-masalih al-haqiqiyya), and looked down on
members of the mob (ghawghaʾ) who did not share their westernised culture
See Abdeslam M. Maghraoui, Liberalism without Democracy: Nationhood and Citizenship

in Egypt, 1922–1936 (Durham nc: Duke University Press, 2006), 53.
21 Samera Esmeir, Juridical Humanity: A Colonial History (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2012), 88–91, 117.
22 Stora, Histoire de l’Algérie, 98–99; Vermeren, Maghreb, 129–130. In Algeria French Arab
schools were dismantled after 1870. Attempts to apply the compulsory primary education
introduced in France in 1881 and 1882 were sabotaged by the colons. As a result, in 1890
only 1.9 per cent of indigenous children were enrolled in school. In 1945 200,000 children
of colons went to school against 120,000 Algerian children, despite the Algerian popula-
tion being seven times larger. In Morocco only 2 per cent of the children went to primary
school in 1944, while in Tunisia it was 10 per cent. During the subsequent decade the
figure increased to 13, 20, and 30 per cent in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia respectively. In
Egypt in 1952, 75 per cent of the population was illiterate.
23 Albert Hourani, “Ottoman Reform and the Politics of Notables,” in Beginnings of Mod-
ernization in the Middle East: The Nineteenth Century, ed. William R. Polk and Richard L.
Chambers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 57, 64–68.
74 Meijer
and lifestyle.24 Secondly, it legitimated an elitist economic system that worked

to the advantage of the indigenous elite, whether landowners or upcoming
industrialists, who cooperated with the colonial powers;25 in Egypt, the alli-
ance with the large landowners meant, for instance, that the rule of law and
reform did not penetrate the private estates of the large landowners, which
covered most of Egypt.26 Thirdly, it supported clientelist politics based on pa-
tronage and a segmented social system that further undermined an inclusive
political entity;27 many political parties, especially the so-called “minority par-
ties” in Egypt, were founded around “personalities” and their patronage and
clientelist relations rather than issues and programmes.28 Fourthly, it upheld
and further rooted a culture of patriarchy and a culture of hierarchy and defer-
ence that undermined notions of gender equality and rights.29 For example, in
Morocco the French Resident Lyautey helped to build up the monarchy and
the makhzen into its present form by trying to keep Morocco “traditional” and
working through the urban elite and Berber tribal leaders.30
Minorities
The introduction of colonial citizenship regimes would have its most devastat-
ing effect on religious and ethnic minorities who were caught up in the co-
lonial game of exclusion – inclusion and divide-and-rule.31 However, not all
members of the minorities decided to take the side of the colonial powers. In
Egypt, for instance, numerous rich and powerful Jewish individuals, such as
Joseph Aslan Cattaoui, played prominent roles in the Egyptian economy and
were briefly supporters of the Wafd’s nationalist cause.32
24 Marius Deeb, Party Politics in Egypt: The Wafd and its Rivals, 1919–1939 (London: Ithaca
Press, 1979), 184; Walid Kazziha, “The Jarid-Umma Group and Egyptian Politics,” Middle
Eastern Studies 13 (1977): 373–385.
25 Tignor, State, 110.
26 Esmeir, Juridical Humanity, 201–202.
27 Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 50.
28 Deeb, Party Politics in Egypt, 78.
29 Hisham Sharaby, Neopatriarchy: A Theory of Distorted Change in Arab Society (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1988). For more on patronage and clientalism in this volume, see
Chapter 4 by Robert Springborg.
30 Gilson Miller, Modern Morocco, 90–102.
31 See, for example, Benjamin Thomas White, The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle
East: The Politics of Community in French Mandate Syria (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univer-
sity Press, 2011).
32 Gudrun Krämer, The Jews in Modern Egypt, 1914–1952 (London: I.B. Tauris, 1989), 90–98.
In the increasingly radical atmosphere of the 1930s a distinction appeared

between minorities that had been “protected” and enjoyed privileges and those
who sided with the nationalist movements for independence. Jews in Tunisia
were on the “good” side of the line, and were supported by the Neo-Destour
as “our brothers”33 because they had refused naturalisation and not become
French citizens, while the Jewish community in Algeria was persecuted in 1897
in Oran and evicted after independence because it had become naturalised via
the Crémieux decree in 1870.34 In Lebanon and Syria the anti-Christian revolts
of 1860 was directed against Christians who were protected by the French.35
On the other hand, the Copts in Egypt were “good” because they had never al-
lied with the British, who had used Syrian Orthodox and Armenian Christians
instead.36 According to the French, the Kabyle Berbers could be assimilated at
some point in time, unlike the barbarous Arabs.37 In Egypt, Jews were treated
as full members of the nation with equal rights and duties if they supported
the demand for independence, learned Arabic, and adapted to local customs.38
Nationalism as Counter-Citizenship
To a large extent, the emergence of citizenship rights inaugurated modernism
in the Middle East and North Africa. This could adopt an Islamic as well as a
secular Westernised form, as long as the relations between state and subject
radically changed and led to a new and modern citizenship regime. For in-
stance, the crisis surrounding the legitimacy of the sultan in Morocco at the
beginning of the twentieth century led to increased power for the ʿulama, who
made their bayʿa (pledge of allegiance) in 1907 to the usurper ʿAbd al-Hafiz
conditional on his abolition of various unpopular taxes and the eviction of
foreigners, thereby turning the new relationship into an explicit “contract.”39

34 Stora, Histoire de l’Algérie, 34.
35 Laila Taraza Fawaz, An Occasion for War: Civil Conflict in Lebanon and Damascus in 1860
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
36 B.L. Carter, The Copts in Egyptian Politics (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 58–79. Thomas
Philipp, “Copts and Other Minorities in the Development of the Egyptian Nation-State,”
in Egypt – From Monarchy to Republic, ed. Shimon Shamir, Boulder: Westview, 1995;
Thomas Philipp, The Syrians in Egypt 1725–1975. Stuttgart: Berliner Islam Studien, 1985.
37 Ruedy, Modern Algeria, 91.
38 Krämer, The Jews in Modern Egypt, 128.
39 For more on this event, of which there must have been many more, see of Gilson Miller,
Modern Morocco, 77–78, 80, and C.R. Pennell, Morocco since 1830: A History (New York:
New York University Press, 2000).
76 Meijer
The establishment of an Arabic press at the end of the nineteenth century

certainly helped to put one of the elements in place for conceptualisation and
articulation of indigenous notions of citizenship and active participation by
creating a public opinion and a discourse of rights to information. The “imag-
ined community” was a precondition for the emergence of a notion of a shared
and equal citizenship with non-kinsmen or adherents of other religions.40
The notions of unity (wahda) and nation (watan), particularly, derived
from European nationalism. In Algeria in the decade before World War i the
Young Algerian movement was the first generation “demanding rights in the
name of the values and principles they had learned from French schools.”41
They began to speak the language of rights and at first limited themselves
to status, demanding complete equal civil rights. But the demands rapidly
extended to political, social, and economic rights. In 1927 Young Algerians
demanded equal pay for equal work, indigenous representation in parliament,
and the abolition of the hated indigénat.42 They protested against their status
as “secondary citizens” (citoyens mineurs). Over the next decade demands for
rights were extended by Etoile Nord-Africaine and the Parti du Peuple Algérien
(ppa) to encompass freedom of the press and of association, and the election
of an Algerian parliament by universal suffrage, the nationalisation of banks,
irrigation projects for peasants, and, when all colonial reforms remained lim-
ited, complete independence.43 In Tunisia, French public schools educated a
generation of Francophone intellectuals in the ideals of the French Revolution
and notions of citoyenneté.44
In response to the colonial dual society and its attempt to split the na-
tion by including the local elites, radical nationalists stressed national unity
and communal, collective rights at the expense of individual ones. The Wafd
claimed to express the “will” (gharba) of the people,45 the Neo-Destour present-
ed itself as “the party of the whole nation and the emanation of its desires and
its will,”46 while the Kutla used terms such as the “people” (shaʿb) and nation
(umma), which included all Moroccans, Jews as well as Muslims.47 The same
trend was also discernible within Islamic reformist movements; the Muslim
40 Ami Ayalon, The Press in the Arab Middle East: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1995).
41 Reudy, Modern Algeria, 106–107.
42 Ibid., 132.
43 Stora, Histoire Algérien coloniale, 79; Ruedy, Modern Algeria, 137.
45 Deeb, Party Politics in Egypt, 62–75.
Brotherhood, the Algerian reformists, and, in the beginning, Salafis were all
focused on unifying Muslims against a foreign domination based on division.48
Trade Unions and Social Rights

Trade unions played an important role in the transformation of the colonial
citizenship regime through their promotion of social and economic rights. At
first they were dominated by Europeans, but in the 1920s and 1930s, with the
expansion of the colonial economy and manufacturing, local workers took
over.49 Unsurprisingly, some of the early demands of these workers were to
be treated with dignity and respect and to obtain the right to defend them-
selves against management charges.50 Much of this was still in the language
of patronage, national unity, and harmony between classes, but gradually, as
the nationalist movement radicalised and the workers’ movement grew more
independent and larger groups were mobilised, the concept of citizenship
also evolved as an independent category. In 1941 al-Nahar published an article
that stated: “We as workers do not lack knowledge or experience, and we have
already spent half our lives caring for this movement. So we must be men and
defend our cause ourselves, without the need of the intervention of patrons
(awsiyaʾ) who raise themselves upon our shoulders and are not of us.”51 As a
mark of growing inclusion, a Ministry of Social Affairs was founded, publishing
statistics on wages and working hours, housing conditions, and nutrition, and
addressing the “labour question.”52 In 1942 trade unions in Egypt were legalised
but regulated, yet as government employees increased so did their “bargaining
power” too. In Tunisia the Confédération Générale des Travailleurs Tunisiens
(cgtt) was founded in 1924 to demand equal rights with French and Italian
workers.53 This was replaced by the Union Générale des Travailleurs Tunisiens
(ugtt) in 1946, giving a social and economic slant to the nationalist move-
ment led by the Neo-Destour. During the repression of political parties in 1951
the ugtt was the main force capable of mobilising mass protests against the
French repression.54
48 Henri Lauzière calls these reformers “Islamic nationalists.” Henri Lauzière, The Making of
Salafism: Islamic Reform in the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press,
2016), 100–101.
50 Beinin and Lockman, Workers on the Nile, 59, 65, 74.
51 Ibid., 239.
52 Ibid., 269–271.
54 Ibid., 124.
78 Meijer
Inclusive and Exclusive Citizenship

Despite these shortcomings of citizenship, important trends emerged within
the region in support of an inclusive and egalitarian citizenship. The Egyptian
Communist movement, based on the influence of the Popular Front strategy,
essentially supported a programme that promised an inclusionary citizenship
covering civil, political, social, economic, and cultural rights without ethnic
distinctions.55 In Egypt in 1945 the Preparatory Committee published its pro-
gramme, calling for the legalisation of trade union federations, a forty-hour
week, a weekly day off, comprehensive social insurance, and the recognition of
the right to strike.56 These demands were adopted during the huge 1946 upris-
ing by the National Committee of Workers and Students. The same was true
of the Communist Party of Iraq (cpi), which, in its National Charter of 1945,
launched a mild social-democratic programme aimed at enhancing citizen-
ship and rights.57
Very much the same democratic reformist ideas were held in Egypt by the so-
called Wafdist Vanguard (al-Taliʿa al-Wafdiyya), a young generation of Wafdists
who were in favour of social reform and who were influenced by European
social-democratic ideas.58 Butrus Ghali’s Society of National Reform and the
Society of National Renaissance also belonged to this group,59 as did Messali
Hajj’s Parti du Peuple Algérien in Algeria, the Istiqlal Party in Morocco, the
liberal wing of the Neo-Destour in Tunisia, and the al-Ahali group in Iraq. The
latter founded the Popular Reform Association, which promoted social reform,
greater democracy, progressive income tax, the legalisation of trade unions,
and a minimum wage, and which was in favour of national development and
the creation of an Iraqi identity.60 Similarly, in Morocco, the Plan de réformes,
a 134 page document, presented an inclusive citizenship programme, one that
included freedom of the press, compulsory primary education, decentralisa-
tion, workers’ rights, unemployed- and pension rights, and a standard school
curriculum for the whole country.61
55 Roel Meijer, The Quest for Modernity: Secular Liberal and Left-Wing Political Thought in
Egypt, 1945–1958 (London: Routledge, 2002), 96–132.
57 Tripp, Iraq, 115. Tareq Y. Ismael, The Rise and Fall of the Communist Party of Iraq (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 24–34.
58 Kirk J. Beattie, Egypt during the Nasser Years: Ideology, Politics and Civil Society (Boulder:
Westview Press, 1994), 25.
59 Meijer, The Quest for Modernity, 37–65.
60 Tripp, Iraq, 84–85, 90–91.
61 Gilson Miller, Modern Morocco, 133.
The Islamist movement also showed signs of adopting a discourse of rights.

Despite its ambiguous attitude towards strikes and the strong influence of
clientelism and patronage, even parts of the Muslim Brotherhood adopted a
discourse of citizenship.62 The Moroccan leader of the Istiqlal Party, Allal al-
Fasi, who is considered in “enlightened Salafi,” produced the Plan de réforme.63
Many individual thinkers, such as Sayyid Qutb and Khalid Muhammad Khalid,
both Egyptians, were affected by the dominant discourse of rights and social
justice of that time.
However, the nationalist frame in which citizenship was cast turned it into
a zero-sum game with the stricter boundaries between insiders and outsiders.
The increase in sovereignty for the Arab countries was accompanied by an in-
creasingly narrow definition of who was a real citizen. Identity politics, such
an important part of the inclusion – exclusion equation, supported by various
conservative forces, would impede and deflect the drive for an inclusionary,
equal citizenship regime. Furthermore, the introduction of nationalism into a
multi-ethnic and multi-religious environment such as the Middle East would
have disastrous consequences for the citizenship regimes of the Ottoman suc-
cessor states. The plight of Greeks and Armenians in Turkey during and just
after World War i, the Assyrians in Iraq in the 1930s, and the Palestinians in
Palestine, would show the devastation that nationalism could wreak on the
region. Nationalism worked at the expense of foreigners and “foreign”
minorities, many of whom had lived in the region for generations. Legal,
political, ideological, and cultural exclusion and closure replaced the openness,
tolerance, and diffuse notions of belonging and identity that had prevailed
previously. The authoritarian bargain, much like Communism in Eastern
Europe, would deepen differences and exclusion rather than promote inclu-
sion and equality.
The Authoritarian Bargain
Social Contracts
The notion that a social contract was established between state and society
after independence is much more widely accepted than it is for the colonial
period.64 In citizenship terms, according to this deal the state acquires political

63 Lauzière, The Origins of Salafism, 133.
64 The term of this agreement has been differently defined: The term “social contract” is
widely employed and has been used by: Saad Eddin Ibrahim, “Civil Society and Prospects
80 Meijer
power and demands political allegiance, while in exchange the population re-
ceives from the state jobs, education, housing, pensions, and food and petrol
subsidies, and can expect the state to ensure social justice, foster economic
development, maintain the national identity, and protect national interests.
Certainly, each social contract in each country was influenced by the previ-
ous citizen regime and the totality of influences which impinge upon it. There
are, however, general trends discernible in the region. The main division is
between republics and monarchies. The monarchies in Egypt (1923–52), Iraq
(1922–58), Tunisia (the bey was deposed in 1956), and Libya (King Idris was de-
posed in 1970) were toppled and replaced by republics because they were un-
able to meet the specific combination of political, social, and economic rights
promoted by the nationalist movement during the 1930s and 1940s, which had
required reforms only a sovereign state could implement. The new populist
authoritarian states in Syria, Iraq, and Egypt were internally supported by co-
alitions of reformers and the beneficiaries of reform, while they were politi-
cally and economically supported by the Soviet Union. The surviving monar-
chies, in Morocco, Jordan, and the Gulf states, were able to weather the storm
by upholding the semi-colonial bargain with the landed and tribal elite and
of Democratization in the Arab World,” in Civil Society in the Middle East, ed. Augustus
Richard Norton (Leiden: Brill, 1995) 37–38; Dirk Vandewalle, Libya since Independence:
Oil and State-Building (London: I.B. Tauris, 1998), 23–30; John Waterbury, “From Social
Contract to Extraction Contracts: The Political Economy of Authoritarianism and Democ-
racy,” in Islam, Democracy, and the State in North Africa, ed. John P. Entelis (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1997), 141–176. Others have called it a “populist authoritarian
bargain”; cf., for example, Rex Brynen et al., Beyond the Arab Spring: Authoritarianism and
Democracy in the Arab World (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2012), 149. It has also been called a
“national-populist social pact” by Steven Heydemann, “Social Pacts and the Persistence of
Authoritarianism in the Middle East,” in Debating Arab Authoritarianism: Dynamics and
Durability in Nondemocratic Regimes, ed. Oliver Schlumberger (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2007), 21–38; an “authoritarian bargain,” in Steven Heydemann, Upgrad-
ing Authoritarianism in the Arab World (Analysis Paper No. 13, The Saban Center for Mid-
dle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, October 2007); a “ruling bargain” by Mehran
Kamrava, The Modern Middle East: A Political History since the First World War (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2013), 363–365; and, more ironically, a “social contract of
sorts” by Salwa Ismail, “Authoritarian Government, Neoliberalism and Everyday Civilities
in Egypt,” Third World Quarterly 32 (2011): 847. Others are even less charitable and call it
a “bribe” of society: Hazem Kandil, Soldiers, Spies, and Statesmen: Egypt’s Road to Revolt
(London: Verso, 2012), 64. Marsha Posusney has called the contract with the trade unions
“a set of reciprocal rights” based on a “moral economy,” Marsha Pripstein Posusney, Labor
and the State in Egypt: Workers, Unions, and Economic Restructuring (New York: University
of Columbia Press, 1999), 2.
maintaining relations with France or replacing Great Britain with the United
States. They were further supported by conservative religious groups such as
the Muslim Brotherhood or Salafi ʿulama in Saudi Arabia.
In Egypt a major part of the populist authoritarian bargain was put in place
after the military coup of the Free Officers in July 1952, when they succeeded
in winning the support of a large section of the trade unions. On December
8, 1952 the government enacted a comprehensive new labour law increasing
their severance compensation, and providing longer annual leave, free trans-
portation to the factories, the right to appeal the dismissal of workers, and,
most importantly of all, job security. In exchange the workers had to accept
the ban on strikes and recognise the new regime.65 Other measures cementing
the authoritarian bargain soon followed, such as the inclusion of trade union
members into Liberation Rally,66 the land reform of September 9, 1952, and the
banning of political parties in January 1953.67 This enabled the military to mo-
bilise the Transport Workers’ Union against the opposition that was demand-
ing a return to the parliamentary system during the “March Crisis” of 1954.68
In Tunisia, the trade union-state bargain was made earlier, just before
independence, when the Neo-Destour accepted the social and economic de-
mands of the ugtt at a national party congress in 1955.69 After independence,
however, the ugtt became subjugated to the Neo-Destour, its leader Ahmad
Ben Salah was forced to resign, and in the new constitution social and eco-
nomic rights were hardly mentioned, let alone the right of workers to strike.70
Throughout the heyday of Bourguiba the ugtt was subordinated to the de-
mands of the state, many of whose cadres and leaders, such as Habib Achour
and Ahmad ben Salah, were also members of the Neo-Destour and became
ministers.71 As part of the bargain huge investments were made in Tunisia in
the areas of education, health care, water, and roads, and between 1961 and
1969 the percentage of the population living below the poverty line declined
from 70–75 to 40–45 per cent.72
65 Posusney, Labor and the State in Egypt, 2.

66 Beattie, Egypt during the Nasser Years, 80.
68 Beattie, Egypt during the Nasser Years, 96. The demonstrators demonstrated against a
return to hizbiyya (partyism) and in favour of keeping the achievements of the revolution.
70 Ibid., 134.
71 Michel Camau and Vincent Geisser, Le syndrome autoritaire: Politique en Tunisie de Bour-
guiba à Ben Ali (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2003), 145–147, 168, 171, 174.
72 Christopher Alexander, Tunisia: Stability and Reform in the Modern Maghreb (London:
Routledge, 2010), 73–74.
82 Meijer
In Iraq, after the revolution of 1958 a similar social contract was implement-
ed, although not directly with the trade unions. The special status of tribal
lands was ended, taxes were imposed on tribal shaykhs, land reforms imple-
mented, and areas of land were redistributed to landless peasants. The slums
of Baghdad were cleaned up and housing projects initiated. Hospitals were
also built, and the number of students in primary and secondary education
doubled between 1958 and 1963.73
The social contract also extended to women: in Tunisia the Personal Status
Law, which drastically changed the position of women, was passed in 1956,
while in Iraq in 1959 women were accepted as being equal to men in terms of
inheritance law and as witnesses in court. In all these cases, women became
the concern of the state and consequently “state feminism” arose.74
These social contracts of the new nations were often formalised and laid
down in so-called National Charters. The first was the 1962 National Charter
(al-Mithaq al-Watani) of Egypt. In Algeria under Boumedienne a National
Charter was adopted in 1976 and accepted by the population in a national ref-
erendum. These charters were extended even after the authoritarian bargain
had crumbled; Ben Ali of Tunisia drew up a National Pact in 1987, while King
Hussein of Jordan did so in 1991. Neither of these, however, was democratically
adopted after a broad national discussion, nor were they substantial, enduring,
or widely supported.
In the monarchies such deals were less well defined, more diffuse and in-
formal, and often more arbitrary and erratic. They were based on much more
flexible arrangements, such as patronage, patriarchy, and religious charity, and
legitimised by symbolic acts and religious institutions and ideologies. Where-
as in the republics the “people” were, in theory, sovereign, in the monarchies
the monarch still ruled supreme and in principle was answerable only to God.
Subjects had no rights but obtained their status, livelihood, and state services
as “gifts” (makrama) from the rulers, and were thus dependent on their be-
nevolence. The public sector expanded as much as in the republics, but public
sector employment was never a right. Moreover, the monarchies were saved
from popular vengeance by the oil boom of the 1970s, which enabled them
to insert much more extensive and far-reaching authoritarian bargains than
the poverty-stricken republics. They also benefited from the collapse of Arab
socialism, and the rise of conservative Islamism.
73 Adeed Dawisha, Iraq: A Political History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 181.
74 Valentine M. Moghadam, Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change in the Middle
East (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2013), 37–75. For Egypt in this period, see especially Laura
Bier, Revolutionary Womanhood: Feminism, Modernity and the State in Nasser’s Egypt (Cai-
ro: The American University in Cairo Press, 2011).
Corporatism
A major drawback of corporatism was that political rights were not based on a
positive view of democracy, which almost everywhere was associated with co-
lonialism, disunity, and the rule of the elite.75 Class differences were denied and
the nation was built on social harmony. People were one and undivided, and
if there were differences they should be neglected, obfuscated, or repressed.
Because the parliamentary system had not led to independence and reform,
but had instead become associated with corruption and divisiveness, it was
denounced as “partyism” or partisanship (hizbiyya) by many organisations that
focused on social, communal, and national rights, such as the Muslim Brother-
hood, radical nationalists such as the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party, the Neo-
Destour in Tunisia, and Young Egypt, later the Socialist Party, and trade unions,
as well as by the communist movement after 1959. All claimed to represent the
nation, the people. This was the case with the Wafd, the Neo-Destour,76 the
Front Libération National (fln), and even the Muslim Brotherhood.77
In the new corporatist state the differences within the nationalist movement
or the various organisations were papered over or repressed. The National Lib-
eration Rally of December 1952 in Egypt began with the discourse that would
become wedded to the new dictatorships: “We are all of the Liberation Rally.”78
The Arab Socialist Union (asu), established in 1961, maintained that “in the
absence of a basic contradiction between interests of the people’s produc-
tive forces, there is no need for each of them to form an independent politi-
cal organization.”79 The Syrian Baʿath Party was there to “to protect the Arab
nation from factionalism, backwardness and corruption.”80
Corporatism also led to a grading and categorisation of citizens according
to state concepts. The new citizens did not have rights as individual citizens
but became peasants, workers, or members of professions, such as engineers,
teachers, judges, and journalists. Insofar as civil society had existed before the
revolutions, it became incorporated and included into the state corporatism
as entities.81
75 Camau and Geisser, Le syndrome autoritaire, 145.

76 Ibid., 227–228.
77 Roel Meijer, “The Muslim Brotherhood and the Political: An Exercise in Ambiguity.” In
The Muslim Brotherhood in Europe, ed. Roel Meijer and Edwin Bakker (London: Hurst,
2013), 295–320.
79 Kandil, Soldiers, Spies, and Statesmen, 57.
80 Lisa Wedeen, Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary
Syria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 42.
81 Robert Bianchi, Unruly corporatism: Associational Life in Twentieth-Century Egypt (New
York: Oxford University Press,1989), 72–81.
84 Meijer
Corporatism could not have flourished to such an extent if it had not con-
trolled such a huge chunk of the economy after the nationalisation of, first,
foreign investments and, later, indigenous capital, which formed the basis of
the huge public sector in the Arab world. The Middle East and North Africa
had seen one of the largest foreign financial investments in the world and their
nationalisation meant that the state would acquire the same central function
as it had in the Soviet Bloc and would create monopoly companies across all
sectors of the economy. The most spectacular change was in Egypt, where
Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal Company and all British and French assets
in transport, banks, public utilities, industries, and land companies during the
Suez Crisis. In 1962 a second wave of nationalisation occurred, which included
Egyptian enterprises and the press.82 In Algeria oil and gas was nationalised in
1968, and in Iraq banks, insurance companies, and “primary” industries were
taken over by the state in 1964. In countries that did not have industrial a ssets,
such as Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria, the land of the colons was sequestered
after independence. Most economists agree that these measures were not eco-
nomically rational decisions, but were politically motivated to increase gov-
ernmental control and shore up the social pact.83 In Syria land reform and
the nationalisation of industries were seen as a “political necessity” to gain
the loyalty of peasants and workers, and to obtain control over them.84 By 1985
140,000 Syrian workers were employed in public industrial sector, almost 40
per cent of the total industrial workforce. In Egypt the public sector expanded
from 770,000 in 1962 to 1.1 million in 1967, while, in 1990, Syria counted 700,000
in state employment, five times the figure of 1970.
Planning and Social Engineering

Corporatism and its denial of conflict and politics is usually regarded as the
bane of populist authoritarian republican regimes,85 but the planning and ide-
ology that went with it, social engineering, perhaps had an even worse effect
on citizenship and democratic rights. In almost all Arab countries new plan-
ning institutions were established and five year plans were implemented after
82 John Waterbury, The Egypt of Nasser and Sadat: The Political Economy of Two Regimes
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 57–82.
83 Lahouari Addi, L’Algérie et la démocratie: Pouvoir et crise du politique dans l’Algérie con-
temporaine (Paris: Éditions la Découverte, 1995), 77; Volker Perthes, The Political Economy
of Syria under Asad (London: I.B. Tauris, 1995), 145; Alan Richard and John Waterbury,
A Political Economy of the Middle East (Boulder: WestView Press, 1996), 173–204.
84 Perthes, The Political Economy of Syria, 39, 44.
85 Bianchi, Unruly Corporatism.
large-scale nationalisation had taken place. It led to the rise of a new breed of
people, such as Rashid al-Barrawi, who was an economic advisor to Nasser, and
who founded the Egyptian Industrial Bank in 1953 and promoted such plan-
ning through his books and the propaganda he placed in the newspapers.86 He
was succeeded by the much more famous ʿAziz Sidqi, the “industrial czar” of
Egyptian industrialisation. But they emerged elsewhere as well. Hedi Nouiri,
the Director of the Central Bank of Tunisia, and Ahmed ben Salah, who be-
came Minister of Planning in 1961, are similar figures.87 In Egypt they were
responsible for Tahrir province, the industrialisation “drive,” and the High Dam.
But it was not just planning itself in the technical sense, or even technocracy
as a technic of management. The Arabic words for “planning” (tarshid, tawjih,
and, especially, takhtit) are closely related to terms such as “organisation”
(tanzim), “supervision” (ishraf), “control” (raqaba), and “coordination” (tansiq),
and represented an ideology of modernisation, a vision that enthralled not just
intellectuals but one that was part and parcel of an ideology that promoted
the state as an agent of change. Planning represented “high” modernism in the
region, and had a crucial effect on the citizenship regime of the period.88 If
the liberals of the 1920s looked at the Middle East through Western Orientalist
eyes and downgraded the indigenous culture as an “uncivilised” one that could
be gradually educated, the planners and the many communists, who imbibed
planning through the Soviet Union, looked at society as “irrational,” a tabula
rasa that could be planned once the state was captured from colonialism. Op-
posed to the “people with real interests” (ashab al-masalih al-haqiqiya), they
were the “people of opinion” (ahl al-raʾy), the intellectuals, who could not just
talk about gradual reform but could also implement it via “scientific planning”
(al-takhtit al-ʿilmi), achieved through the modern state they came to control
after independence.89
Personalisation of Power and Populism

The result was the worst of both worlds. Planning was imposed from above,
unrestrained by civil society or any intermediate professional organisations
or institutions. This led to a paradoxical development: on the one hand, the
state became the embodiment of the nation. It was the state that stood at the
pinnacle of power and that needed protection. The police, the judiciary, and
86 For an analysis of the ideology of planning, see Meijer, The Quest for Modernity, 178–185.
87 Perkins, Tunisia, 146–147; Alexander, Tunisia, 42–43.
88 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition
Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
89 Meijer, The Quest for Modernity, 178–186, 208–245.
86 Meijer
the military were all in the service of the state, not the citizen.90 A typical ex-
ample comes from after the military coup in Algeria in 1992, when the military
established the Haut Comité d’Etat (hce), a five-man council to protect the
state which was “under siege.”91 In the end the state, simply called le pouvoir,
became an end in itself.92
On the other hand, the new leaders took over the task from the previous
mass movements of representing the nation. Power was concentrated in their
hands. The only task of the national assembly in independent Algeria was
to ratify Ben Bella’s decisions, and the fln had no autonomous role. Likewise,
the Neo-Destour was subsumed under Bourguiba’s rule, who personally ap-
pointed its politburo. In Egypt, Nasser increasingly concentrated power over
the security apparatus, the media, and all executive agencies into his own
hands, at the expense of the collective rule of the Revolutionary Command
Council (rcc), following the March Crisis of 1954, and dissolved the rcc in
August 1955.93 Attempts made in 1957 by the Egyptian parliament to show its
teeth and investigate corruption charges were immediately suppressed, and it
was dissolved in 1958 upon the creation of the United Arab Republic, which
joined Egypt with Syria, and when it reconvened in 1960 all 400 members
were appointed by Nasser.94 Even the mildest forms of opposition and criti-
cism were associated with conspiracies, disunity, and subversion.95 In all these
countries, participation was limited to the “support of the goals, the norms,
and values the elite disseminated.”96
The charisma of the first leaders of the struggle for independence, Bour-
guiba in Tunisia (1988), Ben Bella (1962–65) in Algeria, and Nasser in Egypt
(1970), was given so much scope that they absorbed the rights of the people. In
the words of Michael Willis, Bourguiba sought to convey the impression that
he “embodied Tunisia himself.”97 Under his leadership the state took over the
colonial task of educating the population and adopted the mission educatrice
from the French. Bourguiba became the al-mujahid al-akbar (le combattant
90 Christopher, Tunisia, 41.

91 James D. Le Sueur, Between Terror and Democracy: Algeria since 1989 (London: Zed Books),
51–55.
92 Addi, L’Algérie et la démocratie, 35.
93 Beattie, Egypt during the Nasser Years, 120, 123.
94 Ibid., 133.
95 Camau and Geisser, Le syndrome autoritaire, 149, 156.
96 Ibid., 155–158.
97 Michael J. Willis, Politics and Power in the Maghreb: Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco from
Independence to the Arab Spring (London: Hurst, 2012), 51.
suprême).98 Leaders claimed to speak in the name of the people (al-sha ʿb) or
to be the “delegates of the revolution,” although, at the same time, they deeply
distrusted the people, whom they thought should be guided, educated, and
led, but not consulted, let alone be allowed to exert influence on the direc-
tion of state affairs.99 In Iraq, after the toppling of the monarchy in 1958, ʿAbd
al-Karim Qasim became the “sole leader” and the “beloved saviour,” starting a
long tradition of personal dictatorship.100
This tendency to become the embodiment of the nation degenerated into
rulers regarding the nation as a family. Bourguiba regarded the Tunisian peo-
ple as his “children.”101 Under Arab socialism in Egypt the state “was to play
the role of the rab al-bayt (master of the house) and the people that of the
subordinate wife or dependent children.”102 Sadat regarded the nation as one
family, and Wedeen describes the Syrian subject under Hafez al-Asad as a
“child citizen.”103 In this construct, males were sons of the “mother-nation, and
all citizens were sons and daughters of Asad as the patriarch of the nation to
whom they owed obedience.”104 In an attempt to erase the notion of individual
citizens, leader and citizens were conflated into one, leaving the latter without
personality or rights: “They should know that Asad is no one, but one of you.
Every citizen in this country is Hafiz al-Asad.”105 In the case of Iraq, Kanan Ma-
kiya writes, “the whole apparatus of the state is united in regarding the citizen
as an outsider placed at the very bottom of the heap.”106
With the personalisation of politics and the prominence of personal loyalty
followed the building of vast patronage systems, which further undermined the
modernist project and introduced a new privileged social class and a new form
of “differentiated citizenship” that replaced the colonial one. ʿAbd al-Hakim
ʿAmer, Nasser’s Minister of Defence, “transform[ed] the army into a tribe,” with
him as tribal chief. He raised salaries, lowered the retirement age, allocated
summer houses, cars, and interest-free loans to his men, who were beholden

99 Camau and Geisser, Le syndrome autoritaire, 149; Beattie, Egypt during the Nasser Years,
124.
100 Dawisha, Iraq, 177–179, 190.
102 Bier, Revolutionary Womenhood, 58.
103 Wedeen, Ambiguities of Domination, 51.
104 Ibid.
106 Samir al-Khalil (Kanan Makiya), Republic of Fear: The Inside Story of Saddam’s Iraq (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1989), 43.
88 Meijer
to him alone.107 In Syria, military personnel had access to subsidised housing,

cars, food, special limousines, clubs, and economies, as well as to resources;
their pay was higher than civil servants, and they paid no income tax.108
With the increasing personalisation of politics, there was a decline in
playing-off factions and personalities against each other and in prevent-
ing them from turning themselves into representatives of interests and from
formulating programs and presenting issues for open discussion.109 De-
politicisation and demobilisation were part of this strategy and were, in the
end, successful everywhere.
Cultural Boundaries
The fact that post-independence politics was based on ethnos rather than on
demos and on individual rights further undermined a sense of individual citi-
zenship, as rights were also subordinated to exclusive communitarian interests
as defined by the state and imposed from above.110 In Tunisia the Arab-Islamic
culture was adopted as the cultural foundation of the new country.111 Cul-
tural differences were eliminated and in the new, totalising Tunisian identity,
or “personnalité,” there was no room for non-Muslim groups.112 As a result all
references to Amazigh (Berbers) were suppressed and local dialects were ne-
glected. Whole regions, such as Kabyle in Algeria and the Rif in Morocco, were
ignored by the government. Berber activists and opponents were detained,
one of whom was Hocine Aït Ahmed, who was arrested and subsequently con-
demned to death for founding a Berber party.113 After ʿAbd al-Karim Qasim’s
Iraqi initial strategy, based on expounding the unity of “brotherly nationalities,”
the Baʿath returned to pan-Arab unity and exclusion.
The Politics of Exclusion and Elimination

Exclusion was cultural and ethnic, but also political and economic. Opponents
were created to be stigmatised, the past was erased, and new society creat-
ed. Foreigners left the country. Between 1955 and 1959, 170,000 Europeans left
Tunisia, two-thirds of the foreign population.114 In Egypt, the expat community
107 Kandil, Soldiers, Spies and Statesmen, 51.

108 Perthes, The Political Economy of Syria, 150.
109 Alexander, Tunisia, 40, 51.
110 Addi, L’Algérie et la démocratie, 100–101.
111 Camau and Geisser, Le syndrome autoritaire, 99, 108–109, 144, 149.
112 Norma Salem, Habib Bourguiba, Islam, and the Creation of Tunisia (London: Croom Helm,
1984), 146.
113 Le Sueur, Between Terror and Democracy, 16.
declined from 204,000 to 143,000 between 1947 and 1960.115 In Egypt, Syria, and
Iraq all foreigners had gone by 1960. The majority of the Jews also left these
countries. Forced migration was common, such as the 40,000 Shiʿi or Fayli
Kurds in 1971–1972, and the 200,000 “Persian” Shiʿis from Iraq in 1980s, who
were evicted to Iran.
In Egypt, the “purification” of politics from “corrupt politicians,” “feudalists,”
and “monopoly capital,” which was to involve the arrest of 64 leading politi-
cians in September 1952, the abrogation of the constitution in December, and
the instalment of the “treason court,” was one of the means for legitimising
the road to dictatorship.116 On October 22, 1961 the property of 167 “reaction-
ary capitalists” was sequestered. “Political isolation,” or the withdrawal of all
political rights, was extended to another 600 people. Waterbury reckons that,
in total, some 7,000 persons were affected by land reforms, nationalisations, or
political crimes, and consequently deprived of their political rights.117 Nation-
alisations carried out in Syria in 1964 were means to punish “bad citizens”;118
between 1963 and 1969 4,500 landowners whose land exceeded 1,200 hectares
were stripped of 1.5 million hectares between them.119
Members of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood were called “reactionaries,”
“rightists,” and “vermin” who were threatening to “contaminate” the body
politic of the regime.120 After the banishment of the Egyptian Muslim Brother-
hood in 1954, as many as 20,000 of its members were detained and remained in
prison until the start of the 1970s.121 Civil society was brought to heel. In 1980
the lawyers’, engineers’ and physicians’ syndicates were forced to resign and
more regime-friendly members installed.122
As politics was seen as a zero-sum game, violence became widespread. The
degree of repression was staggering. Mass killings became common in the Iraqi
republic, starting with the mass killings in Mosul and Kirkuk in 1958 and the
killing of thousands of communists after the Baʿath coup in 1963, and reaching
its height with the Anfal operations against the Kurds in 1987–88. In Morocco
the “years of lead” lasted from 1978 to 1992 and cost 60,000 people their lives,
Egypt experienced a police state from 1954 to 1970, the Iraqi “republic of fear”

116 Ibid., 76–79.
117 Waterbury, The Egypt of Nasser and Sadat, 75.
118 Volker Perthes, The Political Economy of Syria under Asad (London: I.B. Tauris, 1995), 39.
119 Ibid., 81.
121 Hazem Kandil, Soldiers, Spies, and Statemen: Egypt’s Road to Revolt (London: Verso, 2012),
40, 44.
90 Meijer
lasted from the 1964 until the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003,123 and, between
1962 and 1991, Algeria went through “the dark years” (les années noires) of state
violence, which resulted in 100,000 deaths.124 Another 150,000 would be killed
in the subsequent civil war of the 1990s. Even Tunisia, which was never milita-
rised, had a history of violence, during the ferghala uprisings of 1954–56.
All forms of protest were repressed with extreme violence. The general
strike of the ugtt in Tunisia in January 1978 was repressed at the cost of 200
lives and its secretary general was condemned to ten years in prison, while the
“bread riot” of 1984 was suppressed with 143 dead. The uprisings in Algeria in
1988 were suppressed at the cost of 500 lives.
Republics versus Monarchies

That the monarchies emerged in the post-independence era stronger than the
republics is not surprising. The failure of the modernist project of rationalisa-
tion was because it was not based on citizenship rights. The forces working
against the emergence of rights following independence were immense: tech-
nocracy and the ideology of planning regarded people as tools in the moderni-
sation process; the personalisation and concentration of power in the hands of
the political leaders and their treatment of citizens as children absorbed their
rights on the one hand, while the infiltration and expansion of patronage and
clientalism undermined them on the other; de-politicisation and demobilisa-
tion weakened any form of opposition, while the deepening and normalisation
of the mechanisms of exclusion and repression strengthened the culture of
obedience. While the monarchies also had all of these aspects they were much
more flexible, and through their ideology of makrama could give greater legiti-
macy to the vast patronage systems that they controlled.
The Arab Uprisings and the Re-emergence of Citizenship
The Collapse of the Authoritarian Social Contract

It was the unravelling of the authoritarian bargain on the one hand and the
provocation of the Arab Gulf States’ wealth on the other that led to the Arab
Uprisings. It was not democracy as such,125 nor only social rights, let alone po-
litical Islam, in the sense of building an Islamic state, that was at the root of
the uprisings. Outrage at the complete denial both of people’s basic humanity
123 al-Khalil, Republic of Fear.

124 Vermeren, Maghreb, 178.
125 One should differentiate between liberal democracy and democracy in the Middle East;
very few people are actually in favour of a liberal democracy.
and of their civil, political, social, economic, and cultural rights, all deepened
by crony capitalism, the self-enrichment of the elite, rampant corruption, and
constant harassment by the security forces, brought down the “wall of fear”
and caused people to rise up against the existing citizenship regime, especially
in the republics. As these were not directed at a foreign enemy, nor against in-
ternal religious or ethnic scapegoats, but were aimed at the basic political issue
of citizen-state and citizen-citizen relations, it touched upon the very heart of
citizenship in all its existential aspects. The Arab Uprisings can therefore be
regarded as a struggle for a new social contract. However vague at the begin-
ning, they were inclusionary, egalitarian, and non-sectarian.
The economic unravelling of the authoritarian bargain has been extensively
analysed by others and should not detain us here.126 Its main characteristics
are a gradual dismantling of the welfare state that had been built after inde-
pendence, achieved through austerity measures, the privatisation of public
companies, a significant increase in the size of the informal economy, and in-
secure working conditions. Many mark the beginning of the unravelling of the
authoritarian bargain as the time of the “bread riots” of the 1970s and 1980s
in Tunisia (1978, 1984), Egypt (1977), Morocco (1981, 1984), Algeria (1988), and
Jordan (1989).127 Algeria signed its first “standby agreement” in 1989, agreeing
with the imf to end subsidies on bread and milk in 1991, and in 1995 started its
privatisation programs.128 Syria had gone through an “infitah of abundance”
in the 1970s and a “infitah of public poverty” in the 1980s.129 Raising prices
meant the end of the “acquired rights” of a certain level of consumption, hous-
ing, employment, and dignity.130 The crisis was deepened because, more than
elsewhere, the social dimension in the republics had been at the heart of the
authoritarian bargain.
A New Social Contract

Researchers have been describing the developments that led to the disman-
tling of the authoritarian bargain for decades. These take several forms:
Ideological developments. Ideologically, notions of citizenship have emerged
across the political spectrum, from Islamists to the liberal left, since the “utopias”
126 See, for example, Eberhard Kienle, A Grand Delusion: Democracy and Economic Reform in
Egypt (London: I.B. Tauris, 2001); Ray Bush and Habib Ayeb, Marginality and Exclusion in
Egypt (London: Zed Books, 2012); Adam Hanieh, Lineages of Revolt: Issues of Contempo-
rary Capitalism in the Middle East (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2013).
127 Camau and Geisser, Le syndrome autoritaire, 184–185.
130 Camau and Geisser, Le syndrome autoritaire, 188.
92 Meijer
of both the Islamic state and the Arab socialist state have become less attrac-
tive. What further enhanced this trend was the high level of state repression
and that led to demands for the rule of law, an independent judiciary, and the
separation of powers. So-called “post-Islamism,” described as a change from
duties to rights, is in many ways a “turn” towards citizenship:131 (1) it is a move
away from the project of Hasan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Broth-
erhood in 1928, which promoted Islam as a communitarian system covering
all aspects of life, towards a normative system of ethical guidelines.132 (2) A
willingness among such trends as the Wasatiyya to recognise difference, plural-
ism, and the acceptance of the legal equality of non-Muslims with Muslims. (3)
The recognition of politics as a separate field of activity from religion, a space
where citizens can make compromises to reach pragmatic solutions to daily
political issues and coalitions can reach their goals,133 a process that has often
been subsumed under the notion of “political learning.”134 (4) The separation
of political parties from social movements that are assumed to be ideologi-
cally more rigid and constraining in the formation of political compromises.135
(5) The acceptance of a “civil state” (dawla madaniyya) instead of an Islamic
state (dawla islamiyya) and of civility as an attitude, a new interest in consti-
tutions as a form of social contract, and shared citizenship as the basis of the
state.136 These trends are discernible in the Muslim Brotherhood,137 the Parti
131 Asef Bayat has called post-Islamism a change from duties to rights; Asef Bayat, Mak-
ing Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2007); Olivier Roy, The Failure of Political Islam (London: I.B. Tauris,
1994); Rachel Scott, The Challenge of Political Islam: Non-Muslims and the Egyptian State
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).
132 See Chapter 12 in this volume, written by Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen, for the connection
with citizenship. Much has been written on the Wasatiyya movement. See, for example,
Raymond Baker, Islam without Fear: Egypt and the New Islamists (Cambridge ma: Harvard
133 Roel Meijer, “The Problem of the Political in Islamist Movements,” in Whatever Hap-
pened to the Islamists? Salafis, Heavy Metal Muslims, and the Lure of Consumerist Islam,
eds. Amel Boubekeur and Olivier Roy (London: Hurst/Columbia University Press, 2012),
27–60.
134 For Algeria, see Le Sueur, Between Terror and Democracy, 40.
135 Nathan J. Brown, Amr Hamzawy, and Marina Ottaway, Islamist Movements and the Demo-
cratic Process in the Arab World: Exploring the Gray Zones (Carnegie Papers No. 67, 2006),
5–17.
136 Chris Harnisch and Quinn Mecham, “Democratic Ideology in Islamist Opposition? The
Muslim Brotherhood’s ‘Civil State’,” Middle Eastern Studies 45 (2009): 189–205.
137 Rachel Scott, The Challenge of Political Islam; Carrie Rosefsky Wickham, “Strategy
and Learning in the Formation of Egypt’s Wasat Party,” Comparative Politics 36 (2004):
de la Justice et Développement in Morocco (pjd),138 Ennahda in Tunisia,139

and the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood.140
This is not to deny that the post-Islamist turn has been ambiguous, divid-
ed, and limited, as many have pointed out, and that its ambiguity in the end
explains why a coalition in many countries, such as Egypt, has failed to ma-
terialise.141 But in other cases, such as in Tunisia, they were able to help erect
a “political society,” as Linz and Stepan point out,142 establishing a coalition
known as the Collectif in 2005, and finding a compromise laid down in the con-
stitution of 2014. Even Salafism has seen the emergence of a rights movement
within its ranks and the demand for an accountable government laid down in
a social contract.143
The rise of political parties. This development has, however, been criticised
as a means whereby the state can co-opt politics and “upgrade” the authori-
tarian bargain.144 The first multi-party elections were held in Tunisia in 1981,
Egypt in 1983, Jordan in 1989, and Morocco in 1992. In all cases, however, hopes
were quickly dashed as a “façade democracy” was installed. In 1988 the Ras-
semblement Constitutionel Démocratique (rcd) of Ben Ali won all the seats
in the elections, the same happened with the National Democratic Party (ndp)
in Egypt in 1990, as it did in Jordan in 1993, marking the end of the democratic
205–228; Carrie Rosefsky Wickham, “The Muslim Brotherhood and Democratic Transi-
tion in Egypt,” Middle East Law and Governance Journal 3 (2011): 204–223.
138 Eva Wegner, “Islamist Moderation without Democratization: The Coming of Age of the
Moroccan Party of Justice and Development?” Democratization 16 (2009): 157–175.
139 Francesco Cavatorta and Fabio Merone, “Moderation Through Exclusion? The Journey of
the Tunisian Ennahda from Fundamentalist to Conservative Party,” Democratization 20
(2013): 857–875.
140 Meijer, “The Problem of the Political in Islamists Movements,” 17–60.
141 Roel Meijer, “The Majority Strategy of the Muslim Brotherhood,” Die Orient 54 (2013):
21–30.
142 Stepan, Alfred and Juan Linz, “Democratization Theory and the Arab Spring,” Journal of
Democracy 24 (2013): 15–30.
143 See Chapter 13 in this volume, and Roel Meijer, (ed.). Global Salafism: Islam’s New Religious
Movement (London: Hurst, 2009). For the political dimension see especially Stéphane La-
croix, “Islamists Dilemmas in Post-Arab Spring Saudi Arabia,” in Salafism after the Arab
Awakening: Contending with People’s Power, ed. Francesco Cavatorta and Fabio Merone
(London: Hurst, forthcoming).
144 The literature on this topic is vast: see for Tunisia, Eva Bellin, “Authoritarianism in the
Middle East: Exceptionalism in Comparative Perspective,” Comparative Politics 36 (2004):
139–157; for Morocco, Abdessalam Maghraoui, “Depoliticization in Morocco,” Journal of
Democracy 13 (2002): 24–32; for Egypt, Maye Kassem, Egyptian Politics: The Dynamics of
Authoritarian Rule (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2004) among many others.
94 Meijer
experiment. Mostly the criticism of political parties concentrates on political

system itself, particularly the manipulation of electoral rules, gerrymandering,
fraud, and intimidation. However, despite the poor showing of formal politics,
a major change has occurred since the 1960s in the sense that the monopoly
of state ideology has been broken. Competition between parties has also led
to greater pressure to come up with elaborate programs and spell out the civil,
political, social, and economic rights of citizens.145
The new interest in a multi-party system has been confirmed after the Arab
Uprisings, when in Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, and Libya free and fair elections
were held. These experiences have been mixed, sometimes disastrous, and even
in countries, such as Morocco, where the pjd delivered the prime minister after
the first elections in November 2012, the results were heavily restricted by pa-
tronage system of the king.146 Nevertheless, even in Egypt, the influence of the
Wasatiyya trend and a more rational politics based on concrete social and eco-
nomic programs instead of the slogan “Islam is the Solution” was apparent.147
Social movements. Social movements stepped into the political vacuum that
the failure of formal political parties had left behind, and have been the main
driving force behind the Arab Uprisings. They have been especially important
in formulating lists of grievances and demands, which have themselves been
increasingly couched in terms of rights.148 They have also been adept at form-
ing cross-ideological, cross-sectarian, and broad class coalitions, ones which
could unite on the basis of shared frames.149 Moreover, on account of their
horizontal nature they countered the dominant political culture of patronage,
clientelism. More than just being political parties, they have, therefore, been
145 Mona El-Ghobashy, “The Metamorphosis of the Egyptian Muslim Brothers,” International
Journal of Middle East Studies 37 (2005): 373–395; Sana Abed-Kotob, “The Accommoda-
tionists Speak: Goals and Strategies of the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt,” International
Journal of Middle East Studies 27 (1995): 321–339.
146 See Chapter 5 in this volume by James Sater.
147 See Chapter 12 in this volume by Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen.
148 Joel Beinin and Frédéric Vairel (eds), Social Movements, Mobilization, and Contestation
in the Middle East and North Africa (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011); Quintan
Wiktorowicz (ed.), Islamic Activism: A Social Movement Theory Approach (Bloomington:
University of Indiana Press, 2004).
149 Janine A. Clark, “The Conditions of Islamist Moderation: Unpacking Cross-Ideological
Cooperation in Jordan,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 38 (2006): 539–
560; Maha Abdelrahman, “The Transnational and the Local: Egyptian Activists and Trans-
national Protest Networks,” British Journal of Middle East Studies 38 (2011): 407–424; Maha
Abdelrahman, “‘With the Islamists? – Sometimes. With the State? – Never!’ Cooperation
with the Left and Islamists in Egypt,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 36 (2011):
37–54; Dina Shehata, Islamist and Secularists in Egypt: Opposition, Conflict, and Coopera-
tion (London: Routledge, 2010).
at the forefront of the rise of citizenship.150 This applied to the movements

starting in the interior in Tunisia,151 the different movements such as the Pal-
estinian intifada (equal rights), those represented by Kifaya (political rights),
the April Movement (workers’ rights), and the worker’s movements.152 But it is
not just the demands and coalitions that are important. Just as significant for
social movements are the practices of its members, how they act and perform
when contesting the prevalent citizen regimes and when developing new ex-
perimental citizenship forms.
The Arab Uprisings were carried out by social movements, such as February
20 Movement,153 the early uprisings in Syria,154 the Tahrir occupy movement.155
The rise of independent trade unions. Trade unions became more active in
the 1970s after the unravelling of the authoritarian bargain, when they increas-
ingly tried to wriggle out of the constraints of corporatism. In their struggle for
independence and legalisation they defended civil rights, while also demand-
ing economic (job security, pay rises) and social rights (welfare provisions) in
their struggle against privatisation. The ugtt was able to acquire greater free-
dom and its demands became increasingly political, to the extent that at one
point they intended to establish their own political party,156 and its regional of-
fices played a crucial role during the uprisings in Tunisia.157 The Algerian trade
union, the Union Générale des Travailleurs Algériens (ugta), became active
150 Roel Meijer, “Political Citizenship and Social Movements in the Arab World,” in Hand-
book of Political Citizenship and Social Movements, ed. Hein Anton van der Heijden
(Cheltenham, Edward Elgar, 2014), 628–660.
151 Habib Ayeb, “Social and Political Geography of the Tunisian Revolution: the Alfa Grass
Revolution,” Review of African Political Economy 38 (2011): 467–479.
152 Jeroen Gunning and Ilan Zvi Baron, Why Occupy a Square? People, Protests and Movements
in the Egyptian Revolution (London: Hurst, 2013); Maha Abdelrahman, Egypt’s Long Revo-
lution: Protest Movements and Uprisings (London: Routledge, 2015).
153 Anja Hoffmann and Christoph König, “Scratching the Democratic Façade: Framing Strat-
egies of the 20 February Movement,” Mediterranean Politics 18 (2013): 1–22; Koenraad
Bogaert, “The Revolt of Small Towns: The Meaning of Morocco’s History and Geography
of Social Protests,” Review of African Political Economy 42 (2015): 124–140.
154 Salwa Ismail, “The Syrian Uprising: Imagining and Performing the Nation,” Studies in Eth-
nicity and Nationalism 11 (2011): 538–549.
155 Bahgat Korany and Rabab El-Mahdi, eds., Arab Spring in Egypt: Revolution and Beyond
(Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2014).
156 Christopher, Tunisia, 46.
157 See Chapter 4 in this volume, written by Sami Zemni. See also Sami Zemni, “From Socio-
Economic Protest to National Revolt: The Labor Origins of the Tunisian Revolution,” in
The Making of the Tunisian Revolution: Contexts, Architects, Prospects, ed. Nouri Gana
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 127–146.
96 Meijer
in the 1990s in protesting against privatisation programmes.158 In Morocco,

several more radical trade unions joined the February 20 Movement. Further-
more, the Egyptian trade unions played a particularly crucial role during the
uprisings against Mubarak.159
Human rights. The most active groups promoting the rights discourse –
mainly civil rights, but also political, social, and economic rights – have been
the human rights organisations in the mena region.160 They have had a ma-
jor impact in all countries from the earliest founding of Lique Tunisienne des
Droits de l’Hommes (ltdh) in Tunis in 1977 to the many official human rights
organisations in the rest of the region. Although highly abstract, and accused
of being a Western import, they have also found support from the Islamist
movement, which has fallen back on human rights as a tool against the repres-
sion of the state. Human rights organisations also played a direct role in the
uprisings, such as the amdh in Morocco, helping to formulate the demands for
civil rights against the state and to organise the local tansiqiyyat into creating
networks, demonstrations, and other “acts of citizenship.”
Everyday citizenship, practices and acts of citizenship. With the unravelling
of the authoritarian bargain the state could no longer provide services, but in
addition it also increasingly lost control of society and the economy, with the
result that the informal economy expanded and people increasingly had to
look after themselves. That people develop strategies to evade or resist state
policies and sanctions does not mean that they do not have notions of citi-
zenship and rights; many of the poor have a strong sense of justice and de-
mand that the state takes care of them.161 But, as anthropologists have shown,
there are many ways of undermining the official discourse of power and he-
gemony by what Wedeen calls “transgressions.” These can take the form of
ambiguities, jokes, political parodies, and “everyday, lived experiences of

159 Joel Beinin, The Struggle for Workers Rights in Egypt (Washington d.c.: Washington Soli-
darity Center, 2010); Joel Beinin, Workers and Thieves: Labor Movements and Popular Up-
risings in Tunisia and Egypt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016); Anne Alexander
and Mostafa Bassiouny, Bread, Freedom, Social Justice (London: Zed Press, 2014).
160 Susan Waltz, “The Politics of Human Rights in North Africa,” in Islam, Democracy, and
the State in North Africa, ed. John P. Entelis (Bloomington: Indiana State University, 1997),
75–92.
161 Reem Saad, “A Moral Order Reversed? Agricultural Land Changes Hands, Again,” in Poli-
tics from Above, Politics from Below: The Middle East in the Age of Economic Reform, ed.
Eberhard Kienle (London: Saqi Books, 2003), 229–241; Cilja Harders, “The Informal Social
Pact: The State and the Urban Poor in Cairo,” in Politics from Above, 191–213.
opposition and critique,”162 or by what Bayat calls “non-movements.” It is

through this resistance that new forms of citizenship have been created during
the uprisings.163
Minority rights. An important role in claiming equal civil rights and recog-
nition of cultural rights has been played by minority groups, especially the
larger ones, such as the ethnic-minority Berbers (40 per cent of the Moroccan
population, 20–25 per cent of Algerian population) and Kurds (20 per cent of
the population of Iraq, and 10 per cent of Syria), and the religious-minority
Copts (10 per cent in Egypt) and Shiʿis (60 per cent in Iraq, 40 per cent in Leba-
non). All of them had suffered from the hegemony of Arab Sunni dominance
during the post-independence period. The Berber movement in Algeria and
Morocco was much broader than a regional, cultural movement, and it made
demands for national political reform, equal rights, democratisation, human
rights, and the right to establish cultural organisations, all of which were di-
rected against authoritarianism. They were also active as social movements,
organising petitions, publications, and school strikes.164 The same can be said
of Shiʿi movements in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, which have tried to establish
broad cross-sectarian fronts.
It seems that the Amazigh have not fallen into the trap of enclosure, where-
as Shiʿis have been pushed into the sectarian, exclusionary logic that the Sunni
Gulf states have been promoting, and they have consequently undermined the
inclusionary solutions that were promoted during the early period of the Arab
Uprisings in Syria,165 Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia that called for joint Sunni-Shiʿi
cooperation based on common citizenship. To a large extent the rise of Islamic
State in Iraq and Syria is a result of the active undermining of this project by
Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Constitutions. The major change in the discourse of rights was not just the
emphasis on political parties, it was also in the renewed interest in constitu-
tions. Constitutions have played a role in citizenship regimes in the region ever
162 Wedeen, Ambiguities of Domination, 89–90.

163 Salwa Ismail, Political Life in Cairo’s New Quarters: Encountering the Everyday State (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
164 For the Amazigh movement, see Willis’ chapter “The Berber Question,” 203–229; Paul Sil-
verstein and David Crawford, “Amazigh Activism and the Moroccan State,” Middle East
Report Project 223 (Winter 2004): 44–48; Bruce Maddy-Weizman, “Ethno-politics and Glo-
balisation in North Africa: The Berber Culture Movement,” The Journal of North African
Studies 11 (2006): 71–83; Le Sueur, Between Terror and Democracy, 83.
165 See Chapter 3 by Ray Hinnebusch and Ola Rifai in this volume.
98 Meijer
since the nineteenth century. The Tunisian constitution of 1861, the Ottoman
constitution of 1876, and the Egyptian ones of 1879 and 1923 were important
markers. After independence constitutions were much less important, hav-
ing been hastily drawn up by a small group and applied without debate or
referendum, often being abrogated, suspended, or simply ignored. Since the
1970s constitutions have been taken a lot more seriously. The constitution
of 1971 in Egypt marked an important point in the development of this in-
creased importance, as did the constitution of 1989 in Algeria and the later
Sant’Egidio Platform proposal to end the civil war,166 while those of Morocco,
and elsewhere, also became important because they started to lay down the
rights of citizens and to solve some of the basic problems existing between
state and citizen.
Constitutions were seen as the foundation for solving political problems.
Negotiations surrounding them were directed towards drawing up a new
constitution as a means of creating a political solution. Minority rights were
recognised in constitutions; for example, in 2002 the Algerian constitution was
amended to recognise Tamazight as a national language. The Tunisian consti-
tution of 2014 was a landmark document, and one that functioned as a new
social contract. The two Egyptian ones of 2012 and 2014 attracted widespread
interest and heated debates on their content.167
Restoration of the authoritarian contract. Needless to say, authoritarianism
has not been defeated and has instead been “upgraded,” proving itself to be
more resilient than many had hoped. However, it remains to be seen if the
regime in Egypt can restore the authoritarian bargain without guaranteeing so-
cial and economic rights. The Mubarak regime demonstrated that a repressive
citizenship regime based on stability, security, and economic development
does not last long when economic development remains an illusion. Neither is
the alternative of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, based on overt discrimi-
nation, privilege (of foreign fighters), sectarian exclusion, and open violence
viable in the long run. In the end, in Iraq and Syria a social contract will have to
be signed by all parties. As it will have to address all aspects of the citizenship
regime – the civil, political, social, economic, and cultural rights of groups and
individuals, international boundaries, political and economic systems, and for-
eign relations – this will prove to be an immense task.
166 It called for the end of violence, the separation of powers, respect for the multi-party
system, and recognition of the Berber identity. Le Sueur, Between Terror and Democracy,
66–67.
167 See chapter 14 in this volume by Rachel Scott.
Conclusion
I have argued that the present political crisis in the Middle East and North
Africa is the result of the specific citizenship regimes in the region and has
its origins in the previous two historical periods, those of colonialism and of
the post-independence authoritarian regimes. Neither of these citizenship re-
gimes were able to produce stable citizen-state relations based on equal civil,
political, social, economic, and cultural rights. During the colonial period the
bargain with the notables was elitist, discriminatory, exclusionary, and pre-
served many of the pre-modern forms of state formation, while the authoritar-
ian bargain that replaced it did not meet the demands formulated during the
struggle for independence. The exchange of civil and political rights for social
and economic ones worked for a limited period but collapsed when economic
austerity measures undermined limited political reform measures, enhanced
economic exclusion, and deepened and expanded social marginalisation. In
response, powerful new movements emerged that attempted to re-appropriate
repressed cultural identities and civil, social, and economic rights, and which
sought to define and establish a new inclusionary, egalitarian, and equitable
social contract.
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chapter 3
Syria: Identity, State Formation, and Citizenship

Raymond Hinnebusch and Ola Rifai
Conceptualising Citizenship and Its Requisites
Assessing citizenship in the Arab World and Syria requires consideration of the
factors that advance its normative hegemony. Citizenship implies equal treat-
ment under the law, rights of political participation, and certain entitlements,
not least the right of residence and to hold a passport; conversely, it involves
duties such as national service, payment of taxes, and obedience to the law.
The modern notion of citizenship, particularly the assumption of equality of
rights and duties, was a by-product of the French Revolution, and is intimately
connected with both the state centralisation and mass nationalism that the
revolution promoted, converging in the idea of membership (with attendant
rights and duties) in a nation corresponding to the state’s territorial borders.
Citizenship therefore implies Weberian statehood, including a state monop-
oly of legitimate violence, infrastructural power, territorial penetration, and
rule of law, which, historically, has emerged from a dual process of centralisa-
tion and expansion of state power via the incorporation of mass participation
through political institutions.1 Effective political participation is contingent on
an active civil society, and the possession of sufficient material requisites by
the population, notably minimum levels of education/literacy and a lack of
extreme poverty and class inequality.
State building processes are, therefore, paralleled by nation-building. State-
builders normally try to bring state and identity (nation) into congruence be-
cause of the greater domestic legitimation and international power that this
affords, promoted with tools at their disposal such as the media, state employ-
ment, conscription, and national school systems;2 the process may also happen
“bottom up” as a people, organised in movements, come to see themselves as
a nation, and hence desire a state of their own, a development usually related
to “awakenings” focused on national language, culture, and historical memory.
1 Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1968).
2 Anthony Smith, “States and Homelands: The Social and Geopolitical Implications of Nation-
al Territory,” Millennium 10 (1981): 187–202.

106 Hinnebusch and Rifai
Wars and struggles for national liberation involving mass mobilisation on a na-
tional basis have historically advanced the hegemony of the idea of citizenship.
Actual-existing citizenship can only be understood in the context of this
dual state/nation-building project. This chapter will look at how state forma-
tion and identity have interacted to shape citizenship in Syria over time. The
main argument is that the particular state-building formula that prevailed
in Syria, the Baʿathist’s particular version of populist neo-patrimonialism,
achieved some of the features of Weberian statehood and fostered a level of
national identity; however, it eventually lost its initial inclusive capacity, pro-
voking a peaceful protest movement calling for a more inclusive and equitable
Syrian national identity, which acquired wide support in the early months of
the Syrian Uprising; however, once the uprising turned violent, this movement
was squeezed between a more coercive version of regime patrimonialism and
various radical Islamist notions of community.
Contested Nationhood: Syrian Identity between the Communal

Mosaic and Supra-state Visions
All nations are “constructed,” but Syria is a particular challenge for nation-
builders since it does not benefit from distinctively Syrian national myths or
a history of separate statehood, and suffers from imperialist-imposed arti-
ficial boundaries incongruent with the historic geographical region of Bilad
al-Sham. The result is that both sub- and supra-state identities have power-
fully competed with loyalties to the state and, despite many decades of Syrian
statehood, these have been kept alive by their instrumental use, by both ruling
elites and opposition movements, against each other.
The various empires into which Syria was incorporated over many centuries
fostered broader Islamic identities, while also often dividing the country into
several provinces. Nevertheless, a certain degree of economic integration fos-
tered under the Ottoman Tanzimat and the identity vacuum left by the collapse
of the Ottomans led emergent nationalist movements, after the First World
War, to demand a unified Arab Syria “within its natural borders” – geographic
Bilad al-Sham – perhaps confederated with Iraq.3 This “Greater Syria” might
have become a focus of national identity, but the country’s d ismemberment
into four mini-states and the creation of Israel in Palestine, historically part of
southern Syria, generated an identity crisis in the post-Ottoman period. Once
3 James Gevin, Divided Loyalties: Nationalism and Mass Politics in Syria at the Close of Empire
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 152.
Syria: Identity, State Formation, And Citizenship 107
the Western great powers had divided historic Syria, and the French occupa-
tion had fostered divide and rule among sub-state identities, the dominant
nationalist movement, the National Bloc (al-Kutla al-Wataniyya), gradually
came to prioritise the independence and unity of the truncated Syrian state.
Nevertheless, the new Syrian state, seen as an artificial creation of imperi-
alism by many, did not enjoy the automatic or strong loyalty of its citizens,
many of whom remained attached to communal sub-state units or embraced
supra-state ideologies, such as Pan-Syrianism, Pan-Islam, or Pan-Arabism. Dis-
satisfaction with the artificially imposed borders infused Syrian politics with
irredentism from its birth. The most successful political elites and movements
were those that championed Syria as Arab and as part of a wider Arab nation
even if, to a degree, they accepted its (possibly temporary) separate statehood.
Seeing itself as the “beating heart of Arabism,” Syria gave birth to Baʿathism,
a movement that sought to unify the Arab states, and which is still the official
state ideology.
The Syrian state also faced the challenge of integrating a multitude of sub-
state identities owing to its ethnic and religious diversity, which, combined
with geographical heterogeneity (mountains, plains, oases, deserts), had
historically fostered strong loyalties to sub-state communal groups, cities, and
regions. Indirect rule of sub-state communities (millets) through religious
leaders and notables during the period of the Ottoman Empire (1500–
1918), and the French fostering of the autonomy of minorities as part of a
divide-and-rule strategy (1920–46), strengthened sub-state identities. Sub-
state ethnic minorities include Kurds (7 per cent), Armenians, and small num-
bers of Assyrians, Circassians, and Turkmen while religious minorities include
Greek Orthodox Christians (8 per cent), various smaller Christian sects, and
several Islamic minority sects – the most important being the Alawis (12 per
cent), the Druze (3 per cent), and the Ismaʿilis (1.5 per cent).
The multiplicity of identities in Syria – sub-, state, and supra-state – and
the fact that none is hegemonic – taken for granted as the “normal” dominant
loyalty – suggests a high potential for fragmentation and undermines the le-
gitimacy the state would enjoy if its boundaries corresponded to a distinct and
uncontested national community. This is ameliorated by the fact that indi-
viduals normally hold several identities (which may overlap) simultaneously,
and which are fluid rather than hardened into irreconcilable primordial blocs.
Furthermore, the composition of the current Syrian state, over 90 per cent
Arab and 74 per cent Sunni Muslim, constitutes a potentially unifying basis
of nationhood. Which identities prevail among individuals, groups, and the
country at any given time is shaped by the state-building projects of political
entrepreneurs. In normal times, multiple identities readily co-exist; however,
the “security dilemma” provoked by the breakdown of public order after 2011
has tended to polarise communities into irreconcilable sub-state groups.
Citizenship under Oligarchic Liberalism
Syria’s post-independence liberal institutions, with their checks and balances,

an autonomous judiciary, and competitive elections were, in principle, com-
patible with equality of citizenship. However, their inclusive potential was
stunted by the extreme class differentiation of the population, especially the
gap between the great landed notables and the peasants, which, in effect, al-
lowed the former to dominate elections and parliament.
Syria’s post-independence class formation, did, however, spur a widening
of political mobilisation by several middle class parties, which contested the
power of the oligarchy. A “new middle class” emerged that was attracted to
class and national identities that rivalled traditional attachments to family,
sect, or quarter. An important stratum of this new class was drawn from the ru-
ral towns and the peasantry, including educated youth from the Alawi, Druze,
Ismaʿili, and Orthodox Christians minorities, who embraced secular identities
that enabled them to participate as equals in the national community. If the
ideology of the ruling notability was, by this time, Syria-centric, the middle
class movements challenged it in the name of supra-state ideologies, which
expressed many Syrians’ yearning to be part of the once unified and now lost
larger Arab-Islamic world – the Pan-Islam of the Muslim Brotherhood; the
pan-Syrianism of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, and the Pan-Arabism of
the Baʿath party. While Pan-Islam did not appeal to the minorities, and the
Syrian Social Nationalist Party (ssnp) was too minority-focused, the Baʿath’s
secular Arab nationalism, potentially bringing together the Arabic-speaking
minorities with the Sunni majority (albeit excluding non-Arabs such as the
Kurds), was the most successful in bridging the cleavages of the Syrian “mo-
saic”; this was particularly so after its 1953 merger with Akram al-Hawrani’s
peasant-based Arab Socialist Party, when the Baʿath also acquired a cross-
sectarian peasant base.4
From the mid-1950s, Syria experienced a period of relatively free association-
al activity and political contestation indicative of expanding political inclu-
sion; however, this mobilisation exceeded the incorporative capacity of Syria’s
fragile political institutions. The loss of legitimacy by the oligarchy, especially
4 Michael Van Dusen, “Downfall of a Traditional Elite,” in Political Elites and Political Develop-
ment in the Middle East, ed. Frank Tachau (Cambridge ma: Schenkman-Wiley, 1975), 115–155.
due to its failure in the Palestine war, opened the door to a radicalisation of the
military that, combined with the frustrations of the reformist middle class par-
ties and the grievances of the landless peasantry, spilled over into praetorian
instability. This was aggravated by the permeability of the country’s artificial
borders to external penetration by rival regional powers such as Egypt, Iraq,
and Saudi Arabia, making Syria a battleground for regional and Cold war strug-
gles. Symptomatic of the weakness of attachment to a separate Syrian state
was the political elites’ surrender of sovereignty in the 1958 union with Egypt,
propelled by mass Pan-Arab enthusiasm and the fear that class conflicts and
external pressures had made the country ungovernable.
Citizenship under the Baʿath Regime (1963–2010)
Minoritarian Military Socialism and the Exclusion of

Old Sunni Society
Originating in a 1963 coup by a handful of military officers, the Baʿath regime
faced considerable opposition from political rivals, especially the old oligarchy,
Nasserites, and Islamists. From the outset, the new regime was handicapped
by a certain sectarian image: the Alawi minority that had flocked to the armed
forces and to the Baʿath Party, the two institutions that were seeking to mo-
nopolise power in Syria, was inevitably resented by the Sunni Muslim major-
ity, the religiously minded of whom regard the Alawis as heretical.5 The Baʿath
regime tried to frame the conflict in class, not sectarian, terms: it launched a
socialist “revolution from above” – land reform, nationalisation of finance and
industry – that would build the rural and class power-base needed to stabilise
its rule in the face of intense opposition. But initially the key to its survival was
control of the army: the Baʿath purged officers suspected of disloyalty, mostly
Sunnis, replacing them with ncos, often Alawis. Thus, from the outset, Baʿath
rule appeared to many as both military and Alawi rule, and socialism as an
instrument by which the rurals would despoil the traditionally dominant city.
Moreover, in this period the Baʿath Party was itself split internally by power
struggles. One conflict in 1963–66 pitted the party founders Aflaq and Bitar,
who expressed the reformist worldview of the urban middle class, against “ex-
peasant” rurals advocating a radical revolution. While this struggle was about
ideology and personal power, party institutions proved unable to settle it and
both sides exploited sectarian ties in the battle to control the key military units
5 Nikolaos van Dam, The Struggle for Power in Syria: Sectarianism, Regionalism and Tribalism in
Politics, 1961–1980 (London: Croom-Helm, 1981).
needed to prevail in the power struggle. The provincial radicals won out, but
they soon split over the 1967 defeat by Israel, with the more “realist” wing un-
der Hafiz al-Asad using his military power base to purge the leftist ideologues
who dominated party institutions. In both of these major intra-Baʿath show-
downs the opposing camps were cross-sectarian and civil-military coalitions
at odds over power and ideology.6 However, the inability of party institutions
to settle these conflicts peacefully demonstrated a failure to build autonomous
political institutions. As such, Baʿathist state-building got off to a rocky start –
grounded in military force, institutionally fragile, and excluding much of
urban Sunni society.
State Formation under Hafiz al-Asad: Citizenship under

Populist Neo-patrimonialism
Hafiz al-Asad’s strategy of regime-building followed a neo-patrimonial for-
mula, mixing modern bureaucratic organisation with “traditional” practices
known to Ibn Khaldun, notably reliance on ʿasabiyya (“group-feeling,” or “group
solidarity”). He concentrated power in a “presidential monarchy” through
strategies of co-opting and balancing. He used his military power base to free
himself from Baʿath Party ideological constraints, while co-opting into his in-
ner circle army and party loyalists Sunnis, such as General Mustafa Tlas and the
party leader Abdul Halim Khaddam. He then built up a jamaʿa (“group”) of per-
sonal Alawi followers, who were often his kin, whom he appointed to crucial
security and military commands, which enhanced his control of the military.
To placate urban Sunnis, especially the Damascenes, he co-opted significant
numbers of them into the top ranks of the government and initiated limited
economic liberalisation that was to be of benefit to the merchant classes. The
regime acquired also some nationalist legitimacy from its role in the Pan-Arab
struggle with Israel, notably in the relative success of the 1973 war.7
At the same time, Asad’s consolidation of the regime depended on
establishing a revenue base. This was advanced by his use of his Pan-Arab
foreign policy to access a share of the hydrocarbon rent available in mena
after the 1970s’ oil price boom (later replaced by Syria’s own oil revenues).
Rent lubricated client networks running outward from the core elites, and co-
opted wider elite elements across sectarian lines. Asad’s tolerance of corrupt
6 Itamar Rabinovich, Syria under the Baʿth: The Army-Party Symbiosis (New York: Halstead
Press, 1972); Munif al-Razzaz, al-Tajriba al-Murra [“The Bitter Experience”] (Beirut: Dar al-
ghandur, 1967).
7 Raymond Hinnebusch, Syria: Revolution from Above (Abingdon: Routledge, 2001), 65–88.
self-enrichment by regime barons gave them a stake in regime survival. A

“military-mercantile complex,” as Sadiq al-Azm put it,8 in which the Alawi elite,
and particularly military and intelligence officers, entered into business deals
with the Damascene Sunni merchant class, generated a “state bourgeoisie” with
a privileged stake in the regime. Finally, at its base, the regime incorporated
a cross-sectarian coalition of workers and peasants through party and union
organisation, labour rights, land reform, and co-operatisation.
The Baʿath revolution benefited a large proportion of the lower classes,
particularly peasants who received land, high prices for their crops from the
state, subsidised inputs, and the electrification of their villages, and whose
children got better access to education and state careers;9 the urban masses
received subsidised food and other basic commodities. This amounted to a
populist “social contract” in which citizens traded political rights for economic
entitlements. Baʿathist socio-economic reforms, in breaking down the enor-
mous class stratification under the oligarchy, as well as expanding education,
literacy, and upward mobility, led to many of the basic material requisites of
citizenship being available. The Baʿath’s statist development strengthened the
material foundations of statehood: state apparatus, infrastructure (roads, rail),
the integration of state territory, and agro-industrialisation, which promoted a
national market. This, alongside the widening of secular education, geographic
mobility, and non-agricultural employment, as well as the inward-looking au-
tarky promoted by statist economic development, made the state the focus of
opportunity, thus helping attach the individual’s identity to it.
In parallel, certain regime practices sought to reconcile Syria’s multitude
of identities in ways sufficiently inclusive to foster citizenship. The constitu-
tion specified that the president be a Muslim and Islamic law a main source of
legislation – congruent with the fact that 90 per cent of Syria’s population is
Muslim. Recruitment to cabinets and Baʿath party leadership bodies ensured
that each identity group was represented, albeit unequally. Religious and eth-
nic minorities enjoyed autonomy in matters of personal status and greater pro-
tection than in most other Middle Eastern states by virtue of the Baʿath regime’s
character as, in some ways, one of minorities. Baʿathist Arabism was compat-
ible with Syrian state identity through its discourse on Syria’s special status as
the “beating heart of Arabism” and in its secular inclusiveness. The country’s
8 Patrick Seale, Asad: The Struggle for the Middle East (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1988), 456.
9 Raymond Hinnebusch, Authoritarian Power and State Formation in Baʿthist Syria: Army, Party
and Peasant (Boulder co: Westview, 1990), 166–219.
majority Arab identity, formal equality of all citizens in a secular state, a long
history of religious tolerance, and the cross-sectarian coalition incorporated
into the Baʿath regime long contained and eased sectarian divides.
Yet, at the same time, regime practices also worked against citizenship.
Small group ʿasabiyya was encouraged by the insecurity (the domestic security
dilemma) associated with recurrent power struggles, in which group identities
were often exploited. The politicisation and enervation of the judiciary and all
other checks and balances debilitated the rule of law and equality before the
law, and the competition for patronage via clientalism put a premium on was-
ta (“connections”) based on personal or group particularisms. While Baʿathist
corporatist institutions were, in principle, inclusive, the use of sectarianism as
shorthand for loyalty at the top and of clientalism to get privileged access to
patronage undermined equality of citizenship. The regime’s reliance on buy-
ing loyalty through patronage also enervated the state’s capital accumulation
capacity, keeping it reliant on finite rent inflows while obstructing transpar-
ency and accountability.
Furthermore, Baʿathist institutions never incorporated more than about
half the population, and those excluded tended to gravitate to the most du-
rable opposition movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, allied with elements
of the merchant class, old oligarchy, and politicised Muslim clergy, which
mounted periodic revolts that culminated in the protracted Ikhwan Upris-
ing of 1976– 82. Although this uprising reflected the class resentment of those
damaged by Baʿathist socialism it was expressed in violent sectarian terms and
its brutal suppression left enduring distrust across communal divides. It made
the Alawi political elite wary of economic or political liberalisation that could
empower the Sunni-dominated business or religious establishments, but at
the same time, in order to marginalise Sunni militants, President Hafiz al-Asad
tried to appease and foster a moderate, non-political Islamic establishment by
building mosques and patronising the ʿulama (“members of the Islamic reli-
gious class”) at the expense of secularism.
Thus, Baʿathist state builders, in their effort to consolidate their regime, ex-
ploited both sub-state loyalties, notably the solidarity of the Alawi sect, which
cemented the core of the new state elite, class-based socialist ideology and
organisation that incorporated a cross-sectarian mass constituency, and supra-
state Pan-Arab identity as a means to legitimise the state. The opposition to
the regime promoted alternative (mostly Sunni Islamic) identities in order to
contest the regime’s legitimacy. This continual reproduction of sub- and supra-
state identities, amidst regime-opposition power struggles, undermined efforts
to consolidate the congruence between state/territory and identity/nation.
Regional Politics and Identity

Developments at the regional level, particularly the decline of the Arab na-
tionalism that was the Baʿath’s raison d’ être, also impacted on identity. The dis-
appearance from political agendas, after the 1970s, of Pan-Arab unity projects
signified the consolidation of statehood in the region, including in Baʿathist
Syria. After 60 years of separate statehood the boundaries of the contempo-
rary Syrian state were accepted as the normal framework for domestic politics.
The loss of the Syrian Golan Heights to Israel gave a specifically Syrian ter-
ritorial dimension to Syria’s Arab nationalism and fostered a prioritisation of
Syria’s state interests in the struggle with Israel. It was ironic that the Baʿath
Party, which won the struggle for control of the Syrian state in the name of
Pan-Arabism, eventually consolidated the state at the expense of potential
Pan-Arab unionism. The persisting dilemma for Syria was that an exclusively
Syrian – not essentially Arab – nation-state still held little credibility, manifest
in Syria’s continual and intense involvement in Pan-Arab issues.
Bashar al-Asad’s Post-populism: Stalled Citizenship

When Bashar al-Asad succeeded to the presidency, his reformist discourse
sparked the Damascus Spring in which emergent civil society called for a
non-violent transition to democracy under the banner of an inclusive Syrian
citizenship. However, when hardliners in the regime and opposition quickly
side-lined the possibility of a transition pact, leading to the repression of the
Damascus Spring, the regime missed a chance to widen its base by incorporat-
ing the moderate opposition.
The regime turned instead to an effort to “modernise authoritarianism”
through liberal economic reforms along the East Asian model of economic
growth first, political liberalisation later. Neo-liberal economic reforms were
necessitated by the exhaustion of the public sector and the decline of oil rent.
Although in principle a “social market economy” was to provide a social safety
net for the losers in the transition to a market economy, in reality this project
inevitably meant privileging investors, and, in practice, crony capitalists close
to the centre of power at the expense of the regime’s traditional backers.
In this period, a narrative of Syrian citizenship increasingly overlapped with
the Baʿathist narrative of Arabism. Bashar used Arabism, exploiting events
such as the us war on Iraq and the Israeli wars on Hizbollah and Hamas, to
promote Syria as the centre of Arab nationalist resistance to US–Israeli he-
gemony, contrasting its support for them with the complicity of other Arab
leaders with Washington. Syrianism was also advanced by cross-sectarian in-
tegration at the elite level, symbolised by the president’s marriage to a Sunni
woman from Homs. Attachment to a secular Syrian identity was reinforced

by the sectarian strife in neighbouring Iraq and Lebanon. Wieland10 recounts
a widely accepted narrative of Syria as an island of civility amidst this violent
sectarian conflict: minorities fleeing sectarian violence in Iraq were largely
welcomed and integrated into Syrian society. The regime, in some ways a coali-
tion of minorities, posed as protector of the latter and mediator between them
and the Sunni majority.
Yet, under the surface, communal distrust was rife and, as a taboo subject,
could not be faced and dealt with openly. It became aggravated as social mo-
bility slowed down for most people while a few at the top – perhaps the most
famous of whom was Rami Makhlouf, the president’s cousin – were ostenta-
tiously enriched, with success appearing to be dependent on Alawi sectarian
connections to power. The relative decline of secular ideologies, including
Arab nationalism and socialism, after 1990 left an identity vacuum that was
being filled at the societal level by Sunni Islam, fostered by both regime spon-
sorship of Sufis and Gulf funding of Salafis; this, in turn, provoked a defensive
religious counter-identity in minorities, although many held to the unifying
narrative of secularism. In 2004 Syria also experienced major unrest in the
Kurdish-populated areas of eastern Syria, rooted in the denial of citizenship
rights to some 100,000 Kurds and encouraged by the autonomy enjoyed by the
Iraqi Kurds. As the destruction of the Iraqi state unleashed a wave of Sunni-
Shiʿi sectarian conflict across the region, Asad’s stand with Iran and Hizbollah
against pro-us Sunni regimes generated distrust among those Sunnis who saw
the Shiʿi as the “other.”
What made this especially dangerous for the Syrian state was the enerva-
tion of the social contract constructed by Hafiz to contain Syria’s centrifugal
forces. Bashar al-Asad attacked resistance to reform in the Baʿath Party’s old
guard and trade unions, debilitating them and thereby shrivelling the regime’s
organised penetration of society. The regime’s abandonment of Baʿathist so-
cialism weakened the ideological cement that gave the party solidarity, and
left a vacuum that neo-liberalism and Islamism competed to fill. This, and the
neglect of the rural areas by an urban-centred economic strategy, broke the
alliance with the Sunni peasantry on which the regime had consolidated itself
under Hafiz and made it vulnerable to the Islamist opposition that was pen-
etrating the regime’s former rural stronghold.11 To make up for the c ontraction
10 Carsten Wieland, Syria: A Decade of Lost Chances: Repression and Revolution from Damas-
cus Spring to Arab Spring (Seattle: Cune Press, 2012), 79–87.
11 Raymond Hinnebusch, “The Baʿth Party in Post-Baʿthist Syria: President, Party and the
Struggle for ‘Reform’,” Middle East Critique 20(2011):.109–125.
of its p
opulist-corporatist power base, the regime would have needed to pur-
sue a parallel political liberalisation that would incorporate the winners of
economic liberalisation and de-secularisation. Although attempts were made
to co-opt the moderate secular opposition, moderate Islamists, and new busi-
ness elites through parliament, and while tolerance of small pro-regime par-
ties was pursued, this limited pluralisation was stunted by the continuance of
the emergency law and the constitutionally enshrined majority accorded to
the Baʿath Party.
In summary, neo-patrimonial practices and institutions explain the con-
solidation and durability of the Syrian regime – namely, a mix of the personal
authority of the leader, the loyalty of his in-group, and clientalism, plus bu-
reaucratic institutions with lines of command (e.g. the army and bureaucracy)
and the inclusion of constituencies (the party and unions). This strategy had,
however, certain contradictions built into it – for example, clientalism’s de-
bilitation of bureaucratic rationality – while its durability depended on the
maintenance of a delicate balance between its patrimonial and bureaucratic/
institutional elements – enough of the former to keep the elite loyal and of the
latter to penetrate and incorporate society. This required constant readjust-
ment, and if either was weakened too much the regime could be destabilised.
Under Bashar al-Asad, the populist element of neo-patrimonialism fell out un-
der fiscal constraints, with the enervation of the party and the slashing of state
welfare upsetting the required balance. Moreover, the dysfunctional nature
of this model of governance provoked its victims to embrace rival counter-
narratives, notably one of inclusive democracy and equality before the law and
another of a righteous Islamic polity.
The Syrian Uprising, Identity Clashes, and Citizenship
Roots and Enablers of the Uprising

The Syrian Uprising was sparked by the example of the overthrow of Arab dic-
tators elsewhere. Despite Syria’s acute social heterogeneity, the debilitation of
civil society – wherein regime surveillance worked to stunt habits of associa-
tion beyond the locality and neighbourhood – and the regime’s use of lethal
force against protestors, a true mass movement developed against it in 2011–12.
Grievances had perhaps reached a tipping point amongst those most disad-
vantaged by regime policy: the origins of the Syrian Uprising in villages, pro-
vincial towns such as Idlib and Deir al-Zor, medium-sized cities such as Homs
and Hama, and the informal shantytowns around the big cities, compared with
the relative loyalty of the major cities themselves, was indicative of the reversal
of the regime’s social base under Bashar al-Asad – the city had replaced the
village as the elites’ power base. At the same time, however, the “opportunity
structure” for political mobilisation by regime opponents had improved since
Hafiz’s period. Several previous instances of civil society mobilisation, such
as the Damascus Spring (2001) and the Damascus Declaration (2005), even
though repressed by the regime, provided experience and models for dissent.
There was also a certain loss of fear as repression became more selective under
Bashar, especially among the new generation. During the Uprising, atomisation
was overcome by two practices: at the local level, coordinating committees in
mosques planned day-to-day protests, while cyber – activists used the inter-
net to share information, coordinate and publicise their protests, and convey a
sense of national-level solidarity.12 However, unlike in some of the other states
that experienced the Arab Uprisings, the regime retained a significant support
base comprised of the crony capitalists and urban government employees,
who were often Sunni and concentrated in the two big cities of Damascus and
Aleppo, plus the minorities, which together might have made up 25 per cent
of the population. The two major cities had been the main beneficiaries of
tertiary investment under the economic liberalisation and their urban middle
classes feared instability and the loss of their secular modern lifestyle if tradi-
tional rural or Salafi insurgents were to take power.13 Thus, in contrast to Egypt
or Tunisia, the Uprising was unable to converge on the centres of power and a
stalemate soon resulted.
Entrepreneurs of a Syrian Civic Identity

Meanwhile, the Uprising set off a clash of identities manifest in the contrary
discourses of those seeking to construct different notions of what Syria should
be. From the outset, the mainstream of the anti-regime uprising took the form
of peaceful protest demanding true, equal citizenship in a “civil” state (in
which all would enjoy equal rights regardless of ethno-nationalist or religious
affiliation, or of gender). This discourse reflected an accumulation of factors.
With the gradual discrediting of alternative ideologies – socialism, Marxism,
and Arab nationalism – some variant of liberalism was, besides Islamism, the
last remaining alternative to the regime’s ideology, one that appealed to much
of the educated middle classes. Among the older generation of political activ-
ists this reflected a search for alternatives to previously-held failed ideologies;
12 Kim Ghattas, “Syria’s Spontaneously Organised Protests,” bbc News Online, April 22, 2011,
www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-13168276.
13 Raymond Hinnebusch, “Syria: From Authoritarian Upgrading to Revolution?” Interna-
tional Affairs 881 (2012).
in parallel, much of the youth were affected by the global triumph of liberalism
after the Cold War. Moreover, opposition movements had learned, over time,
of the need to build coalitions to face the regime’s divide-and-rule tactics, and
the various elements of the opposition – liberals, secular nationalists, Kurds,
and even the Muslim Brotherhood found common ground in the idea of a civic
identity. In Syria’s mosaic society, a Syrian identity, distinguished from (though
not excluding) Arab and Islamic identities, appeared the most all-embracing
alternative to Baʿathism since it could include ethnic and religious minorities
as well as the educated Sunni classes. Importantly, the notion of equal citi-
zenship rights would appeal to all who felt excluded from the regime’s client
networks. Finally, during the Uprising itself, an inclusive discourse was initially
imperative to win over the minorities, reaching out, for example to Alawis and
Kurds; later in the Uprising (after 2012), it constituted the main alternative
to the increasingly powerful and more exclusivist regime-centric and jihadi
discourses.
Thus, in the first years of the Uprising a myriad of secular movements ad-
vocated an explicitly Syrian civil identity that prioritised an affiliation with
the Syrian state and advocated the establishment of a “state of citizenship”
(dawlat al-muwatana). These groups were divided into two main factions,
based on age; the old guard opposition to the regime and secular youth. The
old guard was rooted in longstanding Arab nationalist and leftist traditions,
hence its stances of anti-Westernism and anti-interventionism in the Uprising.
The Coordination Committee for Democratic Change (ccdc) (Haʾyat al-Tansiq
lil-Taghyir al-Dimuqrati) and the Current for Building the Syrian State (bssc),
(Tayyar Binaʾ al-Dawlat al-Suriyya) were the most important old guard move-
ments established during the first months of the Uprising. These movements
were cross-sectarian coalitions of intellectuals and activists. The ccdc was a
coalition of fourteen leftist parties commanded by renowned figures such as
Haytham Manaʾ, a Sunni from Dara, Abdulaziz al-Khayer, an Alawi from Qur-
daha, the birthplace of the Asads, and Louay Hussein, an Alawi who had spent
nine years in jail during the Hafiz Assad era for his communist affiliation. Es-
sentially, the ccdc and bssc advocated a peaceful transition to a democratic
state that would guarantee the “principle of citizenship and equality for all
Syrian citizens regardless of their ethnic and religious affiliations,”14 and advo-
cated a “civic state” (dawla madaniyya) rejecting both theocracy and federali-
sation, by which Syria might be fragmented. In their discourses the ccdc and
bssc both emphasised “patriotism” (wataniyya), “the motherland,” and “the
14 “Taʿrif mukhtasar bi-l-tayyar” (Current News in Brief), bssc website. Accessed October 8,
2013. http://binaa-syria.com/B/ar/content.
Syrian people” (al-shaʿb al-Suri). They rejected the sectarian rhetoric of other
opposition factions, and were outspoken critics of other (mainly exiled) op-
position groups who supported Western intervention or the militarisation of
the uprising, and of those groups dominated by Islamists. This reduced the
credibility of these movements in the eyes of many Syrians, for whom the mili-
tarisation of the uprising was a necessary response to the Syrian regime’s mili-
tary repression of the protests. Furthermore, the Syrian regime was believed to
apply a strategy of divide-and-rule to fragment its opponents, promoting the
ccdc and bssc as “a patriotic opposition faction” (al-muʿarada al-wataniyya),
with which it pronounced itself ready to engage in dialogue. Because of this,
and since the rhetoric they used to denounce Islamists, armed struggle, and
western intervention were similar to that of the Syrian regime, many anti-Asad
Syrians considered these groups illegitimate.
The ccdc was behind the so-called Semiramis conference, which was held
in Damascus in June 2011 under the theme “Syria is for all”; some two hundred
anti-regime intellectuals met openly in the heart of the Syrian capital in an ef-
fort to advance a political solution to transform the country into a democratic
state.15 However, the conference proved fruitless as many factions boycotted it,
and it was strongly opposed by the youth protest movements, not to mention
the regime.
The ccdc and the bssc did mobilise a limited number of the “revolution-
ary youth” (shabab al-thawra), secular youths who belonged to various identity
groups and came from outside Damascus but were residing in the city; how-
ever, many of these defected, claiming that their leaders did not establish ef-
fective communication channels with them and lacked “the appropriate vision
of how to apply their logic [principles] on the ground.”16 The old guard leaders
were divided and perceived as “seeking to ride the revolution, since it provid-
ed them with what [the opportunity to get a share of power] they have been
pursuing for decades.”17 As they had rejected external funding their resources
were very limited in comparison with those of other players, particularly the
Islamists. As such, they were largely reduced to issuing press releases.
At the same time, a “new guard” of mostly secular, formerly apolitical youth,
who were inspired by their Egyptian and Tunisian counterparts, mobilised
against the Asad regime on the same anti-sectarian platform. The Tsunami
of Freedom Movement (Tsunami al-Hurriyya) was one example of the youth
15 “Muʾtamar Sameramis fi Dimashq” (Semiramis Conference in Damascus), Sooryoon

website. Accessed October 8, 2013. http://www.sooryoon.net/archives/27267.
16 Rifai interview with Omar, October 1, 2012, in Damascus.
17 Rifai interview with Tammam, March 25, 2013, via Skype.
movements that were active during the first year of the Uprising. It began in
Damascus in May 2011, and, according to its founder, Oula Ramadan (an Alawi
by birth), its goal is to “induce the unity of the Syrian people in order to over-
throw the Assad-regime and to build a democratic state, a state of citizenship”
with equal political rights for all Syrian passport holders, regardless of their
religious or ethnic origins.18 It was recruited from the well-educated, middle-
class stratum of young people belonging to various identity groups who had
migrated to Damascus from various regions of Syria. They conducted self-
funded, peaceful activities, such as organising protests and sit-ins, producing
documentaries, and distributing leaflets to generate a sense of Syrianism; for
example, one of the flyers distributed in Damascus in July 2011 says “Me, Mo-
hamed, Elias, and Ali have grown up together” (ana w Mohamed w Elias w Ali
rbinna sa) – with Ali standing for Alawis or Shiʿis, Elias for Christians, and Mo-
hamed for Sunnis. It sought “to stress that loyalty should be to the Motherland
and not an individual, a religion, or a sect.”19 By early 2013, many members of
the Tsunami of Freedom movement had fled Syria due to suppression by both
the Assad regime and the jihadis.
Similar to the Tsunami Freedom Movement was the Pulse Gathering for Syr-
ian Civil Youth (Tajammuʿ Nabid lil-Shabab al-Madani al-Suri), which was one
of the first and the largest civil youth movements; Nabid’s rhetoric stressed
democracy, pluralism, and citizenship rights, by which “sectarian affiliations
could be transcended.”20 It claimed thousands of members working across Syr-
ia in cities like Damascus, Deir al-Zor, Homs, Aleppo, Hama, Qamishli, as well
as in their suburbs.21 Nabid was an active player on the ground in mobilising
secular youth from various identity groups within the urban middle-classes,
though some of them also came from the lower-classes of the rural areas, and
had moved to the city to study. Nabid even participated in protests dominated
by Islamists, displaying banners rejecting sectarianism, in an attempt to “let
[the secular] voice be heard.”22 One case in point is a banner that was displayed
by a Nabid follower during a protest in Raqqa that was organised by jihadis in
March 2013 which read: “Syria is a country for all, no exclusion, no exception.”23
18 Rifai interview with Oula Ramadan, January 3, 2013, in Beirut.

19 Ibid.
20 Ibid.
21 Rifai interview with Lama, June 1, 2012, in Damascus.
22 Ibid.
23 See picture of this banner posted on Nabid’s page on Facebook, accessed on October 8,
2013. https://www.facebook.com/#!/photo.php?fbid=493381527388304&set=pb.17700925
2358868.-2207520000.1365936732&type=3&theater.
Many Nabid youth were persecuted by both the regime and the Islamists, and
hence they either suspended their membership or left the country.
In the latter case, they resorted to new media in order to promote their mes-
sage from outside the country. One notable example was Souriali, a “Syrianist”
radio station created in October 2012 in Beirut to advance a sense of Syrian
national unity. “Souriali serves as a platform for Syrians to talk about Syria,
without borders and without limits,”24 and its programmes were designed to
evoke Syrian history, symbols, and folklore in an attempt to produce a Syrian
national identity. A second example is Our Syria (Suriatna), a weekly maga-
zine established in September 2011 by a group of young middle-class Dama-
scenes in exile that strove to “underline that Syria is the home for all Syrians,
rejecting the logic of radicalization and discrimination.”25 Another example
was a website called My State (Dawlati), created in January 2013 by secular ac-
tivists who were aiming to promote reconciliation in the rebuilding of post-
Assad Syria and to “eliminate the tendency for revenge…and to increase the
dialogue between all different factions of civil society.”26 Graffiti seen in the
al-Tareb suburb of Aleppo summarised My State’s main objective; they read
“Syria is for all, for me and for you,”27 “Syria is a mother to all its sons,”28 and
“Oh you Alawi, do not hesitate, we are your family and not Bashar [Assad].”29
The reference to “state” (rather than a Syrian nation) denoted the embracing
of a Syrian identity that did not necessarily exclude parallel attachments to
larger communities, whether Arab or Islamic, yet also expressed a rejection
of projects to dismember the Syrian state or merge it into a larger entity. The
songs and slogans that projected a Syrian identity came to occupy a key place
in anti-Assad protests, and were also broadly distributed online.
This discourse was largely replicated by the various factions of the Syrian op-
position in exile, including the Syrian National Congress and the later National
Coalition of Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, whose charter called for
24 See Souriali’s website, accessed October 8, 2013. http://souriali.com/. All of Souriali’s pro-
grams are archived on this website. Souriali has some 83,400 listeners (according to its
Facebook page).
25 See Souriatna’s manifesto on Souriatna’s Facebook page, accessed on October 31, 2013.
https://www.facebook.com/souriatna. All the issues of Souriatna are also available at
http://issuu.com/souriatna/docs. Accessed October 8, 2013.
26 “Man nahnu” (who we are?), Dawlaty website, accessed April 19, 2013. http://www.daw
laty.org/.
27 “Syria is for me, for you and for all,” Dawlaty website, accessed on April 19, 2013. https://
dawlaty.org/node/2617. See also Appendix 16.
28 “Syria is a mother for all its children,” Dawlaty website, accessed on October 8, 2013.
https://dawlaty.org/node/2610.
29 Rifai, fieldwork in Damascus, February-October 2012.
preserving the unity of Syria and the creation of a “civil and democratic system
that ensures equal rights for all Syrians” regardless of their religious and ethnic
affiliations. It promises that “those working in state institutions would be ac-
cepted in a future Syria as long as they were not guilty of crimes against other
Syrians.” In the new Syria, there would be no room for sectarianism.30
In summary, the secular old guard and youthful new guard constituted
the key initial political entrepreneurs who strove to generate a sense of Syr-
ian nationalism. However, the older generation, despite having a long record
of political struggle against the Assad regime, could not develop appropriate
strategies, bridge the generation gap with the youth, or enlist the support of
the pious Syrians of rural areas. They were divided and lacked resources, while
the regime’s depiction of them as a trusted actor it could negotiate with de-
stroyed the credibility they had enjoyed. It was the younger generation that
represented the bedrock of the peaceful mass movements, and was extremely
active on the ground, which gave it much more public credibility. However,
its reliance on the Internet to disseminate its message did not allow this new
generation to reach the devout lower-classes of the rural areas who were in-
clined towards Salafism and jihadism, and where the Uprising found its most
zealous militants, as Baʿathism lost traction in its former village strongholds. In
an attempt to make up for this, those who came from rural areas returned to
their towns and villages from where they established networks that strove to
advance Syrian nationalism and to counter the unfolding sectarian discourse.
However, the regime’s campaign of suppression, the predominance of the
Salafis and jihadis in rural areas, and their general lack of funds stunted their
effectiveness.
Civil War and the Polarisation of Identity

It was by no means inevitable that the Syrian conflict – in good part defined
by class differences, notably the deprived against the regime-connected privi-
leged, and with the main opposition movements also initially demanding
an inclusive civic state – would, by 2012, morph into a violent sectarian war
that divided Syrians along identity lines. The regime’s resort to the “security
solution” – violence against the protestors – was the fatal step on the road to
sectarian civil war. The opposition, in turn, demanded the fall of the regime
and showed its capacity to fill the streets with continuous protests, which the
regime, given the weakening of Baʿathism as an ideology and an organisation
30 Declaration by the national coalition for Syrian revolutionary and opposition forces.
http://en.etilaf.org/coalition-documents/declaration-by-the-national-coalition-for-syri
an-revolutionary-and-opposition-forces.html.
and its discarding of the social contract with its former rural constituency, had
little capacity to counter by mobilising supporters outside of the big cities (as it
had done during the 1980s Islamic insurgency). Hence the regime perceived its
survival to depend on the cohesiveness of its Alawi core (and the loyalty of oth-
er minority groups), which it promoted by painting the opposition as extreme
Islamist terrorists who sought to overthrow the secular state. As the regime
secured the support of minorities, who could expect retribution from Sunni
jihadis if it fell, the opposition took on a more Sunni-Islamist hue and also
helped sectarianise the conflict. The deployment of a Sunni identity gave the
insurgents the potential to overcome class and urban-rural divisions amongst
Sunnis and to fully mobilise their demographic advantage (Sunnis were 70 per
cent of the population). In parallel, the regime’s violence legitimised armed
self-defence by the opposition, precipitating defections from the army by
Sunni soldiers and the defectors’ creation of the Free Syrian Army. Another
factor that fuelled sectarianism was the influx of foreign Sunni jihadis, backed
by money and guns from the Gulf. As a result, those advocating non-violent
resistance were caught between the “for us or against us” mentality of both
sides. Radical Islamist movements such as Jabhat al-Nusra, and later isis, took
over in the north and east while the PKK-linked pyd governed Kurdish areas.
The jihadis’ notions of citizenship were very different from those of the secular
opposition: in isis absolute obedience to the caliph was enjoined, and both it
and al-Nusra expect non-Muslims to pay a poll-tax (jizya) and to have no say
in government. They, and other armed Salafi groups, such as Liwa al-Islam and
Ahrar al-Sham, would apply the Shariʿa to non-Muslims. Of the Muslim oppo-
sition groups, only the Muslim Brotherhood accepted the equality of Muslims
and non-Muslims, but it tended to be squeezed out by salafi jihadists as the
conflict proceeded.
As the Uprising developed into a sectarian civil war, it had a further trans-
forming impact on identities. Remarkably, opposition and official government
discourse converged to squeeze out traditional Arabism. The regime, reacting
to the backing of the opposition by most trans-state Arab-Islamic discourses
and Arab governments, began portraying the “reactionary” Arabs as the enemy,
notably the Arab League, which, in league with the West, was trying to weaken
Syria as a bastion of resistance to imperialism; it began stressing Syrian sov-
ereignty and even a Syrian nation, with Arab references deleted from official
discourse and iconic Syrian landmarks emphasised on official websites. The
opposition was all lumped together as Wahhabi-backed “terrorists” attacking
the secular identity of Syria, or agents of external powers seeking to weaken
the country. In parallel, Alawi identification with the regime was solidified; as
Rosen put it, unable to separate themselves from the regime or imagine a Syria
without Assad, Alawis adopted slogans such as “Assad forever.” He reported

that “while pundits in the West [are]…discussing the possibility of a separate
Alawi state…one hears of no such thing from the Alawis themselves. Syria has
long been their central project.”31 Similarly, the opposition criticised the Arabs
for their failure to help the Uprising, supporting some factions at the expense
of others, hence prolonging the conflict, and also for their lack of hospitality to
refugees seeking asylum in Arab states. One slogan chanted by both pro- and
anti-Asad crowds went: “Oh Syria, shall we cry over you or shall we cry over
our Arabism that has faded away?” Thus, paradoxically, among pro-regime and
secular opposition elements there was a convergence toward a Syrian identity
differentiated from Arabism. This was different from the alternative Salafi/ji-
hadi discourse, especially its trans-state form, as represented by isis, which
sought to merge Syria into a wider Islamic Caliphate.
At the same time, however, an increasing sectarianisation of discourse and
identity arose. Opposed to a Syrian civic identity were the increasingly power-
ful radical Islamists leading the fight against the regime; the notion of commu-
nity put forward by some of these still envisioned a Syrian Islamic community,
whether the Muslim Brotherhood or jihadis such as Ahrar al-Sham, but others,
most obviously isis, promoted a trans-state Sunni identity. As secular moder-
ates were marginalised, with many either joining the armed Islamists or fleeing
the country, and a trans-state Salafi discourse, with a strong anti-Shiʿi angle,
penetrated the country along with the smuggling of fighters and funds from
the Gulf and the wider global Sunni diaspora, the identity balance shifted to
supra-state Islamic identities at the expense of secular Syrianism. At the same
time, as the conflict was increasingly framed as an Alawi/Shiʿi vs. Sunni con-
flict, more overt Alawi/Shiʿi symbolism and an anti-Sunni discourse, notably
in the deprecation of “takfiris,” appeared. These tendencies were incompatible
with an inclusive notion of Syrian citizenship.
However, youth movements promoting a Syrian civil identity, strongest
among secular and non-Sunni educated youth, fought back, seeking to contain
and reverse the increased sectarian polarisation. Thus, in December 2011 (when
sectarian clashes flared up in Homs), a group of secular youths disseminated
a song that denounced sectarianism and called for tolerance among Syrians:
I’m going to Homs within the next two days […]. I’m going to see my broth-
ers; the loyalist, the opponent, the protester and the security officer […]
the radical and the secular […]. I’m going to meet the big family whose
31 Nir Rosen, “Guardians of the Throne,” Al Jazeera, October 10, 2011. http://www.aljazeera
.com/indepth/features/2011/10/20111010122434671982.html.
children grew up together…I’m going to Homs castle to write graffiti that

says “we are one people, a united nation and we will cut off the hand that
played with sectarianism…”32
While the popularity of such slogans decreased, a song was created in March
2013 by civil youths in Aleppo, which was aimed at countering an earlier
Salafi-jihadi song, The Alawi Police (Shurta Nusairiyya), which threatened to
slaughter the Alawis. The new version of the song mimics the melody of the
old version but alters its lyrics radically. A brief extract of it says:
We will build Syria, a civil state. The Syrian people revolted because they
want freedom. Justice is our demand, neither hatred nor revenge. Despite
the pain and the blood, we will remain brothers and Syria will unite us.
Syria is about its colours [diversity], it is rich because of you and because
of us. [So] do not allow the test of the blood to blind your belief33
This song was extensively distributed in the online realm and sung in a few
protest demonstrations in Damascus and Aleppo. Furthermore, a grassroots
youth campaign, Syria First, proclaimed a “revolution within the revolution,”
which attempted to defend what its activists considered to be the core val-
ues of the revolution: dignity and freedom for all citizens, regardless of sect.
They not only condemned regime repression but the excesses of the rebels,
and assumed the mission of monitoring the revolution in order to keep it on
the right path, and of working against new forms of repressive power in “liber-
ated” areas.34
However, this brought clashes with Jabhat al-Nusra, which was intolerant
of dissent within the opposition.35 Similarly, during a protest on February 8,
2013 in Sarqib district, southern Idlib, dozens of secular youth (some of them
affiliated with Nabid), chanted “unity, freedom, civil state,” while waving the
32 For an online version of this song see “Nazil ʿala Homs” ([I’m] going to Homs), on You-
Tube. Accessed on October 8, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3dcHE4SjO4.
33 For an online version of this song see “Shurta nusairiyya, al-niskha al-Halabiyya” (Alawi
policemen, the Aleppo version), on YouTube. Accessed April 15, 2013. http://www.you
tube.com/watch?v=HxXHvkkoZgM.
34 Line Zouhour, “Whither the Peaceful Movement in Syria?” Jadaliyya, March 18, 2013. www
.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/10616/whither-the-peaceful-movement-in-syria.
35 Serene Assir, “Activists Struggle to be Heard amid Roar of Syria Violence,” Daily Star (Beirut),
October 30, 2012. http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Middle-East/2012/Oct-30/193205-ac
tivists-struggle-to-be-heard-amid-roar-of-syria-violence.ashx##axzz2ArfSDeIh.
revolutionary flag. This provoked the fundamentalists to chant loudly: “We

want an Islamic Caliphate,” while waving a Salafi-jihadi flag.36
Despite identity clashes and the territorial division of the country during
the Uprising, among the warring forces there exists, as Dostal argues,37 no
serious domestic demand in Syria to solve the current crisis by splitting the
country into ethnically homogenous smaller states. Given the entanglement
of sects, this would not be possible in most areas of Syria, and even where it
might be attempted, the resulting small states would lack viability and be prey
to the influence of neighbouring countries. Most actors within Syria, he ar-
gues, even the religious leaders of the conflicting confessions, have consciously
maintained a united Syrian national position. Indicative of the resilience of
Syrian identity even in the face of supra-state Islamism is the split within the
radical Islamists themselves between the al-Qaʿeda linked elements, notably
the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (isis), many of whom are non-Syrian
fighters, and Syrian Islamist groups, who started to see the former as outsiders
perverting the revolution. Thus, the notion of Syrian citizenship carries some
resonance among the latter, though not the former.
It has also to be acknowledged that, in practice, the Uprising made a certain
positive contribution to generating an inclusive sense of Syrian citizenship. It
unleashed a powerful tradition of activism that will not be easily reversed by
any subsequent regime. Freedom of discourse was unprecedented, with more
than new 30 online publications promoting democracy, despite the regime
crackdown on the Internet. The Uprising, in removing or weakening the heavy-
handed control of the government, which had never had much tolerance for
any aspect of civil society, stimulated citizen associations, and, especially where
government services and security broke down, caused local neighbourhoods
to organise self-defence. An unprecedented sense of solidarity developed as
people shared homes, clothes, and food amidst the hundreds of thousands
displaced by the fighting. With the intensification of the armed conflict, lo-
cal committees became active in humanitarian relief, in what could be called
an “everyday civility” that was reflective of and promoted citizenship. In some
areas of Syria the tansiqiyyat (coordination and distribution committees) that
36 Interview with an anonymous activist in Saraqib, February 19, 2013, via Skype. See also the
video of this protest, uploaded onto YouTube by rebels: “Anasir kataʾib islamiyya taqum
bi-tamziq ʿalam al-thawra” (Members of Islamist Militias are Ripping Up the Revolution-
ary Flag). Accessed on October 8, 2013. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player
_embedded&v=R_1xdQX33pM.
37 Jörg Michael Dostal, “Analyzing the Domestic and International Conflict in Syria: Are
There Lessons from Political Science?” Syria Studies 6 (2014): 1–80.
emerged managed to preserve the civility, openness, and accountability that

are seen by many as the true counter to Asad’s regime.38 When, after mid-2012,
the regime had completely lost control of large areas of the north and east of
the country, the external-led opposition attempted to set up new institutions
to replace defunct regime ones. According to Baczko et al.,39 these included
new municipal and district councils in charge of health and education; courts,
made up of fighters, clerics, and “free” lawyers; and a substitute police force.
At governorate level, bodies were also established as links between communi-
ties and the Syrian National Council and National Coalition, and used their
foreign funding to establish client links with “liberated” territory. Governance
in areas outside regime control continued to be fragmented and contested, but
could potentially constitute the institutional foundation of a transition regime
able to maintain order until and after any national level settlement might be
reached, either via negotiations or regime collapse.
Conclusion
The normative power of citizenship depends on the hegemony of identification

with an inclusive state that is congruent with a national identity, as well as
requiring the advance of certain material requisites, such as education and
the creation of inclusive institutions. The Baʿath Party advanced the social
mobilisation needed for citizenship, but its neo-patrimonial institutions could
not sustain the political inclusion and economic growth needed to satisfy
the citizenry, and under Bashar al-Asad the populist dimension of Baʿathist
neo-patrimonialism was sacrificed to fiscal sustainability. The Syrian Uprising
was an outcome of this imbalance. Initially mounted in the name of inclusive
secular Syrian identity based on equal citizenship, it morphed into a sectarian
civil war in which radically opposed notions of identity and citizenship came
into conflict. Yet the regime’s particular version of neo-patrimonialism proved
resilient enough to resist the Uprising; patrimonial solidarity prevented an elite
rupture and the sacrifice of the leader as had happened in states such as Egypt,
38 Anand Gopal, “Welcome to Free Syria: Meeting the Rebel Government of an Embattled
Country,” Harper’s Magazine, August 2012. http://harpers.org/archive/2012/08/welcome
-to-free-syria/.
39 Adam Baczko, Gilles Dorronsoro, and Arthur Quesnay, Building a Syrian State in a Time of
Civil War, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, April 16, 2013. http://carnegieen
dowment.org/2013/04/16/building-syrian-state-in-time-of-civil-war/fzrk.
while bureaucratic institutions were also robust enough to prevent regime

collapse, as had happened in Libya or Yemen. At the same time, the relative
debilitation of state institutions and their loss of territorial control over about
half the country indicated the exhaustion of the Baʿathist governance formula.
Its secular antithesis, the non-violent movements promoting an inclusive
secular Syrian “civil” citizenship, were unable to sustain their momentum once
the uprising morphed into militarised civil war, and, even though the notion
of civil citizenship would probably have enjoyed wide public support, its
proponents were unarmed or in exile. Nevertheless, even if squeezed between
regime and radical Islamists, the narrative (and to a degree practice) of a civic
Syrian identity, with its long roots, persisted; indeed, the apparent value put
on Syrian statehood by many, otherwise hostile, political forces is potentially
symptomatic of the construction of a Syrian national identity rising out of the
ashes of an exhausted Baʿathism.
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chapter 4
The Tunisian Revolution and the Question

of Citizenship
Sami Zemni
Even though Tunisia has been the victim of two murderous attacks, one at
the national Bardo-Museum that primarily targeted tourists (March 2015)
and another at a popular tourist hotel in Sousse (June 2015), with the success-
ful organisation of parliamentary and presidential elections in October and
November 2014 the country has been described by the international press, pol-
iticians, and academics as the “only” success story of the Arab Uprisings that
started in late 2010. With the growing pessimism over the consequences of the
Arab Uprisings, it is not clear whether Tunisia’s success lies in the adoption of
a new constitution installing political pluralism and legally enshrining citizen-
ship rights or whether it is the outcome of the ballot boxes of the 2014 elections
bringing a “secularist” political party (Nida Tounis) to power. Even so, and with
no doubt, throughout the events of the Tunisian revolution many new forms of
political subjectivities emerged that have had a significant impact on the path
that Tunisia has followed since Ben Ali’s departure.1
“The people want the fall of the regime” and “work, freedom, national dig-
nity,” the two most prominent slogans of the Tunisian uprising that led to the
downfall of Ben Ali, signalled a strong longing for a renewed pact between
rulers and ruled, between the state and the citizen. The central role that the
longing for dignity played epitomised a demand for individual rights that
would grant the citizen access to political freedoms as well as economic
opportunities. As I have argued elsewhere, the Tunisian revolution did not
start with M ohammed Bouazizi’s self-immolation, nor did it end with Ben
Ali’s disappearance.2 The revolutionary upheaval that started in the margin-
alised areas of the interior of the country in late 2010 and gradually morphed
1 Benoît Challand, “Citizenship against the Grain: Locating the Spirit of the Arab Uprisings in
Times of Counterrevolution,” Constellations 20 (2015): 169–187.
2 Sami Zemni, Brecht De Smet and Koenraad Bogaert, “Luxemburg on Tahrir Square: Reading
the Arab Revolutions with Rosa Luxemburg’s the Mass Strike,” Antipode 45 (2009): 888–907;
Sami Zemni, “The Extraordinary Politics of the Tunisian Revolution: The Process of Constitu-
tion Making,” Mediterranean Politics 20 (2015): 1–17.

130 Zemni
into a n ational revolution constituted, following Hannah Arendt’s analysis,3

a first phase of liberation, i.e. the overthrowing of the old regime. However,
with the interim-president’s historical allocution of March 3, 2011 – suspending
the constitution of 1995, disbanding the former ruling party and calling for the
election of a Constituent Assembly – Tunisia entered the second phase of its
revolution, the phase of constitution or the creation of a new political order.
While the Tunisian people stood united against Ben Ali and his regime, they
discovered that they were ultimately divided over crucial issues that touch upon
civil, religious, and political, as well as social and economic, rights. L iberal and
deliberative accounts of democratisation – that lie at the basis of the transitol-
ogy paradigm – assume, as Näsström states,4 that who constitutes the people
is a historical question (and not a question of legitimacy), i.e. a state of affairs
resulting from the contingencies of war, revolution, civil war, or internal power
struggles. Who constitutes “the people,” who legitimately makes up those
who can found a new political order, remains largely unstudied. This chapter
will address the question of the legitimacy of the people because it relates to
the ways Tunisians have (re-)thought and are (re-)thinking of themselves in
relation to the building of new institutions, and more specifically in terms of
what it means to be a Tunisian citizen. Long before the Tunisian revolution
started Larbi Sadiki pointed out that while Tunisia is a fairly homogenous soci-
ety culturally, religiously, and linguistically, it would be wrong to assume that a
Tunisian demos would emerge without a fight in a post-authoritarian environ-
ment.5 More than fifty years of authoritarian rule emphasising national unity
and prohibiting political division from emerging openly has compromised the
very idea of pluralism, a crucial basis for the protection of rights.
The foundation of “the people” that defines the boundaries of the politi-
cal community, of the demos in which citizens operate as political equals, is
not solely a matter of creating and legitimising specific institutions, but is as
much about the creation of a shared symbolic space where different citizen-
ship claims can be debated openly.6 The idea of (democratic) citizenship has
played a crucial role in delimiting the boundaries of this symbolic space. More
than a question of rights and responsibilities alone that are predicated on the
legal status of abstract individuals in nation-states, the issue at hand is how,
in the aftermath of Ben Ali’s rule, the “Tunisian people” have come to define
3 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 1990 [1963]).

4 Sofia Näsström, “The Legitimacy of the People,” Political Theory 35 (2007): 624–658.
5 Larbi Sadiki, “The Search for Citizenship in Bin Ali’s Tunisia: Democracy versus Unity,”
Political Studies 50 (2002): 497–513.
6 Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2000).
The Tunisian Revolution And The Question Of Citizenship 131
themselves, how they have – through a range of political and social acts –
voiced claims and how they have embraced some forms of political subjectiv-
ity while rejecting others.
This chapter first examines how “the people,” as a normative force, emerged
through the revolutionary episode and how they became a hegemonic refer-
ence point for all political, social, and economic actors. It also traces the emerg-
ing definitions of citizenship back to the postcolonial order that was created by
Bourguiba during the first decades of independence. As Tunisians discovered
that many conflicting and divergent interests, desires, and wills co-existed un-
der the appellation of “the people,” they gradually discovered a conflict-ridden
society. Therefore, secondly, I analyse how this discovery of a plurality of voices
has at times endangered the creation of a shared commonality or symbolic
space binding the people together in a new body politic. The tensions were
(partially) resolved by the generalised use of tunisianité, a patriotic reference
used to bridge different collective identities. It is my contention that the idea
of (democratic) citizenship played a crucial role in founding a political com-
promise that led to the adoption of a new constitution. Thirdly, I reflect on the
nature of this compromise as a way of dealing democratically with different
forms of divisions that cut across Tunisian society and highlight the dangers
that come with it.
The Emergence of “the People” through Revolution
As the Tunisian revolution did not start with Mohammed Bouazizi’s self-
immolation, it must be highlighted that it has a genealogy, a history that can
be understood as a “cumulative process of learning and resistance” that must
be seen as the combination of past and present political and socio-economic
struggles.7 Even so, Bouazizi’s ordeal functioned as the trigger that led to a
local, regional uprising that, over the course of a few weeks, turned into a na-
tional revolt. One of the first rallying cries of the uprising – al-shaʿb yurid isqat
al-nizam (“the people want the fall of the regime”) – suggests the emergence,
through mobilisation, of the category of “the people.”
First guided by local youths as well as local militants and activists from the
national labour union, the (Union Générale du Travail Tunisien/ugtt),8 other
7 Habib Ayeb, “Social and Political Geography of the Tunisian Revolution: The Alfa Grass
Revolution,” Review of African Political Economy 38 (2011): 467–479.
8 Amine Allal, “Réformes néolibérales, clientélismes et protestations en situation autoritaire:
Les mouvements contestataires dans le Bassin Minier de Gafsa en Tunisie (2008),” Politique
132 Zemni
classes and social groups joined the opposition against Ben Ali and his regime.
Through mass mobilisations of different segments of the Tunisian people,
not only geographical distance (from the interior towards the coast and the
capital) but also class divides were (temporarily) overcome. As the disaffected
urban youth, urban middle classes, and even parts of the bourgeoisie joined
the uprising against Ben Ali, the use of the collective noun “the people” became
pervasive. What connected these different social groups and classes was not so
much poverty, deprivation, or corruption per se but rather the shared percep-
tion of large segments of Tunisian society that Ben Ali, as head of state, the
state’s institutions, and the people occupying positions in it, had betrayed the
social ethic, the unwritten contract between ruler and ruled.
Through claim-making in the public sphere, different sections of the Tuni-
sian people gradually became what Saskia Sassen has called the “global street,”
i.e. a space where new forms of the political and social can take shape through
the claims people make on public space.9 Through this process of claim-
making citizenship demands were voiced. Noticeably a specific “demand of
state” became noticeable. The moral corruption of the regime, just as much
or even more than corruption itself, played an important role in bringing “the
people” together. Tunisian activists were clearly aware of this moral dimen-
sion as the narrative of Mohammed Bouazizi’s ordeal was consciously built
on “white lies.” Mohammed Bouazizi was, it turned out, not a higher-educated
unemployed youth, neither was he beaten by a female police officer. As Lim
pointedly remarks: “By framing the Bouazizi story as a death for justice, free-
dom, and dignity, the movement in Sidi Bouzid had built a bridge to connect
with diverse social groups beyond its locale.”10
The power of the nationwide cross-class mobilisations also injected the
socio-economic grievances with more politicised themes touching upon citi-
zenship issues and a “demand of state.” When protesters from all classes and
social backgrounds shouted al-tachgil istishaq ya isabat al-sorraq (“Work is a
right, O you gang of thieves”) they were not solely referring to the failing labour
market and high unemployment, they were also voicing “a demand seeking
inclusion, well-being and/or protection; the ‘privatization’ of the state” – in
which a small group monopolises the state as if it were a private object – “was
africaine 117 (2010): 107–125; Choukri Hmed and Sarah-Louise Raillard, “Abeyance Net-
works, Contingency and Structures: History and Origins of the Tunisian Revolution,” Re-
vue française de science politique 62 (2012): 31–53.
9 Saskia Sassen, “The Global Street: Making the Political,” Globalizations 8 (2011): 573–579.
10 Merlyna Lim, “Framing Bouazizi: ‘White Lies’, Hybrid Network, and Collective/Connective
Action in the 2010–11 Tunisian Uprising,” Journalism 14 (2013): 8.
seen as an intolerable hold-up […] the supreme theft is undoubtedly that of

the state itself!”11 Unemployment was not only seen as an economic problem
but also as a consequence of the undermining by the state’s policies of the
developmental narrative that Tunisia had upheld since independence. When
access to decent work became less dependent on personal merit through pub-
licly organised education, it became closely linked to clientelistic privilege,
money, and corruption.
The emergence of “the people” was thus embedded in a moral economy
that called into question the withering away of the Tunisian “authoritar-
ian bargain,”12 an unwritten “deal” between the postcolonial state and the
citizens in which social and economic rights were promoted while political
rights were curtailed. Tunisia’s independence undermined the legitimacy of
hereditary monarchy with privileged elites ruling their subjects. As artisan
of the independence, Bourguiba swiftly abolished the centuries old beyli-
cate and founded a republic in which the idea that the Tunisian people con-
stituted a community of political equals, a demos as opposed to an ethnos
defined by pre-modern kinship-ties, stood central. The notion of citizenship
was clearly linked to the advent of the modern nation-state. While the 1959
constitution protected civil and political rights, Bourguiba’s efforts in nation
and state building caused him to curtail many of these laudable constitutional
provisions. The independence of Tunisia was based on the authority of the
state to control a well-defined territory – even though this remained an is-
sue until the early 1960s with French military forces stationed in Bizerte and
French and Algerian forces using Tunisian territory during the Algerian war
for independence – within which solidarity and cohesion should be organised
was fostered through the homogenisation and centralisation of a common cul-
ture. The common n ational identity or imagined community that Bourguiba
pushed for was meant to create a cultural basis to organise a state-organised
collective solidarity. A growing perceived commonality provided the necessary
trust to underpin citizenship rights and duties. However, as Bourguiba and
his Neo-Destour prioritised economic development, civil and political rights
were quickly dismissed while social rights were, on the contrary, stressed and
favoured. A corporatist compromise with great political consequences (and as
such for citizenship rights) was gradually put into place by Bourguiba and his
Neo-Destour party.
11 Baccar Gherib, “Economie politique de la révolution Tunisienne: Les groupes sociaux face
au capitalisme de copinage,” Revue tiers monde 212 (2012): 33.
12 Steven Heydemann, Upgrading Authoritarianism in the Arab World (Analysis Paper 13,
The Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, 2007).
134 Zemni
The imperative of economic development necessitated, according to Bour-

guiba, an efficient state structure in which the Neo-Destour party would frame
the political discussions while five national organisations representing work-
ers (ugtt), industrialists and merchants (Union Tunisienne de l’Industrie, du
Commerce et de l’Artisanat, utica), farmers (Union Nationale des Agriculteurs
Tunisiens, unat), women (Union Nationale de la Femme Tunisienne, unft),
and youth (Union Tunisienne des Organisations de Jeunesse, utoj) would
allow for the representation of specific interests. The goal of this corporatist
functional system of representation was to contain conflicts within society
and to prevent social divisions from becoming overtly politicised. This insti-
tutional architecture was further legitimised by a narrative stressing that the
imperative of development necessitated a centralised and bureaucratic state
that would serve the general interest. Therefore Bourguiba and his govern-
ments constantly stressed interclass unity and the homogeneity of the Tuni-
sian people as a means to repress the social question.13 Even during the glory
days of the socialist experiment, the political elite constantly rejected any ref-
erence to class politics or class struggle. Bourguiba’s conceptualisation of citi-
zenship thus emphasised certain entitlements and rights in the economic and
social field through the meritocratic ideal of social upward mobilisation while
neglecting political and civil liberties. As such, this idea of citizenship was as
much about controlling and pacifying the working class (and other groups
deemed “dangerous,” such as tribal groups).
Whether during the socialist experiment of the 1960s (with industrialisa-
tion led by the state, collectivisation of the agricultural production, and land
tenure reform) or the liberalisation of the economy starting in the early 1970s,
the Tunisian state tightly controlled the economy while laying the founda-
tions of a universal welfare state, i.e. the provision of social benefits for all
eligible citizens. As such, the Tunisian economy remained largely protected or,
as Camau and Geisser affirm, “autarchic.”14 It was only during the 1980s, after
Tunisia had turned to the imf to avoid financial bankruptcy, that the Tuni-
sian state gradually started withdrawing from its developmental role, creating
a more globally-integrated economy,15 a policy that was later intensified with
13 Baccar Gherib, “Les classes moyennes Tunisiennes entre mythe et réalité: Éléments pour
une mise en perspective historique,” L’année du Maghreb [Online], vii (2011), Online since
January 1, 2013, accessed January 9, 2014. url: http://anneemaghreb.revues.org/1296;
doi: 10.4000/anneemaghreb.1296.
14 Michel Camau and Vincent Geisser, Le syndrome autoritaire: Politique en Tunisie de Bour-
guiba à Ben Ali (Paris: Presses de Sciences Politiques, 2003), 57.
15 Gherib, “Les classes moyennes Tunisiennes.”
the Free Trade Agreement signed with the eu.16 Social policies were designed
as a trade-off between political stability and economic growth, from which the
different social classes could benefit. The lower classes were guaranteed low
food prices, progressive social policies such as free schooling, low-cost access
to medical facilities, unemployment benefits, and social security provisions,
while the middle classes expected that higher education would automatically
lead to decently-paid jobs. The business and upper classes, in turn, were grant-
ed economic pay-offs through tax cuts and the creation of a business climate
conducive to investment.17 Furthermore, a strong meritocratic discourse was
promoted by political leaders as well as the educational system and media.
However, under Ben Ali’s rule, this tacit trade-off gradually withered away.
As Ben Ali set out to create a strong entrepreneurial class that was integrated
into the channels of global capitalism (and position himself and his family
firmly within this network),18 a perverse crony-capitalism emptied the social
deal of its significance, as corruption became widespread. As Ben Ali was well
aware of the dangers associated with liberal economic reforms he did not
completely dismantle social provisions but rather refocused existing social
programs and established new institutions to mitigate the negative effects
of neoliberal reforms. The Tunisian Solidarity Bank (Banque Tunisienne de
Solidarité, bts) and the National Solidarity Fund (Fond de Solidarité National,
fsn) were created to eradicate poverty and to allow easier access to funds for
small businesses. However, as Tsourapas brilliantly showed, these institutions
rather functioned as a way to reconfigure authoritarian rule by inventing new
ways of surveillance and control of the population.19 Social policies under Ben
Ali were informed by the necessity of creating stability in the face of growing
economic disparities between the coastal areas of the country and the interior,
rising unemployment (especially among the youth), and mounting poverty.
The idea of the Tunisian welfare state based on social and economic rights
16 Gregory White, A Comparative Political Economy of Tunisia and Morocco: On The Outside
of Europe Looking In (New York: State University of New York Press, 2001).
17 Fadhel Biblech, Ahmed Driss and Pietro Longo, “Citizenship in Post-Awakening Tunisia:
Power Shifts and Conflicting Perceptions” (Centre for Mediterranean and International
Studies University l’Orientale in Naples, Democracy and Citizenship in North Africa a fter
the Arab Awakening: Challenges for eu and us foreign policy, Euspring, 2014) http://
www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/research/clusters/irs/euspring/publications/.
18 Emma Murphy, “Under the Emperor’s Neoliberal Clothes! Why the International Finan-
cial Institutions Got it Wrong in Tunisia,” in The Making of the Tunisian Revolution, ed.
N. Gana, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press: 2013), 35–57.
19 Gerasimos Tsourapas, “The Other Side of a Neoliberal Miracle: Economic Reform and
Political De-Liberalization in Ben Ali’s Tunisia,” Mediterranean Politics 18 (2013): 23–41.
136 Zemni
gradually shifted from a generalised, anonymous, and indiscriminate char-

acter to a personalised, individualised, and thus random approach.20 Social
policy became a tool of Ben Ali’s party, the Democratic Constitutional Rally
(Rassemblement Constitutionnel Démocratique, rcd), to control the popu-
lation and rights were transformed into “‘social favors’ monopolized by the
party-State, favors that it can withdraw from the moment that the beneficiary
is not showing signs of gratitude and that it can channel to other individuals
who are not eligible.”21 Tunisians officially enjoyed citizenship as a legal status
that combined some form of more or less collectively shared national identity
with social benefits but, while political membership was officially acknowl-
edged, political rights existed only on paper.
The Tunisian revolution for dignity succeeded because it was supported by
nearly all social groups and classes, thus warranting the temporary use of the
use of “the people.” However, very quickly the category of “the people” would
unravel after Ben Ali’s disappearance. What Tunisians discovered was a society
riddled with antagonistic relationships and conflict; as such, what they discov-
ered was in fact society itself.
The Discovery of Society
The gradual unravelling of the people as a homogenous actor quickly became

apparent when, after Ben Ali’s disappearance, mass mobilisations continued
against the first transitional government. Revolutionary and oppositional forc-
es (first organised in the Front of January 14) – bringing together the margin-
alised youth of the interior of the country, workers, and union militants as well
as Islamists (mobilising for the first time as such) – opposed a political transi-
tion led “from above” and brokered between the political elites of the country.
The Front called for general elections for a Constituent Assembly and the dis-
solution of institutions linked to the former regime (the two chambers, the
Higher Council for the Judiciary, as well as Ben Ali’s party, the rcd). “Caravans
of solidarity and liberty” arrived in the capital and set up camp on the Kas-
bah Square where the Prime Minister holds office. While this first Kasbah rally
was violently broken up at the end of January 2011, mobilisations throughout
the country further pressured the government to give in to the revolutionary
demands. By the end of February, the Kasbah square was again taken over by
20 Mahmoud Ben Romdhane, Tunisie: Etat, économie et société: Ressources politiques, légiti-
mations, régulations sociales (Tunis: Sud Editions, 2011), 259.
21 Ben Romdhane, Tunisie, 267.
demonstrators, who shouted “we kicked out the dictator, let’s kick out dicta-
torship.” However, amidst the growing instability and rising tensions between
the revolutionary demands of the protestors and the constitutional legitimacy
of the government, other social groups and classes started to demonstrate in
another part of Tunis. While the demonstrators on the Kasbah square spoke in
the name of “the people,” the mainly middle-class mobilisation at the Qobba
(the dome at the sports city of al-Menzah, a middle-class neighbourhood of
Tunis) also laid claim to the use of “the people,” a silent majority that wanted a
return to “normality,” a return to work, and an end to what were considered the
erroneous and impossible demands of the ugtt.22
With the notion of “dignity” that was central during the revolutionary mo-
ment and its aftermath, Tunisians made a clear demand for citizenship, as they
wanted to be recognised as citizens, rather than as subjects. The dignity that
was called for – as the opposite of humiliation under authoritarian rule – was
seen as stemming from a demand for freedom and work.23 However, a few
weeks before the October 2011 elections, after the screening of Marjane Satra-
pi’s movie Persepolis by the private channel Nessma, the issue of Islam, and
its role and place in society and the state, moved to the centre stage of pub-
lic debates. Even before, during the spring of 2011, several incidents involving
conflicts over freedom of expression and religious sensibilities emerged. These
politics of identity, which departed from the more social and economic roots
of the uprisings, dominated the electoral campaign.
The public debates held in the post-Ben Ali era made it clear that there
were considerably different meanings given to freedom. The physical pres-
ence of mobilised people on squares or on avenues pointed to, as Tawal-Souri
witnessed in Egypt but can be applied to Tunisia, “citizens staging their right
to public assembly […] the very architecture and embodiment of civicness.”24
The fragmentation of the different voices – each claiming to speak in name
of “the revolution” – indicated that “the people” entered into a phase of dif-
ferentiation “to conduct a war of positions over the meaning, the direction and
upshot of the revolution.”25
22 Zemni, “The Extraordinary Politics of the Tunisian Revolution.”

23 Malika Zeghal, “Competing Ways of Life: Islamism, Secularism, and Public Order in the
Tunisian Transition,” Constellations 20 (2013): 254–274.
24 Helga Tawil-Souri, “It’s Still About the Power of Place,” Middle East Journal of Culture and
Communication 5 (2012): 89–90.
25 Nasser Abourahme and May Jayyusi, “The Will to Revolt and the Spectre of the Real,” City:
Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action 15 (2011): 628.
138 Zemni
In this war of positions the apparent diversity of society and fragmentation

of the body politic became apparent. Authoritarian rule had pre-empted the
possibility of seeing that society was riddled with antagonistic relations and
divided by political, economic, and cultural fault lines.26 The oneness of the
Tunisian people was constantly expounded through the Bourguibist project
of modernisation and development. The idea of an undivided nation was not
only conveyed by this discourse but was also firmly embedded and reproduced
through the state’s bureaucratic corporatist “deal” (see above) – and if need
be the repressive coercion of the police – that stressed an interclass approach.
After 2011, several different configurations of what constitutes the Tuni-
sian people not only emerged but also sometimes entered into conflict with
one another. These conflicting configurations do not simply refer to specific
ideological formations, but rather encompass definitions of divergent “ways
of life” – aptly defined by Zeghal27 as the correct beliefs and conduct appro-
priate for post-2011 Tunisian society. These ways of life are also embedded in
historical questions over identity and state-formation as well as being riddled
with complex class struggles.28 Indeed, after Ben Ali’s disappearance, political
battles were not so much focused on the issue of political institutions – as a
general consensus quickly emerged – but rather saw secularists defending or
safeguarding what they considered their way of life, Islamists using their new
found freedom to publicly display signs of religiosity, and Salafists seemingly
attempting to create reactionary utopian communities where religious law
would regulate all forms of social life so as to undermine the legitimacy of the
state’s institutions and the transitional process itself.
As such, a fierce battle over the issue of who was able to speak in name of
“the people,” and how this people should be politically construed, emerged.
The patriotism that was all-pervasive across the political and ideological
spectrum was not able to defuse the danger of competing legitimacies and
the emergence of debates on the “betrayal” or “treason” of the revolution and
the “return of the former regime.” The redistribution of power in post-Ben Ali
Tunisia is tied to different constituencies that are linked to specific trajecto-
ries of mobilisation in the state- and nation-building efforts in postcolonial
Tunisia.
26 Jocelyn Dakhlia, “L’an I de la révolution Tunisienne ou les résurgences d’un passé qui
divise,” Jadaliyya, December 5, 2012. Available at http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/
index/8804/l’an-i-de-la-révolution-tunisienne-ou-les-résurgen.
27 Zeghal, “Competing Ways of Life.”
28 Fabio Merone, “Enduring Class Struggle in Tunisia: The Fight for Identity beyond Political
Islam,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 42 (2014): 74–87.
The fault line running between secularists and Islamists is not as clear-
cut as is often assumed. The (mostly urban) middle classes that served as the
major backbone of the rule of the Neo-Destour and constituted the bulk of
the nationalist elite are politically represented by secular (but not necessarily
irreligious) political formations that stress the need to preserve what are con-
sidered “historic achievements” (such as the separation of state and religion,
women’s rights, and the republican order). The official narrative of the Tuni-
sian nation – defined by Bourguiba and largely reproduced with some nuances
by Ben Ali – as a homogenous nation embedded in Arab-Islamic history as well
as in a pre-Islamic Mediterranean past and open to elements of Western civili-
sation and modernity came into conflict with societal realities that were and
are riddled with competing narratives. The creation of a national myth served
two purposes. Firstly, it provided the national community with a feeling that it
was firmly embedded and grounded in a history, thus creating a sense of soli-
darity between the generations. Secondly, the Bourguibian myth had a mor-
alising role by inculcating the population with a sense of obligation towards
that past and ancestors.29 The authoritarian manner in which this national
myth was constituted, defined, and reproduced through political institutions,
the educational system, and the media authoritatively imposed an identity
by indoctrination and repression as any divergent or deviant n arrative was
prohibited.
It is not only Islamists or Salafists who have challenged this narrative. Several
parties, such as the Congress for the Republic (Congres pour la République,
cpr), have revived the memory of Salah Ben Youssef, a historical Neo-Destour
leader and challenger of Bourguiba, and have used the new freedoms to assert
themselves and claim a place in the new political system. Those reviving Ben
Youssef’s opposition to Bourguiba – by stressing the Arab-Islamic identity of
the country – refer less to a specific ideological set of ideas on the definition
of the character of the Tunisian people, than to the notion of dissidence, the
right to counter the elitist character of the Neo-Destourian and later rcd elit-
ism. For Bourguiba and the Neo-Destourian elite, the concept of the people
was an important means to mobilise the masses against the French protec-
torate but was in need of the “enlightened” representation and education of
a progressive party to transcend the possible re-emergence of what Bour-
guiba considered as primordial allegiances based on regional affiliation or
kinship.30 It is not a coincidence then, that the middle classes, who had been
29 David Miller, On Nationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press) Online edition: http://
www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/0198293569.001.0001/acprof--‐9780198293569.
30 Camau and Geisser, Le syndrome autoritaire.
140 Zemni
hitherto kept outside the realm of power, strived to radicalise the revolution-
ary experience by countering the political elites’ narrative by referring to Ar-
ab-Islamic identity. In this, they were joined in part by the Islamists, mainly
represented by Ennahda. For Ennahda, the revolution signalled the possibility
for the Tunisian people to reconnect with their “authentic” Arab and Islamic
past. Islamists stressed the fact that Bourguibism alienated the nation from its
own culture; Ennahda’s project is ultimately one of cultural authenticity and
reform rather than a religious endeavour.31 The call for authenticity constitutes
the basis of a conservative modernity where “collective consciousness and cul-
tural reformation are […] the active agents of progress, rather than individual
consciousness.”32 Salafists mostly reject this project, advocating instead the
re-activation of a reactionary utopia that was made possible by the revolution
and through the clear rejection of modernity – seen as imported from and im-
posed by the West to subjugate Islam. Finally, one cannot neglect to mention
the possibilities that the newly-found freedoms also offered for more “invisible
minorities,” as Poussel33 showed how Amazigh, Jewish, and “Black” minorities
made claims to recognise their role in Tunisian history.
The emergence of these “collective archaeologies”34 through which differ-
ent groups voiced their “want” for a history that could be imposed by the po-
litical elites but should emanate from within the nation itself, bear directly on
questions pertaining to citizenship. By offering varying accounts of what the
Tunisian people is or should be, these different narratives also convey specific
ideas about what the place and role of the individual as a citizen should be. The
danger, obviously, resided in the fact that amidst the constitution of a new po-
litical order, these divergent narratives – supported by different constituencies
– seemed to polarise the political debates.
La Tunisianité: Patriotism or Canvas for Citizenship Claims?
With the political murders of Chokri Belaïd and Mohammed Brahmi, in Feb-
ruary and August of 2013 respectively, the Tunisian transitional process came
31 Nadia Marzouki, “The Politics of Religious Freedom: Nahda’s Return to History,” The Imma-
nent Frame. Available at http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2012/04/30/nahdas-return-to-history/.
32 Ibid.
33 Stéphanie Pouessel, “Les marges renaissantes: Amazigh, Juif, Noir: Ce que la révolution
a changé dans ce ‘petit pays homogène par excellence’ qu’est la Tunisie,” L’Année du
Maghreb (2012): 143–160.
34 Guillaume Mazeau and Giedre Sabaseviciute, “Archéologies révolutionnaires: Regards
croisés sur la Tunisie et l’Égypte (2011–2013),” L’Année du Maghreb (2014): 19–39.
under heavy pressure. Amidst growing political polarisation and increasing se-
curity concerns, the political debates witnessed constant appeals to national
unity and the necessity of a national consensus. The idea of tunisianité gradu-
ally but forcefully emerged as the inescapable horizon of political debates,
as fears over where the Tunisian revolution was heading instilled a sense of
national duty within the political actors and large parts of civil society. The
idea that the revolution was somehow under attack (based on real or imagi-
nary threats) necessitated consensus and unity, and led to a discursive national
pride that materialised in the omnipresence of the Tunisian flag in the pub-
lic realm. This flag-waving exhibition of a patriotic sense of duty, obviously,
could not obscure the fact that political conflict over legitimacy and over what
exactly constituted the “national interest” continued to rage.
Tunisianité is an ambiguous and multifocal patriotic narrative that refers
to the specificity of Tunisia, its history, and identity; an assemblage of ideas
believed to be the defining core of a perennial Tunisian identity that is defined
by its realism, rejection of any form of radicalism, and moderation. As Béji
Caïd Essebsi, the newly elected president states, tunisianité points to the fact
that Tunisia does not recognise itself:
[I]n any political, ideological or religious extremism, just like it rejects

class struggle or proletarian dictatorship and rejects tribal or social frag-
mentation. Tunisianité is a culture of moderation, of realism and consen-
sus. We draw from Islam the idea of “nation of the middle” which seeks
to bring together and unify and favours persuasion rather to coercion.
Tunisianité rests on the principle of national unity, natural solidarity and
voluntary cohesion of all the nation’s social layers. It rejects all dogma-
tisms and cultivates the spirit of tolerance and the sense of relativity.35
Tunisianité functions, then, simultaneously as a narrative on Tunisian identity

but also as an admonition that can be used in times of crisis. This became
very clear during the major mobilisations during the summer of 2013 when,
after Mohammed Brahmi’s assassination, society seemed divided between the
elected parties defending their electoral and democratic legitimacy and op-
positional forces calling for the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly based
on a certain understanding of tunisianité that the ruling Troika would have
betrayed. Ennahda, fearing an Egyptian scenario (General al-Sisi capturing
power on the back of the Tamarrod-campaign), was gradually forced or ac-
cepted engagement in discussions with all political parties in order to break
the stalemate. This was made possible by the work of the politically influential
35 Béji Caïd Essebsi, Habib Bourguiba: Le bon grain et l’ivraie (Tunis: Sud Editions, 2009).
142 Zemni
labour Union (ugtt), joined by the utica, the Tunisian League for Human
rights, and the Lawyers’ Association. These civil forces were able to pressurise
all parties to engage in a national dialogue that ultimately would lead to a
historical compromise as reflected in the adoption of a new constitution in
January 2014.
In the national dialogue, all parties agreed that no-one could claim to
speak in name of all the people and thus (gradually and not without con-
flict) accepted the idea that tolerance, pluralism, and freedom were necessary
pre-conditions for a political solution to the crisis. In this sense, tunisianité
seemed to create some form of commonality between the political actors and
civil society movements, a sense of a shared symbolic space. This space made
the search for a political compromise possible as communication between the
political and civil society movements gradually turned the growing antagonis-
tic relationships into agonistic ones. In this shared symbolic space the idea of
citizenship was important. As no political formation was able to impose its
worldview or ideology on the others, the idea of a universal citizenship pro-
tecting civic, political and economic rights became prominent, as reflected in
the adoption of the constitution.
The constitution that was approved by an overwhelming majority in the
Constituent Assembly reflects the search for a compromise between the dif-
ferent political forces. Politically, the adoption of the new constitution sig-
nals a historic compromise between the older elites that have ruled Tunisia
since independence and newer Islamist elites that had remained largely out-
side the power realm. Legally, the new constitution – while not completely
resolving the possible tensions between individual freedoms and religious
rights – undoubtedly enshrines civil and political liberties as well as social and
economic rights. While it firmly recognises citizenship as one of the pillars of
the civil nature of the State (alongside the will of the people and the primacy
of the law), possible divergent readings of the constitution remain possible.
A major breakthrough from and an important difference with the former
constitution is that the new constitution protects citizenship rights in an ab-
solute manner while in the 1959 constitution these rights were bounded by
ordinary law.36 The constitution is “characterized (at least on paper) by limited
executive powers, parliamentary oversight, public accountability, checks and
balances and respect for human rights and the rule of law.”37
36 Biblech, Driss and Longo, “Citizenship in Post-Awakening Tunisia.”

37 Duncan Pickard, “Prospects for Implementing Democracy in Tunisia,” Mediterranean
Politics 19 (2014): 259–264.
The new constitution safeguards the freedom of the press, freedom of ex-
pression, assembly, and association that are considered by most Tunisians the
most important acquis of the revolution thus far. Freedom of association has
not only led to the creation of many new political parties but even more so to
the creation of thousands of new civil society organisations. The freedom of
the press has decriminalised defamation but is still in need of a general legal
framework or press code that would regulate an independent media landscape.
Women’s rights were not touched upon.38 The constitution refers to male and
female citizens that are equal before the law and Article 20 even speaks explic-
itly about gender equality. However, as the Personal Status Code of 1956 regu-
lates many aspects of family and women’s rights (marriage, divorce, paternity,
and inheritance) some contradictions still remain. While Tunisian women
have enjoyed many rights that protect them in relation to their spouses, they
still inherit half of what male sons do. This has led to harsh debates between
secularists and Islamists within the Constituent Assembly without resolving
the issue.
Even more controversial were the debates on religious freedoms. Article
6 declares that the state is the guardian of religion and of the “sacred.” The
state must guarantee freedom of conscience and belief; it must protect and
enable the free exercise of religious practices and ensure that mosques and
other places of worship remain politically neutral. The question, obviously, is
what exactly the sacred and its protection come to mean, as it is very possible
that the simple fact that one openly shows his or her unbelief could be seen
as a threat to the “sacred.” The article reflects the debates that Tunisians have
faced since Ben Ali’s departure, and while it clearly supports religious liberal-
ism, ambiguities or practical impediments remain. According to official state-
ments by the government, about 10 per cent of mosques are run by Salafist
preachers that do not recognise the tutelage of the Ministry of Religion or the
rest of the government. Also, Salafists have, on several occasions, used violence
against other Muslim currents as, for example, many popular Sufi shrines were
attacked and/or destroyed. For secular forces, the civil nature of the state
clearly encompasses the idea of a separation of the political and religious
spheres, while some Islamists tend instead to read the article as the require-
ment that politicians do not hold any religious office. For Ennahda there is no
contradiction in d efending the principle of separating State and Church while
38 On the conflictual relations between the older women’s movement and Islamist wom-
en’s movements see Loes Debuysere, “The Women’s Movement in Tunisia: Fault Lines
in a Post-Revolutionary Context,” Mediterranean Politics, online ahead of print, doi:
10.1080/13629395.2015.1092292.
144 Zemni
s imultaneously striving for a society that is imbued with religion and regulated
through Islamic norms.
What this succinct discussion of the constitution makes clear is that rather
than a generalised consensus, the constitution is more a compromise between
political formations that hold different conceptualisations of society. Tunisian-
ité might have formatted the constitutional process in such a way as to broker a
historical compromise between the nationalist elites and middle classes hith-
erto controlling the Tunisian polity and the conservative newer middle classes
tied to Ennahda. Salafists, mainly but certainly not exclusively represented
within the lower social strata, remained and remain largely outside the scope
of this new social contract. Tunisianité not only fostered the possibility of
dialogue leading to compromise but also served as a way to exclude. Salafism,
for example, while having a Tunisian reality on the ground and local histori-
cal roots, is more and more depicted as an imported religiosity that is not an
element of the Tunisian identity. The Tunisian constitution, like any constitu-
tion for that matter, not only serves to confer rights to citizens but also entails
some sort of closure that marginalises or excludes certain narratives, identi-
ties, or claims of parts of “the people.”39
The constitution of the people, then, should not be seen as a historical event,
as Näsström stresses,40 that once and for all defines what the people is, but
rather as an ongoing claim. The conflicts that still exist over what constitutes
the Tunisian people and thus over what citizenship means are still ongoing,
and it needs to be seen whether the constitution can serve as a platform to
democratically engage with these conflicts or rather as a constraining frame-
work making divergent claims impossible.
Conclusion: Inclusion and Exclusion Underneath Consensus?
With the legislative and presidential elections of November and December

2014 Tunisia seems to have succeeded in implementing political pluralism and
firmly enshrining citizenship civil, political, and economic rights in the newly
adopted constitution. However, the deadly terrorist attacks that hit the coun-
try have already led to the re-emergence of authoritarian reflexes. Just as in
the us and several European countries, the fight against terrorism has led to
the quick approval of a new anti-terrorism law that impinges on the p rivacy of
39 Stefano M. Torelli, Fabio Merone, and Francesco Cavatorta, “Salafism in Tunisia:

Challenges and Opportunities for Democratization,” Middle East Policy 19 (2012): 140–154.
40 Näsström, “The Legitimacy of the People,” 645.
the citizens as well as their general freedoms, and gives the police and other
security services ample powers without any transparent means to hold these
services accountable. Therefore, it should not come as a surprise that ru-
mours about the use of torture against presumed terrorists has become wide-
spread again. Nevertheless, the political compromise that was brokered has
changed the political rules of the game. While many Tunisian politicians and
civil society organisations support the harsh measures against terrorism and
presumed terrorists, many others are voicing their concern and demanding
the accountability of the state and its institutions. Unlike Ben Ali’s repression
against the Islamists in the early 1990s, today’s president and government are
constantly being criticised by watchdogs who want to defend the rule of law
and the rights of citizens. This is the natural consequence of the revolutionary
events that chased Ben Ali from power and installed a new political regime.
Undoubtedly, under the authoritarian rules of Bourguiba and Ben Ali the
state was the sole generator of a narrative of interclass national unity that was
based on a specific discourse of modernisation, development, and identity
that prohibited any alternative imagining of the political community. After
Ben Ali’s disappearance and the temporary emergence of the collective noun
“the people” as a political force, the discovery of a conflict-ridden society led to
political polarisation and issues pertaining to the important question of who
was/is the Tunisian people. The search for a common political language that
could preserve a shared political arena in which to debate the conflicts over
who “the people” are proved that the assumption that a hitherto-constituted
Tunisian ethnos would automatically lead to a demos of citizens was false or,
at least, insufficient.41 Citizenship rights that were heavily discussed within the
constitution-making process of the Constituent Assembly, as well as in civil
society organisations, made clear that different and often conflicting ideas of
how to legalise political subjectivities were widespread. The concept of tuni-
sianité served then as a unifying idea to bridge opposing and different views
on citizenship. It succeeded in brokering a political compromise that installs,
with the adoption of the constitution, political pluralism and a regime of rights
that are firmly embedded within universal conceptualisations of human rights.
However, with the constitution, a form of closure also emerges; i.e. a certain
definition of who does and who does not belong to the Tunisian nation. Main-
ly Salafists have, as they oppose the nascent legal and political order, based
on a religiously-inspired reading of what kind of relationship between state
and society, and between the individual and the state, should exist. Habermas
warns us that “(l)egal orders as wholes are also ‘ethnically imbued’ in that they
41 Sadiki, “The Search for Citizenship,” 508.

146 Zemni
interpret the universalistic content of the same constitutional principles in dif-

ferent ways, namely, against the background of the experiences that make up
national history and in light of a historic prevailing tradition, culture and form
of life.”42 Therefore, it remains to be seen whether tunisianité will engender a
tradition of political pluralism or rather serve as a new authoritarian discourse
on unity that hampers pluralism and diversity so as to pre-empt any alterna-
tive political project.
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chapter 5
Patronage and Democratic Citizenship in Morocco

James Sater
Introduction
Most political analysts and observers of Morocco’s political system agree that
together with clientelism, political and economic patronage has been at the
heart of Morocco’s post-independence political system. A common assertion
would further maintain that the presence of patronage networks is a strong
impediment to democratic citizenship, an assertion that this chapter aims
to investigate by analysing systems of patronage and their role in the events
surrounding Morocco’s version of the Arab spring. In scholarship on Morocco
from the 1990s, such patronage systems have been analysed within the frame-
work of “liberalised autocracies”1 and a recent comparative contribution on
the Maghreb has raised the interesting question as to why, among the North
African liberalised autocracies, Tunisia and Egypt were much more vulnerable
to mass mobilisation compared to Morocco and Algeria. A related focus is why
Morocco and Algeria were able to make arrangements with the contestants
without seriously eroding their power base.2
Taking these questions as a point of departure, I will argue in this chapter
that the Moroccan kingdom not only enjoyed more intrinsic legitimacy due
to religion and history than other societies in the Maghreb but that crucially,
it was also able to build new systems of patronage inside liberalised civil soci-
ety that offered opportunities for incremental political changes under the aus-
pices of the old, undemocratic regime. This has enabled the system to swiftly
move to counter any potential threats by issuing a new constitution in record
time, yet it has its origins in how civil society has been structured in networks
of patronage. Yet, while pointing out the continuity of clientelism and patron-
age and how this impedes democratic citizenship, it is equally important to
analyse and reveal some underlying shifts in patronage systems that allow for
incremental changes to occur. As I argue in this chapter, it has been within
1 Daniel Brumberg, “Democratization in the Arab World: The Trap of Liberalized Autocracy,”
Journal of Democracry 13 (2002): 56–68.
2 George Joffe, “The Arab Spring in North Africa: Origins and Prospects,” The Journal of North
African Studies 16 (2011): 511.

150 Sater
shifting zones of patronage that instances of political changes were initiated,

which allowed the state to reap the benefits of political propositions and con-
stantly reinforce its liberalised autocratic core.
This argument explains why the extra-ordinary February 20 Movement, Mo-
rocco’s country-wide protest network, was ultimately unable to challenge the
monarchical system, unlike similar movements in Tunisia and Egypt. It also
explains the characteristics of the coalition of those that were excluded from
patronage and that formed the basis of the February 20 Movement. Further-
more, examining such patronage networks aims to illustrate that a prevailing
argument about royal manoeuvring and ultimately autocracy, equating royal
tactics to “outfoxing” of the opposition misses an important point about politi-
cal structure and the issue of democratic citizenship.3 In addition to tactics, it
has been the structure of civil society towards the regime and its inclusion in
politically significant networks of patronage that severely hampered the ap-
peal of the February 20 Movement. While the February 20 Movement called for
country-wide mass protests in favour of truly democratic reforms, such politi-
cally significant networks of patronage focused on the monarchical initiative
to draft a new constitution that would give Morocco another veneer of demo-
cratic governance. The focus of this paper therefore aims to fill a lacunae in
research on liberalised autocracies post Arab spring. As Joffe explains,
We need to understand the processes by which precursor movements,

trapped within liberalized autocracy consensus, were able to overturn it
by breaking through the constraints it imposed to become social move-
ments capable of contesting regime legitimacy and regime control.4
One aspect of recent research on the February 20 Movement, inspired by so-

cial movement theory, has been its framing strategies as a way of overcoming
constraints that the liberalised autocracy consensus imposed on the scope of
contestation.5 From the above focus it also appears useful to analyse shift-
ing patronage systems to explain the relative ease with which the regime was
able to retain control, thereby avoiding challenges to its authority that would
have made concessions less effective than they were. Yet, while part of this
argument relies on the broadening of public debate and the inclusion of new
3 Ahmed Benchemsi, “Morocco: Outfoxing the Opposition,” Journal of Democracy 23 (2012):

57–69.
4 Joffe, “The Arab Spring,” 517.
5 Anja Hoffmann and Christoph König, “Scratching the Democratic Façade: Framing Strategies
of the 20 February Movement,” Mediterranean Politics 18 (2013): 1–22.
Patronage And Democratic Citizenship In Morocco 151
groups as significant networks of patronage, I also aim to suggest that the abil-
ity to oppose from outside of patronage systems have significantly shrunk in
recent years, leaving some labour unions, fringe Islamists, and unemployed
graduates as the only organised groups. This is because Morocco’s specificity
partially consists of an increasing royal domination over both a political party
system and the media, through which it diminished the formerly more institu-
tionalised, if limited party opposition. While new social media appear to pro-
vide for an emergent “subaltern” public sphere, as observed by Maghraoui and
Benchemsi in recent contributions,6 this chapter suggests that the unstruc-
tured and virtual nature of such social media activism has had little impact
on the political processes initiated by the Arab Spring. In fact, social media, by
making politically motivated activism individualised and unprotected, made
individuals quite vulnerable to legal prosecution. The persecution of Facebook
authors and online rappers, such as Fouad Mourtada and Mourad Belghawat
are cases in point.
Patronage, Clientelism and Democratic Citizenship

In his discussion of patronage in this volume, Robert Springborg distinguishes
between deep and instrumental clientelism in the Middle East. Deep clien-
telism has traditionally come to be most associated with culture in the Middle
East, particularly in rural areas where individuals and groups relate to each
other through the exchange of political, social, and (potentially) militant loy-
alty for material wealth.7 This type of clientelism is well-developed in weak
states, uncertain and transitional economic markets, and remote rural areas,
in which there is a heightened sense of vulnerability vis-à-vis changes and cen-
tralised politics especially in the early periods of state and nation-building.8
In contrast to such cultural and organic clientelism, state centred approaches
have since the 1970s focused on how state elites and modernising autocrats,
used state resources to create alliances and, consequently, their own clienteles
and networks of patronage, often in opposition to traditional patrons whose
6 Driss Maghraoui,, “Constitutional Reform in Morocco: Between Consensus and Subaltern

Politics,” The Journal of North African Politics 16 (2011): 679–699. Ahmed Benchemsi, “Don’t
be Fooled by Appearances, Liberal Values are Spreading in the Arab World,” (The Middle
East Institute, December 9, 2014), accessible at http://www.mei.edu/content/article/
don%E2%80%99t-be-fooled-appearances-liberal-values-are-spreading-arab-world.
7 Hisham Sharabi, Neopatriarchy: A Theory of Distorted Change in Arab Society (Oxford and
New York, Oxford University Press, 1992).
8 An argument that Lisa Anderson developed in her theory of monarchism. See Lisa Anderson,
“Dynasts and Nationalists: Why Monarchies Survive,” in Middle East Monarchies: The Chal-
lenge of Modernity, ed. Joseph Kostinger (Boulder, Co. Lynne Rienner, 2000), 53–70.
152 Sater
resources were consequently challenged. Such clientelism has been called in-
strumental. It operates outside of organic social relationships; instead elites
use it to achieve particular objectives.9
A related theoretical question concerns the impact of such patronage on
the development of democratic citizenship. A substantive understanding of
citizenship beyond formal voting and election typical of liberalised autocra-
cies involves an active involvement in political decision-making and the ability
to contribute to the evolution of the polity through non-formal means, i.e. in
civil society and the public. Both instrumental and deep clientelism prevent, at
least in part, the development of democratic citizenship, the first by controlling
public activities and shaping them according to the political elite’s interest, the
second by privatising and monetising the relationship between political elites
and citizens, turning the latter into a relationship between clients and subjects.
While this tendency to transform citizenship relationships may be adverse for
the development of democratic citizenship, patronage networks may also be
a source of political access to the decision-making process, ultimately provid-
ing a source of socio-political cohesion that can be quite beneficial for a more
dynamic, and inclusive political system.10 While this debate may be primarily
theoretical in nature, this empirical chapter aims to investigate this issue and
evaluate if a more positive view on patronage and democratic citizenship is
warranted.
This chapter will first discuss the post-colonial development of patronage
systems, before engaging in a discussion of two cases of political patronage:
women members of parliament and civil society’s inclusion in political par-
ties. The purpose of these case studies is to show a two-sided argument about
how such patronage has prevented the development of democratic citizen-
ship in Morocco. On one hand, the inclusion of new groups and the exten-
sion of patronage has allowed for a larger degree of real and perceived public
freedom, and for more inclusion of a large number of minorities in the polity.
Arguably, the protection of individual rights and therefore the potential for
democratic citizenship has greatly increased. On the other hand, the inclusion
of new groups and shifting patronage has increased the stakes that a larger
number of politically significant actors have in the monarchical system and
the liberalised autocracy it represents. Therefore, one of the particularities of
Morocco’s liberalised autocracy has been that the February 20 Movement was
unable to form a broad alliance that reached into political and civil society that
could have realised the potential for democratic citizenship.
9 See chapter 15 by Robert Springborg in this volume.

10 Ibid.
Citizenship and Patronage in the Post-Colonial Moroccan State
Scholarship on Morocco has long emphasised the neo-patrimonial aspects of

the country’s political system in which clientelism, paternalism, and the se-
lect use of coercion served to divide a diverse traditional, technocratic, and
modernising elite. Centred on the monarchical institution and its network
epitomised in the Moroccan term makhzen, the state has been able to develop
multiple networks of patron-client relations that encompass political, social,
and economic actors,11 to the extent that the post-colonial state has become a
structure that has created a field for alliance building for the King. Through-
out the post-colonial period the King has maintained a large number of client
groups by using appointments to high-ranking positions in the civil service,
or in the armed forces as leverage. While he often delegated this authority to
ministers and councillors, such delegation of political authority is similar to
the distribution of economic rewards, in that it fulfils the purpose of keep-
ing a secular clientele under control.12 Such patron-client networks have been
compounded by a paternalistic political discourse. As observed by Waterbury,
“the King consistently tries to promote the notion that all segments of the
élite constitute a large family, subject to political differences, but essentially
united in approval of the direct role of the monarchy in politics.”13 In public
addresses, King Hassan ii, the father of the current King Mohamed vi, fre-
quently addressed the people as “my dear children” and many traditional po-
litical practices, such as the hand kiss or the traditional slaughtering of a ram
during Eid Al Adha, evoke paternalistic relations between the monarch and
the people.14
11 See for instance: William I. Zartman, Morocco: Problems of New Power (New York: Oceana,
1971); Political Elites in Arab North Africa, ed. William I. Zartman (London: Longman, 1982);
The Political Economy of Morocco, ed. William I. Zartman (New York: Praeger Publishers,
1987); Jean Leca, “Réformes Institutionnelles et Légitimation du Pouvoir au Maghreb,” in
Développements politiques au Maghreb: Aménagements institutionnels et processus élector-
aux, ed. Jean Leca (Paris: cnrs, 1979). See also Jean Leca and Yves Schemeil, “Clientelisme
et patrimonialisme dans le monde Arabe,” International Political Science Review 4 (1983):
455–495.
12 John Waterbury, The Commander of the Faithful. The Moroccan Political Elite: A Study of
Segmented Politics (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970), 152.
13 Waterbury, Commander of the Faithful, 149.
14 For a detailed analysis of various cultural practices and power relationship in Morocco,
see In the Shadow of the Sultan: Culture, Power, and Politics in Morocco, ed. Rahma Bourqia
and Susan Gilson Miller (Cambridge, ma: Harvard Center for Middle Eastern Studies,
1999).
154 Sater
This type of paternalistic patronage has been reinforced with the help of
the security forces. Hassan ii, as Crown Prince already the head of the Royal
Armed Forces, extensively built up the security forces, which rendered the state
a model of neo-patrimonial rule. In popular belief and culture, the monarchi-
cal state has been associated to Dar al-Mulk, or house of coercion. Questioning
of the monarch’s role and championing the sovereignty of the people, even
if nominally legal under Morocco’s post-independence constitutions, could
easily lead to prison sentences. In 1959–60, the former Prime Minister Abder-
rahman Youssoufi (1998–2002) was imprisoned. Yet, coercion was never used
alone: the King also had control over the judiciary and was himself the judge
of last resort (if only through his regular amnesties). This rendered him, in the
words of Waterbury, not just the highest religious figure but also the “dispenser
of justice.” Political opponents, after having been condemned, could always
hope to be pardoned by the King in order to be re-integrated into the “national
family.” Yet, as King Hassan famously warned:
If they miss the opportunity, if they persist in error and believe that clem-
ency is a door open widely to them at all moments, I warn them against
the unfortunate consequences of their poor intentions and manoeuvres,
and I call their attention to the fact that Our clemency is equalled only
by Our firmness.15
The duality of “punishments” and “clemency” went beyond sticks and carrots,
as they not only underscored the discretionary powers of the King, but also
served to make opposition strategies ineffective, leading to internal divisions
and splitting opposition political parties.16 This can be considered the core of
Moroccan instrumental patronage and a unique feature of its political system,
as divisive (and changing) elements of Moroccan society could strengthen the
role of the absolute monarch as “referee,” the desired role of the King. The King
is, in the words of Jean-Francois Clement, “the center of a concentric cybernetic
15 King Hassan, quoted in Waterbury, The Commander of the Faithful, 150.

16 According to Susan E. Waltz, “The quality of arbitrariness frequently attached to both
reprisals and measures of clemency have served to reinforce an object lesson about the
King’s raw powers. Disjointed reprisals and unexpected amnesties throw players off bal-
ance even as they underscore the discretionary – and thus enhanced – powers of the
monarch.” Susan E. Waltz, “Interpreting Political Reform in Morocco,” in In the Shadow of
the Sultan: Culture, Power, and Politics in Morocco, ed. Rahma Bourqia and Susan Gilson
Miller (Cambridge, ma: Harvard Center for Middle Eastern Studies, 1999), 291.
system.”17 Abdallah Hammoudi argues these parallel networks weaken institu-

tional structures, such as political parties and trade unions.
In this postcolonial order a civilian network emerged, alongside the

makhzen and the military network. The king acted in such a way as to
maintain rivalry between the networks and to appear as both indispens-
able mediator and unique source of favors and prebends, which were be-
stowed as rewards for political service.18
In the formation of such networks, socio-economic and traditional catego-

ries such as rural, urban, orthodox ʿulama, Sufi groups, zawiya and brother-
hoods, tariqas, caids, marabouts, chorfas, Arab and Berber linguistic groups,
and other tribal networks play a very important role. In return for their alle-
giance, favoured groups were economically and politically empowered. First
and foremost were two culturally and socially very different client groups: rural
notables and military officers.19
The role of these groups is seen in how goods are distributed. Recovered
colonial land was distributed to rural notables and officers, landownership
freed from tax payments was later extended to those military members with
investments in Western Sahara, and large state owned companies were run
by favoured clients. The early period of public sector expansion offered many
opportunities for royal gifts, and such gifts had the effect of depoliticising an
active political opposition and replacing parties with networks and clans.20
Along with the bayʿa, the religious-traditional oath of allegiance, this served
the purpose of disempowering the Nationalist movement (organised in the
Istiqlal party and the National Union of Popular Forces, unfp). In fact, rural
notables were regarded as the “security group” – i.e. the basis of the Moroccan
monarchy’s political authority. As early as in the 1963 elections, and as late as in
the foundation of the Party of Authenticity and Modernity (pam Party) in 2008
through the rural Rhamna district’s election of the King’s direct proxy, Fouad
17 Jean-Francois Clement quoted in Bahgat Korany, “Monarchical Islam with a Democratic

Veneer: Morocco,” in Political Liberalisation and Democratisation in the Arab World. Com-
parative Experiences vol. 2, ed. Bahgat Korany, Rex Brynen and Paul Noble (Boulder: Lynne
Rienner Publishers, 1998), 172.
18 Abdallah Hammoudi, Master and Disciple: The Cultural Foundation of Moroccan Authori-
tarianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 33.
19 Driss Ben Ali, “Changement de pacte social et Ccntinuité de l’ordre politique au Maroc,”
in Changement politiques au Maghreb, ed. Michel Camau (Paris: Centre National de la
Recherche Scientifique, 1991), 53.
20 Hammoudi, Master and Disciple, 33.
156 Sater
Ali Ben Himma, has the proximity of rural interest groups to the government
been a remarkable feature.21
Given the importance of such systems of patronage, and the relatively sta-
ble socio-economic and ideological consensus built up around the king, op-
position politics and, more broadly, political citizenship has been a key field
in which, compared to other Middle East countries limited political activism
has been possible. Yet, the political field has had the characteristic of being
“defused,” in that the central position of the King, as well as the distribution
of economic resources, remained out of public debates. Ironically, the more
politics was stable and consequently, “defused,”22 the more was it possible for
the King to engage in sometimes meaningful reforms with regards to citizen-
ship, thereby broadening the amount of permissible public debate.23 For ex-
ample, the 1990s saw under Hassan ii a significant push towards the effective
promotion of human rights and the release of hundreds of political prison-
ers, precisely because key political opponents, such as the Socialist Union of
Popular Forces (usfp), stopped claiming electoral alternation of governments
and democratic citizenship. Instead, they contended with King Hassan’s of-
fer of alternance that was controlled by the King, which corresponded to little
more than an institutionalised alternation of royal patronage systems. As a
result, the so-called opposition to the King ceased its oppositional character
and joined the royal system of patronage and participated in essentially tech-
nocratic governments.24
Citizenship and Patronage under Mohamed vi
When Mohamed vi succeeded his father Hassan ii in July 1999, he inherited

Hassan ii’s master plan of 1998. Under that plan, alternance, the former op-
position or Koutla (the two socialist parties usfp and Party of Progress and
Socialism (pps), together with the nationalist-conservative Istiqlal Party) was
21 Rémy Levau: Le fellah marocain: Defenseur du trône (Paris: Presse de la Fondation Natio-
nale de Science Politique, 1985).
22 A term originally coined by Mohamed Tozy, “Représentation/intercession: Les enjeux de
pouvoir dans les ‘champs politiques désamorcés’ au Maroc,” in Annuaire Afrique du Nord
28 (1989): 153–168. See also Abdesalam Maghraoui and G. Denoeux, “King Hassan’s Strat-
egy of Political Dualism,” Middle East Policy 5 (1998): 104–127.
23 See Maghraoui and Denoeux, “King Hassan’s Strategy.”
24 See Abdesalam Maghraoui, “Depolitization in Morocco,” Journal of Democracy 13 (2002):
24–32.
included in the system of patronage. The consensus that the country’s political
leadership developed continued to include partial political participation of
the elite in exchange for support to Mohamed vi leadership, thereby achiev-
ing an effective alliance through which the bourgeoisie’s and the monarch’s
long-term survival vis-à-vis the increasingly popular Islamist parties would be
guaranteed. It is against this background that Mohamed vi announced, at the
beginning of his reign in November 1999, a “New Concept of Authority” which
included civil, economic, and social components. This indicated the monar-
chy’s willingness to make further civil rights concessions. This promise of the
New Concept of Authority partially materialised three years later when in 2002
the Islamic family code, Moudawana, was comprehensively reformed, giving
women similar rights to men in the area of divorce and access to marriage.
This inclusiveness with regards to women was further compounded in a new
electoral code, in which women were initially granted 10 percent of reserved
seats, consisting of 30 seats in addition to the 295 member lower house of the
parliament. The number female representatives was increased to 60 members
in the 2011 constitution.
Such inclusion and expansion of citizenship continued to mark Mohamed
vi rule over the first eight years. In 2007, the age limit of first time voters was re-
duced from 21 to 18 years, the Islamist Party of Justice and Development (pjd)
was allowed to field candidates in all electoral districts – whereas before the
Moroccan ministry of interior informally approved only a select number of
Islamist candidates. The press, first and foremost the two weekly Francophone
journals Le Journal Hebdomadaire, and TelQuel, as well as their Arabic coun-
terparts Assahifa and Nichane¸ pushed into new journalistic fields and began
to address questions of corruption and human rights abuses. In addition, they
frequently ran independent and sometimes upsetting editorial opinions dis-
cussing sensitive topics, such as the Western Sahara issue, the army, and the
monarch’s personal wealth. While the press has frequently been described as
sensationalist, it is clear that increasing the scope of political citizenship and
the increasing freedom of the journalistic market were signs of the monarch’s
shifting alignment, as well as signs of the continued need for the King to share
power with members of the former opposition.25
Yet, prior to the profound changes triggered by the Arab Spring in Tunisia,
there have been three factors that reversed the power sharing formula and
25 Moshe Gershovich, “The ‘New Press’ and Free Speech under Mohamed vi,” in Contempo-
rary Morocco: State, Politics, and Society under Mohamed vi, ed. Bruce Maddy-Weitzman
and Daniel Zisenwine, (Abingdon, Routledge, 2012), 93–108.
158 Sater
decreased the scope for electoral accountability and democratic citizenship.

First, the electoral gains that the Islamist group Justice and Development
Party (pjd) achieved rendered the alliance with the secular, pro-monarch, so-
cialist “opposition” increasingly meaningless. Second, the King significantly
reinforced his political authority throughout the 2000s, whilst the former op-
position lost credibility, even rendering these parties a liability for the King.
Third, his economic influence over the private sector through the royal-held
Omnium Nord Africaine (ona), as well as monarchical control in para-state
organisations such as the Hassan ii Fund, significantly strengthened economic
patronage and rendered the state stronger. This can be contrasted with the end
of the 1990s when, inter alia, Hassan ii gave in to demands by political parties
due to intense economic difficulties and a vibrant private sector that was or-
ganised in the entrepreneur’s association cgem.
Consequently, whilst the first phase of Mohamed vi rule (1999–2007) was
marked by the increasing inclusion of long-term political opponents and civil
society actors, such as Driss Benzekri, in a process of human rights reconcili-
ation through the Justice and Reconciliation Commission (which culminated
in the full participation of the pjd in the 2007 parliamentary election), the
second period prior to the 2011 events (2007–11) were marked by an increasing
exclusion.
By forcing the closure of Le Journal Hebdomadaire in 2010 and by forcing
leading journalists such as Aboubakr Jamai, Ali Amar, Ahmed Benchemsi into
exile, by accusing them and their journals of royal defamation in Moroccan
courts, the once vibrant press increasingly was stifled.
Second, the private sector and with it the employer’s federation Confé-
dération Générale des Entreprises du Maroc (cgem) became increasingly
under direct royal control. Elections to the cgem’s presidency had become
a competitive, para-political field in the 1990s, where opposition to the state’s
economic policies and autocratic practices was most commonly expressed.26
The election of Moulay Hafid Elalamy in 2006 to the presidency of the cgem
was a turning point in this respect. The former ceo of Compagnie Afric-
aine d’Assurances (caa), which was owned by the royal holding ona, and a
member of two royal associations, the Mohamed v Foundation for Solidarity
presided over by Mohamed vi, and the Lalla Salma Foundation for the Fight
Against Cancer, his presidency marked the beginning of royal hegemony over
26 See Maryam Catusse, L’Entrée en politique des entrepreneurs au Maroc (PhD diss., Uni-
versité de Droit, d’Economie, et de Sciences d’Aix-Marseille, Institut d’Etudes Politiques
d’Aix-en-Provence, 1999).
the employer’s federation. Not surprisingly, in 2013 he also became the techno-
cratic, i.e. non-partisan, Minister of Industry and Commerce.
Third, the monarchy effectively penalised the usfp – a member of the
2002–2007 government coalition – and its more radical wing after calls for a
constitutional reform were supported by politicians at the head of the usfp
parliamentary group, Driss Lachguer. The electoral defeat of the usfp in 2007,
whilst not directly engineered by the King, was nevertheless linked to the
party’s marginalisation as a junior partner in the 2002–07 government (it was
refused the premiership).
Fourth, by side-lining established political parties, including the usfp,
through the creation of a new royal party in 2008, the earlier mentioned pam,
the monarchy was able to actively recruit aspiring, technocratic new-comers
into a new system of patronage outside of both usfp and Istiqlal. All of this
continued to be based on the monarchy’s rural power base, not just evidenced
by Fouad El Himma’s running in a rural province of the Kingdom in 2007, but
also by continuously gerrymandering the rural vote and loyal towns in con-
stituencies with variable electors and members.27
As I argued elsewhere, the increasing royal domination of the political
sphere since 2007 reflected the monarch’s increasing strength, as he remained
the uncontested leader in juxtaposition to what is perceived as a corrupt elec-
toral system.28 Established political parties were viewed as corrupt and en-
dowed with little political trust as evidenced by public opinion surveys and
exit polls. Such polls also indicate that the ineffective party system was con-
trasted with the King’s energetic projects, especially his land-mark National
Initiative for Human Development. This was launched in 2005 and aimed to
improve the standard of living among Morocco’s poorest population groups.
Accompanied by a massive public relations campaign, the initiative saw the
King inaugurating new projects around the country almost on a daily basis
during much of 2005 and 2006. Riding a wave of popularity, he was proclaimed
King of the Poor and in a (banned) 2007 survey of Moroccan political leaders
published by the French newspaper Le Monde his approval rating was above
90 percent.29
27 James Sater, “Elections and Authoritarian Rule in Morocco,” Middle East Journal 63 (2009):
381–400.
28 James Sater, “New Wine in Old Bottles: Political Parties under Mohamed vi,” in Contempo-
rary Morocco: State, Politics, and Society under Mohamed vi, ed. Bruce Maddy-Weitzman
and Daniel Zisenwine, (Abingdon, Routledge: 2012), 9–23.
29 TelQuel, “Le peuple juge son roi,” cited in Le Monde, August 3, 2009.
160 Sater
Rearranging Instrumental Patronage – The Case of Women

The inclusion of women in networks of patronage is particularly revealing of
what constitutes a Moroccan particularity – a liberalised civil society that co-
exists with very efficient systems of patronage. Upon his ascendance to the
throne in July 1999, Mohamed vi made statements in favour of increasing
women’s rights, in particular with regards to reforming the family code, mou-
dawana. On August 20 he declared:
How can we expect to achieve progress and prosperity when women,

which constitute half of society, have their interests taken away (bafoué);
when the rights with which our holy religion has endowed them, to make
them equal to men, are being ignored? These are rights that correspond
to their noble mission, rights that protect them against all injustice or vi-
olence of which they may fall victim. This [legal injustice] has happened
even if they have achieved a level where they can successfully compete
with men, in the sciences as well as in the workplace.30
This initiative to include women has not been without societal pressure. In
fact, since the early 1990s, women’s groups have been increasingly vocal, seek-
ing independence from political parties which had attempted to control their
political activities. As early as 1997, women’s rights groups drafted an Action
Plan for the Integration of Women in Development, an initiative of the World
Bank in collaboration with the Moroccan government. It included the most
important women’s rights demand: the reform of the Islamic-conservative
moudawana. After it became public in 1999, a massive protest led by Islamists
in summer 2000 led to its withdrawal, and a new committee drafted its replace-
ment behind closed doors from November 2000 to 2003 without public partici-
pation. Crucially, after a series of terror acts by radical Islamists in Casablanca
in May 2003, the reform of the Family Code was made public and was quickly
passed in June 2003 much to the satisfaction of women’s rights activists for
whom this signified an important political victory.
At about the same time, women’s rights activists started to work together
with members of political parties in order to introduce a female quota for the
upcoming 2002 parliamentary election. Such a direct change in the political
landscape fell on the monarch’s very receptive ears, as he was seeking to in-
troduce the above mentioned New Concept of Authority through which he
30 Cited in James Sater, “Changing Politics from Below? Women Parliamentarians in Mo-
rocco,” Democratization 14 (August 2007): 729.
could re-arrange political alliances to his own need and vision. Changes to the
composition of Morocco’s powerless parliament could increase both domestic
and international support for Morocco’s monarchy.31 Yet, it is also important
to remember that throughout the 1990s, Hassan ii’s formula of alternance from
above, i.e. alternance decreed by the monarch and intrinsically linked to royal
patronage, stood in tension with a rival conception of alternance by the bal-
lot, i.e. as an outcome of free and fair election and the exercise of democratic
citizenship. Consequently, increasing the number of women in parliament and
government could, together with changes to the Family Code, visibly strength-
ened the modernist branch of the kingdom’s legitimacy and support network,
and included newcomers into the political system.
Partially due to such political considerations, the brief campaign organised
by the Network of Women in Political Parties during the spring 2002 electoral
reform was quite successful. In the midst of the first electoral reform after Mo-
hamed vi’s accession to the throne, women called for a 30 per cent quota, as
according to the activists, a real impact only becomes noticeable at this level.
As existing male members of parliament would not have agreed to a quota that
may have come at the expense of their own seats, the quota that was intro-
duced extended the number of deputies to thirty women, not 30 per cent, from
295 to 325 members, and delegated to an independent national list in which
women would compete against each other using a proportional system of rep-
resentation called the National List. Interestingly, the fact that women were
selected onto this national list was the result of a simple oral promise by party
leaders, what Moroccans quite ironically called a “gentlemen’s agreement.” The
official explanation for this was that a law that would institute a real quota
would violate the principle of gender equality and non-discrimination as en-
shrined in article 8 of the 1996 constitution.32 This relegation also meant that
women were under intense pressure as other politically under-represented
groups, such as younger generations, scientists, or linguistic minorities, could
also be included in this quota/reserved list.
What can be considered a major political victory for women that has had
its origin outside of established political party networks, however, quickly en-
tered the realm of established patronage systems inside political parties. This
is because selection onto the national list, whilst not just being a result of a
31 Guillain Deneoux and Laurent Desfosses, “Rethinking the Moroccan Parliament: The
Kingdom’s Legislative Development Initiative,” The Journal of North African Studies 12
(2007): 79–108.
32 Constitution of Morocco, Kingdom of Morocco, 1996.
162 Sater
“gentlemen’s agreement,” also increased the dependency of women on party

leaderships. Ironically, whilst locally women faced difficulties due to informal,
deep patronage and voter’s general disbelief in women as effective leaders in
a male-dominated political world, nationally women entered the realm of po-
litical networks that increased their dependency on instrumental patronage.
Complexity of Deep Patronage among Female MPs
Whilst patronage is difficult to detect among a body of politicians, some cues

can be taken from socio-economic data as well as from information about re-
cruitment practices and political socialisation. A survey that this author con-
ducted among the first cohort of women parliamentarians in 2007 indicates a
very high degree of educational achievements, with about 50 percent holding
doctoral degrees from various national and international universities. Whilst
family support may be indicative of these women’s middle class background, a
reported annual household income superior to usd 48,000 of about 50 percent
of these women MPs in fact indicates not just middle class background, but
membership in Morocco’s political elite. After all, in the mid-2000s Morocco’s
gnp per capita was approximately usd 1,200. In addition, the periods of po-
litical socialisation and apprenticeship in political parties can be considered
quite extensive: almost two-thirds of the 2002–2007 women elected in parlia-
ment had been active in party politics for over 20 years, and only one-third en-
tered politics after 1980. Such political socialisation and apprenticeship extend
to non-party activities: activities in women’s rights associations are very com-
mon and about two-thirds report to hold presidencies of various local wom-
en’s rights associations. Through such networks, political patronage obtained
through membership in political parties and, since 2002, in parliament, can
effectively be extended to civil society organisations. Asked about the role that
politics plays in their families, nearly all women surveyed considered political
activism a family tradition. Most often, either father or husband has been ac-
tive in politics, illustrating the strong family ties that underlie many political
parties.33
Such family ties may not in and of themselves count as patronage, yet the
effects are quite strong on political party activism. In contrast to many other
33 James Sater, “Changing Politics”; James Sater, “Reserve Seats, Patriarchy and Patronage
in Morocco,” in The Impact of Gender Quotas, ed. J. Piscopo, (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2012), 72–87.
countries in which women, once they entered the parliament, start to establish
networks of female MPs based on practical and strategic gender interests,34
similar attempts sponsored by the us National Democratic Institute (ndi)
have proven ineffective, in spite of the lack of ideological differences between
the political parties – except for the Islamist pjd party.
However, the lack of ideological orientation may also mean that political
activities are more quickly absorbed by political patronage, such as recruiting
individuals as candidates to both local lists and women’s reserved list. In both
cases, approval is necessary from an internal “candidate commission” that is
often handpicked by party bosses. As a consequence, there have been quite
a number of women parliamentarians who were relatives of party bosses to
the extent that female MPs have begun to describe such candidates as “para-
chuted” onto party lists, as they have suddenly appeared out of nowhere onto
the top tiers of women’s lists. Outside of the national list at the local, multi-
member constituency level, the patronage of the party nomination is in prin-
ciple only effective for relatively new and “fresh” candidates. Locally powerful
women may switch party allegiances if the political party refuses to nominate
her over a (male) candidate. However, to the author’s knowledge, this has only
happened once in 2002 in the case of Fatna El Khiel. Yet, even this locally pow-
erful woman entered the 2011 parliament in the more “orderly” way, i.e. on the
national list to which she was (s)elected.
The dependency on party leadership, and thereby patronage networks, can
be further detected by comparing the list of women MPs elected in 2002, 2007,
and 2011. Of the 35 members that were elected in 2002, only about 50 percent
(18 out of 35) made it into the 2007–2012 parliament. A closer look at the num-
bers reveals that in two parliamentary parties, the Istiqlal and the Popular
Movement, all female 2002–2007 parliamentarians were “re-elected.” In con-
trast, not one single female parliamentarian of the Socialist Union of Popular
Forces was “re-elected” to the 2007–2012 parliament. Officially, the reason was
that the party tried to be more “democratic” by “choosing” different women at
the heads of the lists – away from women such as Fatima Belmoudden, Fet-
toum Koudama, or Rachida Benmessaoud, towards Salwa Karkri Belakziz, Aï-
cha Lekhmass, and Latifa Jbabdi.35 Implicitly, it appears that with a new head
34 Najma Chowdhury, et al., “Redefining Politics: Patterns of Womens’ Political Engagement

from a Global Perspective,” in Women and Politics Worldwide, ed. Nelson, Barbara and Na-
jma Chowdhury (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), 18.
35 Mohamed Boudarham, “La liste nationale: La discrimination positive divise les
femmes,” Aujourd’hui Le Maroc, June 22, 2007, accessed at http://www.agadirnet.com/
news-actualites/details_listes-nationales-la-discrimination-positive-divise-les-femmes
_3862.html.
164 Sater
of the party, Mohamed El Yazghi in 2002–2007, the party leadership activates

different patronage networks from those that prevailed under the preced-
ing head of the party, Abderrahman Youssoufi. Simlarly, with the leadership
change from Mohamed El Yazghi to Driss Lachguer after 2007, Latifa Jbabdi, as
well as Aicha Lekhmass no longer figured on the head of the lists in 2011, and
gave way to other women. Quite ironically, whilst Jbabdi was elected locally,
Driss Lachguer replaced her himself in the traditional pro-usfp constituency
of Rabat in the 2011 election.
On the other hand, it may not be a coincidence that in 2007, both the Istiqlal
and the Popular Movement reappointed all their women MPs to the national
list. After all, they did not experience a leadership change between 2002 and
2007. Yet, after the controversial appointment of the Istiqlali Abbas El Fassi
to head the government in 2007, and his loss of the office of secretary-general
of the Istiqlal party (and failed attempts to include another member of the El
Fassi clan, Abdelwahed El Fassi, in the party leadership), only one out of the
previous seven female members continued in the 2011–15 legislature. Hence
again, the change in leadership brought with it a different network of alliances
into elected office.36
This illustrates the particularities of Morocco’s political party system in
which party membership interlinks with tribal, kinship, ethnic and regional
loyalties. Even if women present themselves not on the national list where
direct patronage seems more important, but at the constituency level where
local support is more crucial (and chances of winning in a male dominated so-
ciety), the process of nominating local candidates also remains monopolised
by the party leadership. In 2007, the Socialist usfp only presented three fe-
male candidates at the top of their local lists for Morocco’s 92 constituencies.37
Overall, the number of women that were listed as candidates in the election
to the lower house only marginally increased from 266 to 269, out of a total
candidate pool that increased from 5865 to 6691.38 Thus, the actual percentage
of women listed by political parties as candidates dropped from 4.5 percent to
4 percent, during a period when major reforms increased women’s rights quite
36 Lists of MPs elected to Morocco’s parliament have been obtained from www.maroc.ma.
Accessed 22 February 2015.
37 Boudarham, “La Liste Nationale.”
38 Boutheina Griba, “Renforcement du leadership féminine et de la participation des
femmes à la vie politique et au processus de prise des décisions en Algérie, au Maroc et en
Tunisie” (Tunis and Santo Domingo, un-instraw and Centre de la Femme Arabe pour
la Formation et la Recherche, cawtar, 2009). http://www.womenpoliticalparticipation.
org/upload/publication/publication1.pdf (accessed September 2, 2009), 56.
substantially. Not surprisingly, just one usfp woman was elected on the local
list, while the number of locally, directly elected women dropped from five to
four, before increasing to eight (out of a total of 295) in 2011.
All the above took place in a national context in which an informal quota
also includes government appointees who are, however, directly selected by
the monarch and his advisors. Here, the lack of autonomous constituencies
is an important feature of appointees and increased the level of patronage. In
the aftermath of the 2007 election, five out of twenty-two full ministries were
headed by women, partially reflecting the nationalist-leftist coalition govern-
ment with a larger number of second-tier politicians: energy, health, sport,
culture, and social development. In 2011, this number was reduced to two out
of twenty-four. It appears that with the pjd (Islamist) dominated government,
the competition among its more secular coalition partners for a reduced num-
ber of ministerial positions increased and therefore pushed women candidates
out, leaving the lesser visible ministries, those for craftsmanship affairs and
women’s affairs, to the two female ministers.
Instrumental Patronage, Civil Society and the Authenticity and

Modernity Party
While women’s involvement in politics have become an issue of deep patron-

age throughout political parties and the monarch, a more formal source of pa-
tronage has been the creation of the Authenticity and Modernity Party (pam)
in 2008. Arguably, a process of monarchical patronage has thereby immunised
Morocco from any serious repercussions of the Arab spring, as a large number
of civil society actors have become quasi- members of the political system. The
process of its creation, from a broad-based political alliance named Movement
of All Democrats (mtd) headed by the closest friend of the King, Fouad Ali
El Himma, was preceded by important mutations in the composition of Mo-
rocco’s political elite of which the reforms of women’s representation and legal
rights were an important aspect. More important, perhaps, was the treatment
of Morocco’s past, with its severe human rights abuses, and the attempt by the
monarch to distinguish his rule from that of his father, Hassan ii. To this end, a
large number of civil society groups were invited to participate in new organ-
isations, such as the Equity and Reconciliation Commission (ier), and to work
on a large number of reports and public hearings of those who had suffered
from past abuses, stipulated compensations for victims and included particu-
lar compensations for female victims, as well as issued recommendations for
legal reforms including increased accountability and important constitutional
166 Sater
changes and a clear separation of governmental powers.39 To allow such proj-

ects meant that the first eight years of Mohamed vi’s rule became defined by
his reformist spirit, of which Fouad El Himma was one of the prime architects.
In addition to human rights oriented patronage, economic patronage rein-
forced the central position of the monarchical system in two other ways: First,
the King successfully co-opted the human development theme by launching
in 2005 the above mentioned National Initiative for Human Development
(indh). Second, privatisation campaigns reinforced the strength of the King’s
private sector equity holdings, and made preferential business partnerships
dependent on political support. In fact, the period of economic privatisa-
tion also had the effect of strengthening parallel state institutions, such as
Mohamed v Foundation for Solidarity and the Hassan ii Fund. These were
financed through the revenues that were generated by the privatisation cam-
paigns, staffed by loyal kingsmen and – women, made them, not the partisan
ministries of economy or development, the primary institutions responsible
for the implementation of the indh.
In private business the King’s pivotal position was reinforced through his
private ownership of large supermarket chains (Marjane, Acima), banks (At-
tarijawafa) vegetable oil producers (Lesieurs), and dairy products (Centrale
Laitière). As in many other Middle East countries, royal economic patronage
over the middle class has also been strengthened through control over private
sector associations, such as the aforementioned Employers’ Federation. Cultur-
ally, the Fondation Omnium Nord Africaine sponsored, amongst other events,
the Villa Des Arts in Rabat, through which new artists and important event
organisers obtain access to royal patronage. Musical events were organised in
Fes (Sacred Music Festival) and Essaouira (Gnaoua and World Music) by lo-
cally powerful organisations (Essaouira Mogador Association) and founded by
one of the most senior advisors to the King, André Azoulay, which contributed
to absorption of cultural activities and welfare into royal circles.
However, with the electoral victories of the Islamist pjd party, all these ac-
tivities seem to be aimed at taming a secular and elitist social strata that is, in
fact, little in need of taming. The 2003 suicide bombings in Casablanca which
targeted a luxury hotel, a Spanish cultural centre, as well as a Jewish institu-
tion, bear testimony to the difficulty of using systems of patronage to reach
broad strata of the population.
39 Human Rights Watch, “La Commission Marocaine de Vérité: Le devoir de mémoire hon-
oré a une époque incertaine,” 17 (2005), 11, accessed at http://www.hrw.org/sites/default/
files/reports/morocco1105frwcover.pdf.
This is partially because such systems rely as much on inclusion of select

groups as on the exclusion of everybody else. This was recognised by King Mo-
hamed vi, when he attempted to contain public criticism of systems of patron-
age, frequently expressed in domestic newspapers. In his words:
You will always find me … determined to thwart every discourse that aims
at casting doubt on the importance of holding elections and on the util-
ity itself of political parties. I will foil all those trendy practices that aim
at posing a threat to their credibility… [I have] the duty to outlaw faulty,
nihilist, and deceptive conceptions, which attack the respect owed to the
democratic verdict of the ballot boxes.40
In addition to such undisguised threats, existing patronage systems in politi-

cal parties as illustrated above in the case of women, made it very difficult for
newcomers to obtain access to the political system, and in spite of frequent
calls for more openness, most parties have refrained from changing much of
their leadership-centred organisational structures. This has made the Islamist
pjd the only newcomer attractive among voters since the 1997 election when it
was first authorised to participate, as witnessed by its steadily increased parlia-
mentary representation from 9 seats out of 295 to 107 out of 395 in 2011. Whilst
in many ways, the authorisation of the pjd was meant to reinforce moderate
Islamists and to integrate disaffected fractions of the population, the con-
tinued popularity of rival Islamist groups that appear to pose a threat to the
monarchical stability, such as the Al Adl Wal Ihssane, illustrates the limits of
this strategy. Taken together with continuously decreasing voter turnout dur-
ing parliamentary elections, plummeting to 37 percent in 2007, the foundation
of the Authenticity and Modernity Party (pam) appeared as a necessary new
strategy. After all, parties themselves appeared unable or unwilling to reform
themselves. As this appeared to have led to political disillusionment among
disaffected youth, the monarch used royal patronage in order to address and,
invariably, contain the popularity of Islamist groups – both moderate and at
the fringe.
While the popularity of the moderate Islamist groups, pjd, was hardly con-
tained as evidenced by a remarkable increase of pjd parliamentarians from 46
to 107 members in the 2011–2016 parliament, an important side-effect of the
pam’s creation was the containment of the Arab spring, or rather the Moroc-
can movement it inspired, the February 20 Movement. This is because pam
managed to represent a movement of “gradual politicization of civil society
40 King Mohamed vi, July 30, 2007, www.maroc.ma, accessed February 10, 2015.
168 Sater
and entrepreneurs”41 as witnessed by the incorporation in its leadership of

key members of Morocco’s leftist human rights organisations (such as Salah El
Ouadi, Khadija Rouissi) and entrepreneurs who have sought, since the 1990s, a
role in politics (Ali Belhaj, Abderrahim Lahjouji). An important precursors of
pam was Daba 2007, a large scale public relations campaign that attempted to
rally more popular support for electoral politics and, in particular, attempted
to mobilise youth to join the elections as voters and candidates. As with pam
in 2009–10, Daba 2007 organised public meetings and debates about people’s
concern, all under slogans such as “the politics of proximity” and “the mor-
alisation of public life” that appear close to civil society activists’ concerns.
As to pam and the Movement of All Democrats, the public meetings it organ-
ised within this spirit of “the politics of proximity” appeared quite success-
ful if judged by the exceptional turnout it achieved.42 Given the prestige of
its leader, Fouad El Himma, the very selective, high profile individuals who
were invited to join, and the media coverage it thereby attained, this may have
hardly been surprising. Yet, the effect was such that when the to date only real
pro-democracy movement appeared on Morocco’s political centre-stage from
February to April 2011, Morocco’s middle class and opinion makers, with their
resources at universities, civil society, media, and the private sector, have al-
ready been absorbed into networks of patronage. This meant that the mass
movement lacked leadership from well-known activists, and in turn allowed
co-opted civil society actors to be involved in yet another of the King’s projects
to create a democratic façade of participation and integration in a new consti-
tutional project that, as with the Movement of All Democrats and Daba 2007
before, was clouded in democratic rhetoric with little democratic content.
Patronage, the February 20 Movement, and the Arab Spring
There have been multiple patronage systems and alliances that developed
throughout the 2000s, and political changes reinforced patronage at the ex-
pense of democratic citizenship. The unprecedented challenges to the regime
in the early months of 2011 brought to the surface the exclusionary aspects
of such patronage systems. As a very interesting ethnographic account of
the events in Tangier illustrates, the ousting of President Ben Ali was almost
immediately followed by anti-globalisation protests by youth, lamenting
41 Ferdinand Eibl, “The Party of Authenticity and Modernity (pam): Trajectory of a Political
Deus Ex Machine,” The Journal of North African Studies 17 (2012) 1: 52.
42 Eibl, “The Party of Authenticity,” 48–49.
corruption, nepotism, lack of justice and, above all, the unfair distribution of
wealth, all of which Moroccans call hogra.43 While attacks on the movement
that called for a nation-wide protests on February 20 were frequent, violent
and defamatory, the movement was joined by the Islamist group Al Adl Wal
Ihssane, unemployed graduates, as well as labour unions that used the protests
as an opportunity to increase their pressure on the regime to obtain financial
advantages for their members – particularly a raise to the country’s minimum
wage. What all these groups have in common is their marginalised position
at the fringe of Morocco’s patronage system, receiving little if any political or
material benefits that the monarchy had bestowed upon others. Partially as a
consequence of Morocco’s economic liberalisation efforts, partially as a conse-
quence of seeking a regime-private sector partnership, trade unions have lost
not just members but also political significance, atomised and placed at the
margins of Morocco’s clientelist party system. Yet, while they have lost signifi-
cance due to size, internal disputes, and political rifts, they have been involved
in sometimes violent labour unrest in the years preceding the Arab Spring, ral-
lying non-members – slum dwellers, uprooted migrants, informally employed
members of the Lumpenproletariat to their cause.44 While the demands for
constitutional change have been analysed elsewhere, it is important to point
out that these protests almost never mentioned the personality of the King,
nor the monarchical system, in their demands, limiting their demands to spe-
cific changes to constitutional articles (such as Article 19 which makes the King
a supreme political figure). In fact, when calls for an end to the makhzen or the
hogra are voiced and individual personalities mentioned, protesters addressed
the circle of patronage surrounding the Monarchy, such as Mounir Majidi (di-
rector of King Mohamed’s private wealth holdings) and Fouad El Himma (the
King’s political right hand and founder of the pam party discussed above),
rather than the King himself.
In contrast to these marginalised sectors of Morocco’s politicised society,
the official political scene supported the King’s efforts of controlling the con-
tent and scope of reforms. The King’s speeches were well received by all politi-
cal parties and became reference points for political discussions, particularly
the speech of March 9, 2011, which announced the creation of the Consultative
Commission for the Constitutional Revision. Those speeches were lauded with
43 Abdelmajid Hannoum, “Tangier in the Time of Arab Revolutions: An Ethnopolitical Di-

ary,” The Journal of North African Studies 18 (2013) 2: 272–290.
44 Matt Buehler, “Labour Demands, Regime Concessions: Moroccan Unions and the Arab
Uprising,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 42 (2015): 88–103. doi:10.1080/13530194
.2015.973189. 3–4.
170 Sater
superlatives; critical discussions of those speeches remained outlawed under

the constitution. Under the leadership of the well-respected jurist Abdelatif
Menouni, the Consultative Commission consulted with a wide range of actors
from civil society, political parties, business associations, and labour unions.
Menouni presented ideas thereby obtained to the King’s advisor, Mohamed
Moattasim, who in the end became the final architect of the new constitution
which was drafted under the auspices of the King without any public contri-
bution or debate. Even though the process was highly undemocratic, lacked
transparency, and was considered little more than an exercise in political pub-
lic relations, the number of participants in the process illustrates the relevance
of extended patronage systems, extending even to the important Sufi brother-
hoods, the zaouia, such as that of Boutchichia that called upon its members to
vote in favour of the new constitution two weeks after it was presented to the
public in June 2011.45 Interestingly, Menouni even tried to include members
of the February 20 Movement in his consultations, extending the potential for
patronage across new political actors of society. The members of the Febru-
ary 20 Movement refused, considering the undemocratic process detrimental
to its own aims, whilst its decentralised leadership (or absence thereof) may
have made it difficult to engage in any meaningful discussions and obtain ac-
cess to patronage. When the constitutional draft was put to a referendum on
July 1, 2011, the number of publicly dissenting voices outside of the February 20
Movement was close to zero. From political parties to labour unions and busi-
ness associations – labour unions have traded in their support for minimum
wage raises – a Yes vote was the order of the day. Imams in state run mosques
were instructed to preach in favour of the project. Such support resulted in
an approval rate of 98.94% and a voter turnout of 72.56%. Given the context
of Hosni Mubarak’s, Muammar Gadhafi’s, and Zine Eddine Ben Ali’s removal
from office, the vote was understood as a vote in favour of the monarch and
against his removal.
Conclusion
From the above it appears that the monarchy is not simply well entrenched
ideologically and religiously to fend off demands for democratic citizenship,
even if its popularity remains high and the religious legitimacy of the King
as amir al-muʾminin is almost uncontested. Beyond deep patronage, the role
of the shifting system of instrumental patronage has become crucial: since
45 Maghraoui, “Constitutional Reform,” 693–694.

the late 1990s, the inclusion in patronage of political parties, women MPs, hu-
man rights organisations, as well as moderate Islamists, guaranteed that in the
public contest between royalists and opponents, the image of the King as a
democrat and reformer was upheld by a large number of politically significant
actors. This provided the regime with enough leverage and strength to engage
in the rhetoric of reform rather than feel challenged by it, and promulgate a
new constitution. Whilst Morocco’s new constitution does not provide effec-
tive checks on monarchical power, the reform process also avoided the uncon-
straint use of brutal force against protesters, thereby limiting the number of
casualties among protesters in comparison to its North African neighbours.
This analysis of patronage networks therefore illustrates some important
points about liberalised autocracies and democratic citizenship with regards
to the Arab Spring and the February 20 Movement. In the historically unique
contestation of autocratic rule in Morocco and the concomitant public expres-
sion of democratic citizenship, instrumental patronage has been fundamental
in countering the threat of mass mobilisation. What distinguishes Morocco
from some of its neighbours may be the organisational and institutional char-
acter of instrumental patronage that has founded structures in political par-
ties, women’s right movements, economic networks, as well as in the country’s
religious-tribal organisations. As this analysis attempted to highlight, these
structures have been built and have been reproduced over the past 15 years,
with important shifts occurring that indicate how demands that occurred from
members of civil society were able to gain access to patronage networks and
initiate many of the visible and liberal political changes typical of liberalised
autocracies.
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chapter 6
Like but not Same as… : Arab Citizenship and

the Jordanian Experience
Morten Valbjørn
The unexpected Arab Uprisings of 2011 have caused scholars of Arab politics
to reflect on whether they need to fundamentally rethink how the Arab world
is studied.1 New approaches and issues have been presented, classic themes
in the study of (Arab) politics have reappeared, and existing theories redis-
covered and in some cases revised. Citizenship theory is one example of the
latter; it was originally introduced in a study of Arab politics by Butenschøn
et al. more than a decade ago,2 and has recently been reintroduced as part of
this post-2011 self-reflection. Meijer, for instance, argues that citizenship rights,
conceptualised as the organising principle of state-society relations in modern
states, are the main issue in the Middle East and the key to understanding the
Arab Uprisings.3
In line with this renewed interest in citizenship theory, this chapter con-
ducts a case study of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, perceived through the
prism of citizenship. Instead of narrowly focusing on what a citizenship lens
can specifically say about the Jordanian role in the Arab Uprisings, the chapter
adopts a wider perspective. It examines broader, long-term political trends in
Jordan and links these to the more general theoretical debate about whether
1 Morten Valbjørn, “Reflections on Self-Reflections – on Framing the Analytical Implications

of the Arab Uprisings for the Study of Arab Politics,” Democratization 22 (2015): 218–238;
pomeps, “Reflections on the Arab Uprisings,” in pomeps Studies (2014); F. Gregory Gause,
“The Middle East Academic Community and the ‘Winter of Arab Discontent’,” in Seismic
Shift – Understanding Change in the Middle East, ed. Ellen Laipson (Washington d.c.: The
Henry L. Stimson Center, 2011), 11–27.
2 Nils A. Butenschøn, Uri Davis, and Manuel Hassassian, Citizenship and the State in the Middle
East: Approaches and Applications (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000).
3 Roel Meijer, “The Struggle for Citizenship: The Key to Understanding the Arab Uprisings,” in
noref Report (2014). Roel Meijer, “Political Citizenship and Social Movements in the Arab
World,” in Handbook of Political Citizenship and Social Movements, ed. Hein Anton van der
Heijden (Edward Elgar Publisher, 2014), 628–660.

176 Valbjørn
and how citizenship theory, as originally developed in and applied to Europe

and the United States, is also useful in the study of Arab politics. More spe-
cifically, the chapter engages with Meijer’s point about how the use of general
concepts and analytical distinctions from the European debate must be com-
bined with a stronger attention to how the Middle East has its own particular
history of citizenship and to Butenschøn’s call for a “back-to-basics” approach
when applying citizenship theory to the Middle East.
The first of the three major sections of this chapter briefly introduces to the
broader discussion about the promises and pitfalls in viewing the Middle East
through the lens of citizenship and why it might be necessary to modify citi-
zenship theory when using this approach in a Middle Eastern context. Insights
from this more general discussion are then used in the following sections,
where the political developments in Jordan are examined through the lens of
a modified citizenship theory. The second section compares the Jordanian tra-
jectory of citizenship with Meijer’s overall narrative about the particular his-
tory of citizenship in the Middle East. While this mainly draws on experiences
from the Arab republics, it appears that the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan has
followed a pattern – in particular when it comes to the content of citizenship
rights (the rights citizens have or claim) – that is similar to, though not ex-
actly the same as, its republican counterparts. Despite these similarities, it is
still possible to identify more distinct features in the Jordanian trajectory of
citizenship, as will become clear in the third section. Inspired by Butenschøn’s
“back-to-basics,” it returns to the fundamental questions surrounding who “the
people” are, how political communities are constituted, and how to draw a dis-
tinction between “us” and “them.” It appears that this lens is a useful tool with
which to grasp the prolonged, highly contested, and still ongoing debate about
“where is Jordan,” “what is Jordan,” and “who is a Jordanian,” as well as to un-
derstand how these issues have influenced not only the content but, even more
so, the depth and extent of citizenship in Jordan, and have given rise to quite
different strategies for how the Hashemite regime has related to fragmented
identities and group conflicts.
Towards a “Modified” Citizenship Theory on the Middle East
A prominent theme in the self-reflective debate on the study of Arab politics

following the Arab Uprisings is the need for approaches that acknowledge the
importance of the societal level in addition to the state level, ones that are able
to move beyond the “democratisation and authoritarianism paradogma” that
has been so prevalent in Middle East scholarship over the last two decades
Arab Citizenship and the Jordanian Experience 177
and towards a broader conceptualisation of political change, and ones which

offer an alternative to both culture-blinded exceptionalism and culture-blind
universalism.4
As already alluded to, citizenship theory has been presented as a promis-
ing place to look for a tool-kit with these qualities. Compared to various other
dominant orientations in the past decades’ academic debate on the Middle
East, citizenship theory has, following Meijer, a range of advantages in terms
of tracing long-term political trends in Middle Eastern history and examining
the causes and consequences of the Arab Uprisings.5 However, Meijer and Bu-
tenschøn both recognise that in order to fulfil these potentials it is necessary to
modify or clarify the original citizenship theory in some regards.
Citizenship theory takes as its point of departure the conceptualisation of
citizenship as the “organising principle of state-society relations in modern
states.”6 Citizenship is seen as a contractual relationship between the state and
its inhabitants that regulates the legal status of the individual and defines the
rules for participation in political institutions and access to public resources.
However, Butenschøn points out that the phenomenon of citizenship does not
in itself “presuppose equality, democracy or a vibrant society of citizens (civil
society).”7 Rather, the content, extent, and depth of citizenship rights should be
regarded as specific outcomes of different citizen-state relations.8 The “politics
of citizenship” thus constitutes a lens through which we can “‘unveil’ impor-
tant aspects of the architecture of power-relations between rulers and ruled,
and to analyse the logic of these relations,”9 or, in other words, an “analytical
gateway to insights into the dynamics of regime formation in a given country
and its ‘raison d’état’, its state idea.”10
Much like Halliday’s notion of combining analytical universalism with
historical particularism,11 citizenship theory is regarded as universal as far as
its theoretical assumptions go but specific in its empirical focus (that is, the
precise nature of the contractual relationship between ruler and ruled). Thus,
4 For an overview of this debate, see Valbjørn, “Reflections on Self-Reflections.”

5 Meijer, “Political Citizenship,” 630–631.
6 Nils A. Butenschøn, “State, Power and Citizenship in the Middle East – a Theoretical In-
troduction,” in Citizenship and the State in the Middle East: Approaches and Applications,
ed. Nils A. Butenschøn et al. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 8.
7 Butenschøn, “State, Power and Citizenship,” 11.
8 Meijer, “The Struggle for Citizenship,” 1.
10 Ibid., 6.
11 Fred Halliday, Islam & the Myth of Confrontation – Religion and Politics in the Middle East
(London: i.b. Tauris, 1995), 15.
178 Valbjørn
citizenship in one country is considered comparable with but empirically dif-

ferent from citizenship in another country, and in the Middle East and any-
where else it therefore constitutes a prism through which we can address the
political.12 Butenschøn argues that while some of the paradoxes and dilem-
mas related to the established order of Arab states might be unique as far as
their historical and cultural references are concerned, they are not necessar-
ily unique as challenges in the processes of creating political authority and of
state-building.13
This analytical universalism is reflected in the way Butenschøn and Meijer
draw on the mainly European/American theoretical debate on citizenship in
their study of the Middle East, including Marshall’s14 classic distinction be-
tween civil, political, and social citizenship. Similarly, they employ the analyti-
cal division between extent (who belongs to the body politic), content (the
rights citizens have or claim), and depth of citizenship (what contribution a
citizen can make to the common good, and how deep their commitment is).15
Butenschøn and Meijer also emphasise the importance of what Halliday
would call “historical particularism.” This is reflected in their awareness of “the
problem of translation” and recognition of how a number of qualifications or
modifications are necessary when citizenship theory is applied in the context
of Middle Eastern political history.
Instead of following the trend in the European debate where the concept of
citizenship has been “stretched” in new directions including cultural, global,
and ecological citizenship rights, Butenschøn recommends going back to ba-
sics when applying the citizenship approach to the Middle East.16 It returns to
the basic – and classic17 – question of how political communities are consti-
tuted in the first place and the related debate surrounding who the “people”
are, how we define “society,” and what criteria we apply to distinguish be-
tween those who are and those who are not included in the political commu-
nity. B
utenschøn also brings attention to the usefulness of Davis’s distinction
12 Butenschøn, “State, Power and Citizenship,” 16; Meijer, “The Struggle for Citizenship,” 1.
13 Ibid., 16.
14 T.H. Marshall, “Citizenship and Social Class (1949),” in Class, Citizenship, and Social Devel-
opment, ed. T.H. Marshall (New York: Anchor Books, 1965).
15 Butenschøn, “State, Power and Citizenship,” 6; Meijer, “Political Citizenship,” 631–636.
17 Cf. Dankwart Rustow, “Transitions to Democracy: Toward a Dynamic Model,” Compara-
tive Politics 2 (1970): 337–363.
between jinsiyya citizenship and muwatana citizenship18 and develops a gen-

eral typology of different normative principles for constituting political com-
munities within state territories.19
As a final “modification” of citizenship theory, it should also be stressed that
instead of assuming some universal sequence or expecting a pure replication
of some “European model,” one must be attentive to the specific ways in which
different kinds of rights have been combined in various phases of the modern
political history of the Middle East. Against this background, Meijer describes
the long-term political development in (the republican part of) the Arab world
and traces broad trends in the trajectory of rights in the region as whole, but
emphasises, at the same time, that “each country has its own specific history
that has determined its particular content, extent and depth of citizenship
rights.”20 In other words, it is important not only to make inter-regional but
also intra-regional comparisons in order to highlight similarities and differ-
ences in how various kinds of rights in countries within a region have been
combined at specific moments and in different places throughout history.
Following this brief outline of the basic ideas of citizenship theory and
why and how this approach, originally developed in a Western context, may,
in a modified version, be useful for examining political developments in the
Middle East, the next two sections turn to examine Jordan as a case-study, and
explore the Hashemite Kingdom through the lens of a modified citizenship
theory.
The Jordanian Trajectory of Citizenship Rights:

Like, but not same as…
This section takes as its point of departure Meijer’s idea that we should in-
clude the particular history of citizenship in the Middle East alongside the
general concepts and analytical distinctions from the European debate. It
examines to what extent the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan fits into Meijer’s
18 Uri Davis, “Conceptions of Citizenship in the Middle East,” in Citizenship and the State
in the Middle East: Approaches and Applications, ed. Nils A. Butenschøn et al. (Syracuse:
Syracuse University Press, 2000), 49–69; Uri Davis, “Jinsiyya Versus Muwatana: The Ques-
tion of Citizenship and the State in the Middle East: The Cases of Israel, Jordan and
Palestine,” Arab Studies Quarterly 17 (1995): 19–50.
20 See introduction to this volume, 12–15.
180 Valbjørn
overall narrative about broader trends in the trajectory of citizenship in the

Middle East, which mainly draws on experiences from the Arab republics. It
thus relates to the classic debate about the similarities and differences within
the development of Arab republics and monarchies,21 and provides insights
into whether this distinction is important in terms of citizenship rights in the
Arab world.
A Narrow yet Broad Notion of Citizenship Rights

In Meijer’s general account, the notion of modern citizenship rights emerged
in the Middle East in the context of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the
establishment of the colonial states, and the introduction of the Mandate
system.22 At that time, the idea of citizenship was primarily promoted by a
new, Westernised elite, who used Western legal and political language of sov-
ereignty and rights in their struggle for national independence, and for civil
and political rights. During this era, the distribution of citizenship rights was
very narrow, as it was limited to an elite of “notables” claiming to represent the
nation and to be the “true citizens,” while also being quite broad, as it was open
to foreigners who were allowed to join the nation.
In the Jordanian case, a similar pattern can be traced back to the early 1920s,
but with a twist on the role of nationalism. Jordan only emerged as a separate
country in the early 1920s after Britain had partitioned the area east of the
Jordan River from that of the British Palestine Mandate and made the son of
Sharif Hussein, Abdallah, emir of the new Emirate of Transjordan. The mod-
ern Jordanian state was first and foremost an outcome of extra-regional, Euro-
pean interests rather than an internal aspiration for independence expressed
by a national movement. For instance, the new Hashemite ruler, who hailed
from the Hijaz, had no specific links to the territory or its people, and as a con-
sequence the notion of the existence of a distinct Jordanian nation was very
vague at the time.23 Large parts of the population either identified with their
21 On this debate, see Russell E. Lucas et al., “Rethinking the Monarchy–Republic Gap in
the Middle East,” Journal of Arabian Studies 4 (2014): 161–162; Russell E. Lucas, “Monarchi-
cal Authoritarianism: Survival and Political Liberalization in a Middle East Regime Type,”
International Journal of Middle East Studies 36 (2004): 103–119; Raymond Hinnebusch, “Au-
thoritarian Persistence, Democratization Theory and the Middle East: An Overview and
Critique,” Democratization 13 (2006): 373–395.
23 Mary C. Wilson, King Abdullah, Britain, and the Making of Jordan (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1987); Joseph A. Massad, Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity
in Jordan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).
tribe, looked towards Damascus, Jerusalem, or Hebron, or identified with a

larger Arab or Islamic community. Abdallah mainly perceived Jordan as being
a stepping stone by which he could realise a much larger regional vision based
on a conservative Hashemite form of Pan-Arabism.24 This was reflected not
only in various calls to unite Jordan with Syria and Palestine and to re-establish
Hashemite control over the Hijaz, but also in the distribution of political rights
to non-Jordanians. In addition to British officials in the British-administered
mandate, including John Glubb, the famous commander of the Arab Legion,
the political elite contained significant numbers of non-Jordanian Arabs, par-
ticularly from Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine. Like Abdallah, most of his advisors
thus did not originate from Jordan, and his first government almost resembled
a “Syrian exile government” as a result of a significant presence of people from
his brother Faisal’s brief rule in Damascus.25
Expanding Citizenship Rights Downwards

During the next phase in Meijer’s general account (1930–1950s), the concep-
tion of the nation became more exclusive in regard to foreigners and minori-
ties. However, this era also saw an inclusion of much larger segments of society
and an expansion of citizenship rights downwards. Through the inclusion and
mobilisation of the lower classes, social justice became a dominant theme, to-
gether with a marked emphasis on independence and the rejection of foreign
domination. In general, this era was marked by a high degree of mobilisation
and politicisation, with demands focusing on independence, national unity,
and social justice, while individual rights were subordinated to the communal
rights of the nation.
In the Jordanian case a similar, though not identical, pattern can be traced.
As regards nationalism, Abdallah’s conservative Pan-Arabism still existed
in the 1940s, but a more distinct Transjordanian nationalism was emerging,
24 This kind of Hashemite Pan-Arabism will be further explored in a later section; see also
Morten Valbjørn, “Arab Nationalism(s) in Transformation – from Arab Interstate Societies
to an Arab-Islamic World Society,” in International Society and the Middle East – English
School Theory at the Regional Level, ed. Barry Buzan and Ana Gonzalez-Pelaez (New York:
Palgrave, 2009), 152; Laurie A. Brand, “Al-Muhajirin w-al-Ansar – Hashemite Strategies
for Managing Communal Identity in Jordan,” in Ethnic Conflict and International Politics
in the Middle East, ed. Leonard Binder (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999),
279–306.
25 Beverley Milton-Edwards and Peter Hinchcliffe, Jordan – a Hashemite Legacy (London:
Routledge, 2001), 21.
182 Valbjørn
as reflected in exclusivist calls such as “Transjordan for Transjordanians.”26 This

trend was disrupted by the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the subsequent annexa-
tion of the West Bank in 1950, to which I will return below. As in other parts of
the Arab world, wider sections of Jordanian society, including the periphery
and the tribes, were increasingly included and granted social rights.27 The quite
liberal 1952 Constitution, moreover, expanded civil and political rights consid-
erably and resulted in broad mobilisations and an intense politicisation across
Jordanian society. The political scene was very active and saw the emergence
of various political parties, strong political debates, mass demonstrations, and
other forms of political activism.28 One of the crucial events during this era
was the parliamentary elections of October 1956, which were arguably the fre-
est in Jordanian history. These elections resulted in a parliament with a strong
Baʿathist and Nasserist presence and a “radical” government led by Sulaiman
Nabulsi. His emphasis on social justice and independence from foreign pow-
ers, i.e., the Britain, resonated in large segments of the politicised Jordanian
public, forcing the new, young, and pro-Western King Hussein, the grandson of
Abdallah, to dismiss Glubb and abrogate the Anglo-Jordanian treaty.29
Citizenship Rights and the Authoritarian Bargain

This expansion of political and civil rights came to an end in the following
phase, as the nature of citizen-state relations was redefined by a new “social
contact” that represented what Meijer labels the “authoritarian bargain.”30
In Meijer’s account, this phase was usually initiated by a military coup led by
so-called “Free Officers” claiming to speak in the name of the (Arab) nation.
The arena of civil and political rights was significantly reduced, and repres-
sion became endemic. Power was highly concentrated, the multi-party system
was replaced by a one-party system, the parliamentary system was disbanded,
leadership personalised – sometimes reflected in cults of personality, e.g.
Nasserism – the military came to dominate politics, the role of the security
26 This is further explored in a later section; see also Philip Robins, A History of Jordan (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 39.
27 Anne Marie Baylouny, “Militarizing Welfare: Neo-Liberalism and Jordanian Policy,” Mid-
dle East Journal 62 (2008): 277–303.
28 On this era in Jordanian history see Betty Anderson, Nationalist Voices in Jordan – the
Street and the State (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005).
29 Robins, A History of Jordan, 92.
institutions increased, and, in the new corporatist state, all civil institutions
came under state control. As Meijer explains, this era was consequently marked
by a massive de-mobilisation and de-politicisation of the population. It did
not lead to exclusion per se, however. The new authoritarian states pursued
a – selectively – inclusive policy towards major sections of the population. As
a kind of compensation for the loss of political and civil rights, large groups of
the population were granted new social rights, including the expansion of edu-
cation, creation of new jobs in the public sector, food subsidies, land reforms,
and free health care, among others. In other words, instead of perceiving the
changes in the state-society relations during this era as marked by a general
decline in and suppression of all kinds of rights, it would be more precise to
talk about change in the combination of rights reflecting the aforementioned
“authoritarian bargain,” where political and civil rights where exchanged for
social rights.
At the immediate level, Jordan differs from this republican trajectory. In
contrast to Iraq and Egypt, where the monarchies were toppled by Free Of-
ficers and replaced by “Arab nationalist revolutionary republics,” Jordan suc-
cessfully countered the challenges the monarchy faced in King Hussein’s first
years of rule, and in the end the young king not only managed to avoid the
fate of his cousin – the Hashemite King Faisal of Iraq, who was murdered in
the 1958 military coup – but also defeated his domestic opponents. On closer
inspection, it appears, however, that the nature of Jordanian state-society re-
lations in the following decades had a number of similarities with those of
the Arab republics. In many ways, Jordan represents a monarchical version of
the “authoritarian bargain.” In a “pre-emptive palace coup” in 1957, the king
dismissed the Nabulsi government, dissolved parliament, banned all political
parties, suppressed popular protests with help from regime-loyal parts of the
army and kinsmen from major tribes, imprisoned hundreds of leading opposi-
tion figures, and declared martial law, which was to last three decades.31 Thus,
civil and political rights were strictly limited from 1957 to 1989: except for the
Muslim Brotherhood, all political parties and movements were closed down
and power was centralised around the king, who relied on the military and
the intelligence service (the Jordanian General Intelligence Directorate gid).
However, as in the Arab republics, broad sections of the population received
new and expanded social rights, especially in the 1970s. Owing to the increase
in grants and aid from the oil-producing Arab countries, Jordan was, at this
31 Robins, A History of Jordan, 99–102.

184 Valbjørn
time, an indirect beneficiary of the regional oil boom. This enabled a dramatic
expansion of the public sector, with a trebling of the number of civil servants
from 1970 to 1985, the swift elimination of unemployment, and the introduc-
tion of various social benefits.32
Citizenship Rights and Liberalised Authoritarianism

The next phase in Meijer’s general account represents the breakdown of this
“authoritarian bargain,” which was a consequence of a gradual unilateral ab-
rogation of the “social contract” of the previous era. This phase began in the
1970s with the introduction of economic opening policies (infitah) aimed at a
market economy, followed by privatisations, which in some places culminated
in imf structural adjustment programs and the implementation of austerity
measures in response to the resultant financial crisis. Food subsidies were re-
duced, and many of the educational, social, and healthcare obligations the “au-
thoritarian bargain” had been based on were rolled back. The initial response in
the 1970s and 1980s was recurrent bread riots and growing protests, which were
met with repression by increasingly delegitimised regimes. At the same time,
these regimes attempted to make a new bargain with their citizens: the loss of
social rights would be compensated by the (re)introduction of more civil and
to some extent political rights. In the late 1980s-early 1990s, this was reflected
in a brief period of limited political liberalisation.33 However, it soon became
clear that these reforms were not meant to promote genuine democratisation,
but were introduced by “liberalised autocracies”34 based on the “Lampedusan”
logic that “things have to change in order to stay the same.” Accordingly, these
new citizenship rights were very selective, and were less about political rights
than specific civil rights associated in particular with the rule of law and the
right to property, which was important for the parallel economic liberalisa-
tions.35 Thus, the state/regime response to the collapse of the “authoritarian
bargain” was a combination of repression and pseudo-liberalisation, which
were often succeeded by new de-liberalisations.
32 Baylouny, “Militarizing Welfare.”

33 Rex Brynen, Bahgat Korany, and Paul Noble, Political Liberalization & Democratization
in the Arab World – Theoretical Perspectives (Boulder co: Lynne Rienner, 1995); Eberhard
Kienle, Grand Delusion: Democracy and Economic Reform in Egypt (London: i.b. Tauris,
2001).
34 Daniel Brumberg, “Liberalization Versus Democracy – Understanding Arab Political Re-
form,” in Carnegie Papers – Middle East Series (2003).
35 Hinnebusch, “Authoritarian Persistence,” 386.
In Meijer’s general account, the subsequent massive expansion of demands

for citizenship rights acquired an urgency similar to the colonial and early
independence periods,36 but differed in the sense that demands in the past
focused on independence, national unity, and social justice, while individual
rights were subordinated to the interest of the nation. This time the demands
were much more complex and diverse, with different groups in society sub-
scribing to very different concepts of citizenship and political communities.
With the change from passive to active citizenship, de-politicisation to politi-
cisation and de-mobilisation to mobilisation, the state gradually lost control
over society, authoritarian regimes weakened, and the context for the emer-
gence of the Arab uprisings was formed. The associated “cacophony of rights
and claims” did, at the same time, make it very difficult to reach a consensus
on a new “social contract” on how state-society relations should be organised,
and the chaotic development since 2011 should, according to Meijer, be seen in
this light.37
Once again, the Jordanian development is similar, though not identical,
to the general pattern. The “authoritarian bargain” lasted until the end of the
1980s, when the Hashemite regime had to accept that the “years of plenty”38
had come to an end. While the “oil bust” of the mid-1980s had led to a decrease
in foreign aid and labour remittances, Jordan initially continued spending, but
this strategy became increasingly unviable as the economic crisis worsened. In
1989, therefore, Jordan was forced to turn to the imf to negotiate a Structural
Adjustment Plan, which implied the removal of subsidies, privatisations, and
cuts in public sector employment.
In April 1989, riots erupted in the southern town of Maan, and unrest, at
times violent, quickly spread to other hitherto pro-Hashemite parts of the
Kingdom, such as Karak, Tafila, and Salt. The protesters demanded the resigna-
tion of the government, the repeal of austerity measures, and greater political
freedom and national elections. This wave of protests marked the beginning
of the so-called “era of reform” of the 1990s. In November 1989, following
promises to reinvigorate electoral politics, King Hussein allowed the first full
parliamentary elections in decades. In 1991 he lifted the 1957 martial law and
promoted the “National Charter” (al-mithaq al-watani), a new “social contract”

37 Ibid., 645–52.
38 Warwick Knowles, Jordan since 1989: A Study in Political Economy (London: i.b. Tauris,
2005).
186 Valbjørn
between the regime and the people of Jordan. The king promised the complete
restoration of pluralist and participatory politics, in return for the acknowledg-
ment of King Hussein as the legitimate head of state and de facto acceptance
of the retrenchment of social rights in terms of general social welfare cuts.39
Restrictions on freedom of speech and the press were eased and political par-
ties were allowed, while in 1993 the first multi-party parliamentary elections
since 1956 were held.
Like in the rest of the Arab world, the political openings in the years im-
mediately after 1989, which were among the freest in the Jordan’s modern
history, ultimately did not lead to any genuine democratisation. Instead, the
political reforms only marked the beginning of what has been described as
a “transition to nowhere.”40 The Hashemite regime turned out to be a liber-
alising autocracy, which always presented itself as being in the midst of a re-
form process. In reality, this was merely part of a regime-preserving strategy
with Janus-faced reforms, whose liberal dimensions were increasingly offset
by autocratic counter-measures from the mid-1990s. For instance, when riots
once again broke out in Maan in 1996, the regime responded with an iron fist.41
Thus, at the end of King Hussein’s rule in 1999, Jordan was less free than it had
been in 1989 and the early 1950s.42
The crowning of Hussein’s young son Abdallah ii was expected to open a
completely new chapter in the political history of the Hashemite Kingdom,
one in which Jordan would (re)turn to the political reform process. Howev-
er, his first decade of rule to a large extent continued the pseudo-reforms of
the 1990s. In his rhetoric, the new king emphasised, even more than his fa-
ther, the importance of democracy and political, economic, and administra-
tive reforms. He launched various ambitious reform initiatives, among them
the so-called “National Agenda,” but few were implemented. The parliament
was dissolved several times and replaced with rule by royal decree, while elec-
tions were marred by vote-buying and gerrymandering. The first decade of
the 21st century was therefore more a story of economic rather than political
liberalisation.43

40 Brumberg, “Liberalization versus Democracy”; see also Beverley Milton-Edwards, “Jordan
and Facade Democracy,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 20 (1993): 191–203; Curtis
Ryan, Jordan in Transition from Hussein to Abdallah (Boulder co: Lynne Rienner, 2002).
41 Jillian Schwedler and Lamis Andoni, “Bread Riots in Jordan,” Middle East Report 201 (1996).
42 Morten Valbjørn, “The 2013 Parliamentary Elections in Jordan: Three Stories and Some
General Lessons,” Mediterranean Politics 18 (2013): 311–317.
43 Sean Yom, “Jordan: Ten More Years of Autocracy,” Journal of Democracy 20 (2009): 151–166;
André Bank, “Rents, Cooptation and Economized Discourse: Three Dimensions of Politi-
cal Rule in Jordan, Morocco and Syria,” Journal of Mediterranean Studies 14 (2004): 155–181.
Citizenship Rights during and after the Arab Uprisings

The popular response to this mismatch between rhetoric and reality and the
decrease in both social and political rights was marked by sporadic protests
and brief riots. In contrast to Meijer’s general (republican) account, the over-
all pattern of reaction in Jordan was, however, less about a change to active
citizenship, re-politicisation and mobilisation: in the decade prior to the Arab
uprisings, Jordan was marked by disillusion, growing apathy, and cynicism, re-
flected in an almost complete lack of public interest in the formal political
scene. Thus, few people were members of political parties, many chose to boy-
cott the elections, and the parliament was considered irrelevant. Furthermore,
such activism as had existed was mainly “apolitical” and directed at emerging
“parallel societies” rather than the “formal” political sphere.
Against this background, it may come as a surprise that Jordan was one of
the first countries after Tunisia and Egypt to experience the Arab Uprisings.
In the early days, some predicted that King Abdallah and Queen Rania would
soon be “palace hunting in Jeddah,” but in comparison to Egypt, Tunisia, Bah-
rain, Yemen, and Syria, the impact of the regional “tunis-ami” has been quite
limited in the Hashemite monarchy.44
In order to understand this, it is necessary – but not enough – to understand
how the regime reacted to the protests. Instead of the violent and repressive
strategies seen elsewhere, the Hashemite regime adopted a multidimensional
strategy that included a limited expansion of political and social rights. Thus,
instead of turning to overt repression the regime allowed demonstrations and
carefully avoided any descent into violent clashes that would initiate the so-
called “funeral circles.” It also sought to appease protesters with economic
measures including new subsidy packages and an increase in public salaries.
The King also quickly dismissed the heavily-criticised prime minister Samir
Rifai and promised that “real political reforms” would now be initiated. Subse-
quently, Jordan has experienced a series of reform initiatives, including various
constitutional amendments, the abolition of some restrictions on the freedom
of assembly, the creation of a constitutional court, the introduction of new
laws on political parties, the implementation of new procedures for appoint-
ing the prime minister, and the passing of a new electoral law under which the
parliamentary elections of January 2013 took place. Yet on closer inspection it
becomes clear that many of these initiatives are still Janus-faced, indicating
that the above-mentioned “Lampedusan” regime-preserving rationale has not
44 For an account of the first years of Arab uprisings in Jordan see for instance Curtis Ryan,
“Oasis or Mirage? Jordan’s Unlikely Stability in a Changing Middle East,” World Politics
Review (January 15, 2015); Valbjørn, “The 2013 Parliamentary Elections,” 311–317.
188 Valbjørn
been abandoned. Critics find this suspicion further supported by the striking
similarities between Abdallah ii’s response to the Arab Uprisings and his fa-
ther’s response to the uprisings of 1989. After a brief political opening, the lat-
ter resulted in two decades of “transition to nowhere,” and according to some
critics the 2013 parliamentary elections represent, if anything, the continuing
“success of authoritarianism.”45
To understand the rather limited impact of the Arab Uprisings on the small
Hashemite Kingdom and why the regime has been so successful in weathering
the initial storm, it is important but not sufficient to pay attention to the regime’s
responses. It is also necessary to look at the composition of the protesters and
how their demands resembled the kind of “cacophony of rights and claims” that
Meijer speaks about in his general account. Compared to the period before 2011,
the protest scene had not only increased in size; it had also been transformed.
In addition to well-known actors such as Islamists and leftists, it now included
new elements such as local youth groups and popular movements, often from
Transjordanian communities, traditionally pro-palace Transjordanian tribes,
Salafis, and military veterans. Unlike protesters in some other parts of the Arab
world, who had called for the ousting of their ruler, the Jordanian protesters’
demands were reformist rather than revolutionary – change was supposed to
take place within the framework of the Hashemite monarchy. In fact, one of
the few things the protesters would agree on, besides the common call against
corruption and for “social justice,” was that they were in favour of the king.
Thus, with very few exceptions the critique was directed at the (de facto power-
less) government rather than (the de facto ruler) King Abdallah. Beyond that,
the protesters had very different demands: some called for genuine democratic
reforms that would give the parliament real power, whereas, for example, the
Salafis rejected democracy as un-Islamic. Some wanted changes in the elec-
toral law, which through gerrymandering favours traditionally pro-Hashemite
areas of Jordan, while others argued that this would only bring Palestinians to
power at the expense of the Transjordanian population. Some supported the
traditional opposition groups and civil society movements, while others saw
them as representing a stubborn old generation that was just as much a part
of the problem as the regime. While many called for more social justice and
argued against neo-liberal reforms and widespread corruption, the protesters
were internally divided as to the extent to which this should have implica-
tions for privileges to specific groups, including military veterans and some
45 Ziad Abu-Rish, “Romancing the Throne: The New York Times and the Endorsement of
Authoritarianism in Jordan,” in Jadaliyya Blog (2013); see also Valbjørn, “The 2013 Parlia-
mentary Elections,” 313–315.
ransjordanian tribes. In addition to these domestic issues, the opposition was

T
also divided on Jordan’s position on the Syrian civil war and the (brief) rise of
Islamists in elections across the region.
While these internal divisions had, elsewhere in the region, led to chaos,
the Jordanian regime successfully used them to upgrade its divide-and-rule
strategy and to take the steam out of the protests. In spite of these differences
during the Arab uprisings, the larger picture of the long-term development of
the Hashemite monarchy reveals a pattern – in particular in the content of citi-
zenship rights (the rights citizens have or claim) – that may not be identical
with but is quite similar to the phases outlined in Meijer’s general account of
the trajectory of citizenship in the Middle East, which is based on the Arab
republics. As will become clear in the following section, this does not mean
that more distinct features in the Jordanian trajectory of citizenship cannot be
identified, at least not in terms of the extent and depth of citizenship.
Back to Basics – What and Where is Jordan and Who are

the Real Jordanians?
When, at the turn of the millennium, Butenschøn et al. brought citizenship

theory into the study of Arab politics, they wanted to show that the usefulness
of this approach was not restricted to the Western context on which it was
originally based.46 As explained in the introduction to this chapter Butenschøn
suggested a “back-to-basics” approach, with a focus on how political communi-
ties are constituted in the first place, instead of following the contemporary
trend in the citizenship debate of “stretching” the concept of citizenship in
new directions to cover post-industrial discourses on state-society relations.47
As part of the rediscovery of some of the more basic questions surrounding
citizenship, Butenschøn draws attention to Davis distinction between jinsiyya
citizenship and muwatana citizenship.48 The former refers to “passport citi-
zenship,” in the sense of civil, political, and social rights towards the state;
the latter refers to belonging to the country, watan, the right of abode and to
public land and water; the two concepts denote symbolically the distinction
between those who are rightful members of the family of the house and those
46 Butenschøn, Davis, and Hassassian, Citizenship and the State. See also Davis, “Jinsiyya Ver-
sus Muwatana.”
47 Butenshøn, “State, Power and Citizenship,” 7.
48 Davis, “Conceptions of Citizenship in the Middle East.” See also Davis, “Jinsiyya Versus
Muwatana.”
190 Valbjørn
who are just guests, tenants, or relatives. In addition, Butenschøn develops a

new typology of normative principles for constituting political communities
within state territories. The purpose of the typology is to identify the varia-
tion of political systems with a particular attention to challenges of building
democracy in conflict-ridden societies where politicised group identities and
a weakly entrenched state idea threaten the integrity of the state. In this sense
the typology can be considered as an extension of Arend Lijpart’s “consocia-
tional democracy.” It has two axes. Vertical: Constitutional principles for dis-
tributing rights between citizens; Horizontal: Levels of territorial integration.
The three main positions on the vertical axis is singularism (laws and political
institutions are designed with the purpose of securing a dominant position of a
particular group in society and the state primarily embodies the aspirations of
that group); pluralism (rights are distributed on the basis of group affiliations
with reference to an agreed-upon key for distribution, leaving state institutions
as arenas for inter-group negotiations, in principle without preferential treat-
ment of any particular group); and universalism (the principle of one-person-
one-vote where group affiliation in principle is irrelevant for distribution of
rights). Along the horizontal axis, Butenschøn shows how it is possible to dis-
tinguish between the unitary state, the fragmented state (federations, unions,
etc.), and separate states (as outcome, i.e., dissolution of empires or separation
of previously unitary or fragmented states as outcome of civil wars or peaceful
separation). Combining positions on the two axes indicate the constitutional
and territorial dimensions of political regimes as possible outcomes of con-
flicts over the political organisation of a state territory.
While these back-to-basics questions of how political communities are con-
stituted are, to some extent, part of any state/nation-building process, they have
held a particularly prominent position in the brief history of the small Jorda-
nian monarchy. Since the modern state of Jordan came into being in the early
1920s, there has been a prolonged and hotly-contested debate about “where is
Jordan,” “what is Jordan,” and “who are the real Jordanians.” The changing ways
in which these questions have been addressed have not only influenced views
surrounding the content but also the depth and extent of citizenship in Jordan,
and given rise to quite different strategies in the Hashemite regime’s approach
to fragmented identities and group conflicts.
Where is Jordan?
One reason the extent and depth of citizenship has been no less contested than
the question about its specific content can be attributed to Jordan’s a mbiguous
and changeable relations with the West Bank in particular and Palestine more
generally. This is reflected in the waxing and waning of the territorial size of the
country and in Jordan’s demographic composition of Transjordanians (a per-
son who hails from the territory that was Jordan before 1948) and Palestinian
Jordanians (someone originating in the British Mandate territory of Palestine).
Before the 1920s, no territory, people, or nationalist movement was desig-
nated, or designated itself, as Transjordanian,49 and, as famously noted by Avi
Shlaim, Jordan originally appeared as “a political anomaly and geographical
nonsense.”50 Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the area was ini-
tially part of the British Palestine Mandate, but by 1921 the area beyond the
Jordan River was separated from Palestine and two years later recognised
by Britain as the Emirate of Transjordan. In the following decades, Abdallah
i made various claims to Palestine based on the argument that “the division
between Palestine and Transjordan is artificial and wasteful,”51 and, after the
Arab-Israeli War of 1948, the West Bank and East Jerusalem came under Jorda-
nian control. In 1950 the territory was formally annexed as part of the Hashem-
ite Kingdom of Jordan; it became part of the Jordanian political community,
and citizenship rights were subsequently extended to include West Bankers.
In 1967 the Hashemite monarchy shrank once again as a consequence of
the Arab debacle in the Arab-Israeli war, in which Jordan lost the West Bank
and East Jerusalem to Israel. Over the next two decades Jordan continued to
make claims on the West Bank, which was considered occupied Jordanian ter-
ritory. The Jordanian authorities accordingly regarded the population of the
West Bank as part of the Jordanian political community. Thus, even though
the West Bank was under Israeli control, Jordan maintained its administra-
tive, economic, and legal ties to the West Bank after 1967: there was a Jorda-
nian ministry for the occupied territories’ affairs, Jordan employed more than
24,000 civil servants on the West Bank, and financed the religious institutions
in these territories. As West Bankers were considered Jordanians citizens, they
were eligible for Jordanian passports and (in principle) had the same political
rights as other Jordanians. This was reflected in the presence of West Bankers
in the Jordanian parliament.52
49 Massad, Colonial Effects, 11.

50 Avi Shlaim, Collusion Across the Jordan: King ʿAbdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Par-
tition of Palestine (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 31.
51 Cited in Daniel Pipes and Adam Garfinkle, “Is Jordan Palestine,” Commentary 86 (1988), 40.
52 Marc Lynch, State Interests and Public Spheres the International Politics of Jordan’s Identity
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 82; Robins, A History of Jordan, 163.
192 Valbjørn
All this changed on July 31, 1988, when King Hussein, impressed by the
first Palestinian Intifada, suddenly declared that Jordan would sever all “le-
gal and administrative ties” with the West Bank. The West Bankers would, in
consequence, lose their Jordanian citizenship rights and were henceforth to
be represented by the Palestine Liberation Organisation (plo). This detach-
ment of the West Bank from Jordan was subsequently confirmed in the Israeli-
Palestinian Oslo Accord of 1993 and the subsequent Jordanian-Israeli peace
treaty of 1994, at the signing of which Shimon Peres affirmed that “Jordan is
Jordan and Palestine is Palestine.”53 As a consequence, the pre-1988 ambiguity
regarding Jordan’s links to Palestine and hence the territorial size of the Jorda-
nian community has become less pronounced in recent decades than earlier.
What is Jordan and Who are the “Real” Jordanians?

While the question “where is Jordan” (i.e. should the West Bank be part of Jor-
dan) might have become less intense, the related questions “what is Jordan”
and “who are the real Jordanians” are still contested and affect the nature of
the citizenship debate in the country. These two questions are closely relat-
ed to the demographic situation within Jordan, which has changed dramati-
cally since the modern Jordan was born in the early 1920s. Following the 1948
Israeli-Arab War and the Jordanian annexation of the West Bank, the size of
the population trebled. Thus, for each Transjordanian there were now two Pal-
estinians. While this changed once again following the loss of the West Bank
in 1967, most observers estimate that at least half of the Jordanian population
are today Palestinians (although inter-group marriage etc. makes it increas-
ingly difficult – and artificial – to make a clear distinction between these two
groups). This demographic reality has given rise to long-standing discussions
about “what is Jordan,” “who are the real Jordanians,” and hence who is entitled
to full citizenship rights. During most of Jordan’s modern history, these ques-
tions have been addressed in a variety of ways by actors inside and outside the
monarchy, as reflected in claims that Jordan’s “true nature” is Jordanian, Arab,
Islamic, Transjordanian, or Palestinian, etc.
Perhaps one of the most intense expressions of this issue is the question of
the place of the Palestinian Jordanians in Jordan and whether “Jordan is Pales-
tine.” During the history of modern Jordan, this notion has existed in a variety
of versions and been advanced by very different actors. In the very early days of
the Jordanian emirate, the notion was, as mentioned above, closely related to
Abdallah i’s vision of uniting Transjordan and Palestine under Hashemite rule.
53 Lynch, State Interests, 183.

However, on the Israeli right there is also a long tradition for arguing that Jor-
dan, due to its demographic composition, constitutes “the alternative home-
land,” and for this reason “the problem is clearly not the lack of homeland for
the Palestinian Arabs. That homeland is Trans-Jordan or Eastern Palestine,” as
Yitzhak Shamir once argued.54 In addition to the Hashemite and the Israeli
versions of how “Jordan is Palestine,” there is also a Palestinian variant. It brief-
ly gained momentum in the late 1960s, when Jordan’s loss of the West Bank led
to open rivalry between the Hashemite regime and the plo about who was
entitled to represent the Palestinians not only in the occupied territories but
also in Jordan.55 As part of this rivalry, the plo was creating a “state within a
state” inside Jordan, and Palestinian groups such as the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine (pflp) even called for the overthrow of the Jordanian
monarchy. In 1970, this resulted in the so-called Black September civil war be-
tween King Hussein’s armed forces and Palestinian groups, and the subsequent
expulsion of the plo from Jordan.56
While Jordan has not experienced such open and violent confrontation
since 1970, the questions “what is Jordan” and “who are the real Jordanians” are
still a source of inter-communal tension, and the Transjordanian/Palestinian
Jordanian divide still influences the views on the extent and depth of citizen-
ship in Jordan. As a way of grasping this tension, it is useful to draw on Davis
distinction between jinsiyya and muwatana citizenship (see above).57 For in-
stance, unlike Palestinians in Lebanon, Palestinians in Jordan do, from a jinsiyya
citizenship perspective, have the same citizenship rights as the Transjordanian
part of the population. But when it comes to muwatana citizenship there is
significant debate in Jordan about whether Palestinians should be considered
as “guests” (who, sometime in the future, will return to their “own” country,
Palestine, and therefore should be grateful for the hospitality provided by the
Transjordanian part of the population), or as full members of Jordanian soci-
ety (for historical reasons and because many of them have lived in Jordan and
contributed to society for generations). The intensity of this debate varies, but
54 Pipes and Garfinkle, “Is Jordan Palestine,” 35; on this version of the “Jordan is Palestine”-
debate see also Lynch, State Interests and Public Spheres; Marc Lynch, “Jordan’s Identity
and Interests,” in Identity and Foreign Policy in the Middle East, ed. Michael Barnett and
Shibley Telhami (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002): 26–57; Mark Tessler, “The Inti-
fada and Political Discourse in Israel,” Journal of Palestine Studies 19 (1990): 43–61.
55 Lynch, “Jordan’s Identity and Interests,” 41, Milton-Edwards and Hinchcliffe, Jordan – a
Hashemite Legacy, 41.
56 Joseph Nevo, “September 1970 in Jordan: A Civil War?” Civil Wars 10 (2008): 217–230.
57 Davis, “Jinsiyya versus Muwatana”; Davis “Conceptions of Citizenship.”
194 Valbjørn
it is a constant, latent issue in the Jordanian debate that re-emerges from time
to time with claims and counter-claims about how one group or the other is
too privileged in comparison with the other. Reactions to various political and
economic reform initiatives have been affected by this Transjordanian/Pales-
tinian Jordanian divide. Thus, the economic liberalisations and privatisations
of the 2000s became even more controversial because they may have changed
the balance between the Transjordanian part of the population, which domi-
nates the public sector, and the Palestinian, which has a much stronger pres-
ence in the private sector. Palestinian businessmen would therefore benefit
more from these reforms, critics argued. During the Arab Uprisings the Trans-
jordanian/Palestinian Jordanian divide re-emerged. Even though the protests
were mainly driven by Transjordanians, there were attempts to de-legitimise
the protests by – unsubstantiated – claims that they were orchestrated by “dis-
loyal Palestinians and Islamists” wanting to overthrow the Hashemite monar-
chy in favour of Palestinian Islamist rule, or that they would lead Jordan into a
new “Black September.” The origins of such claims and rumours are anything
but clear. Some attribute them to so-called “Transjordanian loyalists,” others
see the “hidden hand” of the gid, which, the argument goes, tried to divide the
protesters and turn the loyalty of the Transjordanian part of the population
back towards the Hashemite regime. No matter what, it is clear that the regime
is very much aware of the potential threat to the political stability represented
by the latent Transjordanian/Palestinian Jordanian divide.
A Typology of Hashemite Responses to Fragmented Identities and

Group Conflicts
At the same time, it is important to understand how the Hashemite regime has,
over time, reacted in very different ways to fragmented identities and group
conflicts in Jordan. Instead of speaking about a specific Hashemite model of
relating to society, it is, therefore, necessary to talk about different, more or less
distinct models. Some resemble the general models in Butenschøn’s typology
of different normative principles for constituting political communities within
state territories (see above), while others are harder to capture in this typology,
which suggests the need to expand it. In simplified terms, four models for the
Hashemite regime’s response to fragmented identities and group conflicts can
be identified.
The first is the Arab-Islamic Hashemite model. The notion of a distinct-
ly Jordanian identity is not important in this model. Instead, it focuses on
membership of a larger Arab and/or Islamic community, not least loyalty to
the Hashemite ruler. Brand describes the model as follows:
in the notion of a Jordanian identity was a conservative variant of pan-

Arabism. That is, as the regime developed, being a citizen of the kingdom
was not defined in exclusivist terms. The territory had welcomed Circas-
sians, Chechens, Syrians, Iraqis, Lebanese, and Palestinians and was to
be a place in which all could live together. At the same time, such an
approach provided the bases for legitimizing Hejazis – the Hashemites –
as rulers in a territory not even broadly defined as their home (or their
own). Hence, for the ruling family, being a Jordanian has not meant trac-
ing ancestral ties back to long present or resident tribes or clans. To be a
Jordanian was (indeed had to be) being an Arab (or Arab speaking, as the
Circassians and Chechens became) and to be loyal to a larger Arab nation
and the Hashemite monarchy.58
An early example of this model can be identified in Abdallah i’s very early
years of rule. As explained, the new emir, who originated from the Hijaz and
had no previous links to the territory, primarily perceived Jordan as a stepping
stone for realising a much larger regional vision, based on a conservative Hash-
emite form of Pan-Arabism, in which Jordan would unite with Palestine, Syria,
and the Hijaz under Hashemite rule. This explains why the first Jordanian gov-
ernment had a strong presence of non-Jordanian Arabs rather than Jordanians
and why the fabled “Arab Legion” was not an exclusively Jordanian army in
which recruits would be transformed into “real Jordanians,” but a truly Arab
Legion, as it also recruited from tribes outside of Jordan. In the first decades of
the country’s existence, up to 30 per cent of the forces were mercenaries from
other Arab countries.59 Another version of this model can be found in the way
Abdallah i addressed the changed demography following the annexation of
the West Bank in 1950. Instead of attempting to “transjordanise” the Palestinian
population or to construct a new, distinctly Jordanian identity embracing both
groups, he turned to the Hashemite form of Pan-Arabism and argued that to
be a Jordanian was to be an Arab and this implied loyalty both to a larger Arab
nation and to the Hashemites because of their special place in Arab-Islamic
history. With reference to the latter, Abdallah was fond of depicting Trans-
jordanians and Palestinians as two branches of the Arab-Islamic community
58 Brand, “Al-Muhajrin W-Al-Ansar,” 287–288.

59 Robins, A History of Jordan, 43; see also Valbjørn, “The Soldier King.”
196 Valbjørn
similar to the Ansar, those who lived in Medina and welcomed the Prophet,
and the Muhajirun, those who fled from Mecca to Medina.60
The second model can be labelled Transjordanisation. It has similarities
with Butenschøn’s “hegemonic system” based on “singularism” and the “unitary
state.” In the general typology, the state community is constituted by a single
and specific collective identity embodied by the state. It is organic in the sense
that the constituent community is considered an indivisible whole whose ex-
istence and interests have a superior moral value, and it is programmatic in
the sense that the state is seen as having a historical mission in realising the
constituent community’s fundamental aspiration. The state is not, therefore,
neutral in the way it relates to group identities and inter-group conflicts but is
more or less partisan in the promotion of the status and interests of the titular
community. Different citizenship statuses are therefore accorded to different
groups, who thus become first- and second-class citizens.61
One variant of this “transjordanisation” model can be found in 1930–1940s
Jordan, where a more distinct Transjordanian nationalism was emerging in
parallel with Abdallah’s conservative Pan-Arabism. As reflected in the slogan
“Transjordan for Transjordanians”62 (see above), it expressed resentment of
the prominence of outsiders – British as well as non-Jordanian Arabs – and
an idea about how the Jordanian state first and foremost should promote the
status and interests of the Transjordanian population. Another variant can be
found in the 1970s, with the attempt to “Transjordanise” the country, which was
partly a reaction to the loss of the West Bank in 1967 and the “Black September”
civil war of 1970. Transjordanians were prioritised in government positions,
and the Palestinian presence in the growing public sector was minimised,
particularly in security-related sectors, and disproportionate amounts of the
state budget were allocated to areas dominated by Transjordanians. The so-
called (Trans)Jordanian nationalists also argued that Jordanian passport hold-
ers on the East Bank who identified primarily as Palestinians should return
to a plo-controlled entity when conditions allowed, and these Palestinians
accordingly had a lower position than the Transjordanians in the “hierarchy of
citizenships.”63
60 Brand, “Al-Muhajrin W-Al-Ansar.” 281.

61 Butenschøn, “State, Power and Citizenship,” 18–19.
63 Ibid., 135; Joseph Nevo, “Changing Identities in Jordan,” in Israel, the Hashemites and the
Palestinians – the Fateful Triangle, ed. Efraim Karsh and P.R. Kumaraswamy (London:
Frank Cass, 2003), 195. See also Adnan Abu Odeh, Jordanians, P alestinians, and the Hash-
emite Kingdom in the Middle East Peace Process (Washington dc: United States Institute
of Peace Press, 1999).
A third model is the United Arab Kingdom-model. This model is closer to

“pluralist” in Butenschøn’s terminology, in the sense that the national com-
munity is seen as consisting of separate subgroups without a programmatic
predominance accorded to any of them. The role of the state is not to pro-
mote a specific communal identity but to facilitate politics of compromise that
give the different groups a say, and in the general model the government itself
will be composed of leading representatives from these groups. Citizenship
becomes an indirect relationship between the citizen and the state because
group affiliation determines the nature of the relationship.64
Although not identical, the never-realised vision of a United Arab King-
dom (uak) shares some similarities with Butenschøn’s “pluralism.” This vision
was presented by King Hussein in 1972 as part of his unsuccessful strategy to
unite the two banks of the Jordan River. uak would be a state comprising two
autonomous provinces, the East Bank and the West Bank, each with its own
parliament and administration and with Amman and Jerusalem as respective
centres of government. At the federal level there would be a joint parliament
with equal representation of Palestinians and Transjordanians; a federal gov-
ernment with powers limited to a restricted set of functional areas including
foreign and defence policy; a central supreme court; and a single army. Amman
would be the capital of the Kingdom, where King Hussein would rule as head
of state.65
The fourth model is the Jordanisation model, which, at least at the formal
level, is close to the principle of “universalism” in Butenschøn’s typology. This
refers to the normative presumption that group-specific identities within a po-
litical community are irrelevant when it comes to each individual member’s
status and rights vis-à-vis the state. The political community constitutes the
universe within which every person is considered equal, and rights and obliga-
tions are anchored in the individual as citizen.66
This model can be identified in the various “grand visions” launched since
King Abdallah ii ascended the throne in 1999, including “the New Jordan” pro-
gramme (al-Urdun al-Jadid), the “Jordan First” programme (al-Urdun Awwa-
lan), the “We Are All Jordan” (Kulna al-Urdun) programme, and the “National
Agenda” programme.67 Basically, these programmes are all about how Jordan is
supposed to be a modern and liberal country, where people first and foremost

67 André Bank and Morten Valbjørn, “Bringing the (Arab) Regional Level Back In… – Jordan
in the New Arab Cold War,” Middle East Critique 19 (2010): 303–319.
198 Valbjørn
identify with a Jordanian identity rather than sub- or supra-state identities;

where Jordan’s interest should take precedence over other regional, sectarian
or subgroup concerns; and where rights and obligations should be anchored in
the individual as citizen and not related to their membership of various sub-
groups in society. While the current Hashemite regime has been very keen,
in its rhetoric, to promote this universal Jordanisation model, even a cursory
examination of its actual policies reveals a very different practice.
The previous sections showed how the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan has
followed a pattern – in particular when it comes to the content of citizenship
rights (the rights citizens have or claim) – that is similar to, though not exactly
the same as, its republican counterparts. The reintroduction, in this section,
of some of the basic debates in classic citizenship theory relating to the ques-
tion about how political communities are constituted has, at the same time,
brought attention to a number of more distinct features in the Jordanian tra-
jectory of citizenship, not at least in terms of the extent and depth of citizen-
ship, and in the specific strategies for how the Hashemite regime has related to
fragmented identities and group conflicts.
Conclusions
As part of the self-reflection among scholars following the Arab Uprisings, citi-
zenship theory has been reintroduced to the study of Arab politics as a tool
to examine the long-term political trends preceding the Uprisings that began
in 2011 and to understand their possible implications for future Arab politics.
In line with this renewed interest in citizenship theory, this chapter has con-
ducted a case study of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, as perceived through
the prism of citizenship. While the major part of this chapter has explored
political trends in the small Hashemite kingdom, this exploration does, how-
ever, also carry a number of lessons for the more general debate on citizenship
theory in the Middle East.
First and foremost, the chapter does support the notion that, despite
its Western origins, citizenship is also a useful lens to grasp major political
trends in the Middle East and contrary to the prevalent “democratisation and
authoritarianism paradogma” citizenship theory offers a more fine-grained vo-
cabulary that appears better at acknowledging dimensions of both change and
continuity and similarities and differences at state and society levels.
At the same time, the chapter also underscores the point that there is a
need for a kind of “modified citizenship theory” in order to realise the poten-
tial of this approach. This relates to another general lesson that concerns the
importance of making comparisons in citizenship theory as a way of highlight-

ing similarities and differences in the trajectory of citizenship rights not only
between but also within regions. Thus, while the Jordanian case-study, in gen-
eral terms, supports Meijer’s point about how it is important to pay attention
to how the Middle Eastern history of citizenship rights is different from the
Western, the specific Jordanian trajectory, particularly when it comes to the
depth and extent of citizenship, does, at the same time, illustrate why it is just
as important to be attentive to intra-regional differences. Some of these can be
attributed to the fact that each country will have its own specific history that
influences the particular trajectory of citizenship rights, but there may also be
more general patterns; for instance, the Jordanian case points to the need for
a better understanding of whether and, if so, how (Middle Eastern) republics
and monarchies are similar to or differ from each other when it comes to the
content, extent, and depth of citizenship rights.
A final general lesson emerging from the Jordanian case-study concerns the
call to go “back-to-basics” to rediscover the classic citizenship theory debate
that revolved around the fundamental questions of who are the people, how
are political communities constituted, and how a distinction between “us” and
“them” can be drawn. These classic questions were very useful in examining
some of the more distinct features concerning the depth and extent of citizen-
ship in Jordan, but they do also appear to be – increasingly – important in oth-
er parts of the region, where the weakening or even disintegration of existing
states and the (re)emergence of sub-and supra-state identities based on tribe
or sect have given rise to a debate about whether we are witnessing the “end
of the Sykes-Picot state order” in favour new forms of political communities.
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chapter 7
Social Contract in the Al Saʿud Monarchy: From

Subjects to Citizens?
Ida Nicolaisen Almestad and Stig Stenslie
March 11, 2011 was declared by Saudi activists to be a “Day of Rage” (thawrat
Hunayn).1 Saudis are facing many of the same challenges as people in other
Arab countries – authoritarian rule, corruption, and socioeconomic prob-
lems, which in particular affect the country’s youth. But few Saudis took to
the streets. Only minor demonstrations took place, primarily in the Shiʿi-
dominated coastal cities such as Qatif, in the Eastern Province. The spring ap-
parently never came to Saudi Arabia. However – as this article aims to show
– political awareness is on the rise among broader segments of the Saudi popu-
lation. The Arab Spring inspired several groups to articulate demands for civil
and political rights, based on self-identification as citizens.
This tendency is particularly apparent online, where Salafis, Shiʿi-activists,
women, and liberals all voice their demands for rights, demands that reflect
the materialisation of new concepts of what being a Saudi Arabian citizen
entails. Citizenship refers to a judicial relationship between the state and the
individual, and it defines the citizen’s rights vis-à-vis the state. T.H. Marshall
places citizenship rights in three categories: political (right to vote, right to
found a party, freedom of association), civil (equality before the law, freedom
of speech, personal freedom), and social rights (welfare services, education,
health services).2
The citizens of Saudi Arabia have, primarily, social rights. A citizen benefits
from a “cradle to grave” welfare state, made possible thanks to oil revenues.
In return, the citizen has to swear loyalty (bayʿa) to the ruler (wali al-amr).
Saudi Arabia has the dubious honour of being included, without exception, in
Freedom House’s annual list of the “least free states” in the world – receiving
1 Thawrat Hunayn, literally translated as the “Hunayn Revolution,” is a historical reference to

the battle of Hunayn. The battle of Hunayn is mentioned in the Qurʾan and was fought be-
tween the Prophet Muhammad and his followers and a Bedouin tribe near Taʾif in 630.
2 Thomas Humphrey Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class, and Other Essays (Cambridge:

204 almestad and stenslie
the lowest possible scores in the political rights and civil liberties categories.3
Increased political awareness, demands for civil and political rights, and the
call for a new social contract between the state and its citizens are serious chal-
lenges for the royal family, Al Saʿud.
Moreover, the mobilisation for citizen rights unveils the limitations of the
so-called rentier state. In academic literature, Saudi Arabia has been described
as a rentier state par excellence. The royal family’s rental incomes are first
and foremost from oil sales, as well as from profits from overseas investments
made possible by petrodollars; only a small part of the kingdom’s income is
derived from taxes and levies. According to the theory, putting it somewhat
simplistically, the regime in a rentier state is in a position to “buy” the citizens’
allegiance through an active redistribution policy. A social contract is thus
established where the ruling party guarantees the citizens’ material comfort,
while in return the citizens accept the ruler’s right to rule. This perspective
suggests that economic welfare is the primary variable in influencing citizens’
political interests, including their expectations of civil and political rights.4
As public life in Saudi Arabia is regulated by restrictive laws on media, pub-
lic assemblies, and political participation,5 the Internet is the main arena for
criticism in Saudi Arabia. While there are occasionally critical articles in the
Saudi press, here the censorship is stricter. The Internet has contributed to
increased political awareness for a generation of Saudis that has been raised
under authoritarian rule, and therefore did not have access to arenas of po-
litical debate before.6 As for social media, Twitter is particularly significant in
Saudi Arabia; the number of Twitter users rose 3000 per cent from 2011 to 2012,
and today there are more than five million active tweeters, who together post
more than 150 million tweets every day. In 2013, Twitter continued to expand in
Saudi Arabia, and the country is now the number one on earth for per-capita
3 Bayly Philip Christopher Winder, “The Hashtag Generation: The Twitter Phenomenon in
Saudi Society,” Journal of Georgetown University, Qatar Middle Eastern Studies Student Associ-
ation (2014). Accessed June 20, 2013, http://www.qscience.com/doi/abs/10.5339/messa.2014.6.
4 Numerous researchers have explained the survival of the Saudi monarchy through reference
to the oil income; these include Giacomo Luciani and Hazem Beblawi, The Rentier State
(London: Croom Helm, 1987); Jill Crystal, Oil and Politics in the Gulf (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995); Kiren Aziz Chaudhry, The Price of Wealth: Economies and Institutions
in the Middle East (Ithaca ny: Cornell University Press, 1997); and F. Gregory Gause iii, Oil
Monarchies: Domestic and Security Challenges in the Arab Gulf States (New York: Council of
Foreign Relations, 1994).
5 Stig Stenslie, Regime Stability in Saudi Arabia: The Challenge of Succession (New York:
Routledge, 2012).
6 Philip N. Howard and Hussein M. Muzammil, Democracy’s Fourth Wave? Digital Media and
the Arab Spring (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 3–4.
Social Contract in the Al Saʿud Monarchy 205
usage: about 51 per cent of Saudi Internet users have a Twitter account, while a
third, or 32 per cent, of these are active monthly Twitter users.7
This article is based on an analysis of online discussions around citizen
rights that took place in the wake of the Arab uprisings, in the years 2011–14.
We will focus exclusively on those who are Saudi citizens, which means that we
will not include stateless people (bidun) and foreign workers. Our focus is thus
not on who are citizens, but rather on how citizenship is defined and what it
entails with regard to rights and duties.
The “Day of Rage” Cancelled
Many anticipated that the wave of protests that hit Arab countries would also
reach Saudi Arabia. The royal family gave promises of expanding social rights
in an attempt to diminish any potential displeasure among the population,
and the regime also warned against participating in demonstrations and pre-
pared the security services. The normally moderate foreign minister, Prince
Saʿud al-Faysal, threatened in March 2011 that the regime would “cut off any
finger” raised against the royal family.8 The religious establishment supported
the regime, and issued fatwas that declared demonstrations to be forbidden
according to Islamic law. One fatwa stated that since Saudi Arabia was an Is-
lamic country “reform shall not take place through demonstrations and other
methods that bring about unrest and divides the society.”9
There was no “Day of Rage” in Saudi Arabia. The royal family’s preventative
measures probably had some effect, but there is also little reason to believe
that most Saudis were ready to take to the streets. However, the government
has not been able to prevent online mobilisation among Saudis. Earlier waves
of political mobilisation in Saudi Arabia have been triggered by regional
events. This was the case after the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979, the Gulf
war in 1990–91, and now, in the wake of the Arab Spring. The focus of political
debate has, however, changed over the last decade; today internal condi-
tions are the main focus. This change is illustrated, for instance, through the
7 Peer Reach, “4 ways Twitter can keep growing” (2013). Accessed February 26, 2014, http://blog
.peerreach.com/2013/11/4-ways-how-twitter-can-keep-growing/.
8 “Saudi Arabia Will Cut off Any Finger Raised against It – Saudi fm,” Asharq al-Awsat, March
10, 2011. Accessed April 12, 2013, http://www.aawsat.net/2011/03/article55247240.
9 “A Fatwa from the Council of Senior Scholars in the Kingdom of Saudi-Arabia Warning
Against Mass Demonstrations,” Islamopedia, October 3, 2013. Accessed October 19, 2013,
http://islamopediaonline.org/fatwa/fatwa-council-senior-scholars-kingdom-saudi-arabia-
warning-against-mass-demonstrations.
decreasing interest concerning Saudi Arabia’s close “security policy” relation-

ship with the usa. During the Gulf War (1990–91) more than 500,000 American
soldiers were stationed in Saudi Arabia, which led to massive criticism of the
royal family from different places. But when it was revealed in February 2013
that the Americans had used a military base in the country to carry out drone
attacks against targets in Yemen,10 it did not cause a debate over the coun-
try’s relationship with the us. Today’s focus is instead on domestic issues in
Saudi Arabia, and demands for citizens’ rights are increasingly characterising
the public debate. There are several groups calling for civil and political rights,
and, hence, working to change the established arrangement where citizens
are granted social rights in return for allegiance; in other words, to transform
Saudis from subjects to citizens.
Social Rights in Return for Allegiance
Citizenship is usually regulated by a country’s constitution. Yet Saudi Arabia

does not have a constitution in the normal sense of the word. Instead it is
Islamic law (Shariʿa) that functions as the kingdom’s constitution. However,
there is the Basic Law of Governance (al-Nizam al-Asasi li-l-Hukm), which is
the closest thing to a conventional constitution in Saudi Arabia. The Basic Law
defines the citizen’s rights (huquq) and duties (wajibat).11
Citizen’s rights in Saudi Arabia are based on the Islamic principle of obedi-
ence and allegiance (bayʿa) to the ruler (wali al-amr). The Qurʾanic verse 4:59
says “O you who believe, obey God and obey the messenger and also those
in charge among you.” This principle is literally rendered in the Basic Law,
Article 9. According to ʿAbd al-Wahhab’s teachings, which form the dominant
interpretation of Islam in Saudi Arabia, it is a duty to obey the ruler even if he
is a despot, as long as he does not violate Islamic law. Article 6 of the Basic Law
underlines that obedience to the ruler must be maintained at all times. It states:
“Citizens shall give the pledge of allegiance (bayʿa) to the King, professing
allegiance in times of hardship and of ease.”
In return for their loyalty, the citizens are entitled to welfare services; in
other words, social rights. Article 27 states that: “The State shall guarantee the
rights of citizens and their families in cases of emergency, illness, disability,
10 “cia Using Saudi Base for Air Strikes,” Al Jazeera, February 7, 2013. Accessed October 19,
2013, http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2013/02/201326145922846950.html.
11 “Basic Law of Governance,” Umm al-Qura Gazette, no. 3397, March 5, 1992. Accessed
October 19, 2013, http://www.sagia.gov.sa/Documents/Laws/Basic%20Law%20of%20
Governance_En.pdf.
and old age (…).” The state is also obliged to offer a wide range of different so-
cial welfare goods, including the provision of work for all citizens (Article 28),
education (Article 30), and health services (Article 31).
The pact of allegiance seen in the Basic Law is based on both Wahhabi
Islam and clientelist traditions of the Arabian Peninsula. When King ʿAbd al-
ʿAziz established the modern kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932 he united the
different tribes on the peninsula under one state. In this process, the tribal
chiefs and other local authorities gave their obedience to the king in return
for protection. This clientelist system was developed as a consequence of the
individual’s need for protection in the absence of a centralised state. In pre-oil
Saudi Arabia, the individual was not entitled to rights; the individual obtained
rights as a part of a bigger group – the extended family or tribe. The tribal lead-
ers played a key role in distributing welfare to their fellow tribesmen.12
Oil revenues, however, made the Al Saʿud capable of offering considerable
welfare services directly to the individuals, and hence clearly upholding their
side of the pact of loyalty, while at the same time undermining the standing
of the tribal chiefs in the clientelistic structure. In 1938 the American com-
pany Chevron found oil beneath the Saudi desert sand, and during the Second
World War production blossomed. However, it was not until the price jump
following what in the West is known as “the Oil Crisis” in 1973–74 that oil in-
come seriously began to fill the House of Saʿud’s coffers. Today, Saudi Arabia
has almost one-fifth of the world’s proven oil reserves, and is the world’s largest
producer and exporter of oil.13 Throughout the history of modern Saudi Arabia
the regime has cultivated a narrative in which the ruler cares for and ensures
his subjects’ material needs; thus the welfare arrangements are presented as
gifts (makrama) rather than rights, while subjects are expected to obey their
ruler and benefactor in return.
While the Basic Law illustrates that Saudi citizenship goes a long way to guar-
antee social rights, civil and political rights hardly exist. Article 5b states that:
“Rulers of the country shall be from amongst the sons of the founder King ʿAbd
al-ʿAziz bin ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Faysal al-Saʿud, and their descendants.” In Saudi
Arabia, the king is also prime minister. “Ordinary” citizens’ admission to the
top political position is, in other words, out of the question, as this is reserved
for the al-Saʿuds. In addition to the fact that only the direct descendants of the
modern kingdom’s founder can govern the country, the citizens’ role in political
decision making is very much restricted. Article 8 limits the people’s role in
12 Soraya Altorki, “The Concept and Practice of Citizenship in Saudi Arabia,” in Gender and
Citizenship in the Middle East, ed. Suad Joseph (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000),
215–236.
13 “Saudi Arabia: Country Analysis Brief Overview,” us Energy Information Administration.
Accessed October 19, 2013, http://www.eia.gov/countries/country-data.cfm?fips=sa.
decision making to consultation, in accordance with the Islamic principle

of shura, while Article 43 underlines that: “Councils held by the King and the
Crown Prince shall be open for all citizens and anyone else who may have a
complaint or a grievance. A citizen shall be entitled to address public authori-
ties and discuss any matters of concern to him.”
In regards to the citizen’s civil rights, the Basic Law states that: “The State
shall protect human rights in accordance with the Shariʿa” (Article 26). The
Basic Law does not mention women rights, freedom of religion, or freedom of
assembly. This is hardly sensational in a state where political parties, unions,
and demonstrations are forbidden, and civil society frowned upon.14 Freedom
of expression is also very limited. Article 39 states: “It is prohibited to commit
acts leading to disorder and division, affecting the security of the state and its
public relations, or undermining human dignity and rights.”
This system of loyalty in return for social rights is the “authoritarian bargain”
– a term introduced by political scientists to describe how authoritarian re-
gimes do not survive on repression alone. The so-called bargain is an implicit
arrangement between the ruling elite and the citizens, whereby the latter re-
linquish political influence in exchange for public spending.15 As shown, in
the case of Saudi Arabia, this arrangement is almost stated explicitly in the
Basic Law. In the kingdom, welfare is used to buy the citizen’s allegiance, and in
this way social rights arguably obstruct the development of civil and political
rights. As Saudi citizens only possess social rights, they lack the opportunity to
influence how these rights are distributed. Citizens are not equal – social rights
are related to which class you belong to.
For the royal family citizenship is a mechanism for including and exclud-
ing, one that is used to buy loyalty from selected groups, and to punish others.
To put it somewhat simplistically, the royal family – the Al Saʿud – constitute
an “executive class,” which is the most privileged. The “business class” is com-
prised of aristocratic families with close ties to the royal family, such as the
Al Sudayri, the Al al-Shaykh, and the Al al-Tuwayjiri, which enjoys extensive
14 Abdulaziz H. al-Fahad, “Ornamental Constitutionalism: The Saudi Basic Law of Gover-

nance,” The Yale Journal of International Law 30 (2005): 375–396.
15 Much has been written on the “authoritarian bargain”; see, for instance, Mehran Kamrava,
Beyond the Arab Spring: The Evolving Ruling Bargain in the Middle East (New York and
London: Hurst, 2014); Agnieszka Paczynska, “The Discreet Appeal of Authoritarianism:
Political Bargains and Stability of Liberal Authoritarian Regimes in the Middle East,” in
Contentious Politics in the Middle East: Political Opposition under Authoritarianism, ed.
Holger Albrecht (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2010), 34–51; and Raj M. Desai,
Anders Olofsgård, and Tarik M. Yousef, “The Logic of Authoritarian Bargains,” Economics
& Politics 21 (2009): 93–225.
privileges. The “first class” is men professing to the Wahhabi interpretation of

Islam, while the “second class” consists of women and different minority
groups. Minorities are given even fewer rights than other Saudi citizens as they
are exposed to discrimination in different forms – based both in law and prac-
tice. Outside of this class system are around eight million foreign workers and
the exclusion of these makes Saudi citizenship appear as a privilege.16
Demands for Civil and Political Rights
Even though the Saudis did not mass mobilise in the streets, the Arab Spring
has undoubtedly fuelled the demands for civil and political rights in Saudi
Arabia. Early in February 2011, just before Egypt’s former president, Hosni
Mubarak, was forced to leave office, the Facebook group The people want to
reform the regime (al-shaʿb yurid islah al-nizam) was founded. The group de-
manded the rule of law, efforts to combat corruption, and respect for human
rights. Soon the group had thousands of followers. The same month the Islam-
ic Umma Party (Hizb al-Umma al-Islamiyya) was also created, in spite of the
ban against political parties. The party, which was a rare rapprochement among
Islamists, seculars, and human rights activists, used social media to broadcast
their demands for freedoms and human rights. At the same time, several peti-
tions were put forward demanding a constitutional monarchy. The most im-
portant carried the title Towards a State of Rights and Institutions, which was
drafted by a diverse group of people and got very broad support from Saudi
society. The message of the petition was posted online by many of the drafters,
including the prominent activists Tawfiq al-Sayf and Salman al-ʿAwda. The vir-
tual opposition, despite being made up of different groups, expresses its unity
in terms of the need for a new social contract, which implies that the relation-
ship between the ruler and the citizen needs to change.17
Shiʿis
One of the groups that are demanding rights as citizens are activists belonging
to the Shiʿi minority. Wahhabi scholars emphasise strict monotheism (tawhid),
and often refer to Shiʿi Islam as polytheism (shirk). These scholars are also
16 Mamoun Fandy, Saudi Arabia and the Politics of Dissent (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1999), 30–31; Stig Stenslie, “Elite Integration and Stability in The House of Saud” (PhD
diss., University of Oslo, 2009), 81–82.
17 “The Islamic Umma Party,” Facebook, May 20, 2013. Accessed October 19, 2013, https://
www.facebook.com/islamicommaparty.
critical of the fact that Shiʿis do not acknowledge the three first successors of
the Prophet, and refer to them as “deniers/rejectionists” (rawafid). This minor-
ity is looked upon as divergent Muslims, or apostates, and a “fifth column” that
fraternises with Saudi Arabia’s rival Iran.18 This brings about economic dis-
crimination against the Shiʿis, who primarily live in the oil rich Eastern prov-
ince. They are discriminated on the labour market, excluded from diplomatic
positions and the state bureaucracy, and are also hindered from obtaining high
positions in commerce.19
This marginalisation has contributed to a debate amongst the Shiʿis about their
lack of rights in Saudi society, a debate that was taking place even before the Arab
Spring. However, following the start of the Arab uprisings, the number of Shiʿis
demanding citizen rights and equal citizenship (muwatana) is growing. The fo-
cus for this debate is anti-sectarianism and the need to incorporate this minority
into Saudi society. SaudiShia, a Shiʿi organisation working for their rights, tweeted
the following on April 24, 2013: “Real citizenship is morally & mentally accepting
different people as they are all from one nation sharing the same fate.”20
Hasan al-Saffar, one of Saudi Arabia’s most prominent Shiʿi scholars, is in the
frontline of demanding rights. He is part of a pragmatic and dialogue-oriented
current called the “reformists” (al-islahiyyin). On his website he underlines
the need for an elected National Assembly that reflects the will of the people:
“Saudi Arabia’s population is looking forward to choosing their representatives
to a National Assembly representing the will of the people.”21 Tawfiq al-Sayf, a
reputable sociologist, is another leading activist for Shiʿi rights, one who links
demands for rights to the concept of citizenship. In a post on Rasid.com, a
moderate website established by Saudi Shiʿis, he presents arguments for a new
social contract between ruler and citizen: “The social contract should be based
on an equal relationship between the ruler and the ruled, where both parties’
rights and duties are grounded.”22
18 Natana J. Delong-Bas, Wahhabi Islam: From Revival and Reform to Global Jihad (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2004), 64.
19 Roel Meijer and Paul Aarts (eds), Saudi Arabia between Conservatism, Accommodation
and Reform, Netherlands Institute of International Relations, “Clingendael” (2012). Ac-
cessed October 19, 2013, http://www.clingendael.nl/sites/default/files/20120000_research
_report_rmeijer.pdf.
20 SaudiShia, Twitter, April 24, 2013. Accessed October 19, 2013, https://twitter.com/
SaudiShia/status/327007879913684993/.
21 Hassan al-Saffar, “Al-sheikh al-Saffar yadʿu ila majlis niyabi muntakhab fi-l-mamlaka”
(Shaykh al-Saffar calls for an elected parliament in the Kingdom), 2012. Accessed October
19, 2013, www.saffar.org/?act=artc&id=3094.
22 Tawfiq al-Sayf, “ʿIlm ʿala bayan Naḥwa Dawlat al-Huquq wa-l-Muʾassasat” (Statement
about the Pamphlet Towards the State with Rights and Institutions), 2012. Accessed 19
Saudi Shiʿis demands for equal rights are in some cases supported by non-
Shiʿi activists; for example, Khalid al-Dakhil, a liberal academic and columnist,
underlines that the Shiʿis are entitled to the same rights as other Saudi citizens:
“The Shiʿis in sa [Saudi Arabia] are citizens just like everyone there, and should
be taken as such.”23
Women
Another group demanding rights is women. Women’s participation, both in pub-
lic and in private, is limited in Saudi Arabia. They are dependent on permission
from a male relative (mahram) to study, work, travel, and get married. Until re-
cently they were excluded from participation in the Consultative Council (Ma-
jlis al-Shura) and did not have the right to vote in municipal elections, though
these restrictions were abolished through a royal decree in September 2011. The
Global Gender Report 2012, published by the World Economic Forum, places
Saudi Arabia in 132nd place out of 135 countries, and the report particularly
underlines the political and economic marginalisation of Saudi women.24
The marginalisation of women is the result of a combination of tribal
customs, conservatism, and Wahhabi teachings. The position of women is in-
fluenced by the fact that the country is an Islamic state and by the religious
scholars’ substantial authority in the social sphere. The royal house has tradi-
tionally limited women’s rights to prove Saudi Arabia’s Islamic credentials, and
thus secure legitimacy from the people. Over the past decade this trend has
partially been reversed and many are now looking to King Salman to reform
women’s rights.25 However, the religious establishment is trying to curb this
development, as they hold that women’s rights will weaken Islam’s position
in Saudi society. This attitude was apparent when Wahhabi scholars took the
unusual step of protesting in public against King ʿAbdallah’s decision to allow
women into the Consultative Council.26
In the wake of the Arab Spring Saudi women have organised themselves,
and are demanding an end to the discrimination they suffer. In Spring 2011
October, 2013, https://www.rasid.com/?act=artc&id=48359. [This url, www.rasid.com,

was closed in 2014.]
23 Ahmed al-Omran, “Khaled Al-Dakhil Assistant Professor of Sociology,” 2007. Ac-
cessed October 19, 2013, http://saudijeans.org/2007/02/06/khaled-al-dakhil-assistant
-professor-of-sociology/.
24 World Economic Forum, The Global Gender Gap Report 2012. Accessed October 19, 2013,
http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GenderGap_Report_2012.pdf, 304–305.
25 Female Saudi activists, interview with author, May 2009 and Autumn 2011.
26 “Saudi Clerics Protest against Appointing Women to Advisory Body,” Reuters, Janu-
ary 15, 2013. Accessed October 19, 2013, http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/01/15/
us-saudi-clerics-women-idUSBRE90E0OO20130115.
a group of Saudi women defied the ban against women driving, and posted
pictures of their campaign on social media, including on Facebook and Twit-
ter, and uploaded videos to YouTube. Their campaign received much attention,
and the women attracted both support and anger. They based their right to
drive on Article 8 of the Basic Law, which mandates consultation: “The State
discrimination is based on gender so that men are granted the right to freedom
of movement and even adolescents and children driving is tolerated while
women are strictly prohibited. This is unjust. This is also not complying with
the Basic Law of Governance of the country since, instead of basing it on con-
sultation; the ban was issued on the basis of the views of a limited number of
men with the exclusion of women.”27
The women are also actively working for reform in a wider sense. In a film
posted on YouTube, under #Right2Dignity – one of the hashtags that the wom-
en’s movement is using – it is stated that “citizenship for Saudi women must
entail a formal recognition from the state of women’s equal citizenship, with
the same civil, political, social, and legal duties, and rights, that are given to
male citizens.”28
Furthermore, women are demanding a legal framework that secures equal
rights for both sexes. They underline the need for a codified family law that
safeguards the interests of women in cases of divorce and custody proceed-
ings. Women activists are also demanding political rights and have suggested
the state “establish a quota system to ensure women representation on all
levels of decision making, public sector, and governance to elevate women to
equal citizens.”29
Manal al-Sharif, a famous woman activist, was arrested on May 22, 2011 after
she uploaded a video to YouTube showing herself driving a car. She was ac-
cused of ruining Saudi Arabia’s reputation abroad and inflaming public opin-
ion, but was pardoned by King ʿAbdallah. Al-Sharif herself argues that Saudi
women should have the same rights as men, and states that the women’s move-
ment will not give up until they have achieved this goal: “we will not accept
being non-existent and having our demands marginalised.”30 Eman al-Nafjan,
27 Eman al-Nafjan, “Right-to-Dignity’s Statement on Lifting the Ban on Women Driv-

ing,” August 31, 2013. Accessed October 19, 2013, http://saudiwoman.me/2012/08/31/
right-to-dignitys-statement-on-lifting-the-ban-on-women-driving/#comments.
28 Citizenshipforwomen, “Citizenship for Saudi Women: English subtitles,” YouTube, March
7, 2011. October 19, 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtkXTqXnCHc.
29 Ibid.
30 “Government under Pressure to Lift ban on Women Drivers,” Gulf States Newsletter, May
27, 2011.
another woman activist, who is behind the blog Saudiwomen’s Weblog, argues
for political reform; in one of her posts she demands “a constitutional democ-
racy, after the Norwegian model.”31
Liberals
It is not only “second class citizens” – Shiʿis and women – who have mobilised
online. Wider sections of society have also embraced the concept of citizen-
ship, and are demanding rights. Among those who are making such demands
are the “liberals” (al-libraliyyun). Al-libraliyyun is a wide-ranging term that in-
cludes individuals and groups working to promote political participation and
human rights – including women and minorities – and to weaken the religious
establishment’s influence. The term also includes Islamists who are concerned
about the lack of citizen rights in Saudi Arabia. While the liberal segment in
the kingdom is often described as marginal, liberal activists have attracted a
lot of attention, especially since 2011. And even though most liberals work for
reform within the existing framework of the monarchy, they have been among
the most vocal critics of the royal family. The liberals, who have been send-
ing petitions to the king demanding reforms since 2003, did not march on the
streets on the “Day of Rage.” Instead, they called for a constitutional monarchy
through new petitions posted online.
Khalid al-Dakhil, a liberal activist, states that the Arab Spring illustrated
the need for changing the present relationship between the ruler and the citi-
zen: “There is no longer any argument about whether this relationship should
change. The argument now should be about how this change should occur.”32
He underlines that the regime needs to secure political reform because this
“will support the political stability in the current phase that the region is pass-
ing through.”33
Moreover, many liberal Saudis opposed the economic hand-outs by the re-
gime in 2011, which particularly benefited the religious establishment, and sev-
eral liberals published their objections online. ʿAbd al-Rahim Allahim, a lawyer
and commentator, tweeted: “A scholar is just a citizen, just like me. Why are
31 Eman al-Nafjan, “Karen-Elliott House’s on Saudi Arabia,” January 12, 2013. Accessed October
19, 2013, http://saudiwoman.me/2013/01/12/karen-elliott-houses-on-saudi-arabia/.
32 Khalid al-Dakhil, “What Awaits the Kingdom after the ‘Arab Spring’?” December 24, 2012.
Accessed October 19, 2013, http://www.grc.net/index.php?frm_module=contents&frm_
action=detail_book&frm_type_id=&op_lang=en&override=Articles+%3E+What+Awaits
+the+Kingdom+After+the+%E2%80%98Arab+Spring%E2%80%99%3F&sec=Contents
&frm_title=&book_id=79840.
33 Ibid.
he and his colleagues favoured when the basic concept of citizenship should
ensure that he and I are equal before the law?”34
Muhammad al-Qahtani and ʿAbdallah al-Hamed are among the most well-
known rights activist in Saudi Arabia, and two of the founders of the Saudi
Civil and Political Rights Association (acpra). acpra was established without
the government’s permission in 2009, and works to establish civil and politi-
cal rights in Saudi Arabia. In a post on acpra’s webpage on June 22, 2012 it is
underlined that the current relationship between the ruler and the citizen is
no longer relevant: “Today, the people are in need of a new social contract, one
between the reformed Saudi regime and a free people. This can only be done
through a constitutional governance that draws its legitimacy from the people.
The government must be elected, representative of the people’s will, and held
accountable to them alone.”35
Several acpra members were arrested in the wake of the Arab Spring. In
June 2012 al-Qahtani and al-Hamed were both brought to trial for establish-
ing an “illegal organisation, threatening national unity, and breaking the pact
of allegiance to the ruler.” Through the whole trial al-Qahtani tweeted details
about it, and the case led to much criticism of the regime on social media.
Furthermore, many activists, intellectuals, and academics followed the trials
to demonstrate their support for al-Qahtani and al-Hamed. On March 9, 2013
al-Qahtani was sentenced to ten years in prison and al-Hamed to five years, in
addition to six years from an earlier sentence, for which he had earlier been
pardoned. Another acpra member, Omar al-Saʿid, was sentenced to four years
in prison and 300 lashes in 2013 for calling for a constitutional monarchy and
criticising the royal family for human rights offences.
Liberals also run the risk of being accused of “insulting Islam” and referred
to the General Court on charges of apostasy – a capital crime in Saudi Arabia.
In June 2012, Raif Badawi, a young Saudi blogger who had set up the website
Free Saudi Liberals, was arrested and brought to court on several charges, in-
cluding that of apostasy. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison, a fine of 1 mil-
lion Saudi riyals, and 1,000 lashes.36 In January 2015, Badawi underwent the first
34 ʿAbd al-Rarahim Allahim, Twitter, 19 March, 2011. Accessed October 19, 2013, http://twitter
.com/#!/allahim/status/49150972974473216.
35 Saudi Civil and Political Rights Association, “acpra Calls Upon Saudi Citizens to Demand
Allegiance Conditions,” June 22, 2012. Accessed October 19, 2013, http://acprahr.org/news_
view_178.html.
36 “Harsher Sentence for Held Saudi Activist,” Al Jazeera, September 2, 2014. Accessed Janu-
ary 14, 2015, http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/09/harsher-sentence-held
-saudi-activist-201492104874781.html.
round of 50 lashes in public after Friday prayers in front of the al-Jafali mosque
in Jedda, which triggered global outrage at Saudi Arabia.37
Salafis
Like al-libraliyyun, the term al-salafiyyun encompasses a broad group of in-
dividuals, tendencies, and groups. In Saudi Arabia, Salafism, in the form of
Wahhabism, is the strict state ideology. Likewise, the kingdom’s Sunni Islamists –
who represent the most popular and best organised group of activists – are
Salafis. The vast majority of these Islamists can be associated with the Islamic
Awakening (al-sahwa al-islamiyya), which came about in the 1970s through a
blend of the religious tenets of Salafism and the political discourse of the Mus-
lim Brotherhood.
While liberals acknowledge the concept of citizenship and want equal
rights, Salafis tend towards a more exclusivist approach. Salafis often refer to
the traditional Islamic protection system (dhimma); according to Islamic law,
any Muslim who stays in dar al-islam is ipso facto a Muslim citizen. Christians
and Jews, who belong to the “people of the book” (ahl al-kitab), are categorised
as dhimmis, and do not have the same rights and duties as Muslim citizens. At
the same time, the Salafis typically have a more transnational position based
on the concept of the Islamic nation (umma). From this point of view, the
nation-state (al-watan) is rejected, and replaced with the idea of an Islamic
caliphate in which the concept of citizenship is irrelevant. Women’s rights
should be based on the Shariʿa, which implies that women will not have the
same rights as men. Salafis discard anything resembling the worship of saints,
and some claim that Shiʿis and Sufis practice polytheism (shirk). Thus, strict
Salafis do not regard them as Muslims, and consequently declare that they are
not entitled to equal rights.
However, there are signs that the Salafis’ traditional posture vis-à-vis citi-
zenship is changing. In his ground-breaking research on Sahwa activism,
Stéphane Lacroix identifies a sub-group that he dubs “Islamo-liberals,” be-
cause they merge the language of democracy with that of Islam.38 Several
37 “Saudi Activist Flogged Outside Mosque in Jeddah,” Al Arabiya, January 9, 2015. Accessed
January 14, 2015, http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/2015/01/09/Saudi-activist-flogged
-outside-mosque-in-Jeddah.html.
38 See among others, Stéphane Lacroix, Awakening Islam: The Politics of Religious Dissent
in Contemporary Saudi Arabia (Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press, 2011); and Sté-
phane Lacroix, “Saudi Islamist and the Arab Spring,” research paper, Kuwait Programme
on Development, Governance, and Globalisation in the Gulf States. London School of
Economics, 2014.
“Islamo-liberals” have incorporated the idea of citizenship rights in their calls

for a constitutional monarchy, and they have not hesitated to ally themselves
with liberals and even Shiʿis to strengthen their case. Their ideals are moving
towards a civil state rather than the utopian ideal of a caliphate, and they seem
to have recognised the concept of individual rights. Salafis such as Salman al-
ʿAwda, ʿAyidh al-Qarni, Yusuf al-Ahmad, and Muhammad al-Ahmari, are active
in the debate for citizen rights. They are concerned about civil and political
rights, and want political reform. Another example is Abdullah al-Maliki – a
young Salafi scholar – who calls for civil and political rights in his book The
Sovereignty of the Umma Comes before the Implementation of Shariʿa. In this
book, he argues that civil and political rights should come before everything,
even before the implication of Shariʿa. He also changes the common Islamic
saying “Islam is the solution” to “Sovereignty of the people is the solution.”39
One might see the Salafis’ interest in citizenship rights as a result of their
discovery of politics in general. In contrast to official clerics, who are apolitical,
loyal to the regime, and reluctant to speak about sensitive issues, the Salafis
have gained widespread popularity among ordinary Saudis for their political
activism. They have also conquered social media, and have far more followers
on Twitter than other reform activists.
In 2012, Salman al-ʿAwda published the book Questions of the Revolution
(Asʾilat al-Thawra), in which he argues for a more positive view of revolutions,
which, according to Wahhabi teachings, are synonymous with chaos and dan-
ger. Thus, he challenges the principle of allegiance to the ruler and claims that
there is a middle way between allegiance and violent insurgency: peaceful rev-
olution. He rejects the idea of theocracy, the rule of Islamic jurists, and main-
tains that an Islamic state should be based on a contract between the state and
its citizens. According to al-ʿAwda, democracy is a better governing model than
autocracy, and he advocates representation of the people, freedom, and civil so-
ciety.40 Not surprisingly, the book was banned, but al-ʿAwda used social media
to share his message. In May 2013 he had over 2,800,000 followers on his Arabic
language account, and he is especially appealing to the younger generation of
Saudis. Interestingly, al-ʿAwda is also in favour of pluralism, and warns against
sectarian conflict. On February 26, 2013 he tweeted: “The nation belongs to all
its citizens. It is not in anyone’s interest to marginalise anyone else.”41
39 Stéphane Lacroix, “Saudi Islamist and the Arab Spring,” 8.

40 Salman al-ʿAwda, Asʾilat al-Thawra (Questions of the Revolution), 2012. Accessed October
19, 2013, http://media.islamtoday.net/real/asela-thwra/asela-thwra.pdf.
41 Salman al-ʿAwda, Twitter, February 26, 2013. Accessed October 19, 2013, https://twitter
.com/Salman_Al_Odah/status/306358652216938496.
Salafis associated with the Islamic Umma Party, unlawfully established in

2011, are also demanding political rights. The party consists of Islamists, secular
academics, human rights activists, and lawyers, all of them eager to politically
reform the kingdom. Not surprisingly, the party did not receive recognition
from the regime, and therefore used social media as a platform for advocating
its politics. Shaykh Mohammed bin Ghanim al-Qahtani, one of the founders of
the party, issued a statement arguing “it is time to endorse political rights, in-
cluding the right to elect a government, promote the role of women in society,
and preserve women’s rights.”42
Al Saʿud’s Responses
Saudi Arabia’s authorities have tried to censor sensitive political views ex-
pressed in social media, but have realised that their attempts are inadequate
because of the huge numbers of users. The number of Saudi users of Twitter,
which was blocked in the country until 2008, has exploded. In February 2013,
the minister for media and culture, ʿAbd al-ʿAziz Khoga, admitted that his min-
istry does not have the capacity to survey everything published on individual
Twitter accounts, as it is just too much. The minister added that Saudi web
users need to be more conscious, and called all users to help the authorities in
censoring “unwanted” messages on social media.43
Regarding the demands for rights, Al Saʿud has responded by offering in-
creased social rights, and hence enhancing their part of the authoritarian bar-
gain. In February and March 2011 the regime handed out a gigantic welfare
package, which included, among other items, 60,000 new positions in the Min-
istry of the Interior, the building of 500,000 new houses, and an increase of
the minimum wage in the public sector. The religious establishment received
a considerable slice of that cake. Many interpreted this as a sign of Al Saʿud’s
gratitude for the fatwas underlining the need for allegiance to the king. This
response hardly surprised anyone, and reflected the royal house’s handling of
earlier waves of protests. However, it is interesting to notice that the regime
is starting to adjust its rhetoric concerning social rights. While welfare goods
42 “Middle East Turmoil: Saudi Arabia Apart from the Rest?” Middle East Policy Council.
Accessed April 12, 2014, http://www.mepc.org/articles-commentary/commentary/
middle-east-turmoil-saudi-arabia-apart-rest?print.
43 “Twitter Beyond Ministry Control, Says Khoja,” Saudi Gazette, February 15, 2013, accessed
19 October, 2013, http://www.saudigazette.com.sa/index.cfm?method=home.regcon&con
tentid=20130215153331.
were previously presented as “gifts from the king,” they are now described as
rights that the citizens are entitled to.44 The regime is trying to adjust to Saudis’
increasing conception of social welfare as rights they are entitled to as citizens.
For instance, Saudi embassies no longer have an Office for Subjects (Qism
Shuʾun al-Raʿaya), but an Office for Citizens (Qism Shuʾun al-Muwatinin),
which is another indication that the regime has changed its rhetoric following
the uprisings across the Arab world.45
The regime’s response to demands for civil rights has been ambivalent, and
the status of freedom of speech is a good example of this. Al Saʿud has limited
the right of freedom of speech through new laws,46 but at the same time room
for critical debate has increased, particularly thanks to social media. There are
fewer taboos, something which is, however, reflected only in practice, not law.
The authorities are allowing criticism up to a point in order to give an illusion
of freedom, and to let the people “blow off some steam.” However, to question
the legitimacy of the royal family or the role of religion in society is still very
much frowned upon, something that liberal activists in particular have experi-
enced.47 As soon as Islam is “insulted,” domestic religious forces push for strict
sanctions by the regime. It is interesting to note that Salafi activists have not
been subject to similar reactions. Their books have been prohibited and their
shows taken off air, but the regime has avoided tougher responses. It is plau-
sible to assume that the Salafis’ standpoints are, in general, more accepted by
Saudis – as a deeply conservative segment makes up a significant proportion
of the population – and that suppressing them might bring about undesirable
consequences for the regime’s legitimacy.
From ancient Greece to today’s liberal democracies, political rights are
viewed as the core of citizenship. The right to vote and to be elected defines
the difference between a subject and a citizen. Political rights empower the
citizen to directly influence the development of society, not least by impacting
the country’s legislation.48 Al-Saʿud has passed several smaller – and partially
symbolic – reforms, such as King ʿAbdallah’s decision to allow women to vote
and be elected to the Consultative Council. However, the regime has not met
44 Saudi researcher, interview with author, May 3, 2013.

45 Saudi blogger, interview with author, May 23, 2013.
46 “Political and Social Developments,” Gulf States Newsletter, January 17, 2011; and Human
Rights Watch, World Report 2012: Saudi Arabia, 2012. Accessed October 19, 2013, from
http://www.hrw.org/world-report-2012/world-report-2012-saudi-arabia.
47 Saudi researcher, interview with author, May 7, 2013.
48 Thomas Humphrey Marshall, “Reflections on Power,” Sociology 3 (1969): 141–155.
demands for more substantial political reforms. Members of the royal family
often claim that they are in favour of political reforms, but add that the people
are not ready yet. In the words of a Saudi prince, “political reforms are a good
idea in theory. But the Saudi population is not ready for such rights. You need
to educate the people in democratic understanding first, this will take decades.
Many of us in the family want more democratic governance – but the people
are not ready.”49
Conclusion
Saudi Arabian citizenship guarantees social rights in return for allegiance to

the king, a social contract with little room for civil and political rights. Saudis
are increasingly challenging this contract. During the 2000s, the focus on citi-
zenship and citizens’ rights increased, while the Arab Spring also inspired
wider segments of Saudi society to articulate demands for civil and political
rights, on the basis of being citizens. At the same time, social media makes it
possible for more Saudis to call for such rights.
Many Saudis perceive the regime’s welfare package as an insult to their dig-
nity as citizens as well as undermining their legitimate demands for civil and
political rights. The development of a virtual opposition and the mobilisation
of citizen rights are challenging the royal family’s traditional strategy of co-
optation. This mobilisation in recent years – and especially in the wake of the
Arab Spring – challenges the regime, and unveils the limitations of the renti-
er state. The old social contract depends on people not believing in civil and
political rights. This is no longer the case in Saudi Arabia.
However, as we have seen, in Saudi Arabia the demands for rights are not
coming from one movement, but from a variety of individuals and groups. In
contrast to, for instance, Egypt and Tunisia at the outbreak of the Arab Spring,
there is no united movement confronting the Al Saʿud. The rapprochement
between liberals, Shiʿis, and Islamists during the spring of 2011 was short-lived
due to fundamental disagreements on social issues. Furthermore, the activism
is primarily online; as long as Saudis are not taking to the streets their power
to influence is limited, and as long as the opposition is divided along sectarian,
regional, and ideological lines it is likely that the royal house will continue to
try to co-opt and repress the opposition rather than grant civil and political
rights.
49 Saudi royal, interview with author, May 12, 2013.

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chapter 8
Migration and the Marginality of Citizenship in

the Arab Gulf Region: Human Security and High
Modernist Tendencies
James Sater1
Introduction
In the Arab Gulf region, lopsided population growth and the role of global
labour markets have rendered citizenship questions and migration key con-
cerns for practitioners and scholars alike.2 Migrants have made up 70 per-
cent of the population of Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates (uae)
since the 1970s, and have reached levels above 85 and 90 percent in the early
2010s. Counting the number of migrants, Saudi Arabia (9.1 million) and uae
(7.8 million) are now on the 4th and 5th place of global migration movements
in spite of their relatively small national populations.3 The large majority of
these migrants enjoy none of the rights associated with citizenship.
Discussing the Gulf’s long-term residential and citizenship policies, the uae
political commentator Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi recently suggested introduc-
ing a naturalisation law. Based on socio-economic criteria such as wealth, edu-
cation, professional status, and length of residency, he suggested allowing a
very small number of expatriates not exceeding a couple of hundred per year
to obtain uae nationality.4 His suggestion was met with harsh resistance in
uae social media, stirring up considerable controversy in the country. It lead to
1 The author wishes to thank Rania Maktabi, Kevin Gray, as well as the editors for their very
helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.
2 James Sater, “Citizenship and Migration in the Gulf,” Citizenship Studies 18 (2014): 292–302;
Andrew M. Gardner, “Gulf Migration and the Family,” Journal of Arabian Studies 1 (2011): 1;
Anh Nga Longva, Walls Built on Sand. Migration, Exclusion and Society in Kuwait (Boulder, Co:
Westview, 1999).
3 The global ranking is led by the highly populated states of the United States, the Russian
Federation and Germany, whilst the United Kingdom and France are on 6th and 7th place
respectively. un-desa and oecd, 2013. World Migration in Figures, 2, accessible at http://
www.oecd.org/els/mig/World-Migration-in-Figures.pdf.
4 Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi, “Give Expats an Opportunity to Earn uae Citizenship,” Gulf News,
September 22, 2013, accessible at www.gulfnews.com.

Migration Citizenship in the Gulf Region 225
an Arabic twitter hashtag translated as “this writer does not represent me” with
some writers indicating that such a proposal would be the first step towards
importing not just people, but also their troublesome political problems and
aspirations.5 While this proposal was unlikely to have any real policy implica-
tions, the fact that a relatively modest suggestion unleashed so much public
resistance is indicative of a tense relationship between national and migrant
populations in the Gulf region and a profound malaise about its future.
Given the above mentioned numbers and the debates that these have un-
leashed, this paper aims to contribute to an understanding of the mechanisms
that produce the marginalised status of migrants in the Gulf. This chapter ar-
gues that, in spite of numerous reports documenting the condition of migrants
and their vulnerability in Arab Gulf countries, the status of marginalisation is
likely to continue in the foreseeable future. Indeed, according to the consen-
sus among international experts meeting in Chatham House in May 2012 on
the issue of granting of citizenship rights to migrants, such prospects are close
to non-existent even if there was an increased push emanating from interna-
tional organisations and international law.6 Given that naturalising migrants
and granting nationality remains a reserved right of sovereign states, it appears
that any such change can only emanate from within, not from outside of the
sovereign state.7
Theoretical Framework
The legal and substantive exclusion of populations from full membership in

the state and thereby from the rights of citizenship remains one of the most
central questions in citizenship studies. Throughout the existence of nation
states, gender, class, ethnic and racial categories have been used to domesti-
cally exclude substantial groups of society from full legal and substantive
membership. Increasingly challenged by liberal-democratic thought and judi-
cial institutions, many of these legal restrictions have in the meantime dis-
appeared. Similarly, concerning migrant labour many of the industrialised
welfare states of Western Europe originally developed differential exclusion
5 Albawaba Business, October 12, 2013. Accessible at www.albawaba.com.

6 “Future Trends in the gcc – Workshop Summary,” 13, http://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/
files/chathamhouse/public/Research/Middle%20East/0512gcc_summarytwo.pdf.
7 Echoing Hannah Arendt’s famous dictum that “sovereignty is nowhere more absolute than
in matters of emigration, naturalisation, nationality, and expulsion,” Joppke emphasises this
point very convincingly. See Christian Joppke, “Why Liberal States Accept Unwanted Immi-
gration,” World Politics 50 (1998): 267.
226 Sater
and, hence, marginalisation as the prevalent model towards migrant labour

until the mid-20th century. Differential exclusion meant to accept migrants
within strict temporal and functional limits, primarily as “guests”, “workers”,
and “individuals”, i.e. is not as long term residents, settlers, or families.8 This
model was later substituted with assimilationism and multi-culturalism as two
competing migration paradigms and policies, as also here the legal, domestic
exclusion was increasingly challenged by liberal jurisdiction and courts.9
In the oil-rich states of the Gulf, differential exclusion remains prevalent.
This is hardly surprising given the fairly recent introduction of large-scale mi-
grant labour as well as the fragility of national identities and borders – factors
that also played an important role in migration and naturalisation policies in
Western Europe.10 Yet, there are other important, less temporal factors such
as the significance of rentierism in state-society relations, the authoritarian
nature of the state and the marginal status of Gulf citizens themselves, and,
concomitantly, the extreme imbalance between national and migrant popula-
tions. As a consequence, migrants’ differential exclusion and their marginali-
sation has become a question of human security, a concept that has recently
become a focal point for analysis of global labour, citizenship, and stateless-
ness in the Middle East and elsewhere. In this chapter, human security is used
as a broad concept in order to emphasise the vulnerabilities of migrants in
host countries, and the security related implications. This is used differently
from what has commonly been termed the securitisation of migration in the
eu context,11 as it comprises the following three dimension: the security of
individuals (as opposed to the security of groups); the interrelationship of free-
dom from threats of war with the freedom from physical and material inse-
curities; rule-governed security (as opposed to war-governed security) that is
dependent on structures by law not only in international relations, but also in
the domestic sphere.12
8 Stephen Castles and Alastair Davidson, Citizenship and Migration: Globalisation and the
Politics of Belonging (New York, Routledge, 211), 60–61.
9 Christian Joppke, “Why liberal States,” 266–293.
10 Christian Joppke, Citizenship and Immigration (Cambridge: Polity Press 2010), 51; P. Weil,
“Access to Citizenship,” in Citizenship Today, ed. A. Aleinikoff and D. Klusmeyer (Washing-
ton d.c., Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2001): 17–35.
11 Peter Seeberg and Zaid Eyadat (eds), Migration, Security, and Citizenship in the Middle
East (New York, Palgrave, 2013); Brad K. Blitz and Maureen Lynch, “Statelessness and De-
privation,” in Statelessness and Citizenship: A Comparative Study on the Benefits of Nation-
ality, ed. Brad K Blitz and Maureen Lynch (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2011), 1–22; Judy
Fudge, “Making Claims for Migrant Labour,” Citizenship Studies 18 (2014): 29–45.
12 See Mary Kaldor, “Human Security,” Society and Economy 33 (2011): 445–446.
Consequently, in this chapter I will develop the following three factors that
relate to the domestic dimension of migration and the marginality of migrants’
membership. First, the foundation of Gulf political communities has been
based on the marginalisation of migrant communities, which has been partic-
ularly important due to social and political hierarchies, and ultimately graded
citizenship among Gulf nationals themselves. Second, the rentier state’s rela-
tive autonomy from societal pressure has allowed Gulf states to pursue what
James Scott calls high-modernist ideologies. This means that judicial control
mechanisms play no significant role in the policy making process, which inter
alia further compounds migrants’ differential exclusion and marginalised sta-
tus. Third, any potential reforms of naturalisation policies, for example along
the lines that Ayelet Shachar develops in her usage of jus nexi in advanced
industrial states,13 ultimately fail to overcome the technocratic and high-
modernist views pursued by states, and may even further endanger the human
security of Gulf migrants and their descendants.
Citizenship, Political Communities, and Differential Exclusion

The first part of this chapter analyses the role played by migration in the
construction of political communities in the Gulf. The exclusionary aspect
of citizenship has been very well documented in the literature, as identities
and corresponding ideas of the political have often been constructed through
prisms of exclusion of non-members based on gender, racial, linguistic, cul-
tural, religious, or other distinctions.14 Based on such distinctions, Carl Schmitt
developed the most powerful category of the political based on both the sov-
ereignty of, and membership in the nation-state. Here, citizens as members in
political communities identify as “friends” that could in extremis be faced with
“enemies”– in the so-called Schmittian Ernstfall.15 While such a friend/enemy
distinction may ultimately be critically viewed through Schmitt’s historical
sympathies for fascism, from a constructivist point of view it is quite useful
to consider his distinction as an important historical example of what the na-
tion as an “imagined” community entails.16 In practice, this means that the
13 Ayelet Shachar, The Birthright Lottery (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2009);
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998).
14 Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens (New York: Cambridge
15 Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen (Berlin, Duncker & Humblot, 1963, 3rd edition),
cited in Joppke, Citizenship and Immigration, 2.
16 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Na-
tionalism (London: Verso, 1991).
228 Sater
granting of formal citizenship and nationality as naturalisation continues to

be seen as a privilege of sovereign states often by administrative order. Joppke
uses the analogy of “externally exclusive edges” of citizenship that have, from
its inception, been “hard” in order to restrict the privileges associated with citi-
zenship, including welfare provisions, to members of the national community
that increasingly became universalistic and inclusive.17 In spite of Article 15 of
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (udhr) that guarantees “the right
to a nationality,” this right is unlikely to be operationalised anytime soon. Na-
tionality can be withdrawn according to the laws of many countries, although
often only if the action will not render the individual stateless. Nevertheless,
conflicts between this right and national law regularly occur after divorce or as
political reprisals.18
In the second part of this chapter, I will use James Scott’s concept of high-
modernism as a tool for understanding social, cultural, and economic conse-
quences of the extra-ordinary high levels of migration. While Scott focuses
primarily on large development schemes in urbanism, agriculture and water
management, his main contention is that state planners neglect local knowl-
edge when implementing development plans, arguing that the consequences
are particularly disastrous if state decision makers are unchecked by an in-
dependent judiciary, parliamentary oversight, and liberal-democratic princi-
ples.19 As I will contend in this chapter, in the Gulf this can be adopted and
called a rentier high-modernist dilemma that can be summarised with the
following two assertions: (1) the more developed the state capacity is to pur-
sue development schemes, the larger the need for liberal democratic checks
on these capacities; (2) in rentier states, the more successful development
schemes become, the further the autonomy of the state from the populace,
hence creating even fewer checks on the state. The consequence of this, if
demonstrated, assertion is that local populations are quite alienated from the
domestic development plans, framed in a sense of cultural insecurity, yet in a
rentier state are unable to assert their autonomy and demands. In addition,
driven by economic rentierism, states have difficulties to assert their primary
role as protectors of their populations, and are caught in between their de-
velopmental priorities and the alienation of their population base. In turn,
in a situation of extra-ordinary high levels of migration, the societal response
based on a perception of threat compounds policies of differential exclusion.
17 Joppke, Citizenship and Immigration, 31.

18 Blitz and Lynch, “Statelessness and Deprivation,” 5–10.
19 Scott, Seeing Like a State, 4–6.
Last, with a view to future reforms of the differential exclusion model, I will
further analyse existing naturalisation models and compare the potential of
these to overcome the societal challenges of the rentier-high modernist di-
lemma. In a critique of existing citizenship laws, the Canadian scholar Ayelet
Shachar argues that national citizenship laws should recognise genuine con-
nections to the host country and population, and add a third type of citizen-
ship law, jus nexi, to the two conventional nationality criteria: jus sanguinis
and jus soli. Primarily focusing her analysis of genuine connection on liberal-
democratic states in which social and political inclusion is possible through
a variety of means, she argues that the legal construct of property right and
genuine connection can also be applied to naturalisation laws. This is because
through public education, taxation, language acquisition including accents
and, potentially, class consciousness, genuine connection with a host coun-
try is produced and reproduced, providing a right of jus nexi. In her view,
citizenship “must account for more than the mere automatic transmission of
entitlement.”20 Yet, as a right it should also be subject to change if such con-
nection ceases to exist after generations of non-connection, such as residency
abroad. Using this normative tool and political proposition, I will finally argue
that the local specificities of jus nexi in the Gulf have a tendency to reinforce,
rather than alleviate, existing exclusions.
Theoretical Construction Rentier high- Naturalisation

constructs of political modernist dilemma and jus nexi
communities
Empirical Identification of Impact of The future of

Investigation friends/enemies developmentalism citizenship laws in
in imagination on local citizenship Gulf rentier states
of national
communities
Foundation of Gulf political communities
Analysing the different aspects of citizenship reveals a number of particulari-

ties in the Gulf. First, following Marshall’s distinction between three types of
20 Shachar, The Birthright Lottery, 164–165.

230 Sater
citizenship rights, civil, political, and social, citizens in the Gulf enjoy only
some civil rights, few if any political rights, yet quite extensive social rights.
In fact, there appears a profound imbalance between welfare rights on one
hand, and civil and political rights on the other. In addition, the states with
the highest percentage of migrants, Kuwait, uae, and Qatar, state sponsored
welfare provisions to citizens also appear the most generous, whilst migrants’
access to nationality by means of naturalisation the weakest. Yet, in addition
to gender as the most basic category that has given rise to partial exclusion
amongst nationals, there are numerous population groups identified by al-
leged origin, religion, or language that enjoy fewer civil and social rights than
other citizens of the state. Kuwait and the uae have significant percentages of
Ajamis and bidun (stateless nationals). Shiʿis and other sectarian groups form
minorities that face social, economic, and political marginalisation especially
in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. In addition, tribal affiliations can deter-
mine individuals’ civil and social rights tremendously, and is often officialised
in passports. Recently naturalised citizens, whilst few in numbers, may not
have a family book that is necessary for some administrative procedures and
advantages, thereby providing another source of partial exclusion of the rights
of citizenship.21
This fact illustrates a basic observation about migrants’ citizenship status: a
demarcation line between citizens and migrants is not quite as clear as it may
appear on first sight. Instead, the rentier pact between states and citizens rests
on the provision of quite generous welfare rights, in exchange for reduced civil
and political rights. The distribution of rents from oil income accrued from
abroad remains a foundation of this, yet what has become equally important
feature is the rent that is generated from the surplus value produced by mi-
grant workers inside the Gulf states.
Rents and the Production of Surplus Value

The limitations that Gulf migrants face with regards to civil rights associated
with citizenship are numerous. First, the right to business ownership is limited
as it requires a national sponsor, who is required to hold 51 percent equity in
whatever company is founded. Second, the right to hire employees is regulated
through the sponsorship system, kafala, a traditional way of guaranteeing and
vouching for “guests.” This means that only nationals can sponsor foreign work-
ers. As the right to abode is generally linked to employment, residency is always
limited to sponsorship by a national. Third, non-nationals are not allowed to
21 Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi, “The Book that Proves Some Emiratis Are More Equal than
Others,” The National, February 7, 2010.
own real estate except in specially designed areas. As a result, property markets
generate a substantial amount of rents that becomes part of a redistribution
system from foreign, private enterprise to the indigenous population.
This means that the lack of civil rights of a surplus generating, private sector
migrant community directly leads to a transfer of wealth from migrants to na-
tionals. While data about the extent of this transfer is not available, a clue can
be taken from examining Gross Domestic Product per capita (gdp) and com-
pare this with the gdp per person employed, the difference partially being sur-
plus value generated and transferred to sponsors as rents. According to World
Bank data, the uae where the issue of differential exclusion is among the most
important, has experienced a large fluctuation in gdp per capita growth (that
includes all resident workers and salaried professionals), yet gdp per capita is
constantly twice as large as gdp per person employed. While some of this can
easily be attributed to oil income, the percentage of oil rents does never exceed
25 percent (the maximum in 2008 when oil prices reached levels above US$150
per barrel), and remains otherwise at under 20 percent of gdp. The variations
in gdp per capita can also more directly be linked to the variations of gdp per
person employed, and not to the oil price variations experienced over the last
15 years (www.worldbank.org).
Table 1 gdp per capita in uae compared (1999–2012)
Year 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005
gdp per person 22612 24019 23204 21881 23877 23929 22928
employed
gdp per capita 43370 45969 45038 44819 46661 47081 43533
Oil rents (% of gdp) 11 18 14 13 15 18 22
Year 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012
gdp per person 21402 19420 17678 14924 13874 14113 14244
employed
gdp per capita 40689 35309 31070 25933 24099 23907 24262
Oil rents (% of gdp) 23 21 25 15 19 23 21
Source: http://data.worldbank.org/country/united-arab-emirates
232 Sater
Membership in Political Communities

The extension of citizenship rights to migrants, both in the form of naturalisa-
tion and as an extension of civil, political, and social rights has been strongly
contested in the Gulf. First, this is due to extensive welfare provisions that exist
for those included. The existence of welfare rights generally raises questions
about “the right to have rights,” i.e. based on which set of ethical standards
should welfare rights be extended to non-members who have not previously
participated in the building of the welfare state, with whom solidarity is more
abstract, and trust may be more questionable.22 This question is all the more
acute in rentier states, where public revenues are not based on contributions
through salaried labour and tax: The public cake to share is, indeed, limited and
almost entirely dependent on the exportation of oil and gas resources, and not
dependent on tax revenue to which migrants might contribute. Surplus value
produced through migrant labour takes the form of private rents (sovereign
wealth funds and public works excluded). Second, in the Gulf there exist a sig-
nificant number of groups residing on the national territory without being na-
tionals of other countries, i.e. the phenomenon of statelessness. Consequently,
if citizenship rights are to be granted, then those with a higher level of claims
are those issued from the land but whose citizenship status was not formalised
due to economic, sectarian, tribal, or other administrative considerations.23
Third, gender, sectarianism, and tribal identity all serve to distinguish between
different social and political communities that are only loosely connected as
one community with equal rights, diminishing the universal understanding of
citizenship.24 This means that citizenship hierarchies as degrees of member-
ship enjoy a significant amount of social recognition across the Gulf, and have
been strongly compounded in political discourse and institutions. Even mod-
est reforms such as those advocated by Al-Qassemi echo such recognition and
reproduce them. Fourth, Gulf citizenship has a distinctive economic dimen-
sion due to rentierism. The primary role of the state is that of provider and
distributor of rents to nationals, or as that of facilitating of activities that al-
low access to rents. In this context, migration has been a core rent-distributing
activity. The state provides economic incentives, infrastructure, and a system
where foreign, especially Arab and Indian investors can set up businesses with
a national partner who is legally required to have a majority of 51 percent eq-
uity share. Due to the increasing amount of value-added created through low-
skilled service and construction sectors, transfers have skyrocketed, further
22 Joppke, Citizenship and Immigration, 73–109.

23 See Claire Beaugrand’s contribution in this collection, Chapter 18.
24 Partrick, Nationalism in the Gulf States, 20–22.
constituting important circuits of rent that strengthen economic citizenship

in rentier states. This is especially among close allies to the regimes and their
clients in the private sector, largely limiting the private sector’s political role in
the state.25
A comparison of membership in political communities in the Gulf based on
rentierism with a model of membership based on nationalism, reveals further
idiosyncrasies. While the establishment of political communities in nation-
states has been associated with external enemies that may pose existential
threats, Gulf citizenship has been established and increasingly consolidated in
the face of migrant communities that pose not easily defined security threats
(external enemies), but rather larger cultural and societal challenges to the na-
tional populations. Based on these perceived threats, a process of empowering
national populations has been a crucial component of collectively identifying
as a group.26
In her analysis of Kuwait, Longva develops the Schmittian friend/enemy
categories of the political to the domestic categories of empowerment/disem-
powerment. Coining the term a “besieged” society, she refers to the extensive
use of female migrant domestic workers inside families that has fundamen-
tally altered the privacy and, to some extent, isolation of domestic family dy-
namics. The relevance of this becomes entirely clear when considering that
90 percent of Kuwaiti households employ often three to four female domes-
tic workers. Female domestic workers alone number about 500,000 in Kuwait,
compared to a native population of slightly over one million towards the end of
the 2000s.27 The term “besieged empowerment” aims to capture the combina-
tion of economic and, in some cases, physical power that Gulf nationals have
over migrant domestic workers, ironically highlighting Gulf nationals’ sense
of vulnerability due to the omnipresence of foreign workers in all aspects of
social life. While this certainly applies to domestic workers given the amount
of knowledge migrant workers are able to accumulate about private family
homes, the larger dichotomy of besiegement versus domination also informs
more political and economic approaches to citizenship rights and migrants,
epitomized in the privatisation of the right to residency through the kafala
system of visa. Interestingly, given the complexity of foreign c ommunities with
25 Sater, “Citizenship and Migration”; Steffen Hertog, “State and Private Sector in the gcc
after the Arab Uprising,” Journal of Arabian Studies 3 (2014): 174–195.
26 Partrick, speaks of “inward-facing nationalism,” in Nationalism in the Gulf States, 28.
27 Ahmad Attiy, Migrant Workers in Kuwait: The Role of State Institutions (Middle East View-
point Series. The Middle East Institute, February 2, 2010), accessible at http://www.mei
.edu/content/migrant-workers-kuwait-role-state-institutions#edn2.
234 Sater
different, economically and partially ethnically constructed citizenship status

that live in the Gulf, from wealthy Iranian business communities, to Western
professionals, to Russian, central Asian, Indian, and Arab service sector em-
ployees, to Sri Lankan domestic and Pakistani construction site workers, what
can be called a citizenship hierarchy extends well beyond the simple national/
expat dichotomy. The hierarchy is composed of a myriad of power relation-
ships that depend on gender, ethnic origin, religion, and nationality. Yet, given
the unequal population growth rates, a structural factor underlying the citi-
zenship debate remains that a very large number of migrants are perceived to
be a threat to national homogeneity and authenticity – even if in nationalist
rhetoric this is mainly targeted at low-skilled migrants from the Indian Sub-
continent. As the uae labour minister clarified with regards to gcc policies,
the gcc ministers “have agreed that Asian workers are contracted workers, not
what some call immigrant workers….” The prevailing approach is based on the
notion of besieged empowerment when he argues that “we want to protect the
minority – which is us.”28
As I argued elsewhere, this language promotes restrictions on migrant rights
and instils fear in the public sphere that has the effect of legitimising the role
of the state as that of the protector of national populations.29 The security
paradigm adopted by the state is in contradistinction to the security of indi-
vidual migrants, as it focuses on collectivity. However the restrictive migrant
laws do more than just allow for the production of added value, and legiti-
mate government and its response to a perceived threat. As Herb points out,
especially in the uae there has been strong opposition not just to the state
but also to its developmentist/migration policies which had led to negative
cultural consequences in the eyes not only of intellectuals but also powerful
public figures.30 This has been compounded by the private sector’s perceived
lack of functionality among many Gulf nationals, which employs few Gulf na-
tionals nor pays substantial taxes to Gulf governments.31 Hence, it would be
misleading to argue that restrictions on migrant’s rights serve to legitimate the
role of the state alone; rather it responds to domestic fears and criticism of the
28 Cited Gwenn Okruhlik, “Dependence, Disdain, and Distance: State, Labor, and Citizen-
ship in the Arab Gulf States,” in Industrialisation in the Gulf: A Socioeconomic Revolution,
ed. J.F. Seznec and M. Kirk (London: Routledge, 2011), 125–142, especially 133, emphasis
added.
29 Sater, “Citizenship and Migration in the Gulf.”
30 Dhahi Khalfan Al-Tamim Head of Dubai Police, Abdel-Khaleq Abdulla, Political Science
Professor at uae University, Al Ain. See Partrick, “Nationalism in the Gulf States,” 30.
31 Hertog, “State and Private Sector in the gcc,” 174–195.
state’s bold developmentist and migration policies. After all, demands for par-
ticipation from Gulf intellectuals have often been phrased with reference to
the negative aspects of migration for local authenticity and long-term survival
as a community. As Herb notes with regards to opposition to the state:
Citizens [in the Gulf] lack power, and their interests are not reflected in
government policies that pursue diversification at the cost of overwhelm-
ing levels of immigration, cultural change, and a loss of identity.32
Consequently, the marginality of migrants reflects the marginal status of Gulf

citizens themselves, and the language of state officials is not simply used to
legitimise its “protective” role. Instead, it replicates social concerns that have
been used by domestic critics that created a very particular public sphere
based on the notion being “besieged”. Yet the feeling of a loss of authentic-
ity, so important in contemporary Gulf society, increases the collective iden-
tity as a marginalised political community (with some notable differences
between countries, such as in Kuwait), prompting policy responses from the
political elites with respect to migrants. Consequently, if privileges and citizen-
ship rights are usually defined liberally as protection from the state, and more
Schmittian as protection from external people and states, then both aspects
have been reversed in the Gulf. Membership in Gulf political communities has
a domestic, migration-based focus: to enjoy protection from migrant popula-
tions that the state to varying degrees is called upon to guarantee. Consequent-
ly, the existence of large migrant communities have been instrumental in the
creation Gulf political communities as it gave meaning to citizenship rights of
domestic communities.
Hardening of Citizenship Rights and Rule-governed Insecurity

It follows from the previous argument that the marginalisation of migrant la-
bour in the form of unequal distribution of citizenship rights is a core aspect of
the rentier model of citizenship or the specific Gulf state citizenship regime.33
This applies in particular to more diversified economies such as Dubai, and
those that are moving in similar directions such as Qatar and Abu Dhabi. From
the sponsorship of foreign business and labour, to renewable visa policies,
32 Michael Herb, “A Nation of Bureaucrats: Political Participation and Economic Diversifica-

tion in Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates,” International Journal of Middle East Studies
41 (2009): 390.
33 See “Introduction,” 6; for the definition see, 67.
236 Sater
and some of the control mechanisms such as non-objection letters for job
seekers,34 administrative controls with regards to migrants are strongly em-
bedded in rentierism. Yet, the implications of this rentier model of citizenship
transgress the national community. Migrants are frequently members of upper
strata where material wealth is accrued and control over labour exercised on
behalf of national (co-)owners, making for example Iranian and Indian entre-
preneurs a core constituency of Dubai. Tough policing, low crime rates, lib-
eral economic policies as well as fast administrative decision making due to
extensive use of electronic administrative procedures are particularly attrac-
tive for those who emphasise efficiency and liberal-economic policies.35 This
interior hardening of citizenship rights has been compounded by a strong set
of segregation rules from the work place over sport clubs and public education
to residential areas – the most visible aspect is the construction of “bachelor
cities” for the large pool of male, low skilled labourers from the Indian subcon-
tinent that constitute a large majority of all migrants.36
This “hardening” of the inner meaning of citizenship rights is directly relat-
ed to the lack of meaningful control mechanisms that, especially the Emirate
of Dubai, secured in the late 1970s. It was then when a constitutional reform
project aimed at limiting the policymaking freedom of the ruling families by
federalising oil income and economic policies was rejected by Dubai, which
preferred to keep its autonomy in pursuing its economic policies. As a result,
free from constitutional constraints, the Dubai government was able to pro-
mote construction and real estate transactions with the help of an unprece-
dented influx of foreign labour, thereby strengthening the rentier pact b etween
state, the private sector, and society. It could do so notwithstanding the criti-
cisms that started to become frequently expressed. In short, the Emirate of
Dubai acquired unprecedented autonomy from society, in marked contrast to
Kuwait. Here, similar oil revenues and rentier bargains exist, yet construction,
real estate, business, and tourism sectors are remarkably less diversified yet the
city’s commercial elite politically a lot more powerful.37
34 This is a required document issued by an employer certifying that the authorised to seek
other job opportunities. This is usually issued after a certain number of years employed,
and is aimed to protect the employer’s economic interest with regards to migrant labour.
35 N. Vora, “Business Elites, Unofficial Citizenship, and Privatized Governance in Dubai”
(Viewpoints: Migration in the Gulf. Washington dc, The Middle East Institute, 2010),
46–48.
36 Andrew M. Gardner, “Gulf Migration and the Family,” Journal of Arabian Studies 1 (2011):
3–25.
37 Herb, “A Nation of Bureaucrats,” 389–390.
However, the outer shell of migration remains remarkably soft. Whereas it

has become virtually impossible for most passport holders to arrive legally in
most advanced liberal democracies in Western Europe, re-inventing the term
Fortress Europe, it is comparatively easy to find a job and obtain residency in
the Gulf states, as these states continue to actively recruit a significant amount
of foreign labour. These states have attempted to implement a policy of con-
tractual labour, and circular migration, as Western Europe (in particular West
Germany) did in the 1950s and 1960s with guest worker programs. However, in
contrast to Western Europe where this concept became increasingly obsolete
since the late 1970s due to judicial interference, in the Gulf this remains by and
large possible leading to rule-governed insecurity among migrants: the fluidity
of citizenship rights as mentioned above is compounded by a lack of effective
judicial control mechanisms based on principles of rule of law that mark state-
society relations in the Gulf.38
Human Security as High Modernist Dilemma
It is argued here that gulf migration policies largely reflect a high-modernist

dilemma, which has as one of its consequences the marginalisation of mi-
grants. From labour conditions in the outdoors construction sector, to the
“coordinated deception” of migrant workers upon arrival, demands for guaran-
teed residency, fair juridical treatment, integrated and respectful neighbour-
hoods, health care, education, all this is far removed from genuine political
concern.39 Given the extreme population dynamic, this is hardly surprising.
Even more, the kafala system of visas has become part of a power dynamic in
which the male kafeel becomes the owner of added-value obtained from the
workforce. This has created substantial vested interests in the status quo. Limi-
tations that governments try to implement in terms of the number of workers
sponsored by one kafeel or percentage of foreign workers in private companies
are therefore undermined: employing unregistered labourers, as well as using
38 Some tentative reforms and potential exceptions occurred when judicial and parliamen-
tary oversight was more developed, notably in Bahrain and Kuwait. See Nathan J. Brown,
The Rule of Law in the Arab World: Courts in Egypt and the Gulf (New York, Cambridge
39 Some changes proposed by enigmatic figures including the Bahraini minister of labour
are certainly worth pointing out, tentative reforms aiming at easing the kafeel system and
restrictions on foreign workers, as well as an increasing number of scholarly contribu-
tions to this problematic. See for example Qassimi, “The Sponsorship System is on the
Wrong Side of History,” The National, October 17, 2010, accessible at www.thenational.ae.
238 Sater
fictional Gulf nationals as employees against a registration fee, are current

practices that undermine governments’ attempts at nationalising the private
sector workforce. Given the rentier pact and the privileged position that pow-
erful individuals and families obtained in this hierarchical wealth-creation sys-
tem, enforcement is difficult to sustain. In fact, it has created a black-market
of “industrial-scale rent seeking by nominal sponsors (national businesses or
individuals) who act as informal ‘brokers’ for foreign labour, either selling it to
other employers or extracting payment from workers in return for releasing
them onto a large market for informal, self-employed labour.”40
Furthermore, private sector interests favour low wage labour as well as au-
thority over foreign workers through visa sponsorship, making labour more
subservient easily exploitable. Consequently, state policies that aim at nation-
alising the private sector workforce, as nationals have little actual control over
management and other economic processes, have so far been unsuccessful.
In spite of numerous government initiatives and rhetoric, private sector em-
ployment among Gulf nationals remains under 20 percent in the case of Saudi
Arabia, Oman, and Bahrain, and 2–5 percent in the case of Kuwait, uae, and
Qatar.41
However, the existence of such private sector interests especially in infor-
mal labour does not mean that states have no ability to enforce rules. Yet when
rules on foreign labour and sponsorship are applied, the social and human
consequences seriously threaten the human security of migrants. The recent
mass expulsion of 250,000 undocumented workers by Saudi authorities in the
last two months of 2013 is a case in point. Dubbed “operation clean up” by
the Ministry of Labour, the arrests were not just accompanied by beatings and
confinements in inhumane detention camps, but also by violent assaults led
by angry Saudi male crowds in labour camps. In the Manfouha neighbourhood
south of Riyadh, such attacks left scores of mostly Ethiopians dead.42 The role
of the executive as opposed to the judiciary is shown by the support of the
Ministry of Interior for the “operation clean up.” It created special panels in
passport departments that investigate into over-stayers of visas, and impose
40 Hertog, “State and Private Sector in the gcc”; Stefan Hertog, Arab Gulf States: An As-
sessment of Nationalisation Policies (Gulf Labour Market and Migration – Research Pa-
per, No. 1, 2014), 6, accessible at http://cadmus.eui.eu/bitstream/handle/1814/32156/
GLMM%20ResearchPaper_01-2014.pdf?sequence=1.
41 Ibid., 2–8.
42 Laetitia Bader and Adam Coogle, “Saudis’ Mass Expulsion Putting Somalis in Danger,”
Middle East Research and Information Project, March 18, 2014, accessible at http://www
.merip.org/mero/mero031814?ip_login_no_cache=bad33d7634da101a71cf366bbaadb414/.
penalties including prison sentences. Clearly, none of this involved the King-
dom’s judicial system and no appeals were handled by the courts.43
Violent incidents such as those of Manfouha are not unfortunate cases
which states in the region have difficulty controlling. Instead, they are related
to the states’ reliance on mass migration to pursue development plans, the pri-
vate sector’s profits that heavily rely on employing foreign labour, as well as
a technocratic approach to mobility and population movement. While such
ideas have existed elsewhere – guest labour in Western Europe – the manage-
able scale of foreign labour as well as checks on the inhumane consequences
of this policy led to landmark reversals including reforms to Germany’s natu-
ralisation laws which initiated changes in jus sanguinis. In addition, parlia-
mentary oversight of immigration policy led to restrictive changes to the eu’s
asylum policy, allowing either assimilationist or multi-cultural policies to be-
come meaningfully pursued. In contrast, mass migration in the Gulf with its
70 to 90 percent peaks in Kuwait, Qatar, and the uae, poses its own unique
restrictions on any meaningful integration schemes, obviating any prospects
for rule-governed human security among migrants in the Gulf. Fears of los-
ing authenticity, fears of being numerically outnumbered and marginalised
continue to dominate public debates, and lead to control over migrant labour,
their securitisation and subsequent marginalisation.
Given the state’s interest in economic diversification, the needs of a glo-
balised oil-rentier economy to generate income from non-oil sectors, and the
preponderance of a rent-generating construction and service sector, Gulf states
try to limit the amount of dissent especially from domestic constituencies. For
example, the ruler of Dubai responded to critiques of Dubai’s economic boom,
i.e. the rising number of migrants, by arguing that: “As for those who focus
on the side effects [of Dubai’s economic boom], who consider them negative
and try to inspire fear, they are short-sighted or just speaking their minds or
suffering from inferiority complexes, which are hard to cure.”44 In turn, to re-
spond to outside critiques, suggested and partially implemented reforms fo-
cus on alleviating the more extreme forms of unequal treatment. For payment
questions and in order counter the problem of withholding earned income by
employers for alleged misconduct or contract violations, a state-supervised,
centralised wage payment system was recently introduced. To change the per-
sonalised sponsorship system, kafala, with its potential for abuse especially
among domestic household labour, a centralised sponsorship system has been
43 Arab News, “ksa Toughens Stance on Illegals,” April 15, 2014, http://www.arabnews.com/
news/555891.
44 Cited in Herb, “A Nation of Bureaucrats,” 390.
240 Sater
proposed. Concerning naturalisation, Al-Qassemi suggested a state-supervised

naturalisation process based on a limited number of wealthy expats. Yet, nei-
ther in substance, nor in numbers, do such reforms change the “hardening”
of the inner meaning of citizenship rights for migrants. This illustrates how
the lack of freedom from physical and material insecurities among migrants is
structurally embedded in high-modernist state policies and a strong emphasis
on the security of the national political community.
Naturalisation and Jus Nexi in the Gulf
There have been prior reforms to citizenship laws in the Gulf, allowing the ac-
quisition of citizenship beyond male jus sanguinis. A first reform was based on
altering the tribal and patriarchal male lineage, to also include female lineage.
Other ad hoc naturalisation decisions by executive order have existed for dif-
ferent, often favoured, groups and individuals, with some of these individuals
even holding high administrative and political positions.45 However, in order
to prevent equal status even to naturalised citizens, jus nexi has been used to
exclude a substantial part of these naturalised citizens, by requiring for many
governmental services and privileges not just citizenship but also a proof of
more substantive links to the territory and its people: A family book.46 Natu-
ralised citizens and those who are not from male nationals of Gulf countries
often do not possess this. In Bahrain, a particular ethnic (Arab Sunni Muslim)
and financial (wealth) component has been included as a “nexus” for citizen-
ship. Effectively, long term residents (more than 15 years for Arab and 25 years
for others) could claim Bahraini citizenship if they own real estate property,
yet even then they did not enjoy rights to political participation through voting
and running for office. A sectarian dimension is implicit as invariably, the large
majority of Arab migrants are in fact Sunni Muslims, a very divisive issue given
Bahrain’s strong sectarian tensions.
In Saudi Arabia, the criteria for “nexus” are particularly revealing: The king-
dom reformed its naturalisation laws in October 2004, and some public com-
mentators, such as Al-Qassemi, have welcomed it as a model to be followed by
other Gulf states. Religious and ethnic considerations figure prominently in its
list of criteria for “nexus.” In line with the Arab League’s alleged commitment
45 Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi, “Give Expats an Opportunity to Earn uae Citizenship,” Gulf
News, September 22, 2013, accessible at www.gulfnews.com.
46 Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi, “The Book that Proves Some Emiratis Are More Equal than
Others.”
to a permanent solution in Palestine, these laws bar Palestinians from becom-

ing naturalised Saudi citizens. In addition to these religious, ethnic, and po-
litical considerations, the law introduced a point system, in which points are
distributed according to developmentist criteria, primarily professional and
educational qualifications. The more sought after these qualifications are in
Saudi Arabia, the easier it is to obtain citizenship. Particular family stipulations
include that the grandfather of a Saudi mother who wants to pass down her
citizenship to her offspring needs to be a Saudi national, yet even then it de-
pends on the number of points that a child obtained. In a summary of the new
nexus of blood-line, that introduces a particular form of gendered citizenship,
a Saudi newspaper explains:
The child of a Saudi woman who is married to a foreigner will get one
point upon reaching puberty. Educational qualifications of not less than
secondary level will add another point. If both the mother’s father and
grandfather are Saudi, the applicant will gain six points. If only the father
is Saudi, the child gets only two points. If the mother has Saudi brothers
and sisters, two more points will be given. When the applicant obtains a
minimum of seven points, the citizenship committee will recommend
considering the application for citizenship. If not, the application will be
withheld.47
What appears from all these criteria is a systematic exclusion of those that
have not intermarried with Saudi nationals. Ironically, this exclusion also di-
rectly discourage any Saudi nationals from considering mixed marriages, as
the point system officialises discrimination against “unpure” Saudis. In fact, in
its attempt to establish nexus, the law even introduces Saudi national “purity”
as a concept where it had not existed in the past, allowing for jus sanguinis to
transpire even when nexus is introduced.
Conclusion
With this contribution on migration and marginalisation of citizenship in the

Gulf, I attempted to illustrate the mechanisms through which the marginal
status of migrants is linked to citizenship questions of national populations,
namely the foundation of national communities based on “besieged em-
powerment,” the interior hardening of migrant rights, as well as an increased
47 Arab News, September 8, 2013, cited at http://www.arabnews.com/news/463903.

242 Sater
autonomy from judicial control mechanism allowing a high-modernist ideol-

ogy to be more strongly pursued. The result of these mechanisms is that mi-
grants’ marginal status is reproduced, even when reforms such as the Saudi
naturalisation law are introduced that seek new forms of “nexus.”
First, in the Arab Gulf region, citizenship scholars are faced with a particu-
lar issue of marginalisation of migrants due to the transfer of friend/enemy
to the domestic area, in which Gulf political communities have been created.
As mentioned, these are not based on outside enemies, but rather on the very
distinguishable domestic cultural and numerical hegemony of an expatriate
population which raises questions about the longevity and authenticity of the
national population. As a consequence, the state’s role has become that of pro-
tector of the national population vis-à-vis domestic threats, which makes any
questioning of the non-national population’s marginal status subversive and
sometimes very strongly contested. Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi’s admiration of
the Saudi point system is a case in point, when his suggestion to introduce a
naturalisation law along similar lines (yet with much fewer numbers and with
much tougher criteria) triggered a wave of protest and violent reactions within
uae social media. This “hardening” of the inner shell of citizenship remains in
a dialectic relationship to the outer accessibility of both (renewable) residency
and work rights, supporting core constituencies of the political elite that also
includes non-national populations. The state’s development plans and rentier
economy, as a model of business, quasi-liberal lifestyle and political stability,
remains regionally and globally highly attractive.
Second, the marginalisation of migration is part of a high-modernist so-
cial engineering policy. Uncontrolled by a judiciary or an elected parliament,
the population policies have not just favoured large-scale developments, but
have transformed these into core criteria of these countries’ statehood. Any
reforms that aim at changing the marginality of migration remain resisted by
local economic stake holders. On occasion, the perceived loss of authentic-
ity by national populations results in large-scale attacks on migrants such as
those reported in Saudi Arabia, both by the state and by angered populations.
Yet given the economic importance of migrant populations, such attacks are
only small drops in the bucket that have little long-term effect. In the uae high
population growth rates since 2010 of about 5 percent annual growth is almost
entirely migration driven, given stagnant and declining birth rates among na-
tional populations.
Third, existing and proposed naturalisation laws follow the idea of “nexus”
that has become common in advanced liberal democracies. Yet, the imple-
mentation of “nexus” reproduces and officialises jus sanguinis, and is in line
not only with the developmentalist agenda of the state, but also with its
high-modernist structure that remains unchecked by a judiciary or parliamen-

tary oversight. In fact, given the numerical marginalisation and fears of a loss
of authenticity that structures national populations, the lack of public involve-
ment in naturalisation decision may even be a necessity to at least cushion the
marginal status of some of the migrants. As the public reaction to Sultan So-
oud Al-Qassemi’s tentative discussion indicates, opening the Pandora’s box of
naturalisation can unleash very strong public reactions that may also reinforce
the marginalisation of migrant populations.
Last, the Gulf represents a case in which aspects of rule-governed security,
physical and material security, as well individual security remain significantly
underdeveloped. As has been explained in this contribution, this is intrinsically
linked to a strong emphasis on group security as well as a lack of independent
judicial control mechanisms, which has increased with rentier high-modernist
state policies.
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chapter 9
The Arab Spring and the “Iron Triangle”: Regime

Survival and the Conditions of Citizenship in the
Arab Middle East
Nils A. Butenschøn
Citizenship in the Maelstrom of Power Politics
“The central problem of government in the Arab world today is political le-
gitimacy. The shortage of this indispensable political source largely accounts
for the volatile nature of Arab politics and the autocratic, unstable character
of all the present Arab governments.”1 This observation is not a reference to
the current political upheavals in the Arab Middle East, as it obviously could
have been, but represents the essence of Michael C. Hudson’s analysis in
his well-known book, Arab Politics: The Search for Legitimacy, written about
forty years ago. Hudson analysed the challenges of political transition in the
Arab world in the 1960s and -70s within the theoretical paradigm of political
modernisation. His cautious optimism that the radical Arab republics, if they
overcome a number of structural weaknesses, were forerunners for a demo-
cratic transition in the region did not come through, but his take on underlying
structural problems related to political legitimacy on the country level repre-
sented a more nuanced analysis of the relationship between rulers and the
ruled than was common among modernisation theorists at the time.2
More recently, but well before the Arab Uprisings, important contributions
that enhance our understanding of the political dynamics that inhibit tran-
sitions to citizen-based political regimes has been published. These works
1 Michael C. Hudson, Arab Politics: The Search for Legitimacy (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1977), 2. For more on Hudson’s relevance, see my “State, Power, and Citizen-
ship in the Middle East: A Theoretical Introduction,” in Citizenship and the State in the Middle
East: Approaches and Applications, ed. Nils A. Butenschøn, Uri Davis, and Manuel Hassassian
(Syracuse, n.y.: Syracuse University Press, 2000).
2 Walter Z. Laqueur (ed.), The Middle East in Transition: Studies in Contemporary History
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958); Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society:
Modernizing the Middle East (New York: Free Press, 1958); Manfred Halpern, “Middle Eastern
Armies and the New Middle Classes,” in The Role of the Military in Underdeveloped Countries,
ed. John J. Johnson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), 277–315.

Arab Spring and the “Iron Triangle” 247
a ddress the question of “authoritarian resilience,” why the dominant pattern of

authoritarian political orders, both in the monarchies and the republics, have
withstood the “waves of democracy” in other parts of the world after the end
of the Cold War.3
However, my argument is that, in addition to a focus on structural and ideo-
logical underpinnings of authoritarianism, more analytical focus should be ori-
ented towards the political dynamics and strategies of rulers and other central
actors under the notorious unstable conditions of modern Arab state-building.
Citizens and rulers alike are confronted with the challenges of securing their
needs and interests within the maelstrom of power politics that surrounds
their region. This impacts the relations between citizens and ruling elites and
the range of strategies they are free to choose. What we observe on the be-
haviour level is the politics of citizenship: How the parties in the state-citizen
relationship use available instruments and resources to secure their interests
as they see it. The advantage of the state parties (particularly the centralised
authoritarian states) is that they control state institutions with a monopoly
of coercive powers (the legal system and police and internal security forces)
and access to the country’s strategic commodities and financial resources.
This position gives the ruling elites strong cards in defining the terms of their
contractual relations with the citizens, known as “authoritarian bargaining” in
the contemporary history of the Middle East. The most powerful card on the
hands of the citizens is ways of withholding support for the regime, especially
if organised on a collective basis, for instance by boycotting elections, or as a
last resort, to organise a rebellion. As the Arab Uprisings demonstrated, and
as is well known from other historic experiences, even the most authoritarian
regime is dependent on some level of acceptance by their citizens.
In this chapter we will focus particularly on the strategic options of ruling
elites in developing citizenship policies, considering the challenges of state
building and political stability in the Middle East. As already indicated, the
regional setting is extremely complicated, also from an analytical point of
view for the study of citizenship and state-society relationships. We need to
take into consideration the intertwined processes between local, regional, and
3 See, for example, Oliver Schlumberger (ed.), Debating Arab Authoritarianism: Dynamics
and Durability in Nondemocratic Regimes (Stanford: Stanford University Press 2007); Steven
Heydemann and Reinoud Leenders, “Authoritarian Learning and Authoritarian Resilience:
Regime Responses to the ‘Arab Awakening’,” Globalizations 8 (2011): 647–653; Steve Hess,
“From the Arab Spring to the Chinese Winter: The Institutional Sources of Authoritar-
ian Vulnerability and resilience in Egypt, Tunisia, and China,” International Political Science
R eview 34 (2013): 254–272.
248 Butenschøn
international levels. The state becomes problematic as a given framework for

analysis because of contested state ideas,4 fragmented demographics, strong-
ly politicised sub- and supra-national ideologies, and heavy interference by
external powers in internal politics. Obviously, there are great variations when
it comes to challenges to stability and legitimacy between the states of the
region, between monarchies and republics, but also within these two groups
of states. But most observers agree that shortage of regime legitimacy repre-
sents a basic problem in Arab politics across the region and poses a challenge
in the search for a new political order. The historical reasons for this state of
affairs are also generally accepted to be related to the way in which most Arab
states were established, not least the involvement of colonial powers in the
aftermath of World War i at a particular critical stage in the establishment of
modern states. Patterns of regime formation based on non-participation by
the citizens were introduced and made imprints on regional politics right up
to the current era.
As seen from the ruler, under such conditions, a power-base for the sus-
tainability of the regime that compensates for its lack of popular legitimacy
and other sources of regime sustainability (infrastructure, nation-wide insti-
tutions, competent bureaucracy) must be established. This can be achieved
by co-opting important elites and personalities within the industrial and fi-
nancial sectors and community leaders commanding the loyalty of important
groups in society, i.e. exploiting neopatrimonial structures in society. Citizens
on their part will be inclined to seek safety and social security either by mak-
ing use of the same neopatrimonial mechanisms to access important decision-
making bodies or personalities, or alternatively, to detach themselves from the
state and seek fulfilment of basic needs in existing primordial structures such
as family, village, clan, tribe, or religious community to compensate for state
negligence and possibly for building buffers against oppressive state institu-
tions. This is particularly relevant in areas where people consider the ruling
government to be against them, not their protector. In such environments,
where the trust between citizens (or large group of citizens) and the govern-
ment has broken totally down (as can be observed currently in Syria, Iraq,
Yemen, and Libya, and to a lesser degree in Egypt and Bahrain) the conditions
4 The “State idea” represents the factors which make the population in a country identify with
the state, a concept developed by the American geographer Richard Hartshorne, see Rich-
ard Hartshorne, “The Functional Approach in Political Geography,” Annals, Association of
A
merican Geographers 40 (1950): 95–130.
of democratic citizenship are difficult, indeed. The message of the Arab Upris-
ings was as a cry for politics based on trust and legitimacy, on dignity (karama)
and accountability; that the needs of the citizens should be the first priority of
the leaders.
The First Leg of the “Iron Triangle”: Neopatrimonialism as

Power-Base
A dominant explanation of the lack of transition to democracy in the Arab

world has for a long time been variations over the notion of “authoritarianism.”
Most states in the Arab Middle East are authoritarian in the sense that the
political system is under the control of ruling elites and maintained by more
or less repressive means. But how do we explain their persistence? A num-
ber of approaches to this question have been suggested, among them three
that each contribute with important insights: The first, known as “authori-
tarian resilience,” seeks answers in the institutional organisation of power in
society, centred around a centralised and populist political party with a per-
sonalistic and patriarchical leadership and commanding de facto monopoly
of representation in decision-making organs of the state. Co-optation of key
groups through distribution of patronage is also seen as an important mecha-
nism underpinning elite alliances in support of the regime.5 The second, “the
rentier state,” typically refers to the oil-rich Gulf monarchies where citizens
lack fiscal basis for demanding democracy. Instead of financing public services
through taxation, they are covered through natural resource revenues, some
of which are re-distributed to citizens. The political system is maintained by a
contractual relation between the rulers and the ruled, strictly controlled by the
rulers, whereby citizens are handed benefits to cover basic needs against re-
fraining from demanding political rights.6 The third approach, “authoritarian
5 “Authoritarian resilience” has been applied not only to Middle Eastern countries, but also
for explaining the persistence of the Communist rule in China after the Tiananmen demon-
strations in 1989. See Andrew J. Nathan, “Authoritarian Resilience,” Journal of Democracy 14
(2003): 6–17; Kellee S. Tsai, Capitalism Without Democracy: The Private Sector in Contemporary
China (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2007). For a comparison between the
Middle East and China, see Steve Hess, “From the Arab Spring to the Chinese Winter.”
6 See Giacomo Luciani, “Economic Foundations of Democracy and Authoritarianism: The
Arab World in Comparative Perspective,” Arab Studies Quarterly 10 (1988): 457–475; Giacomo
Luciani (ed.), The Arab State (London: Routledge, 1990).
250 Butenschøn
bargaining,” follows the same logic as the rentier state, whereby some rights
are exchanged against others, but without the oil revenues as the distributive
mechanism. With particular reference to Egypt, Roel Meier explains how the
bargaining was applied at different stages in the development of the republic –
but also its shortcomings in the long run, forming an important background
for the Arab Uprisings in 2011.7
A Wide-spread Pattern, Varying Strategies

What is evident from this brief discussion of relevant literature on Arab autho-
rianism is that there is a wide-spread pattern among ruling elites in the region
of seeking to maintain and strengthen their control over key state institutions
by establishing citizenship regimes that keep citizens at a safe distance from
real political influence. This should not necessarily be interpreted as an in-
herent disposition among Arab politicians of authoritarianism, but rather as
defensive and protective measures in a situation of weak state formations, a
general lack of trust between rulers and ruled (and among different groups of
citizens), and weak traditions for Weberian state formation.
As discussed by Robert Springborg and James Sater in this volume, rulers
exploit the tradition of patron-client relationships as a strategy of forming al-
liances that can strengthen the power-base of the regime (what Springborg
calls “instrumental clientelism” as opposed to “deep clientelism” or “organic
clientelism,” typical of traditional societies). In the case of Syria, discussed
by Raymond Hinnebusch and Ola Rifai in their chapter, a pragmatic use of
instrumental clientelism became a central modus operandi of Hafez al-Asad in
attempts to stabilise his regime and balance the interests of contending elites.
Comparing the two cases of Morocco and Syria in terms of how the two
regimes apply state organised clientelism is particularly interesting in view
of the many differences between the two countries, not least in the way the
regimes handled the uprisings in 2011. In the case of Morocco, Sater demon-
strates how the regime of King Mohammed vi, enjoying at the outset a more
deep-seated legitimacy than the Syrian regime, “… was able to build a new
system of patronage inside liberalised civil society that offered opportunities
for incremental political changes under the auspices of the old, undemocratic
regime.”8 Since he came to power in 1999, the king presented several plans and
7 For a more comprehensive discussion of “authoritarian bargaining” and its relevance for
citizenship regimes, see chapter 2, Roel Meijer, “Citizenship, Social Pacts, Authoritarian Bar-
gaining, and the Arab Uprisings” in this volume.
8 See chapter 5, James Sater, “Patronage and Democratic Citizenship in Morocco,” in this
volume.
initiatives in order to reform Morocco as a liberalised autocracy,9 whereby

important representatives of the middle class and civil society, as well as ru-
ral chiefs and religious leaders were co-opted, without undermining the final
authority of the monarchy. Furthermore, women’s rights have been enhanced
considerably by the regime, increasing the popularity of the king among the
middle classes Thus, when country-wide demonstrations were organised on 20
February 2011 demanding substantial democratic reforms, important segments
of civil s ociety did not take part. Instead, two weeks later, the king created the
Consultative Commission for Constitutional Revision, signalling a willing-
ness to listen to the protests. Consequently, the Moroccan version of the Arab
Spring did not escalate into total confrontation between protesters and the
regime. In fact few, even among the demonstrators, demanded the abolition
of the monarchy itself. But they did voice demands for reforms, accountability,
end to corruption, etc. The main reason they did not succeed was that influ-
ential Islamist Party pjd (Parti de la Justice et du Développement) did not join
because it was under the patronage of the system.
In Syria, the well-developed but fragile system of bureaucratic lines of com-
mand and co-optation of a variety of economic elites and community leaders
that Bashar al-Asad inherited in 2000 from (and held together by) his authori-
tarian father Hafez al-Asad could not withstand the combined internal and
external pressures as they mounted in 2011. Bashar’s challenges of securing his
regime’s power base were much more difficult than those faced by Morocco’s
Muhammed vi. In contrast to Morocco where the state and the kingdom, com-
paratively speaking, are well established in the minds of the people, Syria – as
Hinnebusch and Rifai explains: “…is an especial challenge for nation-builders
since it does not benefit from distinctively Syrian national myths or a history of
separate statehood and suffers from imperialist-imposed artificial boundaries
incongruent with geographic bilad ash-sham. The result is that both sub- and
supra-state identities have powerfully competed with loyalties to the state and,
despite many decades of Syrian statehood, these have been kept alive by their
instrumental use, by both ruling elites and opposition movements, against
each other.”10
Furthermore, a special characteristic of the Asads’ regime was its primary
base in the Alawite minority (12 per cent) and its solid support among most of
the other minorities (apart from the Kurds), and secular segments. The main
challenge was to maintain sufficient loyalty among the large Sunni majority
9 Daniel Brumberg, “The Trap of Liberalised Autocracy,” Journal of Democracy 13 (2011):

6–14.
10 See chapter 3, Ray Hinnebusch and Olai Rifai, “Syria: Identity, State Formation, and
Citizenship” in this volume.
252 Butenschøn
(70 per cent), not least with a view to the brutal suppression of the uprising
against Hafez al-Asad by the (Sunni) Muslim Brotherhood that culminated
with massacres in 1982. When protests broke out in 2011 Asad could still count
on sufficient support from his army and bureaucracy, from minorities and,
to a large extent, the urban elite, including Sunnis in Damascus and Aleppo.
As pointed out by Hinnebusch and Rafai, in contrast to Egypt and Tunisia, the
uprising in Syria was unable to converge on the centres of power, and a stale-
mate soon resulted. At the outset the protesters were non-violent. The fatal
step by the regime was that it chose to respond by disproportionate violence
and mass arrests, possibly overreacting after observing the fate of presidents
in Tunisia and Egypt, escalating the conflict on an increasingly sectarian basis
beyond control.
Lebanon represents another political system in the region that is also fun-
damentally built around clientelist structures, but very differently from either
Morocco or Syria, clearly impacting on the conditions of citizenship in the
country. Like Syria, it is a secular republic composted of a mosaic of ethnic
and religious groups originating in the Ottoman province of Syria. But in sharp
contrast to its eastern neighbour, Lebanon is not governed by a highly central-
ised state ruled by an authoritarian President; we find a very weak central gov-
ernment and a weak army, a system of uneasy co-existence and power-sharing
dominated by changing alliances of families, clans, militias, and religious and
communal leaders. As Samir Khalaf puts it: “This persisting feature of Leba-
non’s pluralism reflects, among other things, the deficiency of secular loyalties,
class ties and other civic attachments and the survival of sectarian, commu-
nal and primordial sentiments. One might perhaps argue that had the earlier
class conflicts succeeded in eroding or containing these feudal and communal
loyalties, Lebanon might have … become more of a nation-state and less of a
precarious mosaic of pluralistic and fragmented communities.11
Given its structural weaknesses it is surprising that the Lebanese political
system has survived over the years in spite of the wars and political upheav-
als in the surrounding countries, as well as internal upheavals; it survived
the Pan-Arabism of the 1950’s and -60’s, the devastating civil war in the -70’s
and -80’s, Israeli invasions and onslaughts ever since the late 1970’s, Syria’s deep
interference in the country until the withdrawal in 2005, and the existence of
parallel security structures not under effective control of the Lebanese state,
11 Samir Khalaf, Lebanon’s Predicament (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 23. See
also Farid El Khazen, The Breakdown of the State in Lebanon, 1967–1976 (London: i.b. Tau-
ris, 2000); Raghid El-Solh, Lebanon and Arabism: National Identity and State Formation
(London and New York: i.b. Tauris, 2004).
related as that is to the regional security situation. And finally, Lebanon has
(so far) survived the deepest crisis that has escalated after the Arab Uprisings,
namely the Sunni/Shia confrontations across the region and the civil war in
Syria. This crisis involve contending Lebanese parties on opposing sides and
has struck Lebanon at the very heart of its system of co-existing community
structures, threatening existing balances of power. The influx of more than one
million Syrian refugees only aggravates the situation.
One reason why Lebanon as a weak state does not disintegrate under
such pressures is that the state itself seeks to stay outside the conflicts that
surround it. This is a well-known pattern: The civil war 1975–1989 was not a
war between the government and its army on one side against rebels on the
other, but between contending coalitions of Lebanese non-state militias (in-
cluding Lebanese-based Palestinian militias). Even when neighbouring coun-
tries (Syria, Israel) invaded Lebanon or were involved in warfare on Lebanese
soil, a regular occurrence since the mid 1970’s, they were not confronted by
the Lebanese army but either by Palestinian or Shia militias. The parallel and
semi-autonomous power-structures in Lebanon, internally organised on the
basis of neopatrimonial relations, keep the country going, even under the cur-
rent conditions when the central political institutions are almost paralyzed.12
The paradox of Lebanese politics is that it is the weakness of the central
authority that more than anything accounts for its ability to withstand the ex-
treme challenges and pressures mounted by conflicting internal and external
forces. This is an aspect of Lebanese politics that explains that it has a pub-
lic life and discourse that is relatively free and open, making Beirut a hub for
Arab political and intellectual networks and debates. Lebanese citizenship
is likewise caught in a paradox: The relations between citizens and the state
are weak; the content of Lebanese citizenship is basically confined to that of
holding a passport and being protected by the state’s representatives when
abroad. Otherwise, the extent and depth of a citizen’s membership in a polity
is basically defined within the religious community that the citizen belongs
to. This is itself a challenge to the idea of equal citizenship. You cannot claim
political rights in the state of Lebanon if you do not belong to one of the eigh-
teen officially recognised religious communities.
To summarise, the general pattern that emerges is that while the coercive
power of the state is exercised through its legal and security arms, the sources of
political authority to exercise the power is more problematic. Since the loyalty
12 Lebanon did not have an elected president between May 2014 and November 2016.
arliamentary elections should have been held in 2013, but has been postponed several
P
times as the existing assembly, elected in 2009, has extended its mandate.
254 Butenschøn
of the citizens towards the organs and institutions of the state cannot be taken
for granted, challenged by sub- or supra-state identities and loyalties, regimes
need to compensate for this fragility in its own power-base. The strategies vary
depending on historical and contextual variables, but one way or the other the
regime must resort to exploiting alternative hierarchical power-structures. It
seems reasonable to say that a “re-traditionalisation” has happened as a result
of the gradual retreat of the state as provider of social security and services.
Thus, citizenship – being member of the political community – becomes a
question of loyalty towards leaders on different levels in society, not a question
of equal and active participation in the life of the nation.
The Second Leg in the “Iron Triangle”: Citizenship in the Regional

Balance of Power
How did Arab regimes that were challenged by uprisings seek support and
strength on the regional level to compensate for lack of legitimacy on the
national level? What kinds of alliances were formed? How did these policies
impact on the conditions of citizenship?
One of the most fascinating aspects of the 2011 Arab Uprisings is the way in
which they swept through the region as an unstoppable fire. It was as if hun-
dreds of thousands responded to a command to rise up – but there was no uni-
fied command, no central leadership, no strategy developed by the vanguards
of a revolution. However the lack of coordination of the mass movement
erupting simultaneously across countries might be explained, and in spite of
the fact that the protests in each country were addressed at national leaders
with slogans for change in the individual countries – there were no traditional
Pan-Arab calls for an all-Arab revolution – the uprisings were strictly Arab in
reach and message. It is often contended that the notion of “the Arab World”
does not reflect a reality. But we can safely conclude that the Arab Spring was a
regional phenomenon reflecting the reality of an Arab public arena.13
The regional dimension of the uprisings was also reflected in the reactions
and policies on the level of governments and heads of states. Some were caught
in the fire and could not escape, others considered their defences and moves
closely, including in relation to the regional balance of forces. Confronted
by an explosive public mood and the uncertainties and the unpredictability
13 See for example Hassan Hanafi cited in Marc Lynch, “The Big Think Behind the Arab
Spring: Do the Middle East’s Revolutions Have a Unifying Ideology?” Foreign Policy
(November 28, 2011).
c reated by the fall of leaders in Tunisia and Egypt regimes were left with the
dilemma of how to position themselves. In the short term rulers had little
time to find together in any concerted efforts to withstand the threatening
revolts.
The history of Arab regional alliances and rivalries is extremely complex as
it can be observed at the intersection of power politics between regional inter-
state relations and great power geopolitics. In the 1950s and -60s the grand
schemes of pan-Arab nationalists lead by Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser to unify
the “Arab Nation” met numerous obstacles. The basic motive was to correct the
divisive politics of the colonial powers that had split the Arabs into “artificial”
states and made the creation of the State of Israel possible in the midst of the
Arab world, and to establish Arab political unity that could stand indepen-
dent of the superpowers and their cold war rivalries. At the same time, the
individual newly independent regimes were compelled to defend their own
interests and security, and to define their position in the geopolitical matrix.
This early on exposed the fragility of many Arab states and the deep cleavages
that worked against Arab unity.14
More than any other region in the 1950’s and 1960’s, the Arab world experi-
enced interventions by the military in politics and frequent coups. Syria was
first with the coup of 1949, followed by some 20 more coups (or attempted
coups) in that country alone until Hafez al-Asad seized and consolidated pow-
er in 1970. The 1952 coup in Egypt, headed by the Free Officers, became more
of a defining moment in modern Arab history because the officers not only
took over the positions of state powers, they also initiated a reform program
for transforming and modernising the Egyptian economy and society. Egypt
was not only a hero for Arab nationalists, it was also a model for the transfor-
mation of Arab societies; Egypt was the future. According to Elizabeth Picard
the Egyptian coup and other coups ousting traditional rulers in the region in
14 “Everyone” wanted Arab unity at the time, but who should define the purpose and
c ontent of this unity? The rivalry for Arab leadership developed into an “Arab Cold War.”
Ruling elites were caught between raison de la nation (Pan-Arabism) and raison d’état
(sovereignty). Millions were mobilised also then, but the Arab cold war was mainly fought
over the heads of the citizens. See Malcolm Kerr, The Arab Cold War: Gamal Abd al-Nasir
and his Rivals, 1958–1970, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971); Bahgat Korany,
“Alien and Besieged Yet Here to Stay: The Contradictions of the Arab Territorial State,”
in The Foundations of the Arab State, ed. Ghassan Salamé (London: Croom Helm, 1987);
Raymond Hinnebusch and Anoushiravan Ehteshami, (eds.), The Foreign Policies of Middle
East States (Boulder co and London: Lynne Rienner, 2002), 8.
256 Butenschøn
the 1950’s and 1960’s were looked upon rather positively at the time, including
by many international observers and scholars.15
The political dynamics and popularity of the new military regime in Egypt,
particularly when Gamal Abdel Nasser as one of the Free Officers came to pow-
er, cannot be explained only with reference to its role as forceful moderniser of
the Egyptian society. It is first and foremost Nasser’s position as the “liberator
of the Arabs” in the critical early years of Arab independence that gave the
new regime its unprecedented legitimacy among Arabs across the region. His
spectacular nationalisation of the Suez Canal Company in 1956 and the way
he survived not only a serious assassination attempt but also the conspiracy
by Britain, France, and Israel to topple him during the Suez War later that year
gave him “almost unlimited credit in his own country and throughout the Arab
world.” According to Adeed Dawisha, “[f]rom then on, Nasser’s legitimacy as
Egypt’s president, and the legitimacy of the political order which he had cre-
ated were not to be questioned…”16 The symbolic significance of the Suez suc-
cess in raising Arab morale can hardly be overrated in view of the devastating
defeat in the 1948–49 Palestine war. Walid Khazziha underlines this strongly:
“… the political, economic, and social life of society was monopolised and the
state came to rule supreme over individuals and the community as a whole.
Perhaps at no time in the modern history of the Arab World was the impact of
Palestine on the Arab state structure more evident and direct than it was in the
decade which followed the Arab defeat in 1948.”17
It is perhaps forgotten today, but at the height of his career Nasser’s popular-
ity reached almost superhuman dimensions overshadowing any rational foun-
dation of a contractual relationship between the ruler and the ruled. As Iyad
Bin Ashur describes it: “The relationship between the raʾis [the leader] and
the people is a direct one: immediate, emotional, marvellous, almost ‘bodily’.
It forms the backbone of the political system, in a situation where political
organisations are no more than tools for mobilisation and recruitment for the
sake of a plebiscitic, populist democracy (bayʾiyya ghifariyya).”18
We have to take this general frame of mind into consideration to under-
stand how it was possible to merge the states of Egypt and Syria into the
15 Elizabeth Picard, “Arab Military in Politics: From Revolutionary Plot to Authoritarian

State,” in The Arab State, ed. Giacomo Luciani (London: Routledge, 1990), 190.
16 Adeed Dawisha, “Arab Regimes: Legitimacy and Foreign Policy,” in The Arab State, ed.
Giacomo Luciani (London: Routledge, 1990), 291.
17 Walid Khazziha, “The Impact of Palestine on Arab Politics,” in The Arab State, ed. Giacomo
Luciani (London: Routledge, 1990), 302–303.
18 Cited and translated from Arabic in Nazih N. Ayubi, Over-stating the Arab State: Politics
and Society in the Middle East (London: i.b. Tauris, 1995), 204.
United Arab Republic (uar) in 1958. To put it simply, Syria was in a deep politi-
cal crisis, threatening the integrity of the state. Finding it almost impossible to
stabilise a Syrian government, nationalist and left-wing parties (headed by the
Baʿath party) supported by the army, approached President Nasser and pro-
posed a Syrian-Egyptian federation. Nasser finally agreed, but only on his own
terms; Egypt-Syria should be a unitary state headed by Nasser, Syrian political
parties should be dissolved and the army’s political role should be terminated.19
The Syrian parties were, it seems, so desperate to get a share of Nasser’s cha-
risma that they accepted his conditions, giving up not only Syria’s sovereignty
but also their own autonomy as political actors. The negotiators were further-
more driven by the exalted pro-unionist opinion in Syria. Said one participant:
“We followed the masses. The crowds were drunk … Anyone at that hour
who dared oppose unity – the people would tear their heads off.” Raymond
Hinnebusch comments: “This episode dramatically exposed how little legiti-
macy the Syrian state enjoyed among a mass public mobilised by Pan-Arab
dreams.”20 With the total marginalisation of Syrian elites by the Egyptians and
the building up of Syrian opposition the union could not survive for very long;
the uar was dissolved in 1961, leaving scars and frustrations in the Arab na-
tionalist movement and Syria without a solution to its problem of finding a
common platform for its fractured communities.
As indicated by Khazziha above, Nasser also laid the foundations for the
authoritarian populist state as a model for the definition of citizenship in the
Arab radical republics that were established in this phase and were to last right
up to the recent Arab Uprisings. As was demonstrated to the extreme in the
case of the setting up of the United Arab Republic, Nasser and his movement
became an attractive source of legitimacy that other Arab rulers, by joining in,
sought to gain political capital from.21
The Egypt-Saudi-Arabia Axis: Protectors of the Regional Order

Since the 1950s Egypt and Saudi-Arabia have been contenders for regional
influence, Egypt representing the secular republics, Saudi-Arabia the conser-
vative monarchies of the Gulf and Jordan. In the 1960s the two countries were
19 Raymond Hinnebusch, Syria: Revolution from Above (London and New York: Routledge,
2001), 41–43.
20 Hinnebusch, Syria, 42.
21 For a summary of the main characteristics of this regime model, see Roel Meijer, “Political
Citizenship and Social Movements in the Arab World,” in Handbook of Political Citizen-
ship and Social Movements, ed. Hein Anton Van der Heijden (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar
Publisher, 2014), 639–640.
258 Butenschøn
fighting a drawn-out proxy war over Yemen between republicans and royalists
which ended in 1967 without a clear-cut victory. But this “Nasser’s Vietnam”
cost Egypt about 15000 casualties, a drain on its economy, and damaging
Nasser’s image as the Arab unifier.22 Later, the two countries were basically
on the same side in regional conflicts, starting with Egypt joining the camp of
pro-Western Arab states after the death of Nasser in 1971. This major shift in the
strategic balance was dramatically exposed when the new Egyptian President
Anwar el-Sadat announced the expulsion of Soviet military advisors in July
1972, re-orienting Egypt towards the usa. In the wars over Iraq, from the Iran-
Iraq war 1980–1988, the two countries supported Iraq against what they saw as
a threat from Iran following the Islamic revolution in 1979.
In fact, the origin of the Egypt-Saudi-Arabia alliance against internal and
external enemies and in support of the regional status quo is to be found in the
Arab summit in Khartoum in August 1967, still in the aftershocks of the Six-Day
War that year. Here the radical republics (lead by Egypt) and the conservative
monarchies (lead by Saudi-Arabia) reached a “gentlemen’s agreement”: The
republics would give up all attempts at toppling the monarchs, whereas the
oil-rich monarchs on their side pledged to finance to rebuilding of the military
infrastructure of the front-line states (vis-a-vis Israel). Paul Jabber has cogently
explained this dynamic, still very much at work today:
The essence of the “special relationship” between Egypt and Saudi-

Arabia, which had its gestation at the Khartoum Arab Summit of August
1967, gradually developed in the interwar period from 1967 to 1973, and
which reached full maturity following the October [War] … consisted
[of] a trade-off of mutual expectations between Cairo and Riyadh. …
Egypt … henceforth expected substantial and continuing access to the
growing riches of the oil states. In exchange, a Saudi regime acutely
conscious of its multifaceted vulnerability, and for years under ideologi-
cal, political and even military attack by the “radical-revolutionary” camp
now looked forward to, indeed demanded, relief from such pressures. It
expected from Cairo … abandonment of revolutionary confrontation,
supra-national appeals, and unduly close ties to the Communist world,
22 In addition, it made Egypt ill-prepared for the escalating conflict with Israel; its weakness
dramatically exposed in the Six-Day War. See Jesse Ferris, Nasser’s Gamble: How Interven-
tion in Yemen Caused the Six-Day War and the Decline of Egyptian Power (Princeton and
Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013), 5–15.
the promotion of socialism with the Arab World and other such policies
and practices subversive of the status quo.23
More recently, the cleavages and alliances in the region are very different
from the height of Pan-Arab nationalism, but the patterns of regimes seek-
ing c ollusion with or support from regional partners to compensate for lack
of legitimacy or other weaknesses persists. No Arab regime or coalition today
balances the Saudi-Egypt axis: Iraq, Syria and Libya are failed states, Algeria
is keeping itself outside the conflict but is supportive of the al-Sisi regime in
Egypt; most of the monarchies are either on the side of Saudi-Arabia or neu-
tral. Sudan now follows Saudi-Arabia as a regional leader.
In the wake of the Arab Uprisings this pattern is particularly evident along
three partly overlapping cleavages: The Sunni/Shiʿi divide, the Saudi-Arabia/
Iran rivalry, and the question of the political legitimacy of the Muslim Brother-
hood. As conflicts have unfolded along all three cleavages, Saudi-Arabia’s role as
a dominant player in the Arab context is a striking factor. Most o bservers agree
that what drives this conflict is the underlying rivalry between Iran and Saudi-
Arabia for regional dominance, a rivalry that to a large extent overlaps with the
Sunni/Shiʿi cleavage. Followers of Shiʾism comprise only a small minority of
about 10 per cent in the Muslim world, but with the 1979 Islamic revolution in
Iran (the only country with a 90 per cent majority of Shiʿi Muslims) Shiʿis got a
powerful religious and political centre with ambitions; as seen from the Arab
heartland Iran had become an expansionist threat. The threat was not only
from a religious competitor, but from the centre of a radical anti-American
mobilising movement with sympathisers all over the region that in many ways
had inherited the role from the outdated and unsuccessful left-wing secular
Arab nationalists. Not since the Nasserists, Communists and Baʿathists had
threatened the conservative Arab regimes back in the 1960’s and 70’s had a
mass-movement of such substantial proportions emerged in the r egion, now
even in religious garments.
Within a few years the sectarian cleavage between Sunnis and Shias be-
came politically relevant and potent. After the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq
in 2003 (notably replaced by a Shiʿi-dominated government), Asad’s s trategic
23 Paul Jabber, “Oil, Arms, and Regional Diplomacy: Strategic Dimensions of the Saudi-
Egyptian Relationship,” in Rich and Poor States in the Middle East: Egypt and the New Arab
Order, ed. Malcolm H. Kerr and El Sayed Yassin (Cairo: The American University in Cairo
Press, 1982), 430. See also Dan Tschirgi, “The United States, the Arab World, and the Gulf
Crisis,” in Perspectives on the Gulf Crisis, ed. Dan Tschirgi and Bassam Tibi (Cairo: Cairo
Papers in Social Science, No. 14, 1991), 16–18.
260 Butenschøn
orientation towards Iran, and the building up in Lebanon of Hezbollah

(a Shia militia, now the strongest military power in Lebanon) supported by
both Syria and Iran, many Arab leaders (Jordan’s Abdullah ii in 2004 followed
by Mubarak in Egypt and others) warned of the formation of a “Shiʿa Axis” or
“Shiʿa Crescent” in the Mashreq, controlled by Teheran and running from Bagh-
dad and Damascus to Beirut, later to be added by the Houthi rebels in Yemen.
As explained by Bjørn Olav Utvik:
What, then, is behind the scaremongering from some Arab capitals? At

one level it reflects a fear of the growth of internal opposition, more often
than not led by Islamists. Movements like Hezbollah and Hamas are seen
as exerting a dangerous influence in that they galvanise oppositional ele-
ments into believing that change is possible. Through their defiant stance
against Israel they also throw into stark relief the inability and unwill-
ingness of most Arab governments to act in defence of the Palestinian
cause. By portraying these movements as mere tools in the hands of an
expansionist non-Arab and non-Sunni Iran the governments hope to un-
dermine the popular legitimacy of the Islamists.24
One clear indication that the Saudi-Arabia-Iran conflict is less about religious
doctrine than a struggle over regional power and citizenship regimes is the fact
that the Palestinian Sunni Hamas movement is often included in the Iranian-
led axis. Also, the Asad regime in Syria is hardly straight-forward Shia: The
regime is secular, the Alawites who holds leading positions in the regime is tra-
ditionally considered as heretics by the Shia clergy, and the President himself
is married to a Sunni. Furthermore, the claim that strategic like-mindedness
among Middle Eastern regimes are primarily formed in the matrix of power-
relations and not by religious or ideological like-mindedness was bluntly dem-
onstrated when Saudi-Arabia (and its Salafi supporters in Egypt) promptly
expressed its full support to al-Sisiʾs coup d’état against President Muhammed
Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood. In the post-Arab Spring era Saudi-Arabia
and Egypt, supported by United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and others, are united
in their attempts to wipe out the Sunni Islamist Muslim Brotherhood from po-
litical influence in the region. The Brotherhood’s show of strength as the most
popular political party in the relatively free and fair elections in Egypt after the
fall of President Mubarak, followed by similar results in Tunisia and Morocco,
was a wake-up call for the autocratic regimes, fearful as they are of the public
24 Bjørn Olav Utvik, “The Fear of a Shia Axis,” forskning (April 10, 2010), http://forskning
.no/content/fear-shia-axis, accessed January 20, 2015.
appeal of the Brotherhood’s anti-regime policies. When al-Sisi was safely in

power, Saudi-Arabia and its closest allies in the Gulf Cooperation Council25
pledged tens of billions of dollars in support to the new-old Egyptian regime
to stabilise the autocratic regime and help al-Sisi out of the huge economic
problems Egypt was facing.26
The geopolitical rivalry between Saudi-Arabia and Iran is the overriding
general tendency that defines alliances in the region today and hence having
deep influences on models of citizenship in individual countries; every state
and all major players have to orient themselves according to this rivalry. Both
regional powers now intervene directly or indirectly in a number of states
(Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, Lebanon) in order to impact the outcome
of the power-struggles in these countries. This room for active regional rivalry
has been made possible to a large extent by the failed us wars in Afghanistan
and Iraq and the break-down of several states that followed, combined with
the partial retreat of the us from the region and the weakening of Egypt as a
regional power in the post-Arab Spring years. The war against isil (the Islamic
State of Iraq and the Levant) furthermore demonstrates how regional alliances
emerge and are re-organised when state authorities are broken down. In both
Syria and Iraq the regimes have failed to gain support from the leaders of large
Sunni tribes that live on both sides of the state boundaries, threatening the
integrity of both states and provoking interventions, it seems, by stakeholders
at all levels and from all corners of the world.
To sum up, rulers and regimes with a fragile support-base in society seek to
compensate for this weakness not only by exploiting neopatrmonial r elations
25 The Gulf Cooperation Council (gcc) consists of six monarchies: Saudi-Arabia, Kuwait,
Qatar, United Arab Emirates (uae), Bahrain, and Oman. Saudi-Arabia has however not
been able to forge consensus within the gcc on relations to either Iran or the Muslim
Brotherhood. Whereas Bahrain (whose rulers were saved by Saudi military intervention
in 2011) and uae are loyal to Saudi-Arabia, the other members follow a more independent
line to a varying degree. Qatar had close relations with the Muslim Brotherhood, but had
to change its position under heavy pressures from Saudi-Arabia.
26 According to Al Arabiya English, within two years of General al-Sisiʾs coup d’état, the gcc
countries had strengthened Egypt’s economy with a total of about 35.5 billion dollars:
They offered 12.5 billion dollars in aid and investments at a conference to enhance invest-
ments in Egypt’s economy in March 2015. In addition, “Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the uae,
which backed the al-Sisi-led army overthrow of Islamist President Mohamed Mursi in July
2013 following mass unrest against his rule, have kept Egypt’s economy afloat since then
with 23 billion dollars in oil shipments, cash grants and central bank deposits.” http://
english.alarabiya.net/en/business/economy/2015/03/13/Saudi-announces-4-billion-aid
-package-to-Egypt.html, accessed November 18, 2015.
262 Butenschøn
at home (the first leg of the “iron triangle”), but also by pragmatically entering
strategic alliances on the regional level as a shield against any threat. Today, a
“Saudi-Egypt Axis” supported by client actors throughout the region forms the
core of the second dimension in the “iron triangle” that restricts the freedom of
citizens. This alliance is organised with the purpose of keeping “de-stabilising”
and “terrorist” elements and their sponsors in the region at bay at any costs.
State-directed violence and political misuse of legal institutions against
political opposition and human rights defenders and organisations, i ncluding
political movements representing major political trends in society, has caused
the suppression of open discourse, and as it seems, the re-instating of the “wall
of fear”27 in people’s mind. The coming of a society based on solidarity across
religious and ethnic cleavages and a “Rebirth of the Arab Citizen,” both impor-
tant motives in the Arab Uprisings, have become distant dreams.
The Third Leg of the “Iron Triangle”: The Collusion between Global
Powers and Local Rulers
The fragile foundations of many Arab states are an endemic challenge to politi-
cal stability in the Middle East. Combined with its strategic location – involving
vital interests not only for regional powers, but for great powers as well – the
region unavoidably becomes an arena for rivalries between powers and actors
on all levels, from tribal leaders to superpowers, creating complex p atterns of
dependencies and inter-dependencies. External powers need bridgeheads in
the region: Access to territory, strategic resources, clients, markets; local rul-
ers need security guarantees and political, economic, and diplomatic spon-
soring to compensate for lack of legitimacy among own citizens and to mend
fences against local and regional challengers. This pattern of interaction be-
tween global and local actors, strongly entrenched in the colonial history of
the region, resembles in many ways the kind of neopatrimonialism described
earlier, and constitute the third leg in our “iron triangle.” But how does this
third dimension impact on the conditions of citizenship in the region?
27 This expression was often used to describe the absence of fear and the civil courage that
characterised the demonstrators; they had teared down the “wall of fear” in their own
mind, aware of the brutal methods used by the different security and police forces, and
the miserable conditions and use of torture in most prisons. In fact, it is fair to say that
the breaking down of this “wall” was a prerequisite for the scale of the demonstrations.
See for example, Nasser Weddady and Sohrab Ahmar (eds), Arab Spring Dreams: The Next
Generation Speaks Out for Freedom and Justice (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 47.
First, priorities are set and deals made in direct negotiations between global
and local actors within a patron-client structure, excluding citizens at large
from any democratic impact or monitoring. Such arrangements work well
in conjunction with dynastic and pre-democratic systems, and contribute to
preserve them, inhibiting dynamic renewal of political leadership. It is a fair
assumption that the remarkable tendencies of the once revolutionary and
anti-monarchical Arab republics of becoming semi-monarchical dynasties can
be explained, at least in part, with reference to this pattern of interaction.28
As seen from an outside power with vital interests to defend in the region, it
would be preferable to do business with a single ruler who you can trust as a
loyal partner (maybe because he is dependent on your economic or security
guarantees) and who can make decisions on his own without having to bother
too much about public opinion, organised opposition or ineffective political
institutions.
Second, again for historical reasons and because of the extreme imbalance
of power between global powers and local actors, the threshold for external in-
terference or intervention, including military, is relatively low. It is as if global
powers, for the most time Western powers, consider intervening in the region
as justified, given their perceptions (or prejudices) of the region as ruled by
weak and unpredictable leaders and where their own vital interests could be
at stake.
But again, it is not only global powers who want to intervene in the region,
it is as much local actors seeking intervention from external powers when they
feel threatened. This kind of reciprocity is the core logic of the third leg of
the iron triangle, creating stumbling blocks in the way of developing demo-
cratic citizenship regimes. The ways in which local ruling elites can exploit the
readiness (relatively speaking) of global powers to intervene in the region is
illustrated by numerous episodes in modern and contemporary history. Events
in the dramatic year 1958 involving Lebanon and Trans-Jordan, and relations
between the United States and the gcc countries in the current era, can serve
as examples.
Saved by the Eisenhower Doctrine

At the peak of Arab nationalism in the aftermath of the Suez War in 1956
the pressure against Arab regimes and conservative forces considered by
the nationalists to stand in the way for a wider Arab revolution and unity
28 Larbi Sadiki, Like Father, Like Son: Dynastic Republicanism in the Middle East (Carnegie
Endowment for International peace, Policy Outlook, 2009), http://carnegieendowment
.org/files/dynastic_republicanism.pdf. Accessed November 10, 2015.
264 Butenschøn
was immense. The fall of the Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq in July 1958 and
establishment of a nationalist republic combined with the abandonment
of the pro-Western Baghdad Pact raised expectations for an all-out radical
Pan-Arab victory even further. Two leaders particularly at risk to be swal-
lowed by the surge at the same time was the Lebanese conservative strongman
President Chamille Chamoun and King Hussein of the Hashemite Kingdom of
Trans-Jordan. When an escalating pro-Nasser revolt with the epicentre in the
city of Sidon threatened to overthrow Chamoun he had no regional partners
to ask for help, and turned to usa with a request for help under the Eisenhow-
er Doctrine.29 Eisenhower responded positively and promptly and sent the
marines to Beirut, saving Chamoun’s pro-Western government. At the same
time, fearful of what had just happened to Faisal ii (son of his second cousin)
in Iraq, King Hussein appealed to Washington and London for military assis-
tance against the Nasserists. Kamal Salibi explains: “Washington was reluctant
to undertake the defence of President Chamoun and King Hussein simultane-
ously. The solution was to detail the defence of Jordan to the British, who still
felt morally committed to the Hashemite regime in Amman. The British mili-
tary airlift to Jordan, like the American oil lift shortly before, could arrive only
by flying over Israeli airspace.”30
The United States as a Protective Shield

Since the end of the Cold War and the bipolar world, the East–west rivalry is
no longer an organising dimension in the regional security arrangements. But
the fragility of many regimes persists, and thus their need for external security
guarantees. In the case of the smaller monarchies in the Gulf sub-region their
needs for security have been partly met within the Gulf Cooperation Coun-
cil with Saudi-Arabia as the dominating partner, but only partly. As discussed
above, challenges from within (Shia minorities, Muslim Brotherhood, jihadist
groups) and from outside (Iran) are of major concerns to most of the rulers;
challenges that cannot be handled only on the regional level. Until recently,
29 The Eisenhower Doctrine from 1957 was a major American policy statement of the Cold
War era identifying us strategic aims and interests in the Middle East vis-à-vis the Soviet
bloc. Under the Doctrine, approved by the Congress in March 1957, the us President could
authorise the commitment of u.s. forces “to secure and protect the territorial integrity
and political independence of such nations, requesting such aid against overt armed
aggression from any nation controlled by international communism.”
30 Kamal Salibi, The Modern History of Jordan (London and New York: i.b. Tauris, 1993), 202.
The required official approval of the Israeli government was given in both instanced,
indicating Israel’s interest in keeping the Hashemite Kingdom.
the gcc countries felt confident that the well-established us guarantees were
solid, given the central role of the Gulf in American strategies for the Greater
Middle East, us dependence on Middle Eastern oil, and the enmity between
usa and Iran, Saudi-Arabia’s main contender for regional power. Consider-
ing the us massive military presence in the Gulf monarchies, the gcc leaders
should have good reasons to feel protected by the American military umbrel-
la, but also reasons to keep it for the future. As explained by Gregory Gause,
“[F]or better or worse, the Gulf monarchies are now America’s closest allies
in the Arab world. The u.s. military infrastructure in the region is centered on
bases in these states.”31
However, especially since the start of President Obama’s second term in
2013, it has been evident that the factors that motivates the us commitments
no more can be taken for granted: Obama is struggling to reduce the American
presence in the Greater Middle East, shifting us strategic attention towards
the Far East; us dependence on oil imports from the Middle East is increas-
ingly being reduced; and the Obama administration has had a clear policy of
reducing tensions with Iran, with the aim of reaching a diplomatic deal over
the controversial issue of Iran’s nuclear programme, and dismantling the
sanctions regime.32
The combined effects of these policies have shaken the Gulf rulers’ confi-
dence in the robustness of the us security guarantees which in fact is not only
guarantees against military attacks, but also vital protection of their archaic
citizenship regimes. With Iraq out of the equation as a buffer against Iranian
dominance and statements by Obama to the effect that the greatest security
threat for the Gulf monarchies is not Iran, but their own lack of democracy,33
motivated the gcc leaders to demand a meeting with President Obama in May
2015. They wanted reassurances of American security guarantees in the form of
31 F. Gregory Gause iii, “Understanding the Gulf States. Why the Monarchies of the Persian
Gulf Fall Out and Get Back Together – and Why it Matters for the Region and the World,”
Democracy: A Journal of Ideas 36 (2015), http://democracyjournal.org/magazine/36/
understanding-the-gulf-states/, accessed December 15, 2015.
32 This was achieved in stages in 2015, in spite of fierce resistance from the Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Republican Party in the us, Saudi-Arabia and its clos-
est allies, and hardliners in Iran. Most of the sanctions were lifted in January 2016 after
confirmation by the iaea (International Atomic Energy Agency) that Iran had fulfilled its
commitments under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
33 Tom Hussein, “Persian Gulf nations unlikely to embrace democracy despite Obama push,”
McClatchyDC, May 12, 2015, http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/world/
middle-east/article24784417.html, accessed December 15, 2015.
266 Butenschøn
some kind of written agreement, preferably a formal defence pact, and prom-
ises of advanced military hardware.34
Conclusion
These few examples demonstrate that the conditions of citizenship in the

mena region are not based on a secure environment of well-established states.
On the contrary, we are dealing with a region of core significance in world poli-
tics where fundamental aspects of political order and regime legitimacy and
stability are under constant challenges, both from actors within the territorial
states and from the outside. There are potentials for major changes, as we saw
during the Arab Spring, but today a bleak picture is what comes through in
most of the region: The stability obtained is mostly of the Machiavelli kind
because of the basic lack of trust, rulers and warlords are bound to play cyni-
cal survival games within the matrix of power that they are thrown into. Thus,
if we want a comprehensive understanding of the conditions of citizenship
in the Arab region today, we must disentangle the political dynamics of the
“iron triangle” that limit the realisation of active citizenship. We might be lead
to conclude, then, that the struggle by the masses for their citizenship rights
in 2011 was to no avail given the overwhelming counter-forces. The authori-
tarian rulers have reasserted their grip on society. What does this experience
do to peoples’ trust, not only in democracy as a basis for good governance,
but also to their own self-respect as citizens? Is a struggle for their basic rights,
risking brutal repression, worthwhile considering that the chances for success
are negligible?
However, in a broader historical perspective, the “uprisings,” the “awaken-
ing,” the “Spring,” the “revolution” of 2011, was a forceful reality and might still
be considered as a “critical juncture”35 in in the modern political history of
the region. The uprisings demonstrated that it is possible for citizens, even
under conditions of autocratic governance and brutal repression, to bring the
political regime to its knees and break up the “iron triangle” that normally
restricts them from exercising citizenship rights. The events of 2011 inserted
34 The gcc leaders did get promises of increased military aid, short of weapons that could
challenge us commitments to Israel’s military edge over the Arabs, but did not get any
kind of formal defence pact. See “Obama Pledges More Military Aid to Reassure Per-
sian Gulf Allies on Iran Deal,” The New York Times 14 May 2015, http://www.nytimes
.com/2015/05/15/world/middleeast/obama-saudi-arabia-iran-persian-gulf-security
.html?_r=0, accessed December 15, 2015.
35 See Nils A. Butenschøn, “Arab Citizen and the Arab State: The ‘Arab Spring’ as a Critical
Juncture in Contemporary Arab Politics,” Democracy and Security 11 (2015): 111–128.
a new dimension in Arab politics that leaders are forced to consider: citizens
are more aware of their rights and their potential powers to enforce change if
their basic rights are violated and their dignity as citizens trampled down. The
uprisings did not revolutionise the Arab political order, but as a ruler you never
know when the people will rise again and challenge your authority. The seeds
of the uprisings may blossom in the form of democratic transitions at a later
stage, not very different from the historic significance of the 1848 revolutions
in Europe, a parallel that has been mentioned by several observers. With refer-
ence to that debate Anne Applebaum writes:
“Historian A.J.P. Taylor once called 1848 a moment when ‘history reached
a turning point and failed to turn.’ And yet – in the longer run, the ideas dis-
cussed in 1848 did seep into the culture, and some of the revolutionary plans of
1848 were eventually realized.”36
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part 2
Concepts of Citizenship
∵
chapter 10
Muslim Subjects and the Rights of God

Knut S. Vikør
The often repeated phrase that “Islam does not distinguish between religion
and politics,” expressed in the slogan al-islam din wa-dawla, “Islam is faith
and state,” can evidently not be taken literally. If Muslims did not distinguish
between din and dawla, they could not claim that Islam should be both. It
is of course a political demand, first expressed at the end of the nineteenth
century,1 for greater religious impact on politics than was the case at that time.
A contrary argument would be that political authority in Islam has since the
death of the Prophet been basically secular, in that the religious scholars far
from taking a political role always considered the profession of politics as a
sordid business, inherently oppressive both for the faith and the believers, and
to be avoided at all costs.
Both views are however programmatic and normative. While anecdotes
abound of pious scholars spurning the praise of the sultans and rejecting the
“blood-soaked money” that was offered by them,2 all indications are that real-
life scholars not only avidly sought the favour of the state, but often depended
on it for their livelihood.3 The historical reality shows a close and co-dependent
relation between the authorities of religion and of the state. Nevertheless,
they were separate. Islam does not have any organised “church” or ecclesiastic
hierarchy,4 but the ruler-caliph did not step into role as a “pope” or religious
leader of Islam, nor did anyone else.5
1 Nazih N. Ayubi, Political Islam: Religion and Politics in the Arab World (London: Routledge,
1994), 123.
2 Tilman Nagel, Das islamische Recht: Eine Einführung (Westhofen: WVA-Verlag Skulima, 2001),
117.
3 Mathieu Tillier, Les Cadis d’Iraq et l’état abbasside (132/750–334/945) (Damascus: ifpo, 2009),
225–274.
4 At least not in the majority Sunni Islam, Shiʿism did from the eighteenth century develop a
religious hierarchy, up to the level of “great ayatollah,” and also had a conception of divinely
inspired imam who had religious authority unknown to Sunnism.
5 Ira M. Lapidus, “The Separation of State and Religion in the Development of Early Islamic so-
ciety,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 6 (1975): 363–385, and criticism by Muham-
mad Qasim Zaman, “The Caliphs, the ʿUlamāʾ, and the Law: Defining the Role and Function
of the Caliph in the Early ʿAbbāsid Period,” Islamic Law and Society 4 (1997): 1–36. See also

274 Vikør
The complex interaction of the divine and the mundane raises the issue
of the relations between the political authority and the believers, the ʿibad
or subjects of the Muslim state. The traditional Orientalist view of the caliph
or sultan was that of an unrestrained despot who, applauded by the religious
scholars or not, ruled over docile subjects according to his personal whim with
only lip service paid to empty religious ethic. In the courts, the judges, qadis,
appointed by the ruler, similarly dispensed justice according to their own in-
clinations, while the formalistic rules of the Shariʿa remained an ignored and
ossified text which had little or no impact on actual jurisprudence, an “ivory
tower” in the image made by Max Weber.6
Modern studies on the practices of Islamic law in the pre-modern period
has mostly dispelled this image of the self-centred “kadi under the tree,” and
shown that qadis in fact largely followed the rules of the Shariʿa, and that these
were flexible enough to allow for considerable adaptation to changing circum-
stances.7 However, the issue of the relation between ruler and ruled in pre-
modern Islam has not been fully developed yet. Did traditional Islamic society
have anything that could resemble the idea of “citizen,” a person who had in-
dependent and predictable rights towards the state and the ruler, or did Islam
sanction the arbitrary rule of whoever was in power? Was there anything that
could be called “rule of law,” a Rechtsstaat, in the classical Islamic state?
It must be clear from the outset that modern conceptions of a state based
on popular sovereignty, and of “citizens” as equal individuals before the law are
anachronistic to the Muslim medieval period and we cannot hope to find such
in the form known to us. It was self-evident to the scholars, and probably also
to the population of the time, that different categories of people had differ-
ent status, such as between men and women, free and slave, and Muslim and
non-Muslim, and that these statuses were reflected in their legal and political
rights. Social differences could also play a role, but the main legal categorisa-
tions were those three; gender, freedom and religion.
Thus, if we are to explore the relation between ruler and ruled, we have
to look for specific aspects and how they were conceived. One is the issue of
rights. Who possessed rights in society, and based on what? The other is the
Neil J. Coulson, “The State and the Individual in Islamic Law,” International and Comparative
Law Quarterly 4 (1957): 49–60.
6 Bryan S. Turner, Weber and Islam: A Critical Study(London: Routledge, 1978), 107–121.
7 Knut S. Vikør, Between God and the Sultan: A History of Islamic Law (London: Hurst 2005),
7–8. On the functions of the qadi, see Dispensing Justice in Islam: Qadis and their Judgements,
ed. Muhammad Khalid Masud, Rudolph Peters, and David S. Powers (Leiden: e.j. Brill, 2006),
in particular the editors’ introduction, 1–44.
Muslim Subjects and the Rights of God 275
legitimacy of the ruler, why does a ruler have licence to rule, and what limits
can be placed on him by society? And if we translate Rechtsstaat into the Eng-
lish term “rule of law,” were laws and court judgments predictable and placed
such limitations on the judges that the “criminal could know in advance” how
the court would handle a transgression?8
When we look for answers to these question, we are also faced with the issue
of what the sources tell us: are they describing the norms of how a good ruler
should behave, or an actual historical reality? Muslim sources of early history
very often blend the descriptive and the normative so it is difficult to separate
the two. We must therefore try to involve both levels in our analysis, the ideol-
ogy as presented by the scholars, and what we may glean from other sources of
how that ideology was put into practice.
The Rights of God and the Rights of Man
The concept of “rights” in Islamic thought, huquq (sing. haqq), is divided

into huquq Allah, the rights of God, and huquq al-ʿibad, the rights of men
(worshippers).9 However, the former term is theologically problematic, since
God cannot strictly speaking be said to need any “rights” – he is the Creator,
and does not get into a one-to-one relationship with his own creation to claim
any rights over what he himself made. Thus God’s rights are not rights for
God, but rights in relation to God’s intentions for his creation, the maqasid,
which is traditionally defined as the “welfare” of the society and the believers
(masalih).10 God’s rights are thus best seen as communal rights, the rights of
8 “Rule of law” may of course include a much wider specter of conditions, such as fairness
and justice, according to the norms of the time, or to universal norms defined today, but
in this connection we are focused on limitations on political and judicial power which the
subject might exercise. On “rule of law,” see e.g. Tom Bingham, The Rule of Law (London:
Penguin, 2011).
9 Baber Johansen, “Secular and Religious Elements in Hanafite Law: Function and Limits
of the Absolute Character of Government Authority,” in Baber Johansen, Contingency in a
Sacred Law (Leiden: e.j. Brill, 1999), 189–218 and 60–104; Baber Johansen, “The Claims of
Men and the Claims of God: The Limits of Government Authority in Hanafite Law,” Pluri-
formiteit en verdeling van de macht in het Midden-Oosten (Nijmegen: moi, 1980), 60–104;
Bernard G. Weiss, The Spirit of Islamic Law (Athens, ga: University of Georgia Press, 1998),
182–184; Anver M. Emon, “Ḥuqūq Allāh and Ḥuqūq al-ʿIbād: A Legal Heuristic for a Natural
Rights Regime,” Islamic Law and Society 13 (2006): 325–391 .
10 Felicitas Opwis, “Islamic Law and Legal Change: The Concept of Maslaha in Classical and
Contemporary Islamic Legal Theory,” in Shariʿa: Islamic Law in the Contemporary Context,
276 Vikør
the Muslim society for a good life, while the huquq al-ʿibad are the rights each
individual has against others. In law, they have some similarity to the distinc-
tion between “public law” (the individual’s relation to society) and “private law”
(inter-personal relations) respectively, although the two terms do not translate
precisely into Shariʿa jurisprudence. Generally, the hudud crimes (sing. hadd)11
are considered to be expressions of huquq Allah, since they are based on spe-
cific prescriptions in God’s revelation – the definition of a hadd crime is that
the punishment is specified in the Qurʾan – and they are not there to right the
wrongs made against any specific individual, but against society as a whole.
The difference can be seen in the jurists’ discussion of the case where a
criminal is accused of a combination of crimes, one relating to huquq al-ʿibad,
and one relating to huquq Allah, for which the punishments conflict. God has
in his mercy the right to forgo his rights under huquq Allah, thus Islamic juris-
prudence says that, following a prescription in the Qurʾan, hudud punishments
should not be carried out if there is any doubt about the guilt of the accused.
But this does not apply to the huquq al-ʿibad, where an individual has a claim
against another that he has the right to have settled. Since the individual has a
stronger right to redress than God (who does not need redress for himself), in
such a conflict the nine huquq al-ʿibad will trump the rights of God.12
An example is if a man confesses to the crime of adultery, while the woman
denies this, and there is no further evidence to substantiate the man’s claim. In
that case, the woman cannot be punished for lack of evidence, while the man
has transgressed against two hudud rules: that of fornication (proved for him,
but not for the woman, by his confession), and that of charging the woman
with adultery without sufficient proof (qadhf, punishable by 80 lashes). M uslim
jurists agree that due to the doubt, the punishment for adultery cannot be car-
ried out for the man either, in spite of his confession, adultery being a haqq
Allah. However, they disagree on whether that means that the charge of his
slander against the woman must also fall. Some say yes, since the two charges
fall under the same act. Others, however, say that qadhf slander is not a right of
God, but the right of this particular woman not to have her name besmirched.
ed. Abbas Amanat and Frank Griffel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 66–71;
and Opwis, Maṣlaḥa and the Purpose of the Law: Islamic Discourse on Legal Change from
the 4th/10th to 8th/14th Century (Leiden: e.j. Brill, 2010).
11 Theft, highway robbery or rebellion (hiraba), drinking alcohol, fornication, as well as false
accusation of fornication (see below. Some schools also include apostasy.) Murder and
bodily harm also have specific sanctions, but are not covered by the hudud and are con-
sidered private claims (huquq ʿibad) of the victim against the perpetrator; Vikør, Between
God and the Sultan, 282–287.
12 Emon, “Ḥuqūq Allāh,” 337–358.
Thus, qadhf, even though it is one of the hudud punishments, is in fact a haqq
al-ʿibad, an individual right of the woman, and cannot be pardoned by God
(society). It trumps the rights of God, and the man must be punished for his
implied charge against the woman, but not for the adultery he confessed.
Rights against the Ruler
When it comes to describing the nature of legitimate rule, there is a wide differ-
ence between the most normative descriptions, which as far as possible see the
legitimate leader of the umma, the imam,13 as the archetypical just ruler fully
versed in the Revelation and able to draw independent legal rules from them
in the manner of the Rightly-guided caliphs, and on the other hand the accep-
tance that this ideal is impossible in these latter days, and that even the first
caliphs sought help from the more knowledgeable of the Revelation (i.e. the
scholars). This theoretical scholar-imam was thus an archetype in the same
way that the Friday prayer was built on the now impossible conception of the
umma, all the world’s Muslims, gathered in one mosque for a prayer lead by
this caliph-imam. Thus, religious and jurisprudential capacity resided instead
with the class of scholars, who were then the wurathaʾ al-nabi, the heirs of the
Prophet in the sense of repositories of knowledge about and understanding of
the Revelation and its law.14 This reality was acknowledged by the early ninth
century at the latest, but the theoreticians of caliphal legitimacy continued
to describe the ideal imam-mujtahid for centuries after this, only grudgingly
recognising the unreality of their description.
This realisation, then, engendered an opposite mythology, that of the sharp
conflict between the mundane caliph and the free spirits of the ʿulama. The
main topos of this discourse was money. Islamic law came to recognise only a
few select categories of taxes, such as zakat, jizya, kharaj, ʿushr. Clearly, the ca-
liph collected taxes far beyond these religiously sanctioned kinds, and he spent
what he collected in ways not detailed in the law. These taxes were therefore
by definition oppressive, and by accepting any financial remuneration from
13 While the Shiʿi current places the imam in an specific, esoteric, position, the Sunni schol-
ars also use the term imam for the worldly political leader of the umma while “caliph”
was and is common for the person filling this position in historical reality. Here, the term
imam may thus be understood as synonymous with caliph. In the following, “sultan” is
used as a general term for a ruler, irrespective of actual title.
14 Roy Mottahedeh, “Wilayat al-faqih,” in Vol. 2 of The Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and
P olitics, ed. Emad El-Din Shahin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 543.
278 Vikør
the caliph, the scholar was also tainted. We find such conflicts described in the
praise-filled biographies of religious scholars at least from the eighth century
onwards.15 However, as we have seen, closer inspection shows that this was
already by this time in contrast to common reality. Some scholars did have
subsistence from private income, donations, or side activities as traders or
other professions, but many depended in reality on their positions as state-
appointed judges or other judicial or administrative posts, and were more than
relieved to be “forced” to take up such appointments.
This then laid the basis for the complex relation between the state, the
caliph, sultan and their locally appointed governors, and the religious schol-
ars. The latter did not rely on any state authorisation of their scholarly sta-
tus. Financially, the most common basis for their livelihood were donations
such as waqfs, endowments set up for mosques, schools, and scholars attached
to them.16 Such waqfs were established by wealthy private individuals, they
could also be made by state officials, but once given could not be recalled and
ensured an independence to the scholars. However, many also relied on ap-
pointments to courts as qadis or other public offices, which the ruler could
freely and easily take away. Thus religious scholars could take on a role as rep-
resentatives of society against a ruler, even lead local protests and revolts, but
a qadi who showed too much independence could expect to lose his job.17 This
integration was probably an important reason why many Sunni scholars came
to agree that political chaos is worse than oppressive rule, and that it was not
justified to rebel against even an unjust ruler, provided he did not transgress
such borders as threatened Islam.18
These borders were normally described as the “five necessities.” The maqa-
sid, the intentions of the Islamic law and rule, was to protect the believers’
religion, life, intellect, lineage and property.19 A ruler who no longer did that
had lost his legitimacy.
This raises then the question of the relation of the ruler to the huquq Allah,
which we must then translate as “the rights of society.” In one sense, the ruler
and his state were the defenders of the huquq Allah. If the rights of society
15 Tillier, Les Cadis d’Iraq, 228–229 and 661–675; also Tillier, “Judicial Authority and Qāḍīs’
Autonomy under the ʿAbbāsids,” al-Masāq 24 (2014), 2: 119–131.
16 Pascale Ghazaleh (ed.), Held in Trust: Waqf in the Islamic World (Cairo: The American
University in Cairo Press, 2011).
17 While a local community could also successfully petition the ruler to dismiss a qadi who
they considered inept or unjust.
18 Antony Black, The History of Islamic Political Thought (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2001), 37–38.
19 Opwis, “Islamic Law and Legal Change,” 66.
were violated, then society must respond, and the imam is the leader and agent
of society. But he was so only in so far as these rights were fulfilled. Thus, by ex-
tension, the huquq Allah did also bind the ruler, and in particular in relation to
the “five necessities.” And it was the religious, and in particular the legal schol-
ars, the fuqaha who here represented the interests of society over the ruler, and
could in final terms legitimate a revolt against the ruler.
al-Siyasa
The act of ruling, governance, was normally translated as al-siyasa (which is

the modern word for politics). Initially, this was a general term for however the
imam or ruler governed over the Muslim society.20 From about the third Mus-
lim century, it was however linked to the Shariʿa as al-siyasa al-sharʿiyya, which
can be translated as “governance in line with the Revelation.” The scholars
accepted that al-siyasa al- Sharʿiyya was different from al-qadaʾ, and that the
ruler must have prerogatives beyond that of the pure law of the scholars. How-
ever, the second element of the term also indicated that proper and legitimate
siyasa must in some way be based on the Shariʿa, and thus limited by the pre-
scriptions of the law of Islam.
The question was what “in some way” meant. In the literature, the two terms
al-siyasa and Shariʿa are often seen as opposites, in that al-siyasa refers to the
ruler’s unfettered power to do whatever he wanted. It is certainly not difficult
to find cases of strained relations between the sultan and the legal scholars.
However, most often it was not so much a dichotomy as a division of labour.
The ruler’s prerogatives were generally accepted by the scholars under the
assumption that he worked under al-siyasa al- Sharʿiyya, that is that his acts
were for the implementation of the “five protections” and the principles of the
Shariʿa.
This idea that the sultan’s siyasa could go beyond the scholarly jurispru-
dence of fiqh as long as it followed the “spirit of the Shariʿa,” was expressed by
Ibn ʿAqil (d. 1119). As the acts of the (legitimate) sultan was aimed at protecting
the people from chaos, they were allowed even when they had no particular
basis in the Revelation. Here Ibn ʿAqil criticised the earlier statement by the
school-founder al-Shafiʿi (d. 820) who only allowed al-siyasa when it directly
20 Muhammad Khalid Masud, “The Doctrine of Siyāsa in Islamic Law,” Recht van de Islam
18 (2001): 1–29; and Émile Tyan, “Méthodologie et sources du droit en Islam (Istiḥsān,
Istiṣlāḥ, Siyāsa šarʿiyya),” Studia Islamica 10 (1959): 79–109.
280 Vikør
executed express statements in the Shariʿa.21 The sultans, said Ibn ʿAqil, must
have discretion to follow their own judgement (raʾy) as long as it did not op-
pose explicit Revelation texts.
This development towards greater acceptance of the ruler’s freedom to
act can also be seen in that al-Shafiʿi did not allow the sultan to deal with
affairs relating to huquq Allah, cases concerning the rights of God / society
(including hudud crimes) which only the qadi could settle. This was clearly in
contradiction with reality, since several of the hudud crimes carried the death
penalty, and these penalties the ruler generally would not let slip from his con-
trol, be it only the power to pardon or confirm the sentence given by a qadi.22
So, by the eleventh century, the political theorist al-Mawardi (d. 1058) granted
that the ruler could handle matters of huquq Allah, since that was necessary
for the ruler to carry out his duty to protect society.23 Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328)
went even further in allowing the ruler freedom of action in the enforcement
of a just al-siyasa.24
The theoreticians thus used the term al-siyasa to accommodate for the
clear reality of the day, that the ruler’s governance had political and legal ap-
plications they did not control. However, by subsuming it under a concept of
al-siyasa al-sharʿiyya, they made this governance subject to the Shariʿa, not in
the strict jurisprudence of fiqh, but under the divine intentions of God’s maqa-
sid, intentions that could be rationally described by the scholars, and against
which they could compare the actions of the ruler. This conception of maqasid
may thus be translated as the “spirit of the Shariʿa,” being the aim to protect
society, religion and the individuals in the community.25 The ruler’s power was
21 Al-Shāfiʿī, Kitāb al-Umm (Cairo: al-Hayʾa al-Miṣriyya al-ʿĀmma, 1987), vi, 51; Ibn ʿAqīl,
Kitāb al-Funūn (Beirut: Dār al-Mashriq, 1970), i, 289, both quoted in Masud, “Doctrine of
Siyāsa,” 5–10.
22 Emile Tyan, Histoire de lʾorganisation judiciaire en pays dʾIslam (Leiden: e.j. Brill, 1960),
224.
23 Ibn Taymiyya, al-Siyāsa al-Sharʿiyya fī Iṣlāḥ al-Rāʿī waʿl-Raʾiyya (Cairo: al-Shaʿb, 1971), 184;
in Masud, 10–13.
24 Baber Johansen, “A Perfect Law in an Imperfect Society: Ibn Taymiyya’s Concept of
‘Governance in the Name of the Sacred Law’,” in The Law Applied, Contextualizing the
Islamic Shariʿa, ed. Peri Bearman, Wolfhart Heinrichs and Bernard G. Weiss (London: i.b.
Tauris, 2008), 259–287; and Abdessamad Belhaj, “Law and Order According to Ibn Taymi-
yya and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya: A Re-Examination of siyāsa sharʿiyya,” in Islamic Theol-
ogy, Philosophy and Law: Debating Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, ed. Birgit
Krawietz and Georges Tamer (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 400–421.
25 Muhammad Khalid Masud, Shāṭibīʾs Philosophy of Islamic Law (Islamabad: Islamic
Research Institute 1995).
thus not unfettered, and it was the religious scholars who could, as interpreters
of the true meaning of God’s maqasid, set the limits to the ruler’s actions.
It must however be emphasised that such limitations were never institu-
tionalised, and there was, short of protest or revolt, no way an individual, or so-
ciety through the scholars, could impose their understanding of God’s maqasid
over those of the ruler.26 So far, they thus remained on the level of the theory
of legitimacy. In actual history, scholars, dependent on the ruler’s economic
support or not, generally allowed him wide leeway to define what was for the
“protection of the society and religion.” The sultans did not necessarily see
this as much of a restraint and accepted fully such theoretical parameters to
their rule. But it explains why sultans increasingly saw the need for attach-
ing to themselves groups of religious scholars, a mufti council, who not only
discussed strictly legal matters, but also gave their sanction to political deci-
sions of the sultan, such as going to war.27 By issuing a fatwa on the correctness
of this or that action, the scholars accepted that the ruler acted within the
framework of God’s maqasid, and at the same time reaffirmed that it was their
prerogative to make such a distinction.
The Ruler and the Courts
The relationship between the Shariʿa law proper, determined by the schol-
ars through their fiqh, and the practical application of the wider “spirit” of
the Shariʿa, al-siyasa, was reflected in court practice. The various states and
regions of Islam organised their legal systems in various ways across the cen-
turies, with various types of specialised courts for different purposes. However,
we can in the classical period group these into qadi or Shariʿa courts, ruled by
established scholars according to the rules and regulations of fiqh, and siyasa
courts, where the “sultan,” the ruler or another representative of political pow-
er, was the judge. The archetypical example of a siyasa court was the mazalim
court, the court “for righting wrongs.”28
26 Khaled Abou El Fadl, “Constitutionalism and the Islamic Sunni Legacy,” ucla Journal of
Islamic and Near Eastern Law 1 (2001), 67–101, and Patricia Crone, Medieval Islamic Politi-
cal Thought (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2005), 282–283.
27 Wael B. Hallaq, Sharīʿa: Theory, Practice, Transformations (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2009), 133.
28 Tyan, Histoire de l’organisation judiciaire, 433–521. See also Christian Müller, Gericht-
spraxis im Stadtstaat Córdoba: Zum Recht der Gesellschaft in einer mālikitisch-islamischen
Rechtstradition des 5./11. Jahrhunderts (Leiden: e.j. Brill, 1999), 103–174, for examples of
siyasa institutions in al-Andalus.
282 Vikør
These two types of courts may be seen to represent a clear dichotomy,

b etween “religion” (fiqh, formulated by independent legal scholars, with to-
tal rejection of any idea that the ruler could vet or influence the rules of law
thereby determined), and “state,” the autochthonous power of the sultan in the
mazalim court, unfettered by the laws of religion. This distinction is reflected
in Muslim legal theory and shows how “religion” and “politics” were demarcat-
ed in Islamic thought. However, that does not mean that they were antithetical
opposites, and both parties accepted and respected the other. The issue here
is to what degree this system of dual courts can be said to represent a “rule
of law.”
The mazalim were fully recognised in the theory of Shariʿa law, under the
principle of al-siyasa. The basis for this acceptance was the principle, variously
expressed, that the strict procedures of fiqh, while true in general, could not
solve all issues under the five necessities, or could in certain circumstances
result in injustice for individuals. Thus, the schools of law had various methods
in their fiqh methodologies for circumventing such situations. The principle
of shubuhat, that if an act that in general fell under the hudud penalties could
have been mistaken for a legal act, then that penalty should not be applied,
is in itself an avoidance of the negative effects of blind application of general
rules.29 In Hanafi law, this principle is more generally called istihsan, “seek-
ing the good,” and allows for the suspension of general rules of fiqh30 when
these would lead to a clearly unjust result in cases specified. In Maliki law,
a parallel principle is called istislah, “seeking maslaha, social welfare.” These
were not general suspensions of fiqh, but a principle that allowed jurists to
designate particular cases where “necessity” (darura) forced a modification of
the general rules.
The Shariʿa courts were subject to very strict rules of procedure, in particu-
lar in what we could call “penal law,” punishment for crimes.31 Well known is
the example that a crime could, short of confession, only be considered proven
by the fully concurring testimony of two morally upstanding and competent
male, free and Muslim witnesses.32 Challenging the moral probity of an oth-
erwise impartial witness to a murder or a theft could be enough to have the
29 Vikør, Between God and the Sultan, 284.

30 In theory only for rules that are based on human jurisprudence, that is qiyas analogy, not
those based directly on the Revealed texts, but exceptions were possible; Vikør, Between
God and the Sultan, 67.
31 Rudolph Peters, Crime and Punishment in Islamic Law: Theory and Practice from the Six-
teenth to the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 13–16.
32 Or one male and two female witnesses, except in cases carrying the death penalty.
case dismissed, if less than two acceptable witnesses then remained. The two
testimonies should also be fully concurring, thus two witnesses where one had
seen, but not heard a conversation between two suspects, while the other had
heard what was said, but not seen the two who spoke, caused both to be re-
jected, as they were then considered two different observations. A confession
was a definite proof if it was stated freely and by someone fully competent in
mind. To ascertain this, however, the confession had to be delivered before the
judge in court, or in front of two witnesses of acceptable probity, where it was
the witnesses that constituted the proof value. In some periods, a confession
given to the police was thus generally inadmissible, since policemen were in
principle morally suspect, as they were employed by the state and their wit-
ness to the confession was thus unacceptable.33 The suspect could at any time
retract his confession of a more serious hadd crime before the judge.
Such very strict rules of procedure often made it difficult or impossible to
obtain a verdict in a criminal case in a Shariʿa court. Partly for this reason,
Shariʿa courts were more often used for and adapted to settlement of conflicts
between two parties than for sanctioning crimes.34 However, while this may
have been agreeable for those suspected of criminal activity, it was less so
for the victims who could then not get satisfaction for the wrongs they had
suffered. Hence, it was accepted that these then could take their case to the
separate mazalim courts, which were totally freed from the procedural limita-
tions of the Shariʿa courts.
The mazalim court could thus hear cases which had first been brought
to the Shariʿa court but without conclusive result, or cases could be brought
directly to the mazalim. As in the Shariʿa court, the case could be raised by a
plaintiff, but the sultan could decide a matter without the defendant, or either
party, present, and could initiate cases, all different from the Shariʿa court. He
could send a case back to the Shariʿa court for review, thus work as a court of
appeal,35 or to arbitration between the parties. In the search for evidence, he
was similarly unbound by the strict rules of admissible evidence set for the
33 Rudolph Peters, “Murder on the Nile: Homicide Trials in 19th Century Egyptian Shariʿa
Courts,” Die Welt des Islams 30 (1990): 112–113.
34 Vikør, Between God and the Sultan, 171, also Mohammad Fadel, “Adjudication in the Mālikī
Madhhab: A Study of Legal Process in Medieval Islamic Law” (PhD diss., University of
Chicago, 1995), 36–130.
35 Thus being one method of effectuating appeals in a system then in theory did not known
of such; Mohammad Hashim Kamali, “Appellate Review and Judicial Independence In
Islamic Law,” in Islam and public law, ed. Chibli Mallat (London: Graham & Trotman,
1993), 62–63; also David Powers, “On Judicial Review in Islamic Law,” Law & Society Review
26 (1992): 315–341.
284 Vikør
Shariʿa court and could make his own investigation, and rely on testimonies
unacceptable to the Shariʿa court.
All this seems to support the idea that, if we accept the Shariʿa court with its
fairly rigid established procedures and laws as constituting a pre-modern “rule
of law,” then that was then nullified by the arbitrary legal power the ruler had
in the parallel mazalim court. But, while classical authors emphasise the inde-
pendent and “extra-ordinary” nature of the mazalim from the Shariʿa courts,
they also considered the latter to be the superior court (thus, that the mazalim
would if possible return cases to the Shariʿa court so it could make the final
decision).36
It must thus be emphasised that the mazalim courts were considered fully
legitimate under the Shariʿa and not in opposition to it.37 Thus, scholarly qadis
regularly participated in these courts and advised the mazalim judge on his
verdict, and al-Mawardi also makes the presence of such jurists “to provide
information on established rights” a prerequisite for the court.38 While the
theory said it was the “ruler” (imam or sultan) who should preside over his
court, the actual ruler of course seldom did and instead delegated his authority
to the governor, or more commonly, to a specified official for the task. This
could often be a trained qadi, thus a religious scholar, although a qadi would
normally not hold the post of mazalim judge and judge of the Shariʿa court at
the same time; the appointment to the mazalim would be temporary or one
step on a scholar’s career path.
Thus, in spite of the emphasis on the freedom of the mazalim court to hand
out judgments, the discussions around it put more emphasis on procedure
than the content of the law. The mazalim could of course not contravene those
commandments that were based directly on the Revelation (rather than on
the human legal ijtihad on the revealed texts), and the court was both part of
and subject to the idea of al-siyasa, the preservation of social welfare. It is also
worth noting that, although the mazalim could take both criminal cases and
settlement of conflicts between individuals (like the Shariʿa courts), the writers
on the subject emphasise complaints against public officials as an important
36 Tyan, Histoire de l’organisation judiciaire, 433–521; and Mohammed Fadel, “State and
Sharia,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Islamic Law, ed. Rudolph Peters and Peri
Bearman (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 99–100.
37 Mathieu Tillier, “Qāḍīs and the Political Use of the maẓālim Jurisdiction under the
ʿAbbāsids,” in Public Violence in Islamic Societies: Power, Discipline and the Construc-
tion of the Public Sphere, 7th–19th Centuries ce, ed. Christian Lange and Maribel Fierro
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 42–60.
38 ʿAli b. Muhammad al-Mawardi, The Ordinances of Government (Reading: Garnet 1996), 90.
part of the mazalim’s area of operation. In this case, rather than being a weap-
on of a ruler’s arbitrary rule, it could (like the huquq Allah) as much be society,
in this case individuals who felt themselves wronged by the state, that used
the concept to limit such arbitrary rule, with the help of sympathetic mazalim
judges who used the authority of the ruler to keep his minions in check.
Again, this is of course still at the normative level, and for lack of records, it
is hard for us to see how far this corresponded to historical reality, which could
evidently be less lenient. It should also be added that the mazalim met less
frequently than the regular Shariʿa courts. The general public would probably
have more contact with a lower level of state authority, the police (al-shurta),
which also held a court for petty crimes that was fairly unfettered by the
restraints of the fiqh procedures.39 The police court initiated prosecution on
its own accord without need for any plaintiff, and could and often did obtain
confessions by beating or torture, unacceptable by the Shariʿa courts proper. In
principle, the police court should only deal with minor cases, more important
ones being referred to the Shariʿa or the mazalim courts, but a typical situa-
tion would probably be that a hudud crime such as being found drunk in a
public place would be settled with a lock-up and a quick round with the stick
in the police court, rather than going to the proper and more serious process of
applying the hudud in a Shariʿa court.
Closer to the Shariʿa court was a third type, which is perhaps better seen
as a stepping stone between the two, the municipal administrative court of
the muhtasib.40 This term is often translated as “market inspector,” as perhaps
the most important part of his office was to regulate the markets and ensure
fairness in trade, thus controlling weights and measures, value of coins, and
similar. However, the muhtasib also had more general municipal duties, such
as ensuring the free passage of the streets of the town, and could for example
order the removal of a house or house extension that blocked a street (evi-
dently a not infrequent occurrence in the narrow lanes of the medieval Mus-
lim cities). More generally, the term muhtasib stems from hisba, which means
“balance” (thus in fair trade), but is also used for social balance. So, the muhtasib
was in charge of public morality, and could on his own initiative, without need
for any individual plaintiff, intervene to stop activities that contravened such
social balance. While this was certainly an area that the court addressed, most
39 Vikør, Between God and the Sultan, 193–195; and Tyan, Histoire de l’organisation judiciaire,
566–616.
40 Müller, Gerichtspraxis im Stadtstaat Córdoba, 117–128. The most detailed study of the
muhtasib is probably now Kristen Stilt, Islamic Law in Action: Authority, Discretion and
Everyday Experiences in Mamluk Egypt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
286 Vikør
of the muhtasib’s activity seems however to have focused on his role to ensure
fairness in markets.
The office of muhtasib was closely linked to the Shariʿa, and the position
was always filled with a trained qadi. It could also be a stepping stone in the
career of a judge. Thus, while it was not a Shariʿa court as such, and had several
aspects in common with the mazalim court (such as the freedom to initiate
action without a plaintiff), it was generally considered inside the area of the
Shariʿa and of fiqh, not that of the ruler.
Categories of Subjects
As mentioned, Islamic law never had a modern conception of “equality of

all citizens” before the law. Status differences resulted in legal differences.
These were focused on three main dimensions: gender, freedom and religion.
The three did not necessarily correlate, thus a free dhimmi (non-Muslim)
could not testify in court while a woman could do so, so religion was there
a more important restriction than gender. But in the calculation of compen-
sation for murder and bodily harm (diya), no difference was made whether
the victim was Muslim or dhimmi, while the compensation for women was
half that of a man, so gender was in that case a more relevant category than
religion.41
Slaves created their own particular legal issues, in being both responsible
as human beings, Muslim or not, and at the same time non-responsible ob-
jects of property, the consequences of their actions instead falling upon their
owners. Corporal punishments (the number of lashes) was thus always halved
for slaves, and a slave could not be executed for fornication, unlike free men
and women.42 This was clearly not out of concern for the slave, but balancing
the interest of the owner against the personal responsibility of the slave. The
owner had to pay the blood money (the slave not having any property of his
own), but less than if he had himself committed the crime.
Social status other than these three did also play a role, such as in the
legality of marriage which required an element of equality, kafaʿa, between
41 This according to the Ḥanafi and Ḥanbali schools; Johansen, “Claims of Men,” 70–71 and
“Secular and Religious Elements,” 207, the Malikis and Shafiʿis consider the dhimmis to
have a lower diya, Peters, Crime, 51. See also Gianluca P. Parolin, “Equality Before the Law,”
in Ashgate Research Companion, 123–135.
42 Peters, Crime, 60–61.
the two parties.43 The religious scholars tended to focus on equality in religious
piety, but lack of genealogical as well as social equality could cause one fam-
ily to demand the denial of a marriage. Punishments for crimes could also be
adjusted according to the general social standing of the perpetrator. Denigra-
tion (such as being paraded through the streets with an official shouting out
his crime) could in many cases be the punishment for someone with a higher
social position, while those of lower standing would have to suffer corporal
punishment, high fines or similar for the same crime.44 The justification for
this was that the social stigma of denigration was greater for the notables than
for the lower classes, who had “less to lose” by this, and thus required sterner
sanctions. This may, however, be seen as comparable to a modern Western
court adjusting the amount of a fine to the income level of the convicted crimi-
nal, seeking an amount that “bites” for the particular individual in the dock.
Predictability
Where does then this lead us in the search for a pre-modern “rule of law”? An
important issue to look for, can be the issue of arbitrary or predictable legal
rules. To what degree could a member of society, before he committed an act
know with reliable certainty whether it would be considered lawful or not, and
if accused, how the court would treat such an accusation? Were the procedures
of the “repressive state apparatuses,” here the courts and ruler, arbitrary and
ultimately unknowable in advance, subject to the caprice of the judge? This,
more than conceptions of “justice” or “fairness” (which we would have to con-
textualise in place and time) could perhaps be a measure of the level of rule
of law in a pre-modern society before the arrival of “universal” ideas of human
rights in the modern period.
At the normative level, then, the society was ruled by God’s law, the Shariʿa
based on an established Revelation. The ruler did no more than to put the
Shariʿa into effect. As such he was an executor of huquq Allah, an agent for
43 Amalia Zomeño, “Kafaʾa in the Maliki School: A fatwa from Fifteenth-Century Fez,” in
Islamic Law: Theory and Practice, ed. Robert Gleave and Eugenia Kermeli (London: i.b.
Tauris, 1997), 194–204.
44 Irene Schneider, “Imprisonment in Pre-Classical and Classical Islamic Law,” Islamic Law
and Society 2 (1995): 157–173; Christian Lange, “Legal and Cultural Aspects of Ignomini-
ous Parading (Tashhīr) in Islam,” Islamic Law and Society 14 (2007): 81–108, and Everett
K. Rowson, “Reveal or Conceal: Public Humiliation and Banishment as Punishments in
Early Islamic Times,” in Public Violence in Islamic Societies, 119–129.
288 Vikør
the social welfare that was God’s intention behind the Shariʿa. When he was
allowed to establish a parallel court system, the mazalim, it was only to pro-
mote the same divine intention of the Shariʿa, social welfare, in cases where
the Shariʿa courts themselves were for various reasons unable to reach this
common and defined goal. The huquq Allah were the rights of society, not of
the ruler, and the ruler was himself subject to the same huquq Allah, and could
be challenged on those grounds by the scholars, who ultimately represented
society in such claims.
In their descriptions, still normative, of how this system worked, the schol-
ars depict the procedures of the Shariʿa courts as extremely predictable, in that
they could prevent the qadi from passing sentence even when guilt would ap-
pear obvious, for example in the case of corresponding, but not identical oral
and ocular witness to the same event. In this way, a thief could “play the sys-
tem” of procedure and avoid conviction by taking the Shariʿa procedures into
account: to be convicted of the hudud punishment for theft, the thief had to
remove the stolen object from an enclosed place. If he threw it out a window
to an accomplice, the criterion of removal was not fulfilled – neither had taken
the object out – and none of them could be convicted.45 This seems like the
poster case of the “criminal knowing in advance” what the court would do, and
the opposite of arbitrary rule where the judge ruled from his gut feelings.
The mazalim, on the other hand, being freed of precisely these restrictions
and subject only to the ruler’s own decision, seems to be the opposite, arbitrary
and unpredictable. How could then the two systems live peacefully side by
side, as they evidently did for several centuries? Two factors could help explain
that. One is, as we have said, that the mazalim were in fact not so unfettered.
The presence of the qadis in this court, and indeed the fact that qadis often
presided over them, ensured that the ruler did not here have a free hand, but
had to conform to what these scholars, who again can be said to represent
society and social mores, considered acceptable as the “spirit of the Shariʿa,”
contextualised of course to time and place, and probably also to political and
social relations of power in that place.
The other was that the Shariʿa court itself did have greater leeway. There were
of course many crimes that were not covered by the five hudud or the similarly
specified crimes of murder and bodily harm. Other crimes were c overed by the
generic term taʿzir, where the punishment was not specified in the law-books
and which did not have so stringent rules of evidence as the hudud. The major-
ity of scholars were of the opinion that the taʿzir punishments must be lower
45 Colin Imber, Ebuʾs-Suʿud: The Islamic Legal Tradition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 1997), 213–214.
than the least severe hudud punishment, which is forty lashes,46 but otherwise
left the nature and severity of the punishment up to the judge in question. This
opened for a wider range of sanctions, such as the mentioned public humilia-
tion, later on a larger part played by imprisonment and fines.
Seen from the level of the Shariʿa as a law spanning worlds and centuries,
both the mazalim and taʿzir appear then to be arbitrary, in that the punish-
ments are not codified, contrary to the hudud and murder cases. And there is
no doubt that they open for an arbitrariness that we must assume was far more
widespread in actual reality than in the normative texts. But this arbitrariness
could also mean adaptation to a historical and social reality that was fairly
stable in each country and century but varied over Islam’s total span of time
and space. A universal Shariʿa law could probably be no more specific than it
was. Such adaptation to social reality was also in some cases accepted into the
framework of the Shariʿa rules through the concept of ʿurf, “common practice,”
which could not be the basis of a rule itself, but could in certain cases (such
as the level of “fair rent”) determine how the rule should be understood. It
is reasonable to assume that taʿzir judgements, and very often also mazalim
judgements, often coincided with ʿurf, more so than the textbooks allowed.47
We do not have much in the way of court records or other documents from
the medieval period to see the actual reality behind these normative texts.
What we do have does show a complicity but also occasional conflict between
ruler and scholars, and also that judges could disregard completely the rules
of the textbooks when need be.48 The material does not lend itself to hard
and fast conclusions, but one way of putting it might be that it seems courts
and judges knew of and attempted to apply the procedures and laws of the
Shariʿa as far as possible in the Shariʿa courts, but used a social construction of
46 The Maliki school did not restrain the application of taʾzir punishments; Peters, Crime,
67.
47 Miriam Hoexter, “Qāḍī, Muftī and Ruler: Their Roles in the Development of Islamic Law,”
in Law, Custom and Statute in the Muslim World: Studies in Honor of Aharon Layish, ed.
Ron Shaham (Leiden: e.j. Brill, 2007), 71; see also Ayman Shabana, Custom in Islamic Law
and Legal Theory: The Development of the Concepts of ʿurf and ʿādah in the Islamic Legal
T
radition (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010); and Gideon Libson, “On the Develop-
ment of Custom as a Source of Law in Islamic Law,” Islamic Law and Society 4 (1997):
131–155.
48 For examples from fifteenth-century Cairo, see e.g. Yossef Rapoport, Marriage, Money
and Divorce in a Medieval Islamic Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
See also how the laws against apostasy were actually instead used as weapons in internal
quarrels among scholars, in Joseph H. Escovitz, The Office of qâḍî al-quḍât in Cairo under
the Baḥrî Mamlûks (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz, 1984), 134–147.
290 Vikør
“fairness” to guide them when the flexibility of the Shariʿa allowed it, such as in
taʿzir punishments or in other ways, and were not adverse to turn a blind eye
even to fixed rules when that would appear to be the only option.49 This would
also coincide with the anthropological, modern, observation that qadis often
try to adjust the judgements to what causes least social upheaval, and could
also be the most likely guiding line for the mazalim courts, possibly except in
cases of strong conflict between ruler and ruled.50
Ottomans and State Law
The relations between state, scholars and society were of course never static,
and a common trend seems to be that, after the scholars were able to establish
their independence from the state and supremacy over the law in the early
Abbasid period, the state and ruler continuously tried to regain an influence
and control over the legal system. This was the situation in the Middle Ages,
with the establishment of sultanic councils (majlis) of various kinds between
rulers and leading scholars, but it was the Ottoman empire from the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries that took a number of steps towards state control over
the law.51
The most noticeable of these concerning the points discussed, was that the
Ottomans abolished the mazalim courts, and unified everything under the
Shariʿa court system. At the same time, the sultan imposed a set of regulations,
kanun that were in theory subject to the Shariʿa and, like the mazalim, “filled
the gaps” that the Shariʿa lawbooks did not cover, but in reality took precedence
over the Shariʿa texts.52 These kanun were to be applied in the Shariʿa courts
and also in the fatwa declaration, which were also centralised under a state-
appointed chief mufti, the shaykh al-islam. It must however, be added that the
kanun were also subject to the concept of al-siyasa al-sharʿiyya, and that when
49 Lawrence Rosen, The Anthropology of Justice: Law as Culture in Islamic Society (Cambridge:
50 Unfortunately, lacking records of the pre-Ottoman mazalim, we have little way of know-
ing to what extent a ruler could or did use the mazalim as an instrument of power over
society. Historical records however seem rather to point to the dismissal of qadis as a
main instrument of political influence over the court system.
51 Vikør, Between God and the Sultan, 206–221; and Haim Gerber, State, Society and Law in
Islam: Ottoman Law in Comparative Perspective (Albany: suny Press, 1994).
52 Imber, Ebuʾs-Suʿud, 24–58, and Richard Repp, “Qanun and Shariʿa in the Ottoman
Context,” in Islamic Law, Social and Historical Contexts, ed. Aziz al-Azmeh (London: Rout-
ledge, 1988), 132.
a kanun rule covered a topic also established in fiqh, it was generally closely
similar to the Shariʿa rule. Nevertheless, the fact that the kanun were based on
state authority and the sultan’s formulation, made this a sea change in the rela-
tion between state and law.
Thus, while the modernising efforts of the nineteenth century in a way re-
introduced the shariʿa/mazalim dichotomy through the establishment of “civil
courts” where plaintiffs unsatisfied with the Shariʿa court could seek redress
for crimes or other conflicts, it may be said that the introduction of modern,
codified laws in the Middle East in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was
only a continuation of a process of modernisation that had already taken a
long step three centuries earlier with the Ottoman empire as the first “modern”
state of the region.
Rule of Law?
There is no doubt that in historical reality, sultanic rule was often arbitrary, nor
that neither the Shariʿa nor mazalim courts were free of abuse or of interfer-
ence and meddling by the authorities. However, there are clearly also elements
in the arguing about the Shariʿa and the courts that may well be considered
as foundations for a rule of law. The most basic one is, of course, the idea that
the divine will behind the Shariʿa is not arbitrary, but for the rationally un-
derstandable aim of “welfare,” masalih, and that this is the foundation of “the
rights of God,” huquq Allah, which bind not only the subjects but also the ruler
who should protect and defend them.
The Shariʿa courts had strong elements of predictability when it comes to
the most critical elements of huquq Allah, the hudud laws, as well as in the
laws of murder and bodily harm which were clearly expressed in great detail
and where it would difficult to circumvent them legitimately. The same applies
for many elements of interpersonal issues – economic conflicts, marriage, in-
heritance, and so on – which were also subject to specific rules that the judge
would apply. In these matters, the parties could have a clear understanding
before taking the case to court of what the result would be. When it came to
matters falling under taʿzir, however, as well as those taken to the mazalim, the
issue is not quite so clear-cut. These could be open to arbitrariness by the judg-
es (or of rulers, in the latter case), but there were also opening for adaptation
to changing social and historical circumstances. Thus, such decisions made
on the judge’s discretion could also well be fully predictable in each historical
context, when the judge ruled according to what society at that particular time
and place found just. To go further into how arbitrary or not court practices
292 Vikør
were in such cases, the historian would need to go into case studies of court
decisions to see the range of verdicts given in similar cases in each period, and
of course with the danger that the records are edited to fit a pattern. Not due,
of course, to any concept of judicial precedence, which did not exist in the
Shariʿa, but to fit society’s conception of “justice” and the welfare of the umma.
The subjects of the state could thus claim certain rights, both in interper-
sonal conflicts under the huquq al-ʿibad, regulated by predictable and known
rules, and against public officials when they were seen to overstep the huquq
Allah. The subjects were not equal before the law, but all free men and wom-
en, including non-Muslims, had some rights specific to their status. While the
strict social division of society into the “elites” and the “common people” were
so strong that it would be ahistorical to speak of “citizens of the Islamic state”
in medieval society, the idea of the inhabitants of the Muslim state as slaves
subject to the caprices of an unrestrained sultan and haphazard whims of a
judge is equally ahistorical.
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chapter 11
The Struggle for Equality and Citizenship in

Arab Political Thought: Ideological Debates and
Conceptual Change
Michaelle Browers
Analysts are still grappling with the Arab uprisings of 2011, which overthrew
heads of state in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen. While the consequences
of those events are still unfolding, a number of assessments of the political
thought behind the political practice have come to the fore. The first is one
that I have often heard from uprising scholar-activists at the myriad confer-
ences, workshops and other forums in which I have participated in the wake
of the uprisings. When I question these individuals about the intellectual and
historical resources from which they draw their vision of politics – particularly
the vision they hold of a future politics – I am most often told that they view
themselves and their activism as unprecedented, that they are not beholden to
any previous movements or ideologies, and that they prefer to create their own
future, without reference to past models. The second view is one that circulates
among academic and media analysts, particularly those trying to make sense
of the reassertion of authoritarianism (what some have termed the “counter-
revolution”) in the region. It is precisely the prevalence and resilience of au-
thoritarian political ideas that is the problem, according to this view, and Egypt
is pointed to as evidence: the May 2014 presidential election ushered in an-
other military man of the same ilk as ousted president Hosni Mubarak, whose
policies are nearly indistinguishable from the old regime. A third perspective
asserts that contemporary political protests in general (and the Arab uprisings
are taken to be no different) are not driven by ideas and/or lack a vision or
even a coherent body of principles to guide their future entirely. The promi-
nent political sociologist Sidney Tarrow claims that it is precisely the “general-
ity” of the message of these new social movements that allows their repertoire
to travel so well from one instance to another, one place to a nother – a char-
acteristic he terms “modularity.”1 This last perspective has become sufficiently
commonplace as to warrant critical investigation.
1 Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics (New York,
Cambridge University Press, 2011), 41.

Equality and Citizenship in Arab Political Thought 297
In contrast to these views, I argue that not only are the core of activists who
inspired and, for a time, led the Arab uprisings articulating distinctive notions
of central political concepts such as citizenship, equality, justice and popular
sovereignty, but their ideas neither lack precedent nor are they without some
important shifts – even innovations – in thinking about these ideas in the his-
tory of modern Arab political thought. Tracing the concept of citizenship in
Arab political thought reveals significant engagement with both earlier gen-
erations of reformist and revolutionary intellectuals from the Arab region and
transnational engagements with critical political theorists across the globe.
Citizenship in the Nahda Period: Islamic Umma and

Territorial Nationalism
Since the Arab renaissance of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth
century (what the Arabs call the Nahda), ideas like citizenship and equality
have been contested and shifted and changed over time in regard to the rights
and responsibilities associated with citizenship, the understandings of who
bears those rights and responsibilities and the basis of civic membership, and
the implications those understandings have for the character of the equality
being sought. Knowledge of that history is essential for establishing the back-
drop for any analysis of what is and is not distinctive about the concepts of citi-
zenship being articulated by so many activists of the Arab uprising. However,
we should insert one caveat here: we should not mistake the mere presence or
absence of the word citizen (or citizenship) for the presence or absence of an
idea. At the same time, as Michael Walzer points out, the particular choice of
term one uses to name “a member of a political community, entitled to what-
ever prerogatives and encumbered with whatever responsibilities are attached
to membership” can be quite significant.2
Rifaʿa al-Tahtawi, the Egyptian Liberal Nationalist whose translation and
analysis of the 1814 French Charter was published in his major work, The Ex-
traction of Pure Gold in the Abridgement of Paris in 1834, notes that what is “very
precious” about the document begins with the very first article, where
it is said that all French people are equal before the law, this refers to all
those who live in France, from the highest to the humblest. No distinction
2 Michael Walzer, “Citizenship,” in Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, ed. Ter-
ence Ball, Richard Dagger, and Russell L. Hansen (New York, Cambridge University Press,
1989), 211.
298 Browers
is made between them in terms of the application of the aforesaid laws

of the code to the extent that legal charges can even be brought against
the king, against whom a judgment is enforceable, just as it is for other
people. So, behold this first article is highly conducive to the introduction
of justice; it ensures the oppressed receive assistance, whereas the souls
of the poor are satisfied that they are in fact important people when it
comes to the execution of the laws. This matter is almost becoming a
canonical saying among the French. It is also clear proof of the arrival
among them of justice, and the high degree of progress in the civilized
way of living. That which they call freedom and which they crave is what
we call ‘justice’ and ‘equity’; inasmuch as ‘rule by freedom’ means estab-
lishing equality in judgments and laws so that the ruler cannot oppress
any human being.3
In al-Tahtawi’s understanding, ordinary citizens should understand their rights

(above all the right to freedom) and their duties, which are best summed up
by hubb al-watan, the love of country, that binds together those who live in
the same community (defined by habitation in the same territory) and calls
them to their duties to sacrifice and submit to the law. Al-Tahtawi’s notion of
citizenship is, in this sense, not merely a passive notion, for patriotism for him
involves an active and participatory form of citizenship rooted in a concern for
the welfare of one’s country and the duty to build a truly “civilised” society.4 It is
also a notion of citizenship not based upon membership in an Islamic umma,
but extended to all who live in the same country – that is, a territorial hubb al-
watan becomes the focus of rights and duties.5 At the same time, despite the
3 Rifaʿa Rafiʿ al-Tahtawi, An Imam in Paris: Account of a Stay in France by an Egyptian Cleric
(1826–1831) (Takhlis al-ibriz fi talkhis bariz aw al-diwan al-najlis bi-iwan Baris) (London: Saqi,
2004), 205.
4 This is noted by Albert Hourani: “[In al-Tahtawi] the emphasis is no longer on the passive
duty of the subject to accept authority, it is on the active role of the citizen in building a truly
civilized society; it is no longer exclusively on the mutual duties of members of the Islamic
umma, but also of those who live in the same country.” Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the
Liberal Age, 1798–1939 (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1983), 78.
5 It is worth noting, however, Abdeslam Maghraoui’s poignant critique of liberal Egyptian
nationalists who constructed a notion of citizenship based on “the myth that the Egyptian
nation and people were an extension of Europe, rendering membership in the new p olitical
community and citizenship rights conditional on conformity with a European origin. B ecause
such a conception assumed a kind of individual who literally approximated the modern
European man or woman.” Abdeslam M. Maghraoui, Liberalism without Democracy: Nation-
hood and Citizenship in Egypt, 1922–1936 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 185–187.
conceptual equivalences al-Tahtawi is affirming between the French Constitu-

tional Charter of 1814 and the Islamic tradition of political thought, it is quite
clear that he maintains a notion of citizenship in which the ruler rules and the
citizen is ruled – that is, the people must obey the ruler, but all (including the
ruler) are bound to the limits imposed by God’s law. Equality, according to this
conception is not an equality of function or power between ruler and subject,
but an equality before God (wrought in the form of the Islamic law or Shariʿa).
At the same time, al-Tahtawi does not merely reproduce the classical notions
of Islamic rule and obedience aimed at political and social stability (perhaps
most closely associated with Ibn Taymiyya). Rather, he maintains both that
the ruler should do his best to retain good relations with and a positive im-
age in the eyes of the populace and the government more generally provide
for the political education of all citizens as a method of reform and develop-
ment of the body politic. Central to al-Tahtawi’s vision was the conviction that
a political education cultivates social virtues and, above all, patriotism (hubb
al-watan), which leads citizens to contribute toward the building of a civilized
society, where the love of the nation-state becomes the focus of one’s energy
and efforts.
We see in al-Tahtawi’s work an understanding of the relationship between
citizen and government that is mutually constitutive. This idea is further de-
veloped in an 1881 writing of Muhammad ‘Abduh, whom many consider the
founder of Islamic modernism:
Legislators and institutors of laws must always take into account customs
and traditional habits in order to establish laws in a just and beneficial
manner. Indeed, the conditions of nations are themselves the true legis-
lator, the wise, regulating guide. The governing power is actually depen-
dent on the capacities of its subjects; the former does not take a single
step unless induced to do so by the latter. True, we do not deny that the
preparation of means and measures depends on the governing power.
The government imposes these things on its subjects willy-nilly, but these
impositions must be in accordance with the capacity of those ruled.
Changes in the form of government and the replacement of its laws
depend on the citizenry’s legitimate claims, and these are tantamount to
the condition of the populace.6
6 Muhammad ʿAbduh, “Laws Should Change in Accordance with the Conditions of Nations,” in
Modernist Islam 1840–1940: A Sourcebook, ed. Charles Kurzman (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2002), 53.
300 Browers
ʿAbduh is quite clear that what binds together Egypt, along with all other Mus-
lim countries is the Shariʿa. This emphasis on the capacity of people demon-
strates the importance not just of popular will but, more importantly, of the
active cultivation of a popular will of a particular kind.
ʿAbduh’s student, Rashid Rida, explicitly bridges notions of a community
formed by Islam and modern notions of territorial nationalism in an answer
(fatwa) he provides to a series of questions from a Muslim from Indone-
sia regarding patriotism, Islamic unity, and the existence of non-Muslims in
Muslim countries published in the journal al-Manar in 1933:
The contemporary notion of patriotism expresses the unity of the people

of different religions in their homeland and their cooperation in defend-
ing the homeland they share….The type of patriotism that should adorn
a Muslim youth is that he be a good example for the people of the home-
land, no matter what their religious affiliation, cooperating with them in
every legitimate action for independence, for developing science, virtue,
force, and resources on the basis of the Islamic law of preferring the
closest relations in rights and duties.7
Rida goes on to explain that patriotism should not lead a Muslim to neglect
Islam or diminish his relations with Muslims throughout the world. An Islamic
citizenship, if it makes sense to call it this, and that notion is contested, in
Rida’s mind takes priority over but should not generally diminish one’s ter-
ritorial citizenship. Al-Tahtawi seems to shift priority in the other direction,
toward a citizenship defined by one’s territorial nationalism. Despite differ-
ence between them, in each of these conceptions there is a distinctive under-
standing of a government activated citizenry that directs its energies toward
the progress and development of the homeland.
Forging Independence After Colonialism: Socio-Economic Justice

and the Search for a more Comprehensive Citizenship in the 1960s
In the post-independence period in the Arab region we begin to see the pro-
liferation of distinctions between the political and economic rights of citizens
just as the project of linking the two comes to the fore. In 1962, ten years after
7 Rashid Rida, “Patriotism, Nationalism, and Group Spirit in Islam,” in Islam in Transition:
M
uslim Perspectives, ed. John J. Donohue and John L. Esposito (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2007), 43.
taking power, Egyptian President Gamal Abd al-Nasser delivers a speech in

which he offers an assessment of his first decade in office, taking to task both
the colonialism that he takes credit for overthrowing and the “revolutionary
leadership” that followed. The latter, he argues, “allowed itself to be misled by
the democratic appearance of constitutional facades with no economic foun-
dations” because “social freedom can only be achieved if each citizen is given
the opportunity of acquiring a fair share of the national wealth.”8 Nasser’s
speech, like so much political discourse of this period, works with an analytical
distinction between social or economic citizenship (which emphasizes socio-
economic equality as essential citizenship) over political citizenship (which
claims an equality of citizens based on liberal rights). Nasser elevates the
former over the latter.
This theme is further developed in the early writings of the Moroccan
philosopher Muhammad ʿAbid al-Jabri, though with the opposite conclusion.
In an essay, originally published in 1964, at a time, al-Jabri tells us, when nation-
alisation of “workshops, factories, mines and transportation” was a primary
demand of Morocco’s “national progressive movement” and in the midst of a
critique of “bourgeois democracy,” al- Jabri maintains that people perceive de-
mocracy as social democracy, that is, as “equality in rights and responsibilities,
in living conditions, before the courts, in the corridors of power, at the school
door and in every other aspect of life.”9 What is interesting about this piece is
that al-Jabri is arguing against both those who would diminish the importance
of political citizenship (“social democracy is not achievable without politi-
cal democracy”) and for the necessity of economic citizenship to achieve real
democracy (which for him is about equality in a comprehensive sense). In
the “Western world today,” he argues, democracy means first and foremost
“political freedom…to enable citizens to fulfil their election ‘duty’” whereas
“economic (liberal) freedom,” which he sees as the freedom “to carry out his
or her economic activity according to his or her means and potential, without
any restrictions” is treated only secondarily.10 In regard to the latter, he argues
that political democracy cannot fully realise the people’s goals and interests. In
regard to the former, he maintains that it is necessary to raise awareness, which
requires civil liberties, first and foremost, free speech: “Raising the awareness
of the masses is the responsibility of the enlightened avant garde, the labour
8 Gamal Abdel Nasser, “The Morrow of Independence,” in Contemporary Arab Political

Thought ed. Anouar Abdel-Malek (London: Zed Books, 1983), 76–77.
9 Reprinted and translated in Mohammed Abed al-Jabri, Democracy, Human Rights and
Law in Islamic Thought (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 115fn2, 111.
10 Al-Jabri, Democracy, Human Rights, and Law in Islamic Thought, 110.
302 Browers
union leader, and the intellectuals also” in order to transform people’s desire
to move up (and perhaps become themselves capitalists) into a more compre-
hensive understanding of the need for a full social transformation.11
This theme permeates not only left-leaning socialist and Arab nationalist
intellectuals, but is also a central aspect of discussions surrounding citizen-
ship among the Islamist intellectuals of the same period. Sayyid Qutb’s 1948
work, Social Justice in Islam, articulates a notion of “social justice” based on
Islam and premised on Islamicising state, society, and citizen in a way that
draws together the social and economic aspects of justice. Although less con-
cerned with electoral forms of justice, he asserts that “social justice in Islam…is
a comprehensive human justice, not merely an economic justice; that is to say,
it embraces all sides of life and all aspects of freedom.”12 Qutb posits Islam’s
social justice between the bankrupt materialism of communism, which “looks
at man only from the stand-point of his material needs,” and the unnaturalism
of Christianity, which “looks at man only from the stand-point of his spiritual
desires and seeks to crush down the human instincts [for material things] in
order to encourage those desires.”13 In his 1964 work, Milestones, Qutb posits
Islamic justice as the alternative to the moral bankruptcy of both western “De-
mocracy” and Russian Marxism – the latter of which failed, he argues, because
it proved to be “against human nature.”14
In a work the author tells us was conceived in late 1960 or early 1961, but
only published a decade later, the Algerian thinker Malik Bennabi offers a
compelling account of how moments of citizenship in the sense J.G.A. Pocock
describes as “membership in some public and political frame of action”15 are
usurped by social forces that betray the original impulse of the movement
in order to exert power. His is, in part, an account of theory falling short in
practice, but it is also a critique of political elites who fail to carry out their
promise of social and political development and sacrifice social ideas for self-
ish and material interests. He examines the Islamic reformist (islah) move-
ment, which emerged in the 1920s and 1930s to raise popular resistance to
French colonialism and, according to Bennabi, reached its “peak” in 1936 with
11 Al-Jabri, Democracy, Human Rights, and Law in Islamic Thought, 114.

12 Sayyid Qutb, Social Justice in Islam (Oneonta, ny: Islamic Publications International,
2000), 45.
13 Qutb, Social Justice in Islam, 45.
14 Sayyid Qutb, Milestones (Cedar Rapids, ia: The Mother Mosque Foundation, 1981), 7.
15 J.G.A. Pocock, “The Ideal of Citizenship since Classical Times,” in The Citizenship Debates:
A Reader, ed. Gershon Shafir (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 35.
the launch of the Popular Algerian Muslim Congress only to fall thereafter
when the i nstitutions of politics became merely a “new maraboutism that was
not selling amulets, barakas, paradise, and its delights, but one that was buying
rights, citizenship and the moon with the ballot papers. Likewise, it was forgot-
ten that right is but a corollary of duty and that a society can create its charter
and its new social statutes only by changing its ‘spiritual attitude’.”16 At that
point, “the idea [of islah] was banished and the idol seized power in Algerian
public life.”17 What Qutb and Bennabi’s accounts share is a recognition that
political citizenship is inadequate: Islamic justice requires a citizenry mobil-
ised to claim justice in a more comprehensive sense and marshals the natural
instincts of the (Muslim) people.
One of the most significant works of political theory from this period
followed the humiliating defeat suffered by the Arab states in 1967 was S adik
al-ʿAzm’s Self Criticism After the Defeat. It has seldom been noted that this
work offers a poignant critique of “citizenship” – or the lack thereof. In one
key passage, al-ʿAzm cites a study published by the Institute for Palestine Stud-
ies about the refugees and the causes of their flight on the eve of the June
War, which concludes that, because of the lack of social institutions, political
organisations, and political parties working effectively among the masses, the
Arab citizen falls, at the time of sudden danger, under the spontaneous sway of
the tribal, behaving in accordance with its norms, and thus feels that his ties to
his family or group are stronger than his ties to the “land,” and his connection
to his tribe, daughters, and relatives is more significant and important than
his connection to the threatened “soil of the fatherland.”18 Al-ʿAzm cites what
he terms a “hierarchy of priorities” that begins with the family and leaves the
responsibility of the citizen in the far distance:
We know how the Arab citizen living in the cities behaved on the eve of
the June War when he anticipated the possibility of shortages of some
merchandise and foodstuffs offered in the market. Each one of us rushes
before all others, and at the expense of every other citizen, to the market,
in order to buy and hoard the greatest amount possible of merchandise
and foods so that he can afterwards relax considering that he has man-
aged to ensure the needs of his close family even at the expense of the
16 Malek Bennabi, The Question of Ideas in the Muslim World (Kuala Lumpur: Islamic Book
Trust, 2003), 64, 65.
17 Bennabi, The Question of Ideas in the Muslim World, 65.
18 Sadik al-ʿAzm, Self-Criticism After the Defeat (London: Saqi, 2012), 51.
304 Browers
nourishment of others and their deprivation. In truth, this citizen brags

among his relatives about his shrewdness and slyness in managing here
a sack of flour and there so many kilograms of bread in such grave hours.
As long as the family does well, all is well. As for the negative consequenc-
es of this type of behavior on the general state of nutrition in the coun-
try and on non-relatives whom we leave behind in our shrewdness in
hoarding merchandise in our homes, this sort of consideration does not
enter our narrow tribal horizons and does not speak to us in the hours of
danger and need.19
Al-ʿAzm’s notion of citizenship invokes the values of common interest and

s ocial justice over private interest and personal gain and bemoaning the lack
of willingness to sacrifice for the greater good at a time of shared crisis.
However, al-ʿAzm saves his sharpest critique for the failures of the regimes
and their “intellectuals.” He takes to task the well-known Egyptian journalist
Mohamed Hassanein Heikel (1923-) for “rationalizing Arab failure and evading
responsibility,”20 citing an article in which Heikel seems to admit that Egypt
went into the war entirely unprepared and how this fact – as well as this intel-
lectual’s knowledge of it underscores the broken nature of the contract be-
tween citizen and state:
One ought not let this acknowledgment of the impossibility of an Arab

victory casually pass by the attention of the Arab citizen, because be-
hind it hides …a frightening truth about the relations and connections
between the Arab masses and their leadership, political organizations,
and communications services in the period following the French-British-
Israeli aggression in the Suez Canal. That is, the misled Arab popular
masses were in one camp, and the regimes, organizations and institu-
tions that should have represented them were isolated in another camp.
In these awful circumstances, the defeat should come as no surprise.21
He concludes that “there can be no deep and long-lasting socialist revolution

unless the formation of its citizens, its young, and its successive generations
has the highest priority.”22
19 Al-ʿAzm, Self-Criticism After the Defeat, 51.

20 Ibid., 57.
21 Ibid., 72.
22 Ibid., 76.
Ontological Commitments Regarding the Nature of the Self:

Citizenship in the 1980 and 1990s
Debates over citizenship in the course of the two decades following the Islamic
Revolution in Iran tended to focus on forging a more inclusive notion that heed-
ed both the reality of a resurgent Islamism and the concerns many were raising
about the impact of political projects aimed at Islamicising state and society
might hold for non-Muslims, non-Islamists, women, etc. The main question
was whether Islamists, should they gain power, would attempt to revive the no-
tion of ahl al-dhimma, where non-Muslims paid tribute to Islamic government
in exchange for “protection” and the right of some measure of autonomy, for
example, to govern their own affairs in family and commercial law.23
A number of intellectuals associated with the Wasatiyya (Moderate Islamist)
trend sought to reconcile modern notions of citizenship with traditional Is-
lamic conceptions. As al-Qaradawi put it: “in modern terminology, dhimmis
are ‘citizens’ [muwatinun] of the Islamic state. From the earliest period of Is-
lam to the present day, they enjoy the same rights and carry the same responsi-
bilities as Muslims themselves, while being free to practice their own faiths.”24
The Egyptian Islamist thinker Fahmi Huwaydi is often credited with being the
first to clearly and explicitly reject the category of dhimmi in favour of full citi-
zenship rights (huquq al-muwatana al-kamila) for non-Muslims.25 He argues
that the dhimmi concept emerges in Islamic thought as a historically bound
concept through a nonbinding hadith, leaving modern Muslims to conceptual-
ize citizenship in a more inclusive manner that conforms to the requirements
of equality and democracy. It is worth noting that the Moroccan political phi-
losophy Abdelilah Belkeziz credits the Shiʿi thinker Muhammad Husayn al-
Naʿini (1856–1936) with having departed from the traditional dhimmi concept
in favour of modern citizenship much earlier. According to Belkeziz “al-Naʿini
deemed citizenship (al-muwatana) and not religion to be the cornerstone
upon which political rights of the umma in an Islamic community, such as the
Iranian one, are built.”26 While I am sure there are other contenders for first
23 This topic and period is dealt with in greater length in the first two chapters of Mi-
chaelle Browers, Political Ideology in the Arab World: Accommodation and Transformation
24 Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Non-Muslims in Islamic Society (Indianapolis: American Trust Publica-
tions, 2005), 12.
25 Fahmi Huwaydi, Muwatinun la dhimmiyun (Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq, 1985).
26 Abdelilah Belkeziz, The State in Contemporary Islamic Thought: A Historical Survey of the
Major Muslim Political Thinkers of the Modern Era (Beirut: Centre for Arab Unity Studies,
2009), 62–63.
306 Browers
to make such a move, alongside Huwaydi, it is clear that the dhimmi concept
has proven problematic for modern Arab and Islamic political thought since
at least the Nahda. In this period, even those who would d efend the idea, find
themselves on the defensive. For example, the Egyptian p hilosopher, Hasan
Hanafi mourns the fact that “this concept of Jews and Christians as dhimmi has
acquired in public opinion a derogatory meaning, that of second-class citizen-
ship,” the original Islamic value that he claims undergirded the idea – “religious
tolerance and inclusiveness” – is what must be reclaimed in the present.27 In
his view, it is not Islam or Islamic values that have failed to provide for equal
citizenship, but the obscuring of original Islamic values in the conflict between
secular nation-states (which supplant religious identity with national identity)
and “fundamentalists” who reconstitute an Islamic identity in opposition to
both non-Muslims and a secular state.
Other Islamic thinkers attempt to reconceptualise a notion of citizenship
that is inclusive, yet Islamic in values and in contrast to the liberal individual-
ism they associate with citizenship in the West. The writings of Abdessalam
Yassine, the founder of Morocco’s Islamist al-Jamaʿa al-ʿAdl wa-l-Ishan (Justice
and Spirituality Group), contain a significant critique of territorial national-
isms (and their forms of citizenship) as aspects of the notion of modernity
that he is challenging. He reasserts a notion of Islamic citizenship, based not
on “the artificial borders of nation-states that imprison Muslim people,” but
instead on “Islamic notions of rights and duties.”28 Islamic values, he argues,
are “radically opposed to the moral emptiness and nagging egoism of the
individual that demands and consumes.”29 In other words, he sees modern
notions of citizenship as embedded in materialism and individualism. Islamic
citizenship, in contrast, he sees as articulating a citizenship based on acts of
giving and altruism, charity and piety. Only these values, he argues, can form
the basis of a new Islamic pact.30
This renewed interest in exploring the religious dimension of citizenship
was not only taken up by Islamists, but also by Arab intellectuals associated
with secular trends. This is particularly prevalent in works dealing with various
aspects of “the heritage” (turath) or engaging the question of the relationship
between “authenticity” (asala) and modernity, which included prominent
27 Hasan Hanafi, “Alternative Conceptions of Civil Society: A Reflective Islamic Approach,”

in Islamic Political Ethics: Civil Society, Pluralism, and Conflict, ed. Sohail H. Hashmi
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 63.
28 Abdessalam Yassine, Winning the Modern World for Islam (Iowa City: Justice and Spiritual-
ity Publishing, 2000), 82, 83.
29 Ibid., 114.
30 Ibid., 115.
Arab intellectuals, such as Tariq al-Bishri, Anwar ʿAbd al-Malik, Ahmad Sidqi
al-Dajani, and Tayyib Tizini. John Donohue’s survey of popular and academic
publications in Arabic during this period found an increasing interest in ques-
tions of cultural authenticity and a growing prominence granted to Islam in
discussions of identity.31 The 1980s is also when Muhammad ʿAbid al-Jabri
began a lengthy engagement with the question of how to instigate a process
of modernisation that could take root in the Arab region and contribute to the
fostering of rationality, democracy, and human rights. His 1980 work Nahnu
wa-l-turath (Heritage and us) engages the question of the Arabs’ relationship
to their intellectual tradition and introduces ideas that develop into a series
of books focused on a critique of al-ʿaql al-ʿarabi, variously rendered in Eng-
lish as “the Arab intellect,” “the Arab mind,” “Arab reason,” or “Arab reasoning.”
While al-Jabri’s writings of the period do not directly engage the question of
citizenship, they are deeply concerned with the status of the subject and draw
critical attention to how the religious permeates through intellectual, cultural,
social, and political spheres directing the behaviour of the Arab citizen. As I
have argued elsewhere, this preoccupation of Arab political thought with
these questions of this time underscores the connection of Arab intellectuals
with global discussions.32 Recall that in the 1980s “communitarians” such as
Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Michael Sandel were challenging lib-
eral notions of the unencumbered self and positing, in turn, a socially situated
self, whose sense of identity remained bound up with certain values, beliefs,
and practices. But the difference of context is important: where communitar-
ians in the West were responding to “disenchantment” with the hegemony of
liberal individualism, many Arab intellectuals were grappling with a broader
and more complex crisis in thought and practice.
Citizenship and the Arab Uprisings
The Arab uprisings garnered almost immediate attention from democratic

and critical theorists. The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek asserted: “It
was immediately possible for all of us around the world to identify with it, to
31 John J. Donohue, “Islam and the Search for Identity in the Arab World,” in Voices of
R
esurgent Islam, ed. John L. Esposito (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 50–51.
32 Michaelle Browers, “Post-Secularism and the ‘New Partisans of the Heritage’: Muham-
mad Abid al-Jabri and Arab Liberalism in the 1980s,” in Arab Liberal Thought after 1967:
Old Dilemmas, New Perceptions, ed. Meir Hatina and Christoph Schumann (New York:
Palgrave MacMillon, 2015), 135–151.
308 Browers
recognize what it was about, without any need for cultural analysis of the fea-
tures of Egyptian society.”33 In fact, whereas in the pre-Arab Uprising history of
Arab political thought accounted above, it is clear that many Arab intellectuals
were studying, appropriating, responding and reacting to trends and ideas often
associated with “the West,” what strikes one immediately about international
response to the Arab Uprising is the extent to which it is inspired by so much
critical and democratic theory in Europe and the United States. Žižek found
within the uprisings a radical emancipatory core. French philosopher Alain
Badiou saw “fascinating similarity between the riots in the Arab world and the
1848 ‘revolution’ in Europe” and proclaimed them to “possess a universal sig-
nificance” and “prescribe new possibilities whose value is international.”34 In
a 2012 work by American political theorist Michaele Ferguson, the example of
Egyptian protesters is used to exemplify the author’s argument that democ-
racy is best seen not as a form of government, embodied in institutions, but
as world-building, intersubjective activity.35 In a 2013 work, American political
theorists Samuel Chambers remarked that, to the extent that Egypt’s revolu-
tion did not merely express pre-existing interests, but constituted new ones, it
was “most decidedly political” and “most distinctly democratic” in the French
political philosopher Rancière’s sense.36
I should clarify that I do not mean to suggest that the Arab Uprisings actu-
ally does exemplify and embody the most novel ideas in recent democratic
and critical theory – in other words, that these democratic and critical theo-
rists somehow got it right. Although I agree with much of this literature I also
think there is a problem with seeing in this moment what it is we have been
waiting for and this becomes all the more apparent when it ceases to appear
as such, when the hope of democracy gives rise to a fear of renewed authori-
tarianism. Neither do I wish to suggest that the uprising activists were spurred
on by these democratic and critical theorists. Though it is certainly the case
that some activists were referring to their uprising as “rhizomatic”37 and, as
33 Slavoj Žižek, “For Egypt, This Is the Miracle of Tahrir Square,” The Guardian (February
10, 2011). Online at http://www.theguardian.com/global/2011/feb/10/egypt-miracle-tahrir
-square.
34 Alain Badiou, The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings (London: Verso Books,
2012), 48, 93, 114.
35 Michaele Ferguson, Sharing Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
36 Samuel Chambers, The Lessons of Rancière (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 9.
37 This characterisation is made by the Egyptian activist and political sociologist Aly
El-Raggal in Linda Herrera, “Generation Rev and the Struggle for Democracy: Interview
with Aly El-Raggal,” Jadaliyya (October 14, 2011), online at http://www.jadaliyya.com/
pages/index/2869/generation-rev-and-the-struggle-for-democracy_inte. The rhizome,
I discuss below, more than a few were reading, listening to and responding to
prominent critical intellectuals, such as Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, Slavoj
Žižek. Mulling over the uprisings and this theory does suggest parallels and
commonalities and provides some opportunity to weigh the optimism and
idealism of each literature against more recent events – and a newer pessi-
mism against what I take to be significant in these new articulations of citizen-
ship. These ideas were, in a sense, “in the air,” circulating among, shared by and
passed between activists across the globe.
The “Inexistent” or “Part of No Part” Constituted as the Public/

People/Citizen
Common to so many of contemporary critical theory’s accounts of the ontolog-

ical significance of the Arab Uprisings as a historical event is the appearance of
something. The “inexistent,”38 in Badiou’s terms, or what Rancière designates
“the part without part.” According to Rancière, “politics exists whenever the
count of parts and parties of society is disturbed by the inscription of a part
of those who have no part.”39 Consensus – or the enclosure of any political
order – always leads to a residual: a part of the structure that finds it has no
part of the “who.” In consensus, this part of no part of the whole can be man-
aged or sacrificed, but it is never eliminated. And, on occasion, this part and
the injustice it names demands that it is, in fact, the whole. In Badiou’s think-
ing, naming is central to the power of the state’s capacity to represent being.
The capacity of identitarian naming of citizens points to certain excess people
among the state. These people “who are present in the world but absent from
its meaning and decisions about the future” are what he calls the “inexistent.”40
The event, the historical riot, poses a rupture to this regime of identitarian
a collection of connected yet heterogeneous components that constantly change and

resist organization and chronology, was developed as a political-philosophical concept
by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizo-
phrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) and has since been utilised
in a n
umber of works of political theory. El-Raggal refers specifically to Michael Hardt
and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York:
Penguin, 2004).
38 Badiou, The Rebirth of History, esp. 56, 64, 67–71.
39 Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2004), 123.
40 Badiou, The Rebirth of History, 56.
310 Browers
representation by presenting an inexistent that is seeking to identify with a

generic that is outside the state’s ability to represent. However, the riot is only
able to produce what he terms a “truth” if it is able to put forth a genericity
that confronts identitariarn objectification and separation through naming.
Badiou captures this in his claim that “in Egypt the people who had rallied in
the square believed they were Egypt; Egypt was the people who were there to
proclaim that if, under Mubarak, Egypt did not exist, now it existed, and them
with it.”41
We saw this in the waving of national flags and the lack of symbols associ-
ated with parties or religious sects – or, in the latter case, in the intentional
combining of religious symbols as an assertion of a common cause and refusal
to be divided. We heard and read the various versions of slogans announcing
“we are Egypt” and “we are Tunisia.” We see this in the Egyptian activist-blogger
Alaa Abd El-Fattah’s claim that “Tahrir is a myth that creates a reality in which
we’ve long believed”42 and the Egyptian scholar Adel Iskandar’s claim that the
“corpus politicus (“body politic”) became the true anatomy and physiology of
the public.”43 Activists’ references “the Republic of Tahrir” similarly suggests a
reconstitution of liberated body politic in the space occupied by the protesters.
Salwa Ismail’s brilliant account of how Syrian activists used songs and chants
in their protests in order to “re-imagine and perform the nation”: “acts of pro-
test have unfolded as enactments of the imagined nation freed and recovered
from the rule of the al-Asad family.”44 Many protesters recall their protest activ-
ity as not just an interaction between citizens and the state but as an interac-
tion of citizens with one another. One is struck at how, even as the uprising
in Syria degenerated into a civil war activists continued – and c ontinue – to
resist disunity and sectarianism through the unfurling of banners proclaiming
that “we are Syria.” One image from Masyaf, near Hama, particularly stood out.
A large banner proclaiming “I am Syria” stood above the claiming of all the
following groups as part of the “I” of that “Syria”: Sunni, Shiʿi, Druze, ʿAlawi,
Ismaʿili, Kurdish, Christian, Assyrian, Circassian.
41 Ibid., 57.
42 In Ahdaf Soueif, Cairo: My City, Our Revolution (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012),
190.
43 Adel Iskander, Egypt in Flux: Essays on an Unfinished Revolution (Cairo: The American
University in Cairo Press, 2013), 5.
44 Salwa Ismail, “The Syrian Uprising: Imagining and Performing the Nation,” Studies in
Ethnicity and Nationalism 11 (2011): 547.
Citizenship as Present Action: What One Does Rather than What

One is (or is not)
In Michaele Ferguson’s words, we need to reconceptualise our understanding

of the demos of democracy “as the product of human imagination and there-
fore as a matter of the intersubjective human activity of world-building.”45 In
this sense, the people in the street stressed a vision of citizenship understood
in terms of present political freedom rather than institutions to come through
their collective agency. For Rancière, it is in these movements of revolution,
“where liberty and equality would no longer be represented in the institutions
of law and state, but embodied in the very forms of concrete life and sensible
experience” that we see “real” democracy.46
The French Tunisian thinker Mehdi Belhaj Kacem directly asserts a com-
monality between the Tunisian Revolution and the ideas of Rancière, in that
it was a revolution carried out directly by the “people” who wrote their own
“indelible page of this history.”47 Or rather profoundly yet simply summed up
by the graphic line graffiti artist Keizer spray-painted on the walls of Cairo:
“We are the leader we have been waiting for.”48 It is this leaderless, horizon-
tal c haracter to the Arab uprisings that gives it what Aly al-Raggal deems it
“rhizomatic” character: “The Arab revolutions are rhizomatic struggles be-
cause they don’t have a clear chain of command or a single point of reference.
They have been successful as small entities linking together. The rhizome is a
complex form of interaction. Even groups that used to be in opposition to one
another…are connecting.”49
Adel Iskandar notes how the peak of the Egyptian uprising is embodied in
that moment when it “did not attempt to take over the main institutions of
government and assert its triumph over the state. Rather, it simply asserted
the stubbornness of human perseverance and liberty in the face of unbearable
pain and agony. It did not try to undo the constitutional order with disorder,
but rather respected the need to demand change and expected that its show
of force would be enough to guarantee the legitimacy of these demands.”50
45 Ferguson, Sharing Democracy, 10.

46 Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy (London: Verso, 2014), 3.
47 Alexander Galloway, “A Tunisian Renaissance: Interview with Mehdi Belhaj Kacem,” The
Symptom (January 31, 2011), online at http://www.lacan.com/thesymptom/?page_id=1046.
48 Iskander, Egypt in Flux, 109.
49 In Linda Herrera, “Generation Rev and the Struggle for Democracy: Interview with Aly
El-Raggal.”
312 Browers
Iskandar argues for “an anarcho-syndicalism, a system of informal collective

self-rule that supplants the state where it can no longer function.”51 Citing
Badiou as a source for thinking through what he witnessed and participated
in, he claims “politics as outside the framework of reconnecting bonds and
chiasms or the search for a more representative and democratically account-
able government….for Badiou as for Egypt, politics is about the meticulous
unbinding of the democratic representative system.”52
On the other hand, Fawwaz Traboulsi asserts that what was so new about
the now famous slogan, “the people want the downfall of the regime” (al-shaʿb
yurid isqat al-nizam) was not just its distinction between people (shaʿb) and
regime or system (nizam), but also the novelty of those very two compo-
nents.53 According to Traboulsi, the discourse of civil society and state, which
had become so prominent in the 1990s54 seemed to have given way to a new
language of people and regime that, he claims, recalls the revolutionary stance
of the national liberation movements of the 1970s. The slogan constructs an
inclusive and equal notion of “the people” (in contrast to both civil society
and things like sects or other social divisions). Here Traboulsi seems to agree
with Iskander. However, Traboulsi also notes how this people call not for the
downfall of the state (that is, not the institutions that govern and unite) but
the downfall of the regime (the system of power in place, which would include
not just authoritarian system, but also the neoliberal order that sustains it),
a broader and radical call that, he argues, warrants our characterization of
these uprisings as revolutionary.55
Hatred of Democracy?
Badiou maintains that the Arab revolts “are opening a sequence,” “stirring
up and altering historical possibilities,” but they do so “by leaving their own
context undecided.”56 Other theorists are less sanguine about the future pos-
sibilities, with some going so far in their purported concern for the state of the
Arab masses as to haughtily dismiss everything they do and think. This brings

52 Ibid.
53 Fawwaz Traboulsi, al-Dimuqratiyya thawra (Beirut: Riyad al-Rayyis, 2012).
54 For more on 1990s Arab thought on civil society see Michaelle Browers, Democracy
and Civil Society in Arab Political Thought: Transcultural Possibilities (Syracuse: Syracuse
55 A similar claim is made by Hamid Dabashi, The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism
(London: Zed Books, 2012).
56 Badiou, The Rebirth of History, 38.
to mind Rancière’s notion of “hatred of democracy,” which says that “there is

only one good democracy, the one that represses the catastrophe of demo-
cratic civilization.”57 The “bad” democracy involves things like “an excess of
democratic activity” that breeds “disorder.”58 Žižek, writing a bit later, stands
out in particular for his more critical view of the Arab spring: “Unfortunately,
it looks increasingly likely that the Egyptian summer of 2011 will be remem-
bered as the end of the revolution, as the suffocating of its emancipatory po-
tential. Its grave-diggers are the army and the Islamists….The losers will be
the pro-Westernliberals…and, above all, the true agents of the Spring events;
the emerging secular left, which has tried desperately to organise a network
of civil society organisations, from trade unions to feminist groups.”59 More
recently, in the Guardian, Žižek says “the ongoing struggle there is ultimately
a false one. The only thing to keep in mind is that this pseudo-struggle thrives
because of the absent third, a strong radical-emancipatory opposition whose
elements were clearly perceptible in Egypt.”60 Egypt, in this assessment, pos-
sessed event-ness, even if only for a moment. In Žižek’s assessment of present
Egypt, the third element no longer appears:
Now that the Egyptian army has decided to break the stalemate and
cleanse the public space of the Islamist protesters, and the result is hun-
dreds, maybe thousands, of dead, one should take a step back and focus
on the absent third party in the ongoing conflict: where are the agents
of the Tahrir Square protests from two years ago? Is their role now not
weirdly similar to the role of Muslim Brotherhood back then – that of the
surprised impassive observers? With the military coup in Egypt, it seems
as if the circle has somehow closed: the protesters who toppled Mubarak,
demanding democracy, passively supported a military coup d’etat which
abolished democracy … what is going on?61
Žižek’s point about the need for a third element is one many Arab intellectu-
als continue to make,62 as one might expect, his claim that the protesters have
become “impassive observers” has provoked critical response.
57 Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, 4.

58 Ibid., 6.
59 Slavoj Žižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously (London: Verso, 2012), 74–5.
60 Slavoj Žižek, “Syria Is a Pseudo-Struggle,” The Guardian (September 6, 2013), online at
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/06/syria-pseudo-struggle-egypt.
61 Žižek, “Syria Is a Pseudo-Struggle.”
62 See, for example, the Tunisian researcher, Leyla Dakhli’s call for finding an approach to
post-uprising Tunisian politics that both avoids the hyperbole of patriotic flag waving
yet includes both the “anti-Islamic modern elite” and “a society that is more Islamicized.”
314 Browers
The Egyptian activist and blogger Leil-Zahra Mortada deems Žižek’s remarks
as “coprolalia” (the excessive and uncontrollable use of obscene language) of
pseudo-leftists: “Žižek´s article is the perfect example of every European l eftist
(prick) sitting in some bar drinking beer and talking about entire populations
fighting in ways he only saw in books and movies.”63 Her more direct and elab-
orated response follows:
To consider that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt were ever “surprised

impassive observers” shows great ignorance. When were they “surprised
impassive observers”?! When they met with Omar Suleiman even before
Mubarak stepped down?? Or when they were playing on various fronts
sending their youth to Tahrir Square while they were striking deals with
scaf? Or when they were actively supporting and defending the same
military regime that is killing them now? To consider that the “agents of
Tahrir Square” are passively supporting the crimes of the military is an-
other blatant sign of lack of touch with revolutionary reality. Or maybe
it is all built on what is coming out in the European mainstream media?
Activist groups and revolutionaries in Egypt, despite having suffered the
brutality of Morsi’s regime, have been actively and loudly denouncing
Sisi’s massacres. They too are worn out from the immense revolutionary
weight yet still carrying out the not-so-glamorous tasks of dealing with
the detainees, military trials, the injured, the housing problems, the fami-
lies of the martyrs, sectarian violence, the attack on liberties, the writing
of the constitution, the attack on women´s bodies and rights…and the
list can go on longer than Žižek´s scheduled appearances on magazine
covers. They are working day and night to stop the further division of
their society, to fight against the stigmatization of even their enemies
(Muslim Brotherhood) so that they can build a country where a woman
can’t be arrested and tortured for wearing a veil and protesting for some-
one she believes was the democratically elected president. Even if this
“Tunisian National Interest: Serving Whom?” Jadaliyya (September 23, 2013), online at
http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/14260/tunisian-national-interest_serving-whom.
Similarly, the Lebanese journalist and activist Rahil Dandash notes how Egypt seems
stuck in a painful dichotomy between religious and military authoritarianism. Rahil
Dandash, “Shabab ma baʿd al-thawra,” Bidayyat 8–9 (Summer/Fall 2014), online at http://
www.bidayatmag.com/node/487.
63 Leil-Zahra Mortada, “Coprolalia on Syria, European Pseudo-Leftists, and Zizek” (Novem-
ber 12, 2013), online at http://www.leilzahra.com/?p=642.
ex-president has blood on his hands and favored neoliberal economical

policies.64
The contemptuous tone of Mortada’s response demonstrates that it is meant to

not only assert that foreign intellectuals both lack a genuine understanding of
and have failed to fully engage the activists of the region about which they are
espousing so much judgment, but also to assert a refusal to be either spoken
for or down to by intellectuals merely watching from the sidelines (or while
lounging in bed, as Žižek is in the two pictures of Žižek that Mortada chooses
to accompany her blog).
The Syrian activist, Yassin al-Haj Saleh commented on Žižek’s article, simi-
larly noting how it reflected a lack of understanding, first of “how the Islamic
faith can be a tool” both of oppression and of “emancipatory mobilization”
and, secondly, of how the ability of religions to do so is abetted by “extreme
political poverty in particular (no right to freely gather, even in private p
laces,
no free speech or publishing).”65 But, “most importantly,” Saleh argues, is the
damage such ill-informed analysis by prominent foreign intellectuals can do
to the people struggling: “the stance of Žižek and others like him does not
help secular Syrians who are struggling against the regime. In fact this position
serves to weaken us, and to make both the regime and the Islamists stronger.
In effect they are saying that people who are interested in mass emancipation
have nothing to do with ‘pseudo-struggles’ and the right thing for them to do
is to stay away from those struggles. This is irresponsible and insensitive to
human suffering.” Thus, Salah too asserts that “the problem is not that such
writers ignore something important about Syria, it is that they are ignorant of
nearly everything about the miserable country.”66
At the very least, we must ask whether our celebration of a grand “onto-
logical” and historical event, our surprise at appearances of “the void” or the
64 Mortada, “Coprolalia on Syria.”

65 Danny Postel, Nader Hashemi, and Yassin al-Haj Saleh, “The Conscious of Syria: An Inter-
view with Activist and Intellectual Yassin al-Haj Saleh,” Boston Review (March 12, 2014),
online at https://www.bostonreview.net/world/postel-hashemi-interview-syrian-activist
-intellectual-yassin-al-haj-saleh.
66 The French Tunisian writer Mehdi Belhaj Kacem similarly notes: “It’s obvious that Badiou
and Zizek… know absolutely nothing about the situation, although, in Badiou’s case, it’s
truly spectacular: almost like Sarkozy he manages to talk about the Tunisian revolution
as if it were no more than some ‘riots.’ He says: ‘maybe some interesting utterances will
come out of this, let’s wait and see…’ He’s completely out of it. From where I sit, there
are ‘interesting’ utterances absolutely everywhere.” In Galloway, “A Tunisian Renaissance:
Interview with Mehdi Belhaj Kacem.”
316 Browers
“inexistent” merely masks our ignorance and inattention to the more mun-
dane ongoing struggles for freedom, democracy, justice. We must further think
critically about our tendency to, at one moment, cheer events of a certain char-
acter – those, in Žižek’s words, where “it was immediately possible for all of us
around the world to identify with it, to recognize what it was about, without
any need for cultural analysis of the features of Egyptian society” (2011) – while,
at the next moment, noting that it will never be enough.
At the end of all this – and despite the period of counterrevolution, stalled
revolutions, civil wars, so called “failed states” and violent assertions of “Islamic
states” – here is what I take to be distinctive about the generation that brought
us the Arab Uprisings and their (re)conceptualisation of the idea and practice
of citizenship. It is not so much that their understanding of citizenship as only
meaningful when justice and equality are sought in a more comprehensive
sense than merely a liberal territorial, political notion of citizenship offers. It
is not only their comprehension of citizenship as a struggle: earlier genera-
tions wielded related ideas in the struggle for independence, socio-economic
reform, and in the name of various conceptions of justice. Rather, the distinc-
tiveness of their notion of citizenship lies in their grasping of citizenship as
action and of the citizen and people as constituted in the acting, of citizenship
as an unfinished project that must be constantly reinvented and reinterpreted
to remain, in Malik Bennabi’s words, “expressed ideas” that are both “genuine”
and “efficacious.”67
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chapter 12
Brothers and Citizens: The Second Wave of

Islamic Institutional Thinking and the Concept
of Citizenship
O brothers, O my sons and my daughters, O my brothers and my sisters,

O my grandsons and my granddaughters, children of Egypt! The usage of
preachers, for their sermons, is to say “O Muslims!” but me, I say in this
Square, “O Muslims and Copts! O children of Egypt!” This is the day of
the children of Egypt all together. It is not the day of the Muslims alone.1
∵
This is the Sermon of the Revolution: The well-known Islamist scholar Yusuf
al-Qaradawi on February 18, 2011, addressing two million Egyptians in Tahrir
Square. Al-Qaradawi had been flown in from Qatar to deliver the first Friday
sermon after the fall of Hosni Mubarak.
It would take an occasion like this, and a preacher of the stature of al-
Qaradawi, to make this remarkable break with established ritual and open with
“O Muslims and Copts.” To al-Qaradawi, Egypt’s Christians and Muslims have
proven themselves to be equal in the revolution. They are compatriots. But are
they co-citizens? Yes, he says so; but while the Muslim citizenship seems to be
a natural state, the Christian citizenship appears to be the result of achieve-
ment. And al-Qaradawi seems to be the authority who grants it to them, or at
least announces it. He, after all, is their father, along with Egypt itself.
As this chapter will argue, ikhwani (Muslim Brother) Islamism has come a
long way towards democratic positions. But some democratic values have been
embraced more wholeheartedly than others. In al-Qaradawi’s and the Ikhwan’s
paternalistic democracy, sovereignty hardly rests with the individual citizen,
but with the group of believers. Next to the formal political equality of the
Egyptians, there is still an important division between Muslims and Christians.
1 Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Khutbat Midan al-Tahrir, February 18, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/

watch?v=Xe1nYUUguWE, accessed March 18, 2015.

Brothers and Citizens 321
And authority is still vested in those who know, those who are virtuous among
you, and those who can lead.
Al-Qaradawi’s sermon marks the culmination of a long march towards the
acceptance of a democratic, republican political system. One month later,
the Muslim Brotherhood established a political party, and ten months later
the party won the first free elections in modern Egypt. The following year, in
2012, Mohammad Mursi of the Brotherhood and its party was elected presi-
dent, and in December a new Constitution was adopted. Necessarily a work
of compromise, it would still qualify as the first ikhwani Constitution. The tri-
umph, however, proved short-lived. A year later, Mursi was removed from of-
fice by the army, in early 2014 a new Constitution was adopted, and the Muslim
Brotherhood was declared a terrorist organisation.
Where does this land the Islamist thinking on democracy and citizenship?
At the time of writing, Allahu aʿlam, only God knows. But this is a question of
great significance for the political future of the region. With most of its parlia-
mentarians in prison, and a hardliner as the interim leader, there is the obvi-
ous risk that they abandon the belief in democratic institutions and values.
Conversely, there is also the possibility that the oppression will make certain
dimensions of politics become more apparent to them, as they realise that,
contrary to expectations, they do not represent the aspirations of the major-
ity of Egyptians. Notably, the protesters against the 2013 military coup have
claimed to defend sharʿiyya, legitimacy, rather than defending the Shariʿa,
as their traditional sloganeering would have it. Does that legitimacy now in-
clude the inalienable political rights of every citizen, irrespective of his or her
religious – or in principle a-religious, or even anti-religious – convictions?
When we talk about citizenship, we mainly think of the enjoyment of basic
political and social rights, including the right to representation and partici-
pation in the state and governance. Underneath these rights, however, there
must be an ingrained feeling of individual autonomy; a sense of entitlement
and self-assurance that allows the citizen to freely exercise these rights. Here,
I shall not pursue specific rights, but rather citizenship as such, and how it has
been perceived and experienced.
This chapter will reflect upon and discuss the specific difficulties faced by
the democratising ikhwani tradition when faced with such a concept of citizen-
ship. It will try to do so by taking a generational perspective of Islamist thinking.
From Enjoying Citizenship to Calling for it
Like their co-patriots, Islamists in the Arab World have been enjoying citizen
rights for generations. Constitutions, such as the Ottoman Constitution of
322 Skovgaard-Petersen
1876, defined such right and introduced the idea of parliamentary d eliberation,
even if laws would still be promulgated by the sultan. What we may call the
first generation of Islamic constitutional thinkers, the late 19th century reform-
ers Muhammad ʿAbduh and ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi, argued that a truly
Islamic state is opposed to despotism (istibdad) in that even the ruler must
be subjected to the rule of law, and is obliged to heed the views of experts
in a consultation (shura). Later Islamist political organisations such as the
Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt and Syria built upon these notions, and their
leaders participated in parliamentary elections in the 1940s. This participation
in the political process was aimed at promoting Islamically oriented policies
and “defending the Sharia.” Although in 1939 the Egyptian Muslim Brother-
hood adopted the slogan “Islam is religion and state” (al-islam din wa-dawla)
it evinced little interest in the constitutional organisation of the state, or in
the concept of citizenship. The organisation of the Brotherhood itself was
also top-down, and emphasising the ideological training and discipline of
the individual member, rather than his personal opinion and development.
Under the one-party system of Gamal Abd al-Nasser (1954–70), and later the
Baʿath Party in Syria (1963-now), the Brotherhood itself also strengthened its
authoritarian discipline, if partly as a response to the regime repression. In the
late 1950s Sayyid Qutb formulated a revolutionary, violent and avant-gardistic
doctrine rejecting the idea of liberal democracy. These ideas were, however,
never fully accepted in the Brotherhood, and after the death of Nasser and
the re-introduction of a multi-party system by Anwar al-Sadat from 1976, the
leadership of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood opted for a strategy of partici-
pation and inclusion in Egyptian parliamentary politics. The Brotherhood was
not allowed to form a political party, but its members could run for other par-
ties, and from 1990 they could run as individual candidates and then form an
Islamic bloc in Parliament. In Syria, the Brotherhood had actually taken part
in government in the late 1940s, and even its radical ideologist Saʿid Hawwa
advocated a form of Islamic democracy with a bicameral political system.2 The
Brotherhood was banned, but in the 2000s the exiled leadership also adopted
a strategy of calling for democratic reforms in alliance with other oppositional
forces. In both countries, this ideological embrace of democracy was met with
scepticism from other committed democratic actors. Gradually, the leadership
felt the need to clarify its position on democratic issues such as the role of
women and non-Muslims, and a number of declarations were published that
allow us to follow the development in ikhwani thinking.
2 Itzchak Weismann, “Democratic Fundamentalism? The Practice and Discourse of the

Muslim Brothers Movement in Syria,” The Muslim World 100 (2010): 10.
The Second Wave of Islamic Institutional Thinking
The pragmatic decision of the Brotherhood leadership to seek influence

through participation predated any serious rethinking on the subject of citi-
zenship. Yusuf al-Qaradawi recalls in his memoirs how in the 1970s there
were two competing schools in the international organisation of the Mus-
lim Brotherhood on the subject of shura: those who considered it solely as a
consultative body to the ruler who could then proceed to issue a decree, and
those who like al-Qaradawi considered the ruler to be bound by the majority
opinion of the ahl al-hall wa -l-ʿaqd (the people who lose and bind).3 As these
in al-Qaradawi’s understanding are the high ʿulama, the choice was between
an autocratic and a sort of theocratic system. Al-Qaradawi also came in for
severe criticism when in 1977 in a book he argued for the term “non-Muslims”
in Muslim society instead of kuffar (unbelievers) or ahl al-dhimma (protected
people).4
The event that triggered more serious reflection was the 1979 revolution in
Iran and the ensuing constitution that established the political system of the
Vilayet e-feqih. Suddenly, the Shiʿis of Iran had constructed a state structure
which combined elected offices and representation with a drive to Islamise
the country. This was attractive to some Sunni thinkers, although they would
hold that a Sunni version could not privilege the ʿulama as much as the Islamic
Republic of Iran did.
These Sunni thinkers were all republican, and mainly Egyptian: Muham-
mad Salim al-ʿAwwa, Tariq al-Bishri, Fahmy Huweidi, Kamal Abu al-Magd and
Muhammad ʿAmara. None of them were ʿulama, and several of them had a
leftist or Arab nationalist background. Their published books on the organ-
isation of a Sunni Islamic state have been analysed by Gudrun Krämer5 and
Raymond Baker,6 among others. None of them were formal members of the
Muslim Brotherhood, but they were an inspiration to it when, from the 1990s
onwards, the Brotherhood itself began to embrace the idea of a “civil state with
an Islamic reference.”
To these thinkers, the true Islamic teaching provides a blueprint for a cer-
tain form of state. This state must be civil, meaning not theocratic (like in
Iran), and not run by the military (like in some of the Arab republics). It must
also be democratic; to these thinkers, shura means parliamentary democracy,
3 Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Ibn al-qarya wa-l-kuttab, vol. 4 (Cairo, 2010), 42.

4 Al-Qaradawi, Ibn al-qarya, 31.
5 Gudrun Krämer, Gottes Staat als Republik (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlag, 1999).
6 Raymond Baker, Islam without Fear: Egypt and the New Islamists (Cambridge ma: Harvard
and the Qurʾanic term for the people who decide, ahl al-hall wa -l-ʿaqd, are
the parliamentarians. The inhabitants of the state all have voting rights and
rights of representation, but as this is an Islamic state, only a Muslim can hold
the presidency and the chief of staff. There are, however, differences between
these thinkers, both in terms of argumentation and the limitations of non-
Muslim citizen rights.7 Still, they adopt a formula of equal rights and duties for
all citizens irrespective of their religious affiliation (la-hum ma la-na, wa ʿalay-
him ma ʿalay-na, a hadith contested by radicals), at least if they are Christians.
Moreover, despite their insistence on the claim that there is such a thing as an
Islamic state, all operate with a functional difference between the state and
religion, contrary to the classical slogan of the Muslim Brotherhood.8
Inspired by these thinkers is Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who for most of his life was
a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and later declined to become its leader.9
As a shaykh with significant scholarly authority, al-Qaradawi has to argue from
within the tradition of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh). That, on the other hand,
is why he is more significant that the other thinkers; it is precisely his political
concern for the “jurisprudence of reality” (fiqh al-waqiʿ), and his weekly pro-
gram in the Al Jazeera satellite tv channel (aptly named “Shariʿa and Life”) that
has made him “easily one of the most admired and best-known representatives
of Sunni Islam today.”10 Al-Qaradawi, too, understands shura to mean parlia-
mentary democracy, but he sees a risk that even Muslim parliamentarians may
promulgate laws that contradict the teaching of Islam. In his Jurisprudence
of the State in Islam, al-Qaradawi argues that the Islamic nature of the state
must be secured through the vetting of parliament’s legislation by a corps of
high ʿulama.11 Al-Qaradawi is keen to secure the political independence of the
ʿulama – a clear reference to the situation in Egypt where the state controls al-
Azhar’s budget and the president nominates the Shaykh al-Azhar. This special
role and authority of the ʿulama was rejected by the other “lay” representatives
of the second wave, but was surprisingly adopted by the Muslim Brotherhood
in its draft political party program of 2007.12
7 Krämer, Gottes Staat, 173–217.

8 Ibid., 164–165.
9 Husam Tammam, “Qaradawi and the Muslim Brothers,” in Global Mufti: The Phenomenon
of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, ed. Bettina Gräf and Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen (London and New
York: Hurst & Columbia up, 2009), 59ff.
10 Bettina Gräf and Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen, “Introduction,” in Global Mufti, 1.
11 Yusuf al- Qaradawi, Min fiqh al-dawla fi-l-islam (Cairo: Maktabat al-Wahba, 1997), 31.
12 Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen, “Egypt’s Ulama in the State, in Politics and in the Islamist
Vision,” in The Rule of Law, Islam and Constitutional Politics in Iran and Egypt, ed. Said
Arjomand and Nathan J. Brown (New York: suny Press, 2013), 294.
What do the thinkers of the second wave have to say about citizenship?
Not much. Beyond a willingness to consider equal political rights, with some
limitations, their interest is with the feasibility of a specifically Islamic state
and a commitment to the rule of law. To many Islamists, the very term for citi-
zen, m
uwatin, has secularist overtones, as it stresses the watan, fatherland, as
people’s primary identity and allegiance. To be sure, Secularists have consid-
ered the word muwatana (citizenship) as a bulwark against religious differ-
ential treatment. When in 2007, the article 1 of the Egyptian Constitution was
amended to state that Egypt was a democratic state building on muwatana,
it was widely seen as a counterbalance to article 2’s definition of Egypt as an
Islamic state with a legislation based on the principles of the Islamic Shariʿa.13
The second wave Islamist thinkers have, however, come to embrace the
term. Again, the last of them to do so was al-Qaradawi who in 2010 published
a book Fatherland and Citizenship (al-watan wa-l-muwatana) from an Islamic
perspective. Here he cautiously considers national belonging a natural human
instinct that may be beneficial, as long as it is not exaggerated, and based on
a reading of the so-called Medina Constitution (a covenant made between
Muhammad and the people of Yathrib, according to the classical Muslim his-
torians), al-Qaradawi considers all inhabitants of a Muslim country basically
equal.14 He proposes to avoid the classical terminology of Christians as ahl al-
dhimma and employ the term “brothers” (as we saw in his speech from 2011).15
Citizenship here means the belonging, the sense of home and entitlement, and
the aim of the book is to make non-Muslims belong in Muslim majority states,
and make Muslims belong in non-Muslim majority states. Warren and Gilmore
have demonstrated how al-Qaradawi, the Muslim scholar among the Islamist
thinkers of the second wave, has struggled to find arguments in the Islamic
tradition of doing away with the basic distinction in classical fiqh between be-
liever and non-believer at the political level.16
13 Bruce Rutherford, “Surviving under Rule by Law: Explaining Ideological Change in Egypt’s
Muslim Brotherhood during the Mubarak Era,” in The Rule of Law, Islam and Constitu-
tional Politics in Iran and Egypt, 256.
14 Yusuf al-Qaraḍawi, al-Watan wa-l-muwatana fi daw al-usul al-ʿaqdiyya wa-l-maqasid al-
sharʿiyya (Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq, 2010), 25.
15 Al-Qaradawi, al-Watan, 42.
16 David Warren and Christine Gilmore, “One Nation under God? Yusuf al-Qaradawi’s
Changing fiqh of Citizenship in the Light of the Islamic Legal Tradition,” Contemporary
Islam 8 (2014): 217–37, DOI 10.1007/s11562-013-0277-4.
The Muslim Brotherhood on the Move
From the 1990s onwards, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood began to liberalise
its views on several issues relating to citizenship. In 1994 it issued two docu-
ments clarifying its position towards women and Copts. These pamphlets drew
heavily on the thinkers of the second wave.17 A decade later, when the Egyptian
regime itself acknowledged a need for reforms, the Brotherhood made more
substantial statements: The Reform Initiative in 2004,18 election programs in
200519 and 2007, and a party platform document (in two versions) in 2007.20
These documents restated the Brotherhood’s acceptance and support for equal
political rights for women and Copts, but they also became increasingly criti-
cal of the role of the executive and made recommendations for a diminished
role for the presidency, an invigorated role for the parliament and for and more
consequent division of powers. Nevertheless, none of these documents would
accept a Copt as president of Egypt, and they still considered the essential so-
cial role of the woman to be in the home and bring up the children.
The pamphlets and later the programs were written by a small group of mid-
dle generation reformers. This observation points to a strategic move rather
than an ideological reassessment. Why would the leadership of the Brother-
hood go along with this redefinition of the state and citizenship? In the 1990s
the strategy clearly helped distancing the Brotherhood from the militant
Islamist uprising that was taking place, reassuring both the regime that could
crush it and the other opposition forces which it wanted to unify. And in the
2000s the Brotherhood also discovered that its more democratic positions
yielded more positive assessments in Western media and capitals. But as Bruce
Rutherford has pointed out, a theory of political incentives must be supple-
mented by other explanations, especially given the fact that the B rotherhood
17 Bruce Rutherford, Egypt After Mubarak: Liberalism, Islam, and Democracy in the Arab
World (Princeton: Princeton up, 2009), 97–98.
18 http://www.aljazeera.net/specialfiles/pages/a7d9e130-0f09-4b77-bbb0-ee07dd61afd3, ac-
cessed July 10, 2015.
19 http://www.ikhwanwiki.com/index.php?title=%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A8%D8%B1
%D9%86%D8%A7%D9%85%D8%AC_%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A7%D9%86%D8
%AA%D8%AE%D8%A7%D8%A8%D9%8A_%D9%84%D9%84%D8%A5%D8%AE
%D9%88%D8%A7%D9%86_%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85%D8%B3%D9%84%D9%85
%D9%8A%D9%86_2005, accessed July 10, 2015.
20 http://www.ikhwanwiki.com/index.php?title=%D8%A8%D8%B1%D9%86%D8%A7
%D9%85%D8%AC_%D8%AD%D8%B2%D8%A8_%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A5%D
8%AE%D9%88%D8%A7%D9%86_%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85%D8%B3%D9%84
%D9%85%D9%8A%D9%86, accessed July 10, 2015.
was never going to get power or even influence in Egypt’s authoritarian politi-
cal system.21 Moreover, in parliament the Brotherhood was reluctant to work
on the improvement of women’s social and juridical equality, and even took a
defensive stand on issues such as Female Genital Mutilation. Hence, the Broth-
erhood was democratically inclined, and interested in curbing the power of the
state, but more often than not the aim was to “defend Egyptian values” against
norms of universal socio-political civic rights, even when Islamic authorities
such as al-Qaradawi made it clear that Islamic law allowed these values and
practices to be reformed.22 Several scholars have pointed to a rivalry inside the
Brotherhood, partly generational, between a smaller group of reform-minded
public figures, who often took their cues from the thinkers of the second wave,
and other more powerful and reclusive groups, some of whom beholden to
the anti-democratic ideology of Sayyid Qutb, and others influenced by a grow-
ing Salafi trend in Egyptian society. In the summer of 2010 elections for the
Egyptian Brotherhood’s highest executive body, the Maktab al-Irshad, con-
firmed that the Liberal group was the weakest.
A somewhat parallel has taken place in the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, but
in very different circumstances. Banned since the 1950s, and completely sup-
pressed after 1982, the group only had sympathisers inside the country, where-
as the leadership and formal organisation was based in Europe. Exposed to
European political realities, and threatened with extinction, in the early 2000s
the group reached out to other oppositional parties set out on a revaluations
of its political ideology. In a document entitled “The Political Project for the
Future of Syria” it recognised the fundamental idea of the second wave that
God’s sovereignty allows for man to create parliaments and legislation, as man
is God’s representative (khalifa) on earth. It also embraced the concept of the
civil state, and in principle equal citizenship for Syria’s religiously diverse pop-
ulation.23 However, like in Egypt, collaboration with other opposition forces
proved difficult and marred by mutual suspicion, and in the 2010 internal elec-
tions the reformist Ali al-Bayanuni was defeated by the more uncompromising
Muhammad Shaqfa.
Hence, new ideas of equal citizenship had been introduced in both the
Egyptian and the Syrian Brotherhood. But when revolution came, none of
21 Rutherford, “Surviving under Rule by Law,” 249–278.

22 Ibid., 260.
23 “The Political Project for the Future of Syria: A Vision of the Muslim Brotherhood Group
in Syria,” http://www.ikhwanweb.com/article.php?id=5804, Chapters 1 and 4, accessed
March 16, 2015.
them was prepared, and their leadership had weak ties to other political forces
and did not inspire trust.
Revolutions and Rethinking Citizenship
When President Mubarak of Egypt was overthrown on February 11, 2011, the
Muslim Brotherhood stood to gain as the most formidable opponent through-
out his reign. On the other hand, new forces had appeared and made the
revolution happen, and the Brotherhood had accepted the new transition
plan of the military which would lead to open elections within few months.
Consequently, in March the Brotherhood announced the establishment of a
political party, called the Freedom and Justice Party. Within a few weeks, the
Freedom and Justice Party (fjp) produced a detailed program, largely build-
ing upon the earlier documents of the reformist wing, but taking these ideas
further in this new situation where they would no longer be dead paper. In the
general elections of December 2011 and January 2012, the Freedom and Justice
Party won almost 50 per cent of the votes and could legislate with the sup-
port of other Islamist parties to the left and right. However, the parliament was
dissolved by court order after only four months which revealed little about the
future directions of legislation in Egypt.
Things went very fast after the revolution, and the transition from jamaʿa
(society) to hizb (party) was so smooth that it was revealing. The emblem of
the Freedom and Justice Party, with a dove signalling freedom, in contrast to
the society’s emblem of a Qurʾan defended by swords and an oath of allegiance,
give an idea of the scale of the move. The name, too, was revealing; for while
justice was a long term concern and demand of the Brotherhood, freedom was
not; it smacked of moral laxity and of the Western Liberalism that the Brother-
hood has always opposed. The party itself, though, looked more recognisable:
its leaders were all well-known brothers appointed by the Brotherhood itself.
Protesting against this top-down management of the new party, a large group
of the Brotherhood’s talented younger members stepped back and established
their own party, the Egyptian Current (al-Tayyar al-Masri).
The platform of the Freedom and Justice Party celebrates political freedom,
civil rights and parliamentary politics as in accordance with Islam’s principles.
Among these civil and political rights is equal citizenship for all:
The State is based on the principle of citizenship, where all citizens en-
joy equal rights and duties guaranteed by law in accordance with the
rinciples of equality and equal opportunities without discrimination

p
because of religion or race (Chapter 2, Part 1).24
Also the equality of women is assured, albeit “consistent with the values of
Islamic law, maintaining the balance between their duties and rights” ( Chapter
2, Part 2). And freedom of religions appears to mean freedom to belong to one
of the three “heavenly” religions, but not necessarily other religions, or no
religions at all. Nevertheless, the two all-dominant religions of Egypt, Islam
and Christianity, are placed on an equal footing – a departure from traditional
Islamic, and Muslim Brotherhood, thinking. Egyptians are citizens with equal
rights, but they are citizens belonging to the religions accepted by Islam. And
these religions have a lot in common; they agree that prophets must not be in-
sulted, women should be “respected” and national culture should be cleansed
of imported “filth.”25 Muwatana then, has moved from being a formal preroga-
tive of the Muslims to being shared by Muslims and Christians – but in a con-
servative, and sometimes illiberal, variety.
This embrace of the concept of citizenship to be shared with the Christians
is underlined in the new Constitution, written almost solely by Islamists and
Salafists and adopted in a referendum in December 2012. The concept of citi-
zenship has been moved to Article 6, which stresses equal rights and duties
in a pluralistic democracy. Before that, however, Islam (Article 2) and Chris-
tianity and Judaism (Article 3) are given their due. In between the state and
the individual is the religious community (milla) which also holds rights and
defines the state. Article 2 reiterates from earlier constitutions the request that
the principles of the Shariʿa are the basis of legislation, but now an article 219
specifies and narrows the possible interpretations of this request, and a group
of Muslim scholars from the al-Azhar University is tasked with formulating the
overall interpretations of the Shariʿa (Article 4).
Moreover, at the end of the chapter on citizen rights, Article 81 reads:
Rights and freedoms pertaining to the individual citizen shall not be sub-
ject to disruption or detraction.
24 Freedom and Justice Party Election Program 2011, http://kurzman.unc.edu/files/2011/06/

FJP_2011_English.pdf.
25 Mathias Rohe and Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen, “The Ambivalent Embrace of Liberalism:
The Draft Program of the Freedom and Justice Party in Egypt,” in Arab Liberalism after
1967, ed. Meir Hatina and Christian Thuselt (London: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2015), 195–214.
No law that regulates the practice of the rights and freedoms shall in-
clude what would constrain their essence.
Such rights and freedoms shall be practiced in a manner not conflicting
with the principles pertaining to State and society included in Part 1 of
this Constitution.26
The last three lines, added to the article in this Constitution, subsumes all
rights to the overall principles of the state as listed in the first 13 articles of the
Constitution, including the definition of the state as Islamic, the legislation as
being based on Islamic principles, and the commitment of the state to defend
vaguely defined “family values” (Article 10) and “public morality” (Article 11).
More than in the Freedom and Justice Party election program, then, the
Constitution of 2012 subsumes citizen rights under religious provisions, and
tasks the state with upholding and imposing a specific religious set of norms
and values upon its citizenry. The above-mentioned stipulations gave rise to
protests, and after the military take-over in 2013 a new Constitution was passed
in January 2014 abolishing these specifically Islamic injunctions (but introduc-
ing or strengthening other limits to civic rights in the process).
The Syrian Brotherhood and Citizenship
A parallel development can be seen in the Syrian case. As mentioned above,

the Muslim Brotherhood’s first serious reform document, A View to the Future
issued in 2004 had introduced the concept of citizenship, and recognised
the religiously diverse nature of Syrian society. There was, however, a strong
emphasis on the religious identity of the individual citizen and state building
was seen as springing from the religious communities in peaceful cooperation.
Now the revolution forced the Brotherhood to signal complete acceptance
that it would be just one party among others, which might not accept the same
religious framework. In February 2012, in the run-up to an important meeting
of Western and Arab supporters of the revolutionary forces, the Syrian Muslim
Brotherhood gave in to the pressure to clarify its political position and issued
a covenant for its work for a future Syrian civil state that was characterised as
2. A democratic, pluralistic state [that operates on the principle of]

transition of power, based on the loftiest [ideals] that modern human
26 The Constitution of the Arab Republic of Egypt (2012), http://www.sis.gov.eg/newvr/

theconistitution.pdf.
thought has achieved. [A state] with a parliamentary republican regime,

in which the people elect its representatives and rulers in free, fair, and
transparent elections.
3. A state [based on] citizenship and equality, in which all citizens are
equal regardless of their ethnicity, faith, school of thought, or [political]
orientation. [A state] based on the principle of citizenship, which is the
basis for rights and duties, and in which every citizen can attain the high-
est positions based on [one of] two principles: elections or [personal]
qualifications. Furthermore, [a state in which] men and women are equal
in human dignity and legal capacity, and [in which] the woman enjoys
her full rights.27
Note the avoidance of Islamic language. The Brotherhood accepted an essen-

tially religiously neutral state where they could establish an Islamic party, just
like others could establish parties on other ideological bases. And they knew
full well that the majority of Syrians are Sunni Muslims, and many are socially
conservative. In their assessment, a democratic Syria would secure the Broth-
erhood significant influence, if not power, as had been demonstrated in Egypt
and Tunisia after the revolutions.
The concept of muwatana had come full circle; from being a means for
secular political forces to oppose the designs of Islamists for an Islamic state,
it was now considered by Islamists an integral part of the state they wanted.
A democratic state would give room for individuals and groups to pursue the
individual and collective life they wanted – and that would include Islamic
ideals that could be pursued by Islamist parties. It is, however, not inconceiv-
able that, had the Muslim Brotherhood of Syria found itself in a situation
like the one in Egypt where they and their allies would form the majority in a
constitutional assembly, it would also have opted for a state that was not only
Islamic in definition, but also in its architecture and its policies, as understood
by the Islamists themselves.
And Back to the Islamist Thinkers
The Islamist thinkers of the second wave were sympathetic to the Muslim
Brotherhood, but also critical of its conservatism it was they, after all, who for-
mulated the idea of equal citizenship, based on a new reading of the Medina
Constitution. Although respected and publishing freely in the Mubarak era,
27 “Syrian Muslim Brotherhood: Pledge and Charter on Syria,” http://carnegieendowment

.org/syriaincrisis/?fa=48390, accessed March 16 2015.
they were jubilant in February 2011 when the revolution succeeded, and in
March one of them, Tariq al-Bishri, was appointed head of a commission which
prepared for constitutional amendments that could pave the way for a fair
election law. Another of them, Muhammad Salim al-ʿAwwa, was a candidate
in the first presidential elections, and briefly participated in the constitutional
assembly. When Mursi came to power, most of them were supportive, and the
journalist Fahmy Huweidi actively defended president Mursi’s November 2012
decree granting himself immunity from legal oversight.28 Since the military
takeover in July 2013, they have continued living in Egypt and writing, albeit
cautiously, and Huweidi was barred from leaving the country.
The odd man out once again is shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi. After his sermon
in Tahrir Square he engaged in the revolutions in Libya, Yemen and Syria, call-
ing for their presidents to step down (or even get killed). But not the uprising
in Bahrain, which he denounced as a Shiʿi conspiracy, and in May 2013 he tried
to mobilise the Sunni world against the Shiʿi support for president Assad of
Syria.29 Sunni Islamist power, rather than the power of the people, seemed to
be the goal. This also became evident in his unflinching support for the Mursi
government. After the military takeover in 2013, al-Qaradawi was a vocal critic
of the new ruler, general al-Sisi. When in 2014 he also criticised Saudi Arabia
and the United Arab Emirates for their financial support to al-Sisi (who was
now elected president of Egypt), these countries responded by withdrawing
their ambassadors from Doha. Soon afterwards Qatar seems to have banned
him from preaching in order to mend fences with its powerful neighbours.
What is important here is that al-Qaradawi and his allies in the Interna-
tional Union of Muslim Scholars not only supported the revolutions with
sermons and statements, but also with publications on a new fiqh centered
upon the relationship between citizen and state. Adopting the term “fiqh of the
revolution,” the gist of the idea is that rules of jurisprudence that are normally
valid may be temporarily discarded for the sake of the higher interests of the
28 http://www.mbc.net/ar/programs/monashazly/qadaya/articles/%D9%81%
D9%87%D9%85%D9%8A-%D9%87%D9%88%D9%8A%D8%AF%D9%
8A-%D9%84%D9%80-%D8%AC%D9%85%D9%84%D8%A9-%D9
% 8 5 % D 9 % 8 1 % D 9 % 8 A % D 8 % A F % D 8 % A 9 - - - % D 8 %
A8%D8%AF%D8%A7%D8%A6%D9%84-%D9%85%D8%B1%D8%B3%D9%
8A-%D9%83%D9%84%D9%87%D8%A7-%D9%83%D9%88%D8%A7%D8%
B1%D8%AB.html#comment%7Clist, accessed March 19, 2015.
29 A detailed account of al-Qaradawi’s words and actions in the years after the revolution
is provided by David H. Warren, “The ʿUlamaʾ and the Arab Uprisings 2011–13: Consider-
ing Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the ‘Global Mufti’, between the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic
Legal Tradition, and Qatari Foreign Policy,” New Middle East Studies 4 (2014): 2–33.
u mma.30 Having always promoted the idea that fiqh must serve the communi-
ty of believers al-Qaradawi has nevertheless considered this general p rinciple
of al-maslaha al-ʿamma (public interest) as a supplementary guideline, clearly
subsumed under the general texts and rulings.31 With the fiqh al-thawra, how-
ever, there appeared to be much more leeway for broad considerations of the
interest of the umma. And yet, when in June 2013 al-Qaradawi came to Cai-
ro and witnessed the unpopularity of Mursi he made an appeal through his
programs to the Egyptians that it was unlawful to depose him. And when the
military actually took power, al-Qaradawi in a fatwa denounced this, arguing
firstly that, from a political point of view Mursi was elected and must remain in
office until the next elections, and secondly, from an Islamic legal point of view
that sedition is only defensible if the ruler renounces his faith or commands
his subjects to act against it.32 As pointed out by David Warren, this last tradi-
tional quietist argument stands in contrast to the creativity and utilitarianism
displayed by al-Qaradawi two years earlier when he promoted the idea of a fiqh
of the revolution.33
Conclusion
This chapter has outlined how the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Syria in
a period of authoritarian rule moved towards more inclusive and democratic
visions of society, but ultimately failed – or were never given the chance – when
the Arab Uprisings ushered in an era of free elections. At the time of writing
in the spring of 2015 the Brotherhood in both Egypt and Syria is struggling to
survive what they term the “ordeal” (al-mihna), feeling that, once again, God
is testing their steadfastness. To some of the brothers, the decision to adopt
a new constitutional thinking was probably merely a strategic choice, but to
others it must have been a true conviction. Whatever the motives might be,
the documents of the Egyptian and Syrian Brotherhoods undeniably affirmed
a new understanding of how an Islamic state must be organised. These docu-
ments were written by reformist brothers, but their ideas came from a small
30 Warren, “The ʿUlamaʾ and the Arab Uprisings,” 12.

31 David L. Johnston, “Yusuf al-Qaradawi’s Purposive Fiqh: Promoting or Demoting the
Future Role of the Ulama?” in Maqasid al-Shariʿa and Contemporary Muslim Reformist
Thought: An Examination, ed. Adis Duderija (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 39–72.
32 Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Fatwat taʿyid al-raʾis al-muntakhab, July 24, 2013. http://iumsonline
.org/ar/default.asp?menuID=6&contentID=6666.
33 Warren, “The ʿUlamaʾ and the Arab Uprisings,” 24.
group of Islamist writers whom I have called the second generation of Islam-
ic constitutionalists. Writing from the time of the Iranian revolution of 1979,
these men believed that a Sunni Islamic state would have to be a parliamentary
democracy that would establish the rule of law, checks and balances of the
powers, and something coming close to equal political citizenship for men and
women, and Muslims and non-Muslims. Not all Islamists would agree.
But the second wave of Islamic constitutionalists were also of a generation
who believed in a strong and centralized state, anti-Imperialist, an enemy of
Israel and a defender of Islam and the Muslims. Their interest lay with the
strength of this state and its legitimacy in the eyes of its people as a reviver
of the greatness of Islamic civilization. Like the first generation they were op-
posing “tyranny” (istibdad) with “justice” (ʿadl), and not with freedom. They
believed in a unified and strong popular will. The secular Arab ruling repub-
licanism was, in their eyes, unjust, mainly because it imposed its Secularism
upon a people who largely wanted to live a pious life in a Muslim society. Their
concern, then, was with the people and its will, not with the individual and his
or her freedom, including the freedom to live as he pleases and believe what
he wants to believe. Citizenship, for them, was first of all a question of equal-
ity in rights and duties: the right to live in a just society, and the duty to live by
its “values.” With time, they managed to find ways to include Christians in the
citizenry of the Islamic state. But they were thinking of Christians as a group,
and excluding other, not recognized groups of believers.
In November 2014 I met two of the second generation of Islamic constitu-
tional thinkers in Beirut. Muhammad Salim al-ʿAwwa and Tariq al-Bishri were
understandably depressed over the counter-revolution and the new authori-
tarian conditions in Egypt. Although they were still engaged in writing (and al-
ʿAwwa was one of the lawyers of president Mursi) they are also quite old. Tariq
al-Bishri was 81, and al-ʿAwwa, the youngest of the group, was 71. Al-Qaradawi
was 89 and, though still active, politically a spent force. He, in particular, had
revealed the limits to his understanding of citizenship rights.
The question, then, is: will there be a third generation of Islamic Constitu-
tional thinkers who will shift the focus from state paternalism to citizen auton-
omy, from the will of the people to the freedom and rights of the individual?
If the 1979 Iranian revolution inspired new Sunni constitutional thinking of
a certain ideological hue, will the much more liberalist slogans of the Arab
revolutions of 2011 inspire constitutional thinking on the part of a younger
Islamist generation to match? I think that there is reason to expect such new
thinking, again not from inside the Brotherhood, but perhaps from the broader
Islamist-leaning current in the Arab World which never felt at ease with the
authoritarian tendencies of the Muslim Brotherhood. The people who ran
I slamist websites such as IslamOnline, or the younger brothers who sided with
the revolution, such as the Egyptian Current group, or the group behind the
al-Arabi tv (launched in January 2015 in London).
One of the themes that was beginning to be explored already prior
to the Arab Uprisings was taking the notion of the “civil state” (al-dawla
a l-madaniyya) beyond the confines of the second generation (who used it to
distance the Islamic state from a theocratic and a military state, but also from
a secular state), and considering the Islamic state a secular state with certain
modifications. This has more or less been the outcome of the Tunisian con-
stitutional process, but it has also been endorsed by Ennahda Party and its
main thinker, Rachid al-Ghannouchi. Similar efforts have been made by the
younger Islamist thinker Jasser Auda who in his book Between Sharia and Poli-
tics: Questions for the Post-Revolutionary Phase posits that the religious sphere
and the civil sphere have significant overlaps.34 Both al-Ghannouchi and Auda
are members of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, and their writings
carry weight in Islamist circles. This cautious embrace of secularism makes for
a more flexible approach to some of those Shariʿa issues that have been hin-
dering an embrace of equal citizenship for Muslims and non-Muslims, in that
the Islamic state is defined less by its adoption of specific items of legislation,
and more with a broader approach focusing on public interest and the broader
“intentions” (maqasid) of the Shariʿa. And there is a certain acceptance that
some features of Islamic law, for instance the so-called hudud punishments,
may not be implemented due to resistance by parts of the population, including
Muslims.35 This is a small sign of acceptance that authority could rest with the
individual citizen, also when it comes to formulating what the Shariʿa should
mean today.
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chapter 13
The Ambiguity of Citizenship in

Contemporary Salafism
Emin Poljarevic1
Religious Citizenship
The idea of citizenship (muwatana) for many, if not most, activist Salafis repre-
sents an expression of belonging to a community of believers within or without
the confines of state borders. This communitarian understanding ties in with
their particular theological understanding of religious, and therefore social
and political, boundaries between communities – an us vs. them worldview –
that implies that some of the rights and responsibilities of “believers” are not
available to “unbelievers” or to the wrong kind of “believers.” Like many other
fundamentalist religious movements2 (e.g. Haredi Jewish groups, the Vishva
Hindu Parishad, or the Buddhist Madhatha movement, and even pre-modern
Calvinists), Salafi groups are keen to separate friends from enemies and the
righteous from the unrighteous.3 What is more, the particular Salafi worldview
1 Much of this chapter is based on research funding provided by the Wenner-Gren Foundation
between 2013–2014. I also wish to thank Roel Meijer and Jay Willoughby for their comments,
insights, and editing work.
2 John Bowker, “Fundamentalism,” in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions, ed. John
Bowker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Among the many definitions of Salafism is
the following: “Salafism: A puritanical movement in Islam that emphasizes a conservative
and literalist interpretation of scriptural sources. Literally followers of the salaf as-salih, or
‘pious predecessors’, Salafis emphasize exclusive reliance on the teachings of the early Mus-
lims closest to the Prophet Muhammad. Classical Salafism is concerned almost exclusively
with issues of creedal purity and the authenticity of scriptural sources, but in recent years
Salafism has become cross-fertilised with overtly political groups.” See also, The Pew Forum
on Religion and Public Life, “Muslim Networks and Movements in Western Europe” (Wash-
ington dc: Pew Research Center, 2010); R. Meijer, ed., Global Salafism: Islam’s New Religious
Movement (New York: Hurst, 2009), xiii–xiv; Emin Poljarevic, “In Pursuit of Authenticity:
Becoming a Salafi,” Comparative Islamic Studies 8 (2012): 140.
3 See Teun A. Van Dijk, Ideology: A Multidisciplinary Approach (London: Sage, 1994), 1–3. A so-
cial movement outlook can be found in Robert D. Benford and David A. Snow, “Framing Pro-
cesses and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment,” Annual Review of Sociology 26
(2000): 611–639, especially 619–622. A relevant overview of social movement theories and Islam-
ic activism is presented in Quintan Wiktorowicz, “Introduction: Islamic Activism and Social

Ambiguity of Citizenship in Contemporary Salafism 339
ultimately produces strict, dichotomising sets of practices that perpetuate the

continuous conflict between “friends and enemies,” wherein members of the
in-group are on God’s side and those of the out-group are not.4 The method of
separating these opposites permeates not only their religious and social activi-
ties, but also marks their political activism.
For example, this impulse to differentiate is often based on a specific religio-
ideological frame that determines the particular movement’s aims and scope
of operations.5 In this case, the logic of differentiation is premised on the be-
lief that religious communities are the foundation of a society and, by exten-
sion, a state or even a supra-state structure such as the Caliphate.6 As shown
elsewhere, the Salafis’ primary activity is to invoke the Qurʾan as the primary
source of both individual and collective identity.7 Such activities are usually
demonstrated through their observable everyday practices, such as ankle-long
robes for men and full face-veils for women, and a distinctive vocabulary, be-
haviour patterns, and orientation in the social space.8 Much has been said
about both the religious and social roots of such practices.9
Movement Theory,” in Islamic Activism: A Social Movement Theory Approach, ed. Quintan
Wiktorowicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 1–37.
4 Richard Antoun, “Fundamentalism,” in The New Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Reli-
gion, ed. Bryan S. Turner (New York: Blackwell, 2010), 519–543.
5 As will become clearer below, this impulse to differentiate is very strong among many Salafi
groups. Despite their claim of doctrinal and practical unity, coherence, and consistency, self-
proclaimed Salafis are part of a disjointed religious movement. See Quintan Wiktorowicz,
“Anatomy of the Salafi Movement,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 29 (2006): 207–239; also
Emin Poljarevic, “Les Salafistes and a French Reproduction of Certainties in a World of Un-
certainties,” Muslim World (2016): 145–55.
6 Sultaan ibn ʿAbdurrahmaan al-ʿEed The Way to Salafiyyah, (e-book, undated), http://almu-
flihoon.com/media/ebooks/AlMuflihoon/theway.pdf. Other related religious decrees by
this quietist Salafi scholar can be found at http://www.fatwa-online.com/category/scholars/
sultaan-eed/. Al-ʿEed’s remarks are neither controversial nor deviant from standard pietist
Salafi arguments, especially those represented by the Saudi religious establishment.
7 Emin Poljarevic, “In Pursuit of Authenticity: Becoming a Salafi,” Comparative Islamic Studies,
8 (2012): 139–164, especially 141–143. See also Bryan S. Turner, “Acts of Piety: The Political and
the Religious, or a Tale of Two Cities,” in Acts of Citizenship, ed. Engin F. Isin and Greg M.
Nielsen (London: Zed Books, 2008), 121–136, especially 133–135.
8 See Güney Dogan, “Moral Geographies and the Disciplining of Senses,” Comparative Islamic
Studies 8 (2012): 93–112. The issue of religious symbols and citizenship is just as controversial
in the mena region as it is some parts of Western Europe, and cuts deeper than the issue
of citizenship rights and social belonging. For more on this topic, see an early text of Nilu-
fur Göle, The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1996).
9 Roel Meijer, “Yusuf al-ʿUyairi and the Making of a Revolutionary Salafi Praxis,” Die Welt des
Islams 47 (2007): 422–459; Roxanne L. Euben, Enemy in the Mirror. Islamic Fundamentalism
340 Poljarevic
By invoking the Qurʾan, Salafis promote pre-modern solutions to the many

problems caused by modernity. Like many social movement organisations in
the Middle East and North African region (mena), among them the Islamists
(such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Ennahda Party, the Islamic Action Front,
and the Sahwa movement), the Salafis have opposed some of the most visible
aspects of the modern nation-state’s formation, such as the centralisation of
political power and institutionalisation of religious authority, which has most
often opposed their interpretations of religious texts by employing the repres-
sive force of the state.10 Salafi groups have responded to these challenges pri-
marily by developing a range of mobilisation strategies11 that do not seek just
to deal with modernity, but which are part of a project to create an alternative
modernity. Even though these groups claim to be theologically consistent with
the “authentic” (literal) meaning of (Sunni) Islam’s canonical texts, their activ-
ism demonstrates great diversity in both theory and praxis, especially in terms
of understanding the political. This contradiction, their claims of guarding the
authentic Islamic teachings and their diverse ways of expressing these claims,
is perhaps their greatest asset – so much so that it has made them one of the
mena region’s most significant social, and in a few instances political, forces.
and the Limits of Modern Rationalism: A Work of Comparative Political Theory (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1999); Adis Duderija, “Constructing the Religious Self and the
Other: Neo-traditional Salafi Manhaj,” Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations 21 (2010):
75–93; Roel Meijer, “Politicising al-Jarh wa-l-Taʿdil: Rabiʿ b. Hadi al-Madkhali and the
Transnational Battle for Religious Authority,” in Essays in Honour of Harald Motzki, ed.
Nicolet Boekhoff-van der Voort, Kees Versteegh, and Joas Wagemakers (Leiden: Brill, 2011),
375–399.
10 See Emin Poljarevic, “Islamic Tradition and the Meanings of Modernity,” International
Journal for History, Culture and Modernity 3 (2015): 29–57.
11 An overview of Salafism as a diverse social and religious movement can be found in Roel
Meijer, ed., Global Salafism: Islam’s New Religious Movement (New York: Hurst, 2009). One
of the most cited overviews of the categorisation of Salafi groups can be found in Quintan
Wiktorowicz, “Anatomy of the Salafi Movement,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 29 (2006):
207–239. Here, Wiktorowicz divides Salafis into three major clusters: purists, politicos,
and jihadis, and defines them as follows: “The purists emphasize a focus on nonviolent
methods of propagation, purification, and education. They view politics as a diversion
that encourages deviancy. Politicos, in contrast, emphasize application of the Salafi creed
to the political arena, which they view as particularly important because it dramatically
impacts social justice and the right of God alone to legislate. Jihadis take a more militant
position and argue that the current context calls for violence and revolution. All three fac-
tions share a common creed but offer different explanations of the contemporary world
and its concomitant problems and thus propose different solutions. The splits are about
contextual analysis, not belief” (page 208).
The broader Salafi movement consists exclusively of conservative Sunni

groups that claim to be the inheritors and guardians of the Islamic axial period (ca.
610 – 661) and sometimes even elements from the early Islamic tradition (662 –
ca. 800s). Their literal interpretations of the canonical religious sources (the
Qurʾan and the books of Sunna) seek to reach doctrinal purity and establish ortho-
praxy. Their primary goal, as with many historical revivalist/reactionary move-
ments, is to achieve a political, spiritual, and economic revival of Muslim-major-
ity societies,12 and their main principle is to establish the political dominance of
Islamic monotheism on a global scale, regardless of the existence (or lack there-
of) of any other religion(s). The driving force here is the belief in the Divine’s im-
manence through the existence of the “righteous” community (i.e. Salafis) and
the closely-related obligation to establish the “pure” Islamic political order.13 For
example, Salafis often invoke one important principle in terms of their envi-
sioned society: al-amr bi-l-maʿruf wa-l-nahi ʿan al-munkar (“enjoining the good
and forbidding the evil”).14 Enjoining here also means ordering as well as encour-
aging the good. This consideration is important, as most Salafis, at least in Egypt,
are either explicitly or implicitly bound by the principle of rifq (public civility)
and thus find it necessary to endorse a non-violent notion of implementing
this principle in order to maintain their imaginary us vs. them dichotomy.15
12 There is a clear overlap among revivalist, reactionary, and even some revolutionary move-
ments that look back at specific historical periods and draw not only inspiration but also
ideals to be implemented, revived, or simply copied into the new spatial context. For
example, the early intellectuals of the Renaissance looked back to classical Greece and
Rome, copying and reviving their cultural and artistic legacies. Likewise, the intellectual
elites behind the Romanticism of the early 19th century opposed the sweeping changes
of the Industrial Age, during which technology and rationalism dominated the vision of
human ideals.
13 Jamaal al-Din M. Zarabozo, The Life, Teachings and Influence of Muhammad ibn Abdul-
Wahhaab (Riyadh: The Ministry of Islamic Affairs, Endowments, Dawah and Guidance,
2003), 11–15.
14 This Qurʾanic principle represents a general obligation encompassing the moral and ethi-
cal conduct of all Muslims. Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), who is frequently celebrated by Salafis,
understood this principle to be directly connected to the concept of jihad, an opinion
held by ʿulamaʾ before and ever since the 14th century. He developed a new focus: repair-
ing the Muslim domain from what he perceived to be public and religious wrongdoings
and structural corruption within the political establishment. See Michael Cook, Com-
manding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2000), 151–160.
15 Yasir al-Burhami, “Enjoining the good and forbidding the evil,” January 1, 2015, Summary
of an audio lecture on the Salafi Call’s official website, http://www.anasalafy.com/play
.php?catsmktba=53005.
342 Poljarevic
This dichotomy is important to keep in mind, especially as regards their con-

ceptualisation of citizenship.16
Salafism can be considered an umbrella term that refers to those self-
proclaimed religious activists, namely the Salafis, who share a family resem-
blance. These similarities are located in the shared theological framework
generated by their literalist approach to and interpretation of Sunni canoni-
cal texts.17 The differences among various Salafi currents primarily depend
on their strategies. This is both a source of miscommunication among lead-
ing Salafi personalities in their inter-personal rivalries as well as a reflection
of a more complex issue related to political and social enmity.18 We find that
intra-Salafi rivalry leads many groups to develop distinct mobilisation strate-
gies, ranging from exclusively spiritual and proselytising activities to parlia-
mentary politics and even violent attacks against perceived enemies. In other
words, despite their claim to religious authenticity, unity, and doctrinal purity,
they are neither insulated from the permeating processes of social and politi-
cal change nor from the impact of the idea of citizenship.19 In order to better
grasp this tension between their will to remain “authentic” and, at the same
time, their will to stay socially and politically relevant, I will first demonstrate
the broad Salafi understanding of the political, followed by three different ex-
amples in which this tension is manifested.
16 See Imad Jaad, “Faces of Tribulations,” al-Masry al-Youm June 29, 2015, http://today.almas-
ryalyoum.com/article2.aspx?ArticleID=469313; see also Imad Khalil and Hamdi Dabsh
“Bishop Jeremia: ‘I reject the third amendment of the constitution’,” al-Masry al-Youm,
September 24, 2013, http://today.almasryalyoum.com/article2.aspx?ArticleID=397865.
17 Most if not all Salafis agree on the Islamic canons (this goes for most Sunni jurispruden-
tial schools) with a slight difference in the attention, or methodological emphasis, given
to various textual sources and in relation to a specific issue (e.g. Is a democratic political
order in conflict with Islamic principles?).
18 The strategy of inter-personal rivalry is sometimes expressed through a contemporary
and expanded version of the classical Islamic method of source critique (in Hadith lit-
erature), jarh wa taʿdil (praise and criticism), wherein various influential Muslim scholars
and groups are acknowledged as “righteous,” “pious,” “the people of the Sunnah,” “innova-
tors in religion,” “sinners,” or simply “criminals.” See the website of a contemporary Saudi
pietist Salafi scholar Rabiʿ bin Hadi al-Madkhali and his application of “criticism” to other
Muslim groups: www.rabee.net/ar/rabeegroups.php.
19 Emin Poljarevic, “In Pursuit of Authenticity: Becoming a Salafi”; and Emin Poljarevic, “Les
salafistes and a French Reproduction of Certainties.”
Salafism and the Political
Acknowledging religious differences within a population and identifying “the

other” by creating an in-group unity is an essential part of Salafism’s broader
political ideology.20 A social group’s understanding of the political strongly
influences its shared conception of larger socio-political bonds, among them
citizenship. For instance, Salafis identify intensely with what they call manhaj,
a specific set of socio-political actions (e.g. religious proselytisation, political
activism, study circles, sport activities, and even military combat), as well as
with religious values and beliefs that delineate the boundaries of a moral com-
munity. Such consideration suggests that their understanding of the political
has a bearing on their theoretical conceptualisation of community and col-
lective belonging. In other words, the primary task of Salafi mobilisation in
regard to the larger society, whether Muslim-majority or not, is to promote a
particular understanding and practice of Islam by establishing its normative
principles. Consequently, establishing the principles of one’s understanding of
the Islamic tradition includes politicising its doctrine. This process brings the
idea of manhaj into sharper focus.
For instance, the political work of some Salafi groups reveals the specific
method of their exclusionary process, which also establishes a dichotomy be-
tween friends (the members of one’s moral community, who share a common
worldview and the strategies to achieve their ambitions) and enemies (every-
one else, for all of them are, by definition, their moral, political, and ideological
adversaries).21 Such logic is common among populist political groups, which
make sharp distinctions between members of the narrowly defined in-group
and the out-group. The “other” is often represented as the “corrupt” and an
essentially evil moral, political, economic, cultural, and otherwise out-group
20 This is linked to the traditional Salafi (also mainstream Sunni madhahib) conceptualisa-
tion of an ancient Islamic terminology, al-firqa al-najiya (the saved sect) or, more often in
jihadist circles, al-ṭaʾifa al-mansura (the victorious group), which is qualitatively different
from umma, the more common word for community (or nation). For a useful overview
of Muslim sects and who is/is not a true believer, see Montgomery Watt, “Conditions of
Membership of the Islamic Community,” Studia Islamica 21 (1964): 5–12.
21 Or at least on the principle of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” For example, in
the aftermath of Muhammad Morsi’s overthrow, Hizb al-Nour sided with Abdel Fattah
al-Sisi’s military regime against its main political rival, the Muslim Brotherhood; see also
Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap between Us and Them (New
York: Penguin, 2013), 4–10.
344 Poljarevic
member.22 Similarly, most, if not all, self-proclaimed Salafi groups strive to

revive the various pre-modern religious principles of collective allegiance in
modern political contexts, something that has been a characteristic of the
broader Islamist activist tradition since the 1970s.23 This is not as reaction-
ary as it might appear at first, for the Salafis’ exclusionary element of religious
community-based citizenship is analogous to the idea of nationality-based
citizenship,24 as both are grounded in the idea of an imagined community of
individual agents who share a set of exclusionary characteristics that are cost-
ly, difficult, or even impossible to attain.25
In such a socio-political context, the political implies the continual presence
of enemies, those “others” whose mere existence threatens the very survival
and composition of the community of “believers,” be they related to one an-
other through a shared religious creed, skin colour, or belonging to a common
“nation,” language group, or culture. Schmitt explicated such a dynamic in 1920:
The phenomenon of the political can be understood only in the context

of the ever[−]present possibility of the friend-and-enemy grouping, re-
gardless of the aspects which this possibility implies for morality, aes-
thetics, and economics.26
Even though this argument was presented as a critique of the democratic

praxis found in the Weimar Republic, we can nevertheless detect common el-
ements of the enmity that defined parliamentary politics during periods of
22 Cas Mudde, “The Populist Zeitgeist,” Governance and Opposition 39 (2004): 541–563,
especially 544.
23 See Ibrahim Abu-Rabiʿ, “Contemporary Islamic Thought: One or Many?” in The Blackwell
Companion to Contemporary Islamic Thought, ed. Ibrahim Abu-Rabiʿ (Malden: Blackwell
Publishing, 2004), 1–20.
24 Similarly, the struggle of Black Muslim slaves, but also Arabs and Turks, in antebellum
America was defined by race and religion. In other words, skin colour and creed were
used as important criteria for u.s. citizenship. This was particularly evident in the u.s.
Naturalization Act. See Khaled Beydoun, “Antebellum Islam,” Howard Law Journal 58
(2014): 141–193; Sylviane Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas
(New York: New York University Press, 1998).
25 See Uri Davis, “Conceptions of Citizenship in the Middle East: State, Nation, and People,”
in Citizenship and the State in the Middle East: Approaches and Applications, eds. Nils
Butenschøn, Uri A. Davis, and Manuel Hassassian (New York: Syracuse University Press,
2000), 49–69.
26 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
2007), 35.
popular distress and national crises in both post-World War I Germany and,
for example, post-2011 Egypt. If we are to adopt Schmitt’s basic premise that
“democracy rests on the principle that not only are equals equal but [that]
unequals will not be treated equally,” we can also understand his succeeding
postulation that “democracy requires, […] first homogeneity and second – if
the need arises – [the] elimination or eradication of heterogeneity.”27 In other
words, in highly polarised societies, be they religiously, politically, ideologi-
cally, or socially divided and stratified, we can assume that the democratic pro-
cess is unlikely to produce equality and social cohesion. Instead, what seems
to happen is that inequality needs to be recognised as the dominating social
superstructure within which every particular social group or stratum needs
to create internal mechanisms of equality and cohesion to secure its contin-
ued existence in the face of constant threats from rival groups – “others” or
“enemies.” He exemplifies this argument by reviewing a historical interaction
among religious groups:
In the democracy of English sects during the seventeenth century

e quality was based on a consensus of religious convictions. Since the
nineteenth century it has existed above all in membership in a particular
nation, in national homogeneity. Equality is only interesting and valuable
politically so long as it has substance, and for that reason at least the pos-
sibility and the risk of inequality.28
Here, he seems to be suggesting that the substance of equality rests on the con-
ceptualisation of the political, whereas social relations rest on the distinction
between “friend” and “enemy.” More concretely, equality among the in-group’s
27 Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (Cambridge ma: mit Press, 2000),
9. The idea that the democratic order is a uniquely Western concept has been promoted
by Samuel Huntington, who identifies Western civilisation as thoroughly modern and
unique and therefore at odds with all other civilisations. This is principally because its
display of long-term “industrialization, urbanization, increasing levels of literacy, edu-
cation, wealth, and social mobilization, and more complex and diversified occupational
structures” have contributed to its “success” and, arguably, its domination over others;
Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 68. A more pragmatic and constructive understanding of
democracy as a universal set of principles (as opposed to a more limited understanding
of it as an administrative mechanism of political power transfer), including a complex
view of liberalism as a form of cosmopolitanism, can be found in Roland Niezen, A World
Beyond Difference: Cultural Identity in the Age of Globalization (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004),
in particular the concluding chapter of the book, 168ff.
28 Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, 9.
346 Poljarevic
members is a precondition for a functioning democratic order within the

margins of that particular group (“us”). “Others” are considered aliens, foreign-
ers, and non-citizens even by contemporary liberal democracies based on uni-
versal human rights,29 as “enemies” (to various degrees and in various shapes)
who cannot be a part of this order because their religious, ideological, or social
loyalty rests elsewhere. Such reasoning remains prevalent in nation-states, be
they democratic or otherwise, and, paradoxically, is at odds with liberalism.30
The political and politics are conceptually different here. Schmitt rightly ar-
gues that politics is a game or a system within the realm of the political and
wherein antagonism is real and ongoing. Politics in this case recognises the
political with its antagonistic potential, which will make a state a stronger and
more virile international actor. Otherwise, if a state’s political elite allows poli-
tics to become pluralistic, “liberal,” and tolerant of social and political groups’
differences, it inevitably finds itself weak and sterile, hence unable to fulfil its
power potential – e.g. to control and dominate others.31 Schmitt believes that
the highest goal (i.e. self-actualisation) of any given state is to dominate others
(states etc.). War is therefore a real option and the ultimate test of the (com-
pleteness of the) political:
The friend, enemy, and combat concepts receive their real meaning pre-
cisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing. War
follows from enmity. War is the existential negation of the enemy. It is the
most extreme consequence of enmity. It does not have to be common,
normal, something ideal, or desirable. But it must nevertheless remain a
real possibility for as long as the concept of the enemy remains valid.32
Such basic assumptions of the political, namely, that it is shaped and domi-
nated by the dynamic distinction, antagonism, and possibility of war between
friends and enemies, is directly related to the Salafi-promoted ideas of “loyalty
and disavowal,” whereby loyalty to Islamic principles, as interpreted by them,
29 See Chantal Mouffe, “Carl Schmitt and the Paradox of Liberal Democracy,” in The Chal-
lenge of Carl Schmitt, ed. Chantal Mouffe (London: Verso, 1999). See also Schmitt, The
Concept of the Political, 71–72.
30 For a contemporary example of a similar paradox, see Samer Shehata, “In Egypt Demo-
crats vs. Liberals,” New York Times, July 2, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/03/
opinion/in-egypt-democrats-vs-liberals.html. This contradiction continues to challenge
contemporary social theorists. For an overview of the important challenges, see Mouffe,
“Carl Schmitt and the Paradox of Liberal Democracy,” and Alfred Stepan and Juan J. Linz,
“Democratization Theory and the ‘Arab Spring’,” Journal of Democracy 24 (2013): 15–30.
31 Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 69ff.
32 Ibid., 33.
makes one an authentic Muslim and therefore a moral “citizen” of the Mus-
lim “nation” (umma) that, ideally, transcends state borders. Many of the jihadi
Salafi groups, most prominently Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (isis), consider
this line of reasoning a central tenet of its operative structure.
In claiming Islamic authenticity and purity, Salafis represent a narrowly
defined vanguard of Islam that (in a variety of ways) asserts truth claims, in-
cluding the concept of the political sometimes manifested in everyday parlia-
mentary politics.33 The totalising impulse of Salafism or of any other political
thought claiming universalism (e.g. neo-liberalism or communism) incorpo-
rates questions related to legitimacy of political power, effective governance,
and peoples’ identification with a political, social, and/or communal entity.
As such, Salafi political theology is, among other things, systematised around
the idea of a hierarchy of religious communities defined through and catego-
rised on the basis of their creed.34 This does not mean that theirs is a political
project void of variation. Despite their claim of unity and coherence, Salafi
communalism is shaped and occurs within an international order defined by
nation-state politics. This reality leads to real disparities among Salafi groups,
disparities expressed primarily through their differing mobilisation strategies.
This is not only a tactical divergence, as some claim,35 but is rather part of
the theological prioritising that asserts specific features and/or objectives of
the groups’ shared ambitions: the establishment of a morally flawless Islamic
society.36
Much like other social movements, the strategic prioritising of a group is
affected by both the cultural and socio-political realities that surround it. As
discussed below, some Salafi groups, mainly politicos, enter politics so thor-
oughly that they effectively replace their notion of the political by the func-
tions of politics;37 thereby, at least in practice, they are transformed. They
make a c onscious shift from considering communal interaction exclusively
33 Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan Van Antwerpen, Rethinking Secular-
ism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), especially the introductory chapter, and in
part Chapters 8 and 10.
34 At the top of these communities would be the “righteous” Muslims (i.e. Salafis), “People
of the Book” (Jews and Christians), and sometimes followers of other monotheistic
religions.
35 Wiktorowicz, “Anatomy of the Salafi Movement.”
36 Tawfiq al-Saif, “Political Islam in Saudi Arabia: Recent Trends and Future Prospects,”
Contemporary Arab Affairs 7 (2014): 398–420.
37 This usually means that a political group focuses on negotiations and compromises inter-
nally as well externally in order to reach certain objectives prioritised by the leaders of
that particular group.
348 Poljarevic
through the theological framework to the more pragmatic practice of masla-

ha, or benefit.38 For instance, a Salafi political party engages in cooperation
with state authorities in order to ensure its survival within the existing politi-
cal framework. Their political participation in turn safeguards this particular
Salafi group’s primary activity – religious proselytisation.
Its subsequent rationalisation for political participation and cooperation
with an un-Islamic regime surely violates their basic theological principle of
al-walaʾ wa-l-baraʾ – to show allegiance and affection to that which God ap-
proves of (everything that complies with Islamic principles), and disavowal
of that which is considered un-Islamic. Nevertheless, when faced with non-
existence it asserts the notion of necessity, or rather that of benefit. Such a
“utilitarian moment” allows the group’s leadership to temporarily or at least
partially violate a central moral principle in order to secure, defend, and pro-
mote “the greater good.” It follows, therefore, that any analysis conducted by
Salafi politicos needs to consider the socio-political context to a far greater
degree than has been the case up to now. It is within the context of the state,
its institutional framework, and unique feature (i.e. the claim of sovereignty
[of a nation, a people, or a single leader]) that Salafis in general, but politicos
in particular, operate in their attempts to accommodate their claims to the
“realities” of state power.39
38 Such shifts in practice and interpretation among Salafis are not uncommon. Consider, for
instance, a shift in recommending (Saudi) Muslims not to settle in (or even visit) non-
Muslim “lands” (e.g. eu states) for purposes of employment to allowing them to settle
down if necessary (i.e. not finding employment in a Muslim-majority state). See Abd
al-Razzaq al-ʿAfifi, “Hukm al-safar ila bilad al-kufr lil-amal” [Ruling on Travelling to the
Land of Non-Muslims for Work], in 500 Jawab fi al-Buyuʾ wa al-Muʿamalat, ed. Ahmad
A. al-Sharifʾi, (Cairo: Dar ibn hazm, 2010); a related issue concerns the early Nasir al-Din
al-Albani’s defiance on the issue of non-requirement of niqab – a significant minority
opinion among Salafi scholars. This can be found in Stéphane Lacroix, “Muhammad Na-
sir al-Din al-Albani’s Contribution to Contemporary Salafism,” in Global Salafism: Islam’s
New Religious Movement ed. Roel Meijer (New York: Hurst, 2009), 58–80. See also Wil-
liam McCants, “The Lesser of Two Evils: The Salafi Turn to Party Politics in Egypt,” Middle
East Memo, 23 (Washington dc, The Brookings Institution, 2012), www.brookings.edu/
research/papers/2012/05/01-salafi-egypt-mccants; Uriya Shavit, “‘The Lesser of Two Evils’:
Islamic Law and the Emergence of a Broad Agreement on Muslim Participation in West-
ern Political Systems,” Contemporary Islam 8 (2014): 239–259.
39 An innovative analysis of the relation between Islamic judicial tradition and the idea of
the modern nation-state can be found in Wael Hallaq, The Impossible State: Islam, Politics
and Modernity’s Moral Predicament (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), espe-
cially Chapter 1.
The notion of state sovereignty, on the other hand, is particularly appealing

to Salafi groups, for it includes a state’s ability to “command” its citizens toward
the “truth.” This means that there is a process of valorisation (and thus priori-
tisation of ethical goals) of what sovereignty means, which is directly linked
to a modern state’s capacity to influence public space and opinion. In other
words, politicos and jihadi Salafis, regardless of their radically different strate-
gies, choose to engage with politics so they can command, or at least strongly
affect, public opinion. The state’s capacity to create “equality” and order within
a majority group (i.e. Muslims within a Muslim-majority society) and its domi-
nance over others is attractive.
Salafis consider the individual’s political loyalty and identity as primarily,
but not exclusively, determined by one’s religious affiliation. For instance, trib-
al and religious allegiances to the recognised legitimate authorities in Oman,
Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Somalia, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, and other places, is
based on a different set of notions from those that centre around individual
rights, which is deemed to be “the organizing principle of state-society rela-
tions in modern states.”40 Instead, a community embodied in a tribe, religious
sect, or ethnic group represents a primordial form of identity that merits a
stronger allegiance than that of a modern nation.41 Nevertheless, this tension
between the modern and pre-modern understanding of group belonging is not
permanent; instead, it is often greatly defused, if not eliminated, by prioritising
a particular Salafi group’s interests.
For example, some Salafi groups, including some jihadi groups (such as
rebel groups in Chechnya) adjusted their long-term strategies as well as their
moral, political, and social claims to fit themselves into the modern nation-
state framework. This becomes clearer if we consider that the modern state
is an institutional construct supported by an abstract mix of human thought
that ranges from loyalty and submission to the state’s (i.e. the political elite’s)
general framework of a common identity to legitimating that political power
and the role and significance of state ideology. From this perspective, citizen-
ship is a denominator through which the legal framework of people’s rights is
squared and legitimised. Today we can see that a number of Salafi groups,42
40 Nils Butenschøn, “State, Power, and Citizenship in the Middle East,” in Citizenship and
the State in the Middle East: Approaches and Applications, ed. Nils A. Butenschon, et al.,
(Syracuse ny: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 3–27.
41 Clifford Geertz, “The Integrative Revolution: Primordial Sentiment and Civil Politics in
the New States,” in Old Societies and New States: The Quest for Modernity in Asia and Africa,
ed. Clifford Geertz (New York: Free Press, 1963), 105–157, especially 107ff.
42 This is particularly visible in post-revolutionary Egypt, where a number of Salafi political
parties have prioritised different political goals.
350 Poljarevic
organisations, and political parties are revising previously held certainties,

among them their previous rejection of citizenship.
The Ambiguity of Citizenship
As there are many formulations and attempts to capture the meaning of

citizenship, I have chosen one that demonstrates the ambiguity of the Salafi
understanding of this principle; Nils Butenschøn’s broad definition that holds
that “citizenship can be considered the organizing principle of state-society
relations in modern states.”43 The organising principle, as some liberals would
argue, is anchored in the desire to protect individual rights from breaches of
state authority. For instance:
Citizenship is grounded in the guarantee of legal and political protec-

tions from raw coercive power, whether that power comes in the form of
the sword blade or gun barrel of soldiers, the fists of an abusing spouse
or parent, or an employer’s shout of “you’re fired” that leads to a loss of
work, income, status and possibly nourishment.44
Such attempts to delineate citizenship rights as an organising principle of a

modern nation-state’s relationship with its individual members are defined,
discussed, and implemented inconsistently across the spectrum of the exist-
ing international order. As we shall see, the discourse of rights and communal
belonging has precipitated important divisions among Salafi groups (e.g. mis-
sionary groups, political parties, and various violent factions). Such divisions
are closely tied to, and in many ways dependent upon, the political order of
the nation-state within which these groups are mobilising.45 This effectively
violates a general perception of Salafi homogeneity, one that usually lumps
43 Butenschøn, “State, Power, and Citizenship in the Middle East,” 11.

44 Thomas Janoski and Brian Gran, “Political Citizenship: Foundations of Rights,” in Hand-
book of Citizenship Studies, ed. Engin F. Isin and Bryan S. Turner (London: Sage, 2002),
13–52, especially 13.
45 See John Turner, “Strategic Differences: Al Qaeda’s Split with the Islamic State of Iraq and
al-Sham,” Small Wars & Insurgencies 26 (2015): 208–225; Khalil al-Anani and Maszlee Malik,
“Pious Way to Politics: The Rise of Political Salafism in Post-Mubarak Egypt,” Digest of Mid-
dle East Studies 22 (2013): 57–735; Bjørn Olav Utvik, “For Gud og friheten: politiske salafier i
Kuwait og Saudi-Arabia” [For God and Freedom: Political Salafis in Kuwait and Saudi Ara-
bia], Babylon – Nordisk tidskrift for Midtøstenstudier 2 (2010): 32–43; and Bjørn Olav Utvik,
“Islamister i åpnere landskap: hvilken rolle i det nye Midtøsten?” [“Islamists in Open Land-
scape: What is their Role in the New Middle East?”], Tidsskriftet Politik 15 (2012) 1.
together an eclectic set of Muslim puritan groups under the label of “Salafism.”
For instance, in his Islam and Liberal Citizenship: The Search for an Overlapping
Consensus, Andrew March notes that “it is quite clear that the most consis-
tent and conscientious rejection of the very idea of membership and belong-
ing in a non-Muslim society [i.e. citizenship] is limited to the so-called Salafi
groups.”46 This view, however, misses important nuances within the broader
Salafi movement that reveal an evolving multitude of strategic and even ideo-
logical trajectories.
In fact, recent research has shown that such groups are as diverse as those
belonging to any other movement on the left and right of the traditional politi-
cal spectrum. Various groups have developed a range of different socio-political
strategies to bring into being a social order based on their individual literalist
interpretations of the Islamic canons.47 In other words, both the scholars’ and
the Salafi activists’ perception of a unified movement is disintegrating in the
wake of overwhelming empirical evidence of diversity among self-ascribed
Salafi activist groups and political parties. In the post-Arab Spring period, such
diversity has become clearer as the polities of the mena region produce more
contentious and ambiguous political discourses on practically every socio-
political theme, not least on the meaning of citizenship.48
There is no easy answer to the question of how Salafi groups conceptualise
citizenship. As previously noted, despite their relative consensus on the ab-
stract ideas of the political, there exist many different understandings of how
politics should be conducted in practice. The region’s differing political con-
texts offer various sets of options. As is true of any socio-political group in a
rapidly changing political order, Salafi factions need to address the question
“what binds us together?” with more precision than ever before. For instance,
the Muslim Brotherhood had already re-examined such questions49 by seeking
46 Andrew March, Islam and Liberal Citizenship: The Search for an Overlapping Consensus
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 274; on a similar point see Talal Asad, “Reflections
on Blasphemy and Social Criticism,” in Religion: Beyond a Concept, ed. Hent de Vries (New
York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 580–610.
47 Poljarevic, “In Pursuit of Authenticity”; see also Meijer (ed.), Global Salafism; Poljarevic,
“Locating the Event Horizon.”
48 Jennifer Mitchell, “Citizenship,” in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought,
ed. Gerhard Bowering (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 94–95.
49 Amr Hamzawy and Nathan J. Brown, “The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood: Islamist Par-
ticipation in a Closing Political Environment,” Carnegie Paper No. 19 (Washington dc:
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2010); Amr Hamzawy and Nathan J. Brown,
“Can Egypt’s Troubled Elections Produce a More Democratic Future?” Policy Outlook
(Washington dc: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005); Abdullah Saeed,
“Rethinking Citizenship Rights of Non-Muslims in an Islamic State: Rashid al-Ghannushi’s
Contribution to Evolving Debate,” Islam and Christian Relations 10 (1999): 307–323; Emin
352 Poljarevic
inspiration from such previously scorned ideological traditions as liberalism.50

Throughout the late twentieth century, it survived and gradually developed
into a solid social movement through its leadership’s long-term planning and
the establishment of a membership system that transformed peripheral and
targeted sympathisers into loyal and dedicated activists focused on realising its
socio-political vision.51 The Muslim Brotherhood’s current widespread appeal
rests primarily on its organisational skill in terms of coordinating the mobilisa-
tion mechanism for socio-political dissent. Moreover, well-established com-
munication networks and interpersonal (i.e. viva voce) recruitment, supported
by the activities of regular neighbourhood “family”-groups (usrah), played a
significant role in maintaining the Muslim Brotherhood’s cohesion and sur-
vival despite the shifting authoritarian regimes and their repressive tactics.
Similarly, in the aftermath of Mubarak’s fall in February 2011, al-Daʿwa
al-Salafiyya (the Salafi Call) and other Salafi groups adjusted their strategic
and conceptual frameworks by addressing the same issues tackled earlier by
the Muslim Brotherhood. For instance, they initially answered the question
“what binds Muslim citizens together?” with “the ‘correct’ faith and practice
of Islam.” In this context, “correctness” is supposed to secure one’s authentic
identity and God’s right over the believers, thereby making them not only
morally responsible but also moving them closer to becoming God’s “friends.”
From a Salafi perspective, this acknowledgment and affirmation of differ-
ence within a multi-religious, ethic, and ideologically diverse population has
another goal: to identify the “other.” In effect, the vast majority of Salafis,
particularly in a Muslim-majority context such as Egypt, seek the institu-
tionalisation of communal differences as a major organising principle of
their society and state. They set the community’s borders by identifying the
individual and communal creeds connected to various groups, such as Copts,
Sufis, liberals, and secularists. Thus, both friends and (potential) enemies are
Poljarevic, Exploring Individual Motivations for Social Change: A Study in Mobilization of

Islamism under Repression in Pre-revolutionary Egypt (PhD diss., European University In-
stitute, 2012).
50 Hesham al-Awadi, In Pursuit of Legitimacy: The Muslim Brothers and Mubarak 1982–
2000 (New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 2004); Utvik “Islamists in Open Landscape”;
Michaelle L. Browers, Political Ideology in the Arab World: Accommodation and Transfor-
mation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 121ff.
51 See “The Principles of The Muslim Brotherhood.” http://www.ikhwanweb.com/article.ph
p?ID=813&LevelID=2&SectionID=116; a similar programme is presented in the Muslim
Brotherhood’s Political Program for Parliamentary Elections 2010 (al-Barnamij al-intikhabi
lil-ikhwan al-muslimin, intikhabi al-majlis al-Shaʿb, 2010), the mb’s internal document.
categorised according to a set of propositions rooted in ideological, religious,

and ethnic differences.52
The debate on citizenship rights, at least in Egypt between mid-2011 and
mid-2013, revealed a notable conceptual ambiguity as regards understanding
the classical term ahl al-dhimma, traditionally defined as Christian and Jew-
ish subjects who are ruled by Muslims based on a contract of protection.53
This concept has often been cited as an alternative to the liberal notion(s) of
citizenship based on (religious) communitarian principles, at least in theory.54
This range could include reserving full citizenship (al-muwatana al-ʿamma)
rights for Muslims as the main religious community, and limited or specified
citizenship rights (al-muwatana al-khassa) for all others.
Drawing on Faulks, Meijer suggests a three-dimensional model that is partially
related to the Salafi construction. First, the term citizenship would define the ex-
tent of belonging (who is a citizen?). Here, the citizen’s allegiance to a particular
set of state symbols is crucial. Secondly, the content of citizenship would reveal
how it is defined and who does (and does not) belong to the main (religious/
political) community. Thirdly, the depth of citizenship refers to the level of an
individual’s (or a community’s) commitment to the group, territory, and state
institution in question.55 The concept of ahl al-dhimma distinguishes between
citizens’ commitment to the idea of the state based upon their religious affiliation
and merely to belonging to a religious community.
Salafi Ambiguities in Egypt
The primary goal of Egypt’s Salafis is to transform those of their co-religionists

who are passive, demobilised citizens into active, mobilised, and “committed
52 Wael Hallaq, The Impossible State; see also “A Statement about the Political Positions of
Nour Party,” January 12, 2014, http://www.almoslim.net/node/198580?page=1. Initially
Yasir al-Burhami, the group’s leader, stated that Egypt’s Cops should have the status of
the three Jewish tribes in the city of Medina (622–632 c.e.), meaning that they would
enjoy the rights of citizens only as outlined in a separate agreement between the Mus-
lim (majority) community and Christian (minority) community. A memri(Tv) clip,
“Egyptian Salafi Leader Yasir Al-Burhami Compares the Christians of Egypt to the Jews of
Al-Medina,” http://www.thememriblog.org/blog_personal/en/41621.htm.
53 See Mohammad Fadel, “Contracts,” in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political
Thought, ed. Gerhard Bowering (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 117–118.
54 See Robert W. Hefner, “Islam and Plurality, Old and New,” Society 51 (2014): 636–644; also
Browers, Political Ideology in the Arab World.
55 Roel Meijer, “Political Citizenship and Social Movements in the Arab world,” in Hand-
book of Political Citizenship and Social Movements, ed. H.A. van der Heijden (Cheltenham:
Edward Elgar, 2014), 628–659, especially 663ff.
354 Poljarevic
Muslims” (al-muslim al-multazim) who are involved in communal and now

political work, and who will strive to create a general sense of Islamic civic
virtue. Bearing this goal in mind, the main Egyptian Salafi group, Alexandria’s
al-Daʿwa al-Salafiyya, has been promoting religious mobilisation by spreading
its puritan and apolitical activism since the 1970s, initially under the leader-
ship of Alexandria native Muhammad Ismaʿil Muqaddam (b. 1952) and, more
recently, under the leadership of Muhammad ʿAbd al-Fattah (b. 1954), with the
guidance of its spokesperson Yasir al-Burhami (b. 1958).
The tactical and indeed strategic shift from apolitical activism to forming a
political party and participating in the political system displays the flexibility
of at least the non-violent part of the broad Salafi movement. This adaptation
to changing political circumstances is due to the leadership’s decision to take
advantage of a unique opportunity to protect, develop, and promote the con-
tinued dissemination of their religious doctrine – the primary goal of the Salafi
Call – and to establish a political party, the Hizb al-Nour. But the question re-
mains: does the group’s engagement in the political process change its original
theological understanding of the political? It seems that it does, for by recon-
sidering its previously held categorical division between friend and enemy, the
Hizb al-Nour transformed both the form and content of its activist practice
(exclusively proselytising activities). In other words, from the 1970s until its
political involvement in 2011, its leadership had shunned domestic politics by
consciously refusing to politicise the group’s primary goal, namely “purifying”
the Muslims’ beliefs and practices, which allowed them to maintain their un-
derstanding of the political and its particular moral order.
After Mubarak’s fall, the Salafi Call’s leadership opted, at least in practice, to
abandon this understanding and enter the realm of (parliamentary) politics. As
mentioned earlier, politics here signifies a game wherein the strict distinction
between friends and enemies becomes blurred and the means of achieving
one’s ultimate political goals are not bound by the strict morality found in the
ideological realm of the political. This strategic decision and the leadership’s
subsequent political choice(s) have been fiercely criticised by other sections of
the country’s Salafi community.56 However, what they did was not unique: al-
Jamaʿa al-Islamiyya (Islamic Group) shifted from violent anti-Mubarak regime
campaigns during the early 1990s to social grassroots activism during the early
56 Osama al-Mahdi, “‘Brotherhood’ is costly for Islamist leaders [in their effort to] to persuade
Nour [Party] to support Morsi,” al-Masryal-Youm, June 15, 2013, http://www.almasryalyoum
.com/news/details/221779; see also Saʾid ʿAbd al-Azem’s criticism of the party: “Not falling
into sedition [subversion, chaos, betrayal]”: YouTube Channel Hamada almasry, Novem-
ber 15, 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQqbO9Wx7YE.
2000s. It subsequently joined parliamentary politics in the aftermath of the

popular revolt of 2011.57
The Salafi Call appeared to be the most stable civil society Salafi organisa-
tion prior to 2011, primarily because there was no recorded large-scale falling-
out among its members. Nevertheless, the country’s ensuing popular unrest
and the decision of the organisation’s leadership to politicise the group did
lead to some ruptures. Most notable was the split between Emad al-Din ʿAbd
al-Ghafour (b. 1960), a founding member of Hizb al-Nour, and Yasir al-Burhami
Muhammad ʿAbd al-Fattah’s deputy. Al-Burhami together with the Salafi Call’s
core leadership, exposed a difference within the organisation as regards po-
litical strategising. The main quarrel seems to have been over the role of the
main organisation’s religious leadership and its degree of control over the
new party’s political activities. ʿAbd al-Fattah and al-Burhami were strong sup-
porters of the idea that religious scholars had to control the party’s political
activities;58 ʿAbd al-Ghafour and his supporters rejected this out of hand and
argued for the independence of the political party.59
While the Salafi Call’s leadership struggled to maintain its creed’s “purity”
(i.e. the political) by maintaining its control over Hizb al-Nour’s political ac-
tivities, the party’s more pragmatic members realised that the political and
religious frameworks needed to be kept separate, at least in parliamentary
politics. The result was the establishment of a rival Salafi political party, the
ʿAbd al-Ghafour-led Hizb al-Watan, which seems to have accepted the idea of
equal citizenship rights as a political and theological reality. This divergence
of strategic practices was present from the formation of Hizb al-Nour. ʿAbd al-
Ghafour’s vision of a successful political party that can offer enough credibility
to challenge both the Muslim Brotherhood and the old political elites extend-
ed far beyond what the rest of the Salafi Call’s leadership could foresee. One ex-
ample of his foresight has been his insistence on creating a professional mana-
gerial structure in the party, in which only the most competitive candidates
would be employed; this meant including people who were not necessarily
57 Fawaz A Gerges, “The Decline of Revolutionary Islam in Algeria and Egypt,” Survival 41
(1999): 113–125; Khalil al-Anani and Maszlee Malik, “Pious Way to Politics”; William Mc-
Cants, “The Lesser of Two Evils”; Uriya Shavit, “The Lesser of Two Evils.”
58 See Stephane Lacroix, “Sheikhs and Politicians: Inside the New Egyptian Salafism,” Policy
Briefing (Doha: Brookings Doha Center, June 2012).
59 Al Arabiya, “Resignations Are Afflicting the Salafi Nation Party led by Abd al-Ghafour,”
June 14, 2013, http://www.alarabiya.net/ar/arab-and-world/egypt/2013/06/14/-� ‫لا ��ست��ق��ا لا ت‬
‫ا �ل غ��ف‬-‫�ع��د‬-‫ � ز ع�ا �م��ة‬- ��‫ا �ل��س�� فل‬- ‫ا �ل ط� ن‬- ‫ح ز‬ ‫ف‬
� ‫ت‬
‫ور‬ ‫ب‬ �‫ي� ب‬ � ‫ب�� ب� و‬-� ‫��ع��ص�ا‬.html; see also Kent Davis-Packard, “A Ripple
Beneath the Surface: Trends in Salafi Political Thought,” Analysis Paper Number 33(Wash-
ington dc: The Brookings Institution, 2014).
356 Poljarevic
Salafis. This has meant that the fissure in the biggest Salafi camp in Egypt
evolved, perhaps initially due to personal animosity between the top-leaders,
but ultimately due to differences in political vision and aspiration and not nec-
essarily due to religious disputes. This sort of political fragmentation is not un-
usual in the Egyptian context.
The Muslim Brotherhood experienced a similar rupture during the mid-
1990s when it faced, among other things, an internal disagreement over the
role of religious discourse and terminology in party politics. At that time, the
“political rebel” Abu al-ʿAla al-Madi (b. 1952) and his supporters left to form
Hizb al-Wasat, an independent political party that represented a clearer break
between religion and politics, primarily by conceptualising religion in far
broader terms.60 A similar disagreement within the Muslim Brotherhood one
that revolved around separating its social (including religious) and its political
activism, was observed during the 2000s and 2010s.61
The number of factors contributing to these ruptures is potentially end-
less. Nevertheless, one clear element is post-Arab Spring Egypt’s dramatically
changed political climate. The topics of public discussion and potential for a
reformed social contract facilitated vibrant discussions on previously banned
topics, at least during March 2011–July 2013, a period of relative political free-
dom and vivacious political campaigning. For example, Salafis were confront-
ed with the issue of citizenship, and each of the seven registered Salafi parties
had to offer “an authentic” Islamic solution to the issue of rights, especially as
regards religious minorities and women’s rights.62 In the immediate aftermath
of the popular uprisings in 2011 it became evident that the Egyptian polity is
60 Carrie R. Wickham, “The Path to Moderation: Strategy and Learning in the Formation of
Egypt’s Wasat Party,” Comparative Politics 36 (2004): 205–228, especially 209–210.
61 Emin Poljarevic, Exploring Individual Motivations for Social Change: A Study in Mobiliza-
tion of Islamism under Repression in Pre-revolutionary Egypt, 185ff.
62 The seven parties are Hizb al-Nour (Party of Light), Hizb al-Asala (Authenticity Party),
Hizb al-Binaʾ wa-l-Tanmiya (Building and Development Party), Hizb al-Fadila (Virtue
Party), Hizb al-Shaʿb (People’s Party), Hizb al-Salama wa-l-Tanmiya (Safety and De-
velopment Party, currently called Islamic Party), and Hizb al-Raya (Flag Party). Oth-
er parties became largely defunct after the military coup on July 3, 2013, among them
Hizb al-Watan (Homeland Party) and Hizb al-Umma ([Islamic] Nation Party). See also
N. Saleh, “Egypt’s Salafist Ansar al-Sunna to Form Political Group,” al-Sharq al-Awsat, April
7, 2011, http://www.aawsat.net/2011/04/article55246907/egypts-salafist-ansar-al-sunna-
to-form-political-group; al-Ahram, “Al-Nour [Party] Calls Copts to Join” (al-Nur yadʾu al-
aqbat lil-indhimam ilayhu), al-Ahram, June 18, 2011, http://www.ahram.org.eg/The-First/
News/83774.aspx; H. Dabash, “The Salafi Nour Party” (Hizb Al-Nour Salafi…), al-Masri al-
Youm, June 14, 2011, http://www.almasryalyoum.com/node/468178.
f ractured and deeply divided. In such a political climate the Salafi Call’s appeal
to establish a moral and virtuous political communitarian order reinforced
such divisions, which demonstrated the weakness and, perhaps even, absence
of a (viable) social contract.63 The group’s ultimate decision was to realign it-
self with the military regime in the belief that such a move represented its best
option to preserve its social (and political) gains in the face of the concern that
they would be excluded from any political activities following the predicament
of the Muslim Brotherhood.
This meant that while Hizb al-Nour quickly learned how to use the current
political vocabulary, others, among them a Tunisian Salafi organisation (Ansar
al-Shariʿa), much like earlier Salafi and Islamist groups, explicitly rejected any
vocabulary of citizenship rights.64 As noted below, isis is an extreme example
of the rejection of the very idea of citizenship rights and of any other terminol-
ogy not explicitly found in the classical Islamic sources. Its members, who op-
pose both the idea and reality of the nation-state, are attempting to restructure
the current state (dis)order in Iraq and Syria.65 But despite this, Hizb al-Nour’s
conceptualisation of citizenship rights clearly remains rooted in communitar-
ian principles and therefore differs from the principles of citizen equality be-
fore the law. On the other hand, and while maintaining its Salafi profile, Hizb
al-Watan seems to have abandoned this idea and moved toward embracing
equal rights for all of Egypt’s citizens.66
63 Some, like Nazih Ayubi, argue(d) that Salafis do not believe in the modern idea of the
social contract; Nazih Ayubi, Political Islam: Religion and Politics in the Arab World (New
York: Routledge 1991), 41. That assertion is largely misleading, at least in the socio-political
contexts of contemporary Egypt, Jordan, and Kuwait where Salafi politicos groups have
engaged in general politics of those countries, actively engaging with their regimes to
clarify and define the relationship between citizenry and state. Rejection of the social
contract across the Salafi activist spectrum might have been the case in 1970s and 1980s,
as well as among most jihadi Salafi groups today, but as this chapter shows, the evolution-
ary process of Salafi groups has produced an important plurality of understandings of
politics, not least on how the social contract should be shaped. This is important to note
even though such understandings are substantially different from the common liberal
notion(s) of the social contract.
64 See Stefano M. Torelli, Fabio Merone, and Francesco Cavatorta, “Salafism in Tunisia: Chal-
lenges and Opportunities for Democratization,” Middle East Policy 19 (2012): 140–154.
65 Raymond Hinnebusch, “Syria-Iraq Relations: State Construction and Deconstruction and
the mena State System,” lse Middle East Centre Paper 4 (London: Middle East Centre, 2014).
66 El Hasad, “Hizb al-Watan Has a Vision for Ending the [Political] ‘Split’ after Its With-
drawal from the Coalition [against the Coup],” September 21, 2014, http://www.elhasad
.com/2014/09/blog-post_501.html.
358 Poljarevic
Members of the Salafi Call are still unclear about the contents of citizenship
rights. During 2011–2013 its leadership was rather pragmatic when it came to
applying the classical notion of ahl al-dhimma (protected, but not equal, status
for minorities) in Egypt – one of the central Salafi principles of the political. Al-
Burhami explained that citizenship rights could be based on dhimma, some-
thing that the Salafi Call prefers and hopes to establish. According to him, this
is just one of the alternatives that could serve as the basis for citizenship for
minority communities.67 In other words, he recognised that there are several
competing understandings involved here, all of which contradict the Salafi op-
tion. In the end, however, the Egyptian people are entitled to choose what they
wish to implement, even if such a choice would violate the Shariʿa. He thus
recognises the reality of the public will (iradat al-shaʿb) and, indirectly, its va-
lidity as a source of authority. A similar point was formulated in Hizb al-Nour’s
original political program.68
This suggests that the new political climate incentivised various Salafi
groups, most notably the Salafi Call, to engage with topics they had previously
avoided, such as the state’s political arrangement, the status of women and
religious minorities, and universal human rights. But to address these and
similar issues realistically, the Salafi leadership had to move beyond just cor-
recting everyday religious rituals and securing its “pure” Muslim identity. Their
communitarian understanding of collective rights is likely to dominate their
on-going conceptualisation of citizenship rights. Clearly, the Egyptian Salafis
consider the goals and needs of the (Muslim) community, as opposed to indi-
viduals, as the defining parameter of how all aspects of society, without excep-
tion, should be arranged, and which identifiable groups of people can claim
rights. At the same time, one can argue that Salafis in general consider rights
subordinate to collective obligations and thus, at least in terms of citizenship
theories, are closest to the communitarian version of civic republicanism.69
As we have seen, the liberal notion of individual autonomy within the citizen
rights framework seems to be powerful enough to penetrate even the hard
shell of communitarian Salafis. It remains to be seen how more progressive
67 The official YouTube Channel of Salafi Call (anasalafy.com), “Yes to the Constitution, Why?
The Second Part of an Interview with Sheikh Yasser Al Burhami,” published D ecember 6,
2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p67BmtATl7w.
68 Hizb al-Nour (Political Program), retrieved from (archive.org, Wayback Machine),
http://www.alnourparty.org/page/program_poilitcal, Hizb al-Nour: Narfud. al-Dawlah
al-Madaniyyah, available at http://www.youm7.com/News.asp?NewsID=567760.
69 Thomas Janoski and Brian Gran, “Political Citizenship: Foundations of Rights,” in
Handbook of Citizenship Studies, ed. Engin F. Isin and Bryan S. Turner (London: Sage,
2002), 19–20.
forces within the debate, such as ʿAbd al-Ghaffour and his Hizb al-Watan, will
resolve the apparent tensions between individual autonomy and communi-
tarian rights. Unfortunately, the return of authoritarianism in Egypt seems to
have stalled any public debate on this topic.
A Form of Institutionalised Salafism
A unique political Salafi understanding of communal rights and collective

belonging exists in Saudi Arabia, where a purist (i.e. pietist) form of Salafism
has become so firmly established that it has assumed the form of an institu-
tionalised religion characterised by a totalising principle though which Saudi
citizens pledge their allegiance to the House of Saud. The majority population
adheres to a single religious tradition (a Hanbalised form of purist Salafism)
that promotes each citizen’s obligation to obey the political authorities as a
religious duty and thus severely limits individual freedoms and the rights of
minority groups.70 In this case, citizenship does not mean a set of legal prin-
ciples by which citizens are protected from the political authorities, but rather
their obligation to obey (taʿa) the king (wali al-amr) in return for a specific set
of services,71 namely, a general sense of security, political and social stability,
and economic privileges.72
The country’s unity and stability rests upon each side fulfilling its mutual
responsibilities toward the other and exists within a delicate balance between
change and national development.73 At the same time, the religious establish-
ment (ʿulamaʾ) is so completely embedded in its institutional structure that it
70 Tawfiq al-Saif, “Political Islam in Saudi Arabia: Recent Trends and Future Prospects,” Con-
temporary Arab Affairs 7 (2014): 398–420, especially 417. This political order is premised
on a pre-modern form of social contract between the ruler and ruled. See Noah Feldman,
The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2008), 100ff.
71 Badr b. ʿAli al-ʿUtaybi, “Salafism: Method on [Making] Legitimate National Demand,”
(2009 [1431]), http://www.al-islam.com/Content.aspx?pageid=1153&ContentID=1417.
72 Naif b. Abdel Aziz, “Crown Prince Speech during the Opening of the Seminar ‘Salafism:
A Shariah Approach and a National Demand’” (Riyadh: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2011).
Retrieved from http://www.mofa.gov.sa/sites/mofaen/ServicesAndInformation/news/
OfficialSpeechesCrownPrince/Pages/20122221150.aspx; Arab News, “Kingdom will con-
tinue to follow Salafist ideology: Prince Naif,” December, 28 2011, www.arabnews.com/
node/402266.
73 Toby Jones, “Seeking a ‘Social Contract’ for Saudi Arabia,” Middle East Research and
Information Project (merip) mer 228 (2003), www.merip.org/mer/mer228/seeking
-social-contract-saudi-arabia#_28_.
360 Poljarevic
is completely subservient to the royal family’s political authority. Nevertheless,

the balance between religious considerations and the socio-political is more
delicate than that.74
For instance, in this context citizenship, or rather the official recognition of
one’s nationality represents a form of privilege (makrama) bestowed upon an
individual by the ruler. Due to Saudi Arabia’s rentier form of capitalism, mem-
bership in the state entails a range of privileges reserved for its citizens, who
are, in practice, the king’s subjects, such as tax-free income, free education and
healthcare, as well as a host of other monetary rewards.75 Despite this, how-
ever, Islam plays an important role in the state by amalgamating its various
regions while simultaneously providing the ideology underlying the rule of law
through its domestic scholarly judicial and theological elites.
Even though Salafism was regarded as the kingdom’s official ideological
basis from its inception in 1926, King Faisal only officially made it the state
religion in the early 1970s when he established the Council of Senior ʿUlamaʾ,
made up of a group of leading religious scholars, many of whom are descended
from Muhammad b. ʿAbd al-Wahhab al-Shaykh, an ally of the al-Saud in their
first attempt to establish a state.76 This institutionalisation of a pre-modern
religio-political order has allowed the Salafi movement to develop a solid intel-
lectual base, out of which other streams of activism have spread abroad. This
“purist” Salafi methodology (manhaj) served as an important point of depar-
ture for both “politicos” and “jihadis,” as their theological arguments and calls
for action are based primarily on their high regard for a significant (historical)
part of the traditional religious scholarship in contemporary Saudi Arabia. At
the same time, and somewhat paradoxically, “to preserve the Saudi state, Wah-
habi [Salafi] ʿulamaʾ stretched the limits of Salafi theology; self-preservation
[of the monarchy and the religious elite], rather than the literal interpretation
of scripture, was the ultimate criterion.”77 Consequently, this survival instinct
has helped preserve the state, although it has also led to the growth of a Salafi-
inspired opposition to the Saudi monarchy.78
74 See David Commins, The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia (London: i.b. Tauris, 2006),
157–163 and especially 205ff.
75 J.R. Minnis, “First Nations Education and Rentier Economics: Parallels with the Gulf
States,” Canadian Journal of Education/Revue canadienne de l’éducation 29 (2006):
975–997.
76 Madawi Al-Rasheed, Contesting the Saudi State: Islamic Voices from a New Generation
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 27ff.
77 Ibid., 35.
78 Commins, The Wahhabi Mission, 173–186.
For example, in order to limit the number of citizens by preventing pilgrims

from settling permanently in the country, the government officially defined
Saudi nationality, at first called tabiʿiyya and later on jinsiyya, in the following
terms in 1954: 1. The person should have been: (a) “a former Ottoman subject
(in 1914) resident in the Kingdom at its formation (1926)”; (b) “a former Otto-
man subject born on Saudi soil who resided in it from 1914 to 1926”; (c) “every
individual who resided in the Kingdom from 1914 to 1926 and had no other
nationality.” It may seem peculiar that religious affiliation was not specified,
but the tacit understanding among the Saudi jurists was that the person had
to be a Muslim.79 This attempt to construct Saudi nationality and status, and
subsequently a variation of communal citizenship, illustrates how the political
and religious authorities created an imagined community without the explicit
auspices of Islamic doctrine. This construction is still highly volatile and arbi-
trary. This is in part reflected in the workings of tribal relations and developing
cooperation between the Gulf monarchies all of which are not easily resolved
through purely religiously stipulated legal mechanisms. Instead, such com
plexities require the ad hoc application of customary and traditional Islamic
laws.80 The ambiguity of communal rights and national belonging, which is
thus left unresolved, is potentially an important source of socio-political ten-
sion, especially in the wake of the Gulf region’s dependency on energy exports
and precarious economic conditions.
Importantly, the Salafi scholarly elite is both a source of stability in the
country as well as a potential base of enmity for the many rival activist and
jihadi Salafi groups. The eschatological dimension of the shared Salafi creed
is directly linked to its adherents’ understanding of the political, which has, at
its core, the totalising idea of a hierarchical social and political order. This has
also meant that the pietistic mode of understanding the political has also, to
great extent, discouraged the development of politics as defined above. This is
true not only for Saudi Arabia but for all gcc member states. In effect, despite
79 This consideration raises a number of questions related to the Saudi Shiʿi minority and
their absorption into the Saudi nationality, at least formally. At a more informal level, this
minority had been repressed, especially after the Iranian revolution of 1978/79.
80 Mariam al-Hakeem, “Thousands in Saudi Arabia after Losing Qatari Citizenship,” Gulf
News, April 3, 2005, gulfnews.com/news/gulf/qatar/thousands-in-saudi-arabia-after
-losing-qatari-citizenship-1.283103. For the gcc states’ citizenship framework, see the
“Sakhir Declaration,” wam, Gulf News, December 25, 2012. http://gulfnews.com/news/
gulf/bahrain/full-text-of-the-gcc-sakhir-declaration-1.1123682. This document is a follow-
up to the “Riyadh Declaration” of December 19, 2011, which is an attempt to promote
closer cooperation and rekindling the idea of establishing a political union between the
six gcc member states.
362 Poljarevic
the Salafi activists’ broad common goal both in and beyond the Saudi context
(i.e. establishing and maintaining the correctness and authenticity of Islam
and its religious practices), Salafi groups across the mena region are undergo-
ing a tactical and strategic metamorphosis both in the content and form of
their mobilisation.81 One outcome of this transmutation is the emergence and
evolution of isis.
The Unambiguous Rejection of Citizenship
For many reasons, isis can be viewed as an outlier on the Salafi ideological
scale because it is a product of a specific set of socio-political and military dis-
integrations and circumstances in Iraq and Syria. Nevertheless, it is the most
significant proponent of the jihadi Salafi rejection of the modern state, includ-
ing the idea of territorially-bound citizenship rights. For example, it has inter-
preted the Qurʾanic verse “[This is] so that Allah may distinguish the wicked
from the good [al-Anfaal: 37]” as “In doing so, He separates the sincere from the
insincere, the truthful from the liar, the believer from the hypocrite, and the ally
of Allah from the enemy of Allah” in an attempt to eliminate dissenting views
within the group.82 This dialectic of reality and distinction between friend
81 Anthony N. Celso, “Zarqawi’s Legacy: Al Qaeda’s isis ‘Renegade’,” Mediterranean Quar-

terly 26 (2015): 21–41. The analysis shows one of the many points of contention among
Salafi groups, in this case the jihadi trend. Various Salafi groups also differ in their under-
standing of which religious authority has primacy over others in interpreting the text; see
Jonathan Brown, “Is Islam Easy to Understand or Not?: Salafis, the Democratization of
Interpretation and the Need for the Ulema,” Journal of Islamic Studies 26 (2015): 117–144.
See an open letter by various Saudi Salafi scholars who outline the priorities of their (and
by extension all other Muslims’) mission to maintain the “correct” Islamic values and
“authenticity” of their faith and religion. Mohammed b. Nasir al-Suhaybani (with 73 other
signatories), “The Riyadh International Book Fair Statement,” March 12, 2012 (displayed
on a website connected to Hizb al-Nour), http://www.almoslim.net/node/161837.
82 Dabiq, “Dismantling a Khariji Cell,” Issue 6 (Rabiʿ al-Awwal [December] 2014) 31, http://
media.clarionproject.org/files/islamic-state/isis-isil-islamic-state-magazine-issue-6-al
-qaeda-of-waziristan.pdf. This isis online magazine, first published in English in July 2014,
is riddled with terms that describe “the enemy,” and which systematise and categorise
them: murtadd (apostate), munafiq (hypocrite), salibi (crusader), mujrim (criminal), kha-
warij (“those who have departed from the right path”), murjiʿa (“those who defer God’s
judgment”), taghut (false deity or oppressive ruler), nusayriyya (Alawi), and rawafid or
“rejectionists” of the first four caliphs (Shiʿis). This terminology specifies the type of en-
emy that needs to be combated in accordance to what the isis leadership finds to be
appropriate action depending on the category of the “enemy.”
and enemy, which is characteristic of modern-day jihadism, also illustrates

a violent interpretation of the principles “enjoining the good and forbidding
the evil” and “loyalty to [God and his friends] and disavowal from [enemies
of God].” By engaging in armed combat, an isis fighter becomes the equiva-
lent of Schmitt’s partisan who “has turned away from the conventional enmity
of the contained war and given himself up to an other – the real – enmity
that rises through terror and counterterror, up to annihilation.”83 And so we
might suppose that for Schmitt, jihadi Salafism or any other violence-driven
socio-political movement represents “the most extreme consequences of the
political grouping of friend and enemy.”84
Since the occupation of Iraq by the United States and its allies, and par-
ticularly since the popular uprisings in Syria in 2011, these extreme ideas have
gained traction. The failure to initiate democratic regime change in Iraq and
Syria, as well as elsewhere in the mena region, not to mention the ensuing
brutal violence in the wake of such failures, has desensitised many indigenous
social activist groups and political factions. As a result, they are increasing-
ly choosing to join the most effective groups that, they believe, can protect
their collective interests.85 isis has played a significant role in shaping how
at least some Syrians and Iraqis understand the political, for its leadership
and fighters oppose both the idea and the reality of the nation-state. In fact,
they are attempting to replace it with the idea of a Caliphate, thereby mak-
ing the modern notion of citizenship irrelevant.86 For example, in an extreme
act of provocation and rejection of the nation-state and national belonging,
groups of foreign-born isis fighters have burned their passports.87 This does
83 Carl Schmitt, The Theory of the Partisan: A Commentary/Remark on the Concept of the
P olitical (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1963), 7.
84 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 35. Such demarcation between enemies and
friends are not only characteristic of social and religious movements, but entire states,
and quite independent from the fact those states are established democracies or not.
85 Al-Jazeera, “isil Wins Support from Iraq’s Sunni Tribes,” June 4, 2015, http://www.aljazeera.
com/news/2015/06/sunni-sheiks-pledge-allegiance-isil-iraq-anbar-150604074642668.
html. As a way of comparing the impact of state repression of social activism and the
issue of radicalisation, see Donatella della Porta, “Research on Social Movements and
Political Violence,” Qualitative Sociology 31(2008): 221–230.
86 See Raymond Hinnebusch, “Syria-Iraq Relations: State Construction and Deconstruc-
tion and the mena State System,” lse Middle East Centre Paper 4 (London: Middle East
Centre, 2014).
87 A video showing a self-identified group of isis fighters burning their passports: Live-
Leak.com, “isis-Soldiers Burning Their Passports” (12.31min.), uploaded on April 14,
2014, http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=76f_1397526887. See also Shiva Malik, “French
364 Poljarevic
not mean that other Salafi activists (jihadis or otherwise) living elsewhere will
follow suit, even though they would agree, at least in principle, that the reality
of nation-states in the mena or other Muslim-majority regions contradicts the
idea of the umma, defined as the unified global Muslim community/nation.88
isis represents an extreme example of Salafis rejecting the modern concept
of citizenship in favour of belonging to a political group that bases this concept
upon one’s membership in a specific religious community. This is the starting
point for the broader Salafi understanding of the political, which is based on
the classic theological principle of al-walaʾ wa-l-baraʾ (loyalty to Muslims and
disavowal of non-Muslims), which confirms a person’s allegiance to God’s will
instead of that of the people.89 This allegiance allows Salafi activists to draw
a rigid line between insiders and outsiders, included and excluded, while si-
multaneously collapsing the distinction between religious and civic rights and
obligations. Subsequently, the notion of communalism in a Muslim-majority
state will include a set of presuppositions of an individual’s loyalty to the Mus-
lim community and disavowal of other religious groups. This is directly tied
to the Salafi definition of political belonging, which is based on one’s loyalty
(walaʾ) and obligation (taklif) to obey the Islamic tradition. They may have some
secondary loyalty, perhaps to a state or some other superstructure. This line of
reasoning leads to the conclusion that in the isis-run state, non-Muslims can
Isis Fighters Filmed Burning Passports and Calling for Terror at Home,” The Guardian,
November 20, 2014, www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/20/french-isis-fighters-filmed
-burning-passports-calling-for-terror.
88 One of the primary differences between isis and other jihadi groups, at least in the
realms of religious rhetoric, is its members’ willingness to accept/reject the proclamation
of the Caliphate as well as their position regarding the statements made by rival leaders
(Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi vs. Ayman al-Zawahiri). See Muhammad Abu Rumman, “The Fol-
lowers of ‘Abu Musʿab’ Swear Their Allegiance to isis and Rebel against ‘Abu Qatada’ and
Attack [Abu Muhammad] al-Maqdisi,” al-Hayat, November 21, 2013, http://alhayat.com/
Details/572023. See also the statement of a leading Salafi cleric in Syria and Jabhat al-
Nusra field commander Abu Basir al-Tartousi, in which he assures his followers that he is
loyal to al-Qaʿida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri and declares the Islamic State fighters as kha-
‫�� ن‬-‫ا ق��ت��ت�ا ل‬- ‫�م� ن‬- � �‫ي‬-‫�م�ا‬-‫ح ل‬

warij (i.e. those who have “transgressed” Islamic principles and supposedly its creed),
‫ن‬
http://www.jihadica.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/-�‫ي‬ ‫ب‬ � �‫�جر ي‬ ‫�و‬-� ‫�ب�ي��ا‬
‫ش‬ ‫ة‬ ‫ة‬
‫و جم‬-��‫ا �ل�د و�ل‬-��‫ ج��م�ا ع‬.pdf.
‫ا �ل��ا �م‬-�‫��ا �ه�د �ي‬
89 See the pietist Salafi scholar Muhammad Saeed al-Qahtani’s al-Walaʾ wa-l-baraʾ, a ccording
to the ʿAqeedah of the Salaf, Parts 1 and 2 trans. O. Johnston (London: al-Firdous, 1993).
Another explanation is that righteous Muslims need to demonstrate rejection of all things
ungodly and show their affection towards all things “authentically” Islamic (i.e. godly).
never be “loyal” because they do not share in the state’s identity (Islam) and
function (enjoining the good and forbidding the evil). Therefore, they are not
entitled to equal rights. Thus, the Salafi notion of the political (as applied by
isis) maintains the distinction between friend and enemy.
Contentious Politics and the Open-Ended Evolution of the Salafi

Conception of Citizenship
In Egypt, the Salafi Call seems to have accepted the return of authoritarian
rule, viewing it as an opportunity to preserve and advance their activities.
Nevertheless, their realignment with political power has revealed several con-
cerns, one of which is the current al-Sisi-led military regime’s revision of the
curricula from the elementary school level up to and including the university.
The president of Hizb al-Nour, Yunus Makhyun, has objected strongly to how
his party is portrayed in the third-grade history book. Naturally, the 2011 popu-
lar revolt is explained through the current regime’s prism. Political parties with
any religious agenda, especially the Freedom and Justice Party, are described
as illegitimate and unconstitutional groups and, ultimately, as enemies of the
state. The Salafi Call has responded by mobilising its Hizb al-Nour Party to lob-
by the regime to revise the schoolbooks, hoping thereby to exclude itself from
such a negative and hostile classification.90
Another source of tension has been the state-controlled al-Azhar Univer-
sity, a religious institution that has challenged the Salafi Call’s legitimacy and
relevance under the current political order. For example, one of the univer-
sity’s latest initiatives has been to reform its curriculum by deleting any form
of radical interpretation (e.g. literal reading) of Islamic religious sources – or
simply any reading contrary to that of the position of al-Azhar. Its president,
Abdel Hai Azzab, has stated that “[w]e [al-Azhar] will just teach [the] curricula
which is suitable for our times. This emanates from our belief in the necessity
of renewal and coping with the latest developments in different disciplines.”91
This policy supports the political strategy promoted by the al-Sisi regime as well
as by its predecessors, all of which have sought (unsuccessfully so) to c ontrol
90 Masr al-Arabiya, October 1, 2014, “Hizb al-Nour is Unconstitutional according to

‫ة‬
High School History Book,” http://m.masralarabia.com/‫ا �ل��سي��ا ��سي��ة‬-�/369449-‫حي��ا‬
‫ا �ل‬
�
‫ن‬ ‫ث‬ ‫ة‬ ‫ث‬ ‫ث‬ ‫خ‬ ‫ت‬ ‫ف‬ ‫ت‬ ‫�غ‬ ‫ن‬ ‫ز‬
-�‫ �ا �و�ي‬-��‫ �ا ��ل‬-�‫ �ا ري‬-�‫ �ي‬-�‫د ��س��ور �ي‬-‫ ��ير‬-‫ا ��ل�ور‬-�‫�� ب‬‫ح‬.
�
91 Ashraf Khaled, “Islamic University Pledges Reform to Fight Militancy,” University World
News 363, April 17, 2015, http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20150416
110346514.
366 Poljarevic
the content of religious sermons and curricula at the country’s thousands of

mosques in order to limit the risk of religiously-inspired political opposition.
Al-Azhar plays a significant role in shaping the religious subjectivities of
the Egyptian public. As the only state-endorsed institution of religious higher
learning, it is responsible for educating and appointing the country’s Islamic
religious leaders. In this case, the al-Sisi regime and al-Azhar are making a joint
effort to exclude any competing Islamic narrative or interpretation in order to
“mitigate the influence of extremist religious orators such as those affiliated
with the Muslim Brotherhood, Salafist groups or Shiites, who use those places
of worship to take advantage of religious gatherings.”92
All of these tensions have placed more pressure on the Salafi Call, which has
widened its conceptual ambiguity surrounding citizenship rights even further.
Having decided to enter politics, its members had to consider the strategies that
would attract votes from the wider population and, at the same time, maintain
their long-held principles (e.g. al-walaʾ wa-l baraʾ) so that their grassroots activ-
ists, those with a clear vision of the meaning of the political and its distinction
between friend and enemy, would not defect to other groups. Nevertheless,
although the new repertoire of meanings and collective practices is develop-
ing rapidly, it remains unclear around which future conceptualisation of citi-
zenship (rights) the majority of Salafi politicos will coalesce. The most likely
scenario is that the pietist groups will continue to reject direct participation
in any open public debate on citizenship. As the most likely ones to maintain
a conservative position, they will also reject the idea of an integrated nation-
state based on a citizenship that accords equal rights to all citizens regardless
of religious affiliation. The jihadi groups, on the other hand, are most likely to
maintain the illegality of any type of citizenship based on the modern nation-
state, for this is a purely secular notion of belonging. Activist groups such as
the Salafi Call have shown that they are capable of evolving in the direction of
Islamist parties in the mena region, most notably the Muslim Brotherhood.93
92 Rami Galal, “Egypt Closes 27,000 Places of Worship,” www.al-monitor.com/pulse/origi-

nals/2015/03/egypt-endowments-decision-close-worship-places.html, al-Monitor, March
3, 2015. Interestingly, Galal added a web-link explaining what these various groups stand
for; this link goes to www.al-sunan.org, which is a famous Salafi pietist website (also en-
dorsed by a senior Saudi scholar Rabiʿ al-Madkhali and is the supervision of another Sau-
di, Abu ʿAbdallah Mahir al-Qahtani). Thus, the author essentially endorses the definition
of Salafism and its opposition to other groups as outlined by pietist Salafis themselves.
93 Amer Katbeh, “The Civil State (Dawla Madanīya) – A New Political Term?” ifair (2014),
http://ifair.eu/think/the-civil-state-dawla-madaniya-a-new-political-term/.
As most Salafi groups operate outside of their respective state’s institution-

al frameworks, largely as religiously-inspired socio-political opposition, it is
reasonable to maintain that their defining feature will remain their (at least)
conceptual insistence on communitarianism, where religion defines which
type of citizenship one will be accorded by the authorities. Although many
contemporary Salafis ascribe agency to individuals, they do so only within the
confines of a religious, rather than an ethnic or tribal, community.
By entering the field of parliamentary politics and political activism, politi-
cos, much like traditional Islamist groups, are reformulating, reorganising, and
reinterpreting their previous rejection of democratic politics. It is therefore rel-
evant to ask not if, but to what extent the politico groups will be able influence
the state when it comes to shaping the format and content of citizenship in the
mena region. Although this question is not answered here, it is important to
conclude that the Salafis, at least in their political activist form, have entered
the realm of political debate wherein classical Islamic, democratic, and liberal
terminologies are readily debated, as much in the streets as in the activists’
study circles.
Much like the on-going debate within the Muslim Brotherhood since the late
1990s, politico Salafis are debating the issue in light of their traditional source
material, including redefined concepts of dhimma, al-walaʾ wa-l-baraʾ, iradat
al-shaʿb, and the principles of al-maqasid and al-maslaha. Within the frame-
work of the broader Salafi debate on citizenship, we can note that the commu-
nitarian notion, although in many ways fundamental to the Salafi perception
of political life, is slowly being reframed. It is reasonable to assume that politico
Salafis will maintain their theological stance on communal/sectarian-based
citizenship; however, in practice they will inevitably have to de-emphasise
those issues that deal with subjugating minority communities that live within
their domain. The processes of religious revisions (murajaʿat) are on-going in
the broader context of intellectual Muslim debate, and it seems that the most
dynamic revisions are taking place within the Salafi camp – the emergence
of Hizb al-Watan is the clearest example of this. We might expect that the
Salafis will increasingly emphasise people’s rights rather than their exclusive
obligations. This will, in turn, produce a Salafi (i.e. politico) conceptualisation
of citizenship rights that will bear a close resemblance to civic republicanism.
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chapter 14
Citizenship, Public Order, and State Sovereignty:

Article 3 of the Egyptian Constitution and the
“Divinely Revealed Religions”
Rachel M. Scott
Constitution debating and writing featured prominently during the events fol-
lowing the ouster of President Mubarak in 2011. Among the many new articles
that appeared in the Egyptian Constitution of 2012 was Article 3. The article
stated that “the principles of Christian and Jewish laws are the main source
of legislation for followers of Christianity and Judaism in matters pertaining
to personal status, religious affairs, and the nomination of religious leaders.”
While this article was accused of contributing to the “Islamist” nature of the
constitution, it was retained by the seemingly more secular Constitution of
2014, which replaced the Constitution of 2012. This chapter discusses the sig-
nificance of the article’s initial appearance in the Constitution of 2012 and its
retention in the Constitution of 2014. The chapter argues that the constitution-
al commitment to Judaism and Christianity and therefore to the concept of
the divinely revealed religions is not simply the product of the increased role
of Islamic law in the public sphere, but is distinctly modern and is the result
of a complex interaction between Shariʿa law and state law. Article 3, which
had a broader constituency of support far beyond that of the Islamists, can be
understood as resulting from the process of state formation by which the con-
cept of the divinely revealed religions, linked to the concept of public order,
has become nationalised. The nationalisation of the concept of the divinely
revealed religions is the result of a compromise between the Coptic Church
and the state and has important consequences for the currently hegemonic
form of citizenship in Egypt.
Religion, Culture, and Citizenship in State Formation
Lincoln has argued that culture “is the prime instrument through which
groups mobilize themselves, construct their collective identity as outsid-
ers, while simultaneously establishing their own internal hierarchy, based

376 Scott
on varying degrees of adherence to the values that define the group and its
members.”1 The articulation of a national culture has aided state formation
such that Matthew Arnold has stated “culture suggests the idea of the state.”2
In Culture and the State, Lloyd and Thomas argue that culture “occupies the
space between the individual and the state so that the state can lay claim to
universality and representation.”3 Religion is a key component of the culture
of all nation states. This applies to states that have some sort of religious affili-
ation or commitment. Yet even in seemingly secular societies, the role of reli-
gion or that society’s attitude towards religion forms a key component in how
that culture is defined. Thus, religion – in terms of the variety of ways religion
is compartmentalised, managed and defined – is a key part of the culture of all
nation-states.
Peter van der Veer illustrates not only religion’s integral role in the forma-
tion of the state, but also with the formation of the nation-state, since in
nineteenth-century Britain – both internally and in its dealings with colonial
India – religion became “a defining feature of the nation, and for that purpose
it is transformed in a certain direction, that is, it is nationalized.” Religion, Van
der Veer argues “creates the public sphere and in so doing, is transformed and
moulded in a national form.”4 Thus religion, he argues, “becomes one of the
fields of disciplinary practice in which the modern civil subject is produced.”5
The inter-connected nature of culture, religion, and the formation of the
nation-state means that the question of citizenship and its connection with re-
ligious orthodoxy and religious heterodoxy becomes more pressing. According
to William Cavanaugh, contrary to secularisation narratives that the modern
state was established as a solution to violence caused by religion, the religious-
ly confessional nature of the state in fact evolved to be a subject of concern.
A key part of the transformation of medieval feudal monarchies into modern
states was, he argues, the establishment of religious uniformity in the state.6
The treaty of Westphalia gave the prince the right to determine the religion
of the state (limited at the time to Lutheranism, Catholicism and Calvinism).
1 Bruce Lincoln, “Culture,” in Guide to the Study of Religion, ed. Russell McCutcheon and Will
Braun (London: Cassell Academic, 2000), 411.
2 David Lloyd and Paul Thomas, Culture and the State (New York and London: Routledge, 1998), 1.
3 Lloyd and Thomas, Culture, 10 and 3.
4 Peter van der Veer, Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 22.
5 Van der Veer, Imperial Encounters, 33.
6 William Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern
Conflict (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 169.
Citizenship, Public Order, and State Sovereignty 377
This had implications for how national culture and its relationship to religion
were defined and who was to be included or excluded in the process.
Most understandings of citizenship emphasise that the concept involves
a direct relationship between the individual and the state. It is also assumed
that this relationship gives rights to the citizen. The rights focus of citizenship
discourse often serves the narrative that citizenship should be aspired to in
other parts of the world. Yet citizenship as bestowed upon the citizen by the
state also makes certain demands. Nils Butenschøn argues that “citizenship is
a major institutional control mechanism which regulates the distribution of
rights and obligations in a society, including access to decision-making arenas
and state-controlled economic resources.”7 For Wael Hallaq, the state asserts
its sovereign will, which, “knows only itself, deferring to nothing but itself”
over the citizen. Thus “to be a citizen means to live under a sovereign will and
to privilege the supremacy of the state as the highest value. The citizen as a
subject, he argues, is fashioned in the service of a state.”8
In the fashioning of the citizen, the concepts of minority and majority are
often produced and reproduced. Saba Mahmood has shown how the figure of
the minority – and the production of the “minority problem” in Middle East-
ern history – has served as a site for the articulation and exercise of European
power.9 This in turn has facilitated the assumption that the minority group
represents an incipient threat to national unity.10
Humeira Iqtidar argues that the majority is also managed by the state. A fter
Pakistan’s independence, new social imaginaries of the nation state were
constructed, which are connected to the “precise contours of the state and its
relationship to citizenship.” Iqtidar shows that the creation of the Ahmadiyya
as a separate community was critical for “articulating what counts as citizen-
ship in Pakistan.” It was done in order “to divert attention from other crises in
Pakistani citizenship” and to erase other unmanageable differences within the
Muslim/ Pakistani citizen.11
7 Nils Butenschøn, “State, Power, and Citizenship in the Middle East: A Theoretical Intro-
duction,” in Citizenship and State in the Middle East: Approaches and Applications, ed. Nils
Butenschøn et al. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 3.
8 Wael Hallaq, The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 45, 28 and 96.
9 Saba Mahmood, “Religious Freedom, the Minority Question, and Geopolitics in the Mid-
dle East,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 54 (2012): 419, 423.
10 Mahmood, “Religious Freedom,” 424.
11 Humeira Iqtidar, “State Management of Religion in Pakistan and Dilemmas of Citizen-
ship,” Citizenship Studies 16 (2012): 1014, 1021–1022.
378 Scott
This chapter argues that new configurations have occurred as the Egyptian
majority and its relationship with religious minorities deemed legitimate and
illegitimate have been managed since the country’s independence in 1952. It
will illustrate this by looking at the relationship between citizenship, public
order and state sovereignty with reference to Article 3 of the 2012 and 2014
Constitutions. It will argue that the way religion and religious minorities are
managed in these constitutions shores up Egyptian nationalism and state pow-
er. The way that religion and citizenship have been managed is the result of
an agreement between the state and the church that emphasises the commu-
nal status of citizenship. While the uprisings tried to challenge this concept of
citizenship and tried to establish new ideas of citizenship, the communitarian
concept of citizenship has only been further consolidated.
Shariʿa as Rule of Law: Continuities and Discontinuities
In thinking about Article 3 or indeed about the 2012 Constitution, one en-
counters the assumption that anything that appears Islamic represents a
seamless continuity with pre-modern Islamic law. However, with reference to
pre-modern Shariʿa, Emon argues that in Shariʿa there was a mutually con-
stitutive relationship between law and governance, so that Shariʿa should be
understood as “Rule of Law.”12 Anver Emon argues that “in some cases the in-
telligibility of a particular legal doctrine may be deeply dependent upon the
assumed institutional and political environment in which that rule was or will
be applied or otherwise made manifest.”13 In addition, Johansen argues that
Shariʿa was ethical and that “Muslim jurists of the pre-modern period had as-
signed ethical norms an important place and had clearly distinguished purely
ethical from enforceable legal norms.”14
A plurality of perspectives was one of the features of pre-modern un-codified
Islamic law. However, in the late nineteenth century, Muslim countries began
to codify “traditional Islamic law in certain select areas, particularly family and
personal status, but also certain areas of civil law,” and adopt a single legal code
as its national law. Andrew March argues that this constituted “a revolutionary
12 Anver M. Emon, Religious Pluralism and Islamic Law: Dhimmis and Others in the Empire of
Law (Oxford University Press, 2012), 7.
13 Ibid., Religious Pluralism, 18.
14 Baber Johansen, “Apostasy as Objective and Depersonalized Fact: Two Recent Court Judg-
ments,” Social Research 70 (2003): 687.
transformation of the meaning and practice of the Shariʿa.”15 Such a transfor-

mation had important implications for the emerging concept of citizenship in
the late nineteenth century.
The notion of Shariʿa as a mutually constitutive relationship between law
and the enterprise of governance can be seen in the relationship pre-modern
Islamic empires had with their non-Muslim subjects. This relationship was
based on the dhimma contract within Islamic law, a contract that accorded
protection to Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians and, in some cases other non-
Muslims, on condition that they paid the jizya (a poll-tax) and acknowledged
the domination of Islam.16 The dhimma contract, which defined greater pro-
tection and freedoms for Jews and Christians and left the question of other
non-Muslims less clear, was broadly based on the theological concept of the
People of the Book, which implied that freedom of religion was to be accorded
to fellow monotheists whose religion was based on some form – a lbeit a dis-
torted or misinterpreted one – of revelation from God. The specific legal rights
and duties inherent in the dhimma contract were complex and not always
clearly defined. The contract offered non-Muslims security of life and prop-
erty, defence against the enemy, communal self-government and freedom of
religious practice. While the People of the Book had freedom to practice reli-
gion, some stipulations of the dhimma contract forbade public expressions of
Christianity.17
While the dhimma accorded some level of recognition and acceptance to
People of the Book, the status of other non-Muslims was more ambiguous. The
Maliki and the Hanafi schools argued that the jizya may be collected from any
polytheist, while the Shafiʿi and the Hanbali schools argued that jizya may only
be accepted from People of the Book and Zoroastrians.18 In addition, jurists
differed over the precise meaning of the jizya: some jurists defined the jizya as
a substitute for converting to Islam and for receiving protection from attacks
15 Andrew March, “What Can the Islamic Past Teach Us About Secular Modernity?” Political
Theory 43 (2015): 838–849.
16 Claude Cahen, “Dhimma,” in The Encyclopaedia of Islam 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1965), 227.
17 Ismail Ibn Umar Ibn Kathir, Tafsir Ibn Kathir (Abridged), trans. Shaykh Safiur-Rahman
al-Mubarakpuri, 10 vols., vol. 4 (Riyadh: Darussalam, 2000), 407.
18 Ibn Rushd, “‘The Legal Doctrine of Jihad: The Chapter on Jihad from Averroes’ Legal
Handbook Al-Bidaya,” in Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam, ed. Rudolph Peters (Princ-
eton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 40; Al-Mawardi, The Ordinances of Government
(Al-Ahkam Al-Sultaniyya wa-l-Wilayat al-Diniyya), trans. Wafaa H. Wahba, Great Books of
Islamic Civilization (London: Garnet Publishing, 1996), 159.
380 Scott
by Muslims or others.19 It could also mean re-numeration that unbelievers paid

for a safe life, the right to stay in Islamic lands, the right to remain in their infi-
delity, and the right to the protection of the state.20 Other interpretations held
that the jizya is a payment for unbelief, a punishment for infidelity and an in-
strument of humiliation by which the unbeliever was vilified and brought low.21
The payment of the jizya gave the dhimmis the right to the cessation of hos-
tilities against them and positive protection.22 Dhimmis were allowed to retain
their own religious organisations and places of worship. They were also en-
titled to their own religious trusts, law courts, and law codes, which covered an
area of law that was broader than – although in some respects corresponded
with – that denoted by the later term ‘personal status.’
Anver Emon argues that “the frame of ‘tolerance’ does little to explain the
intelligibility of the dhimmi rules” and that “the Islamic legal treatment of non-
Muslims is symptomatic of the more general challenge of governing a diverse
polity.” Far from being constitutive of an Islamic ethos [although here I would
argue that connections were clearly made by pre-modern jurists], he argues
that “the dhimmi rules are symptomatic of the messy business of ordering and
regulating a diverse society.”23
Emon’s concept of a mutually constitutive relationship between law and
governance can be seen in how the millet system of the Ottoman Empire was
informed by – and yet transcended – the dhimma concept. The millet system
emerged gradually to provide, “on the one hand, a degree of religious, cultural,
and ethnic continuity within these communities, while on the other it per-
mitted their incorporation into the Ottoman administrative, economic and
political system.”24 The millet system enabled political and religious-cultural
19 Tabari, History of the Prophets and Kings (Taʾrikh Al-Rusul wa-l-Muluk), trans. Khalid
Blankinship, 39 vols., vol. 11 (The Challenge to Empires) (Albany, N.Y.: State University of
New York, 1993), 4, 6, 46 and 96.
20 Antoine Fattal, Le Statut Legal des Non-Musulmans en Pays d’Islam, vol. 10, Recherches
Publiés sous la Direction De l’Institute de Lettres Orientales de Beyrouth (Beyrouth: Im-
primeries Catholique, 1958), 266–267.
21 Antoine Fattal, Le Statut Legal des Non-Musulmans, 266; Ibn Kathir, Tafsir Ibn Kathir
(Abridged), 4, 405–406; Ibn Naqqash, “The Jizya Meaning: Edict of Caliph al-Amir
Bi-Ahkam Illah (1101–1130),” in The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians under Islam, ed. Bat Yeʾor
(Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson, 1985), 188.
22 Al-Mawardi, The Ordinances of Government (al-Ahkam al-sultaniyya wa-l-wilayat al
-diniyya), 159.
23 Emon, Religious Pluralism, 5, 3.
24 Kemal Karpat, “Millets and Nationality: The Roots of the Incongruity of Nation and State
in the Post-Ottoman Era,” in Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning
systems to be independent of one another. Millets were not territorial. Chris-

tian millets, for example, had control over church organisations, schools, legal
and court systems, waqf property, and had great economic power and inde-
pendence. In addition, the rights and freedoms of the original millet grant-
ed by Sultan Mehmet ii in the 15th century were “given in perpetuity and
thus became inherent in the millet itself without being subject to renewal,
abolition or limitation.”25 The Ottoman Empire was highly flexible and was
based – p articularly before the identification of the Ottoman state with a
distinct Sunni identity in the later period – on the idea that “difference was
perceived as the norm, a condition that need not be altered, but managed.”26
In the mid-19th century, a number of reforms were introduced to this system.
These reforms created new relationships and had new implications for the state’s
management of culture, religion, citizenship and orthodoxy and heterodoxy.
The religious discrimination of the dhimma system was abolished. The Hatti
Hümayun Decree of 1856 guaranteed freedom of religious practice, freedom to
convert from Islam and no distinction on the basis of religion. However, Karpat
argues that the reforms “recognized implicitly that the government was the
source of their rights and freedoms” (emphasis in the original). In addition, such
reforms resulted in the shrinkage of millet control: the jurisdiction of the clergy
was limited to duties defined as “religious” and the government extended its
authority over other activities of the millets such as education.27 Thus the com-
munitarian model of religious pluralism was narrowed. Eventually, religious
communities were left in control of an area of law that came to be defined as
“personal status law” (qanun al-ahwal al-shakhsiyya), which is a term that did
not exist in the classical texts of Islamic jurisprudence. It was first used in 1893 by
the Egyptian jurist Muhammad Qadri Pasha, and the first definition of person-
al status was given by the Egyptian Court of Cassation in 1934.28 Personal status
law roughly corresponded with the extent to which Islamic Shariʿa was pushed
back when it gave way to Western criminal and commercial law designating the
sphere of personal status as an area of communal/ religious autonomy. In this
process, not only was the area in which the citizen dealt directly with the state
of a Plural Society, ed. Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis (New York: Holmes & Meier
Publishers, Inc., 1982), 142.
25 Ibid.,145.
26 Karen Barkey, Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008), 168 and 120.
27 Karpat, “Millets and Nationality,” 164–165.
28 Jamal J. Nasir, The Islamic Law of Personal Status (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2009), 34–36.
382 Scott
enlarged, “but the rights and freedoms in all areas and in the area of personal
status were entrusted to the government.”29
Ottoman nationality established a more direct relationship between the
individual and the state. In 1869, the Ottoman government imposed upon
Ottoman subjects an Ottoman citizenship that was modelled on Western
conceptions of citizenship: every person born of an Ottoman father was an
Ottoman subject and was equal regardless of faith or language.30 Yet in doing
so, the relationship between non-Muslims and the state was altered by the fact
that the Sunni Muslim character of the Ottoman government acquired a new
political significance since the idea of the nation state, “demanded that the po-
litical system and the religious-national culture be expressions of each other.”31
Citizenship, Nationality and Religion
Wael Hallaq argues that “as a paradigm of governance, [the modern state]
evolved in Europe … [and] is uncomfortably seated in many parts of the world”
and that “none of the otherwise persistent structures of the modern state
have ever proven themselves compatible with even the basic requirements
of Islamic governance.”32 For many, citizenship is a Western concept that has
been transplanted onto Middle Eastern societies that are poorly suited to it.
According to Kemal Karpat, the secular idea of state and the religious concept
of nation rooted in the millet philosophy are incompatible. He argues that the
concepts of nation and state, which were naturally integrated into each other
in Western Europe had no basis for success in the Ottoman Empire or its suc-
cessor states, where the nation was conflated with religious community.33
Certainly, citizenship and its connection with the legacy of colonialism can-
not be ignored. In the case of Egypt, the evolution of the concept of Egyptian
citizenship is complex: this includes the challenge of identifying the point
at which Ottoman citizenship gave way to Egyptian citizenship.34 Yet, the
29 Karpat, “Millets and Nationality,” 164.

30 Ibid., 163.
31 Ibid., 144.
32 Hallaq, The Impossible State, 156.
33 Karpat, “Millets and Nationality,” 141, 166.
34 While most Egyptian historiography is nationalist in orientation and emphasises the ear-
ly transfer from Ottoman nationality to Egyptian nationality, Will Hanley demonstrates
the persistence of Egyptians’ Ottoman status well into the twentieth century. He argues
for, on the basis of censuses and law courts, signs of enduring Ottoman citizenship in
Egypt, even if this model of citizenship was apolitical. Will Hanley, “When Did Egyptians
c oncept of citizenship – in a variety of manifestations and interpretations –

has been broadly – and readily – embraced: Islamist ideology, for example, has
shown an impressive flexibility at internalising – and naturalising – the con-
cept of citizenship. The importance of citizenship as a concept to define the
relationship between Egyptians and the state has become more prevalent in
the last two decades. This is due, Meijer argues, to the collapse of the authori-
tarian bargain contract that left a vacuum that could only be filled by a new
social contract based on rights.35 New forms of contestation, he argues, have
emerged, which have included the demand for citizenship rights.36 Thus, in
2007, a constitutional amendment to the 1971 Constitution was made to i nclude
a commitment to the concept of citizenship. This was included in subsequent
constitutions. The concept featured prominently in discourse about the 2011
revolution when invoking citizenship claims became a source of legitimacy.
While the concept of citizenship has been adopted as the normative basis for
relations between Egyptians and the state, what that means is contested. There
are different understandings of citizenship and the authoritarian, nationalist
state version has – at least for now – prevailed.
One of the areas about which the concept of citizenship is contested is the
extent to which communitarian ideas inherited from the millet system can be
absorbed into Egyptian articulations of citizenship. The question of the extent
to which communitarian ideas inherited from the millet system are compatible
with the relationship between individual Egyptians and the state was reflect-
ed in debates about the Constitution of 1923. The 1923 Constitution declared
Egypt a sovereign, free and independent state, with Islam as its religion and
Arabic its official language. It has been customary for historians to talk of this
moment as a secular one that facilitated the integration of Copts and Muslims
in the process of Egyptian state building. However, Sebastian Elsässer points
out that: “the Egyptian nation, henceforth almost universally accepted as con-
stituting a political community, consisted in many aspects of two (sometimes
three) religious groups, namely Muslims and Christians (and Jews).” He argues
that the mantra “long live [the unity of] crescent and cross” served the tenet of
Stop Being Ottomans? An Imperial Citizenship Case Study,” in Multilevel Citizenship:

Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism, ed. Willem Maas (University of Pennslyva-
nia Press, 2013), 90–91.
35 Roel Meijer, “The Struggle for Citizenship: The Key to Understanding the Arab Uprisings,”
(noref: Norwegian Peacebuilding Resource Centre, 2014), 5.
36 Roel Meijer, “Political Citizenship and Social Movements in the Arab World,” in Handbook
of Political Citizenship and Social Movements, ed. Hein-Anton van der Heijden (Edward
Elgar, 2014), 628–660.
384 Scott
Egyptian nationalism and was elaborated on verbally in a discourse of nation-

al unity. He argues that religious symbols, references, and networks remained
highly significant and that popular support “was often mobilized through reli-
gious or communal networks and expressed in a religious idiom.” This religious
patriotism, he argues, “strongly rejected secularism and atheism and insisted
that national identity should remain connected to religious identity.”37
During discussions about the 1923 Constitution, the British supported some
sort of quota for the Copts, while both Muslims and Copts were divided on the
issue of quotas. The Constitution of 1923, however, did not mention quotas
for Christians. It states the equality of all Egyptians before the law regardless
of religion (Article 3), freedom of belief (Article 12) and freedom of worship
within the bounds of public order and morals (Article 13). Islam was named
the religion of the state (although no commitment was made to the Shariʿa)
and Coptic Christianity was not given any status in the constitution.38 For
S.S. Hasan, this failure to recognize the specific nature of Coptic identity was
regrettable but understandable, given the mosaic nature of Egypt’s ethnic and
religious make-up. The left, she criticizes, “never question[ed] the model of na-
tional integration that the Egyptian nationalists brought back from France at
the turn of the century, namely a homogenizing one” even though that model
of integration never really came to be.39
The State’s Management of Religion, Public Order and

State Sovereignty
One of the drawbacks of defining the 1923 Egyptian Constitution and the
inter-war period as secular is that it sets up a binary between the religious and
the secular and opens the way for the common narrative which is that during
the second half of the twentieth century, under the influence of Islamists, the
law and the state – especially with the 1971 Constitution that was amended
in 198040 – became increasingly Islamised. Such a perspective looks upon
religious movements in Egypt, both Muslim and Christian, as aberrations.41
37 Sebastian Elsässer, The Coptic Question in the Mubarak Era (Oxford; New York: Oxford
38 Ibid., 35.
39 S.S. Hasan, Christians versus Muslims in Modern Egypt (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2003), 260–261.
40 This is when Article 2 (first established in 1971) was amended to read “the principles of
Islamic sharia are the major source of legislation.”
41 Hasan, Christians versus Muslims, 260.
The main problem with this narrative is that it assumes the stability of the
categories secular and Islamic, polarises and simplifies them and shifts atten-
tion away from the important shifts that have occurred to Islamic law in the
process.
Rather than identifying the differences between secularism and Islamism,
it may be useful to think in terms of what secularism and Islamism have in
common, specifically that both involve the state’s management of religion –
including what counts as religion and religious. The management of religion
includes the management of the religious majority and religious minorities.
Thus, one of the things that secular – and, I would argue, Islamic – states do
is, in the words of Hussein Ali Agrama, promote “an abstract notion of ‘reli-
gion,’ [in distinction to the civil] define[ing] the spaces it should inhabit,
authorize[ing] the sensibilities proper to it, and then work[ing] to discipline
actual religious traditions so as to conform to this abstract notion, to fit into
those spaces, and to express those sensibilities.” Thus, the project of a modern
state, he argues, involves an ongoing entanglement in the question of the rela-
tionship between religion and politics.42
This is, of course, not to say that there are no important distinctions be-
tween the kind of state envisaged by states that identify themselves as Islamic
and those that identify themselves as secular. Rather such an approach can
allow one to focus on one of the key issues involved in the projects of these
states: defining the boundary between religion and politics. Defining such a
boundary plays an important role in the definition of culture and therefore
in state formation and reformulation. The state uses its disciplinary power
to define what gets to count as religion or religious and therefore to define
questions of religious freedom and the relationship between the civil and the
religious spheres. Citizenship involves the fashioning of the citizen, which in-
volves the fashioning of what religions are to be considered integral to the na-
tion and what are not. This is integral to the project of modern states regardless
of whether they are defined as secular or as Islamic.
The regulation of religious freedom and the management of religious mi-
norities and the regulation of the principle of religious freedom are f requently
42 Hussein Ali Agrama, “Secularism, Sovereignty, Indeterminacy: Is Egypt a Secular or a Reli-

gious State?” Comparative Studies in Society and History 52 (2010): 499. Here I have avoided
subscribing to Agrama’s argument that this is a particular characteristic of secularism.
Andrew March has criticised Agrama for “not limiting himself to saying that secularism
is one [my emphasis] distinctive way of politicizing religion,” but for arguing that: “it is
secularism itself that makes religion into an object of politics.” March, “What Can the
Islamic Past Teach Us about Secular Modernity?” 7.
386 Scott
bound up with the concept of public order. The concept of public order
(al-nitham al- ʿamm) is a concept that has been used by different parties in
Egypt to negotiate the relationship between the religious and the secular. The
concept of public order is of European origin and was introduced into the Egyp-
tian legal system around the end of the nineteenth century.43 Article 13 of the
1923 constitution restricted the freedom to perform religious rituals “by public
order and traditions in the Egyptian state.”44 The Court of Cassation, in several
rulings in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, defined public order as “the social, politi-
cal, economic or moral principles in a state related to the highest (or essential)
interest … of society” or as “the essence of the nation.”45 In 1979, the same court
defined public order as being based on secular doctrine. However, it was also
argued that public order is “sometimes based on a principle related to religious
doctrine in the case when such a doctrine has become intimately linked with
the legal and social order, deeply rooted in the conscience of society.”46 Thus,
while seemingly a secular concept, Maurits Berger has shown how the concept
of public order has been used to endorse Islamic rules, “prevent non-Muslim
rules from being applied because they violated essential rules of Islamic law,”
and to protect the essential values of non-Muslim law and therefore the au-
tonomy of non-Muslim religious communities.47
Many political parties and state and non-state actors, Islamist and secular,
have utilised the concept of public order to invoke the limits of Egyptian soci-
ety that cannot be transgressed (what those limits are, of course, would vary
depending on who invoked them). Elsewhere, I have argued that the Muslim
Brotherhood, in the years leading up to the revolution of 2011 and for two years
subsequent to that, used the concept of public order to manage and define
43 The first European code to adopt the expression ordre public was the French Civil Code
of 1804 (Art. 6), which reads, “Private agreements cannot derogate from laws which affect
ordre public and good morals,” Maurits Berger, “Apostasy and Public Policy in Contempo-
rary Egypt: An Evaluation of Recent Cases from Egypt’s Highest Courts,” Human Rights
Quarterly 25 (2003): 720–740. The concept is, of course, vague and variable. According
to Husserl, “Ordre public is a function of time and place.” It stands for certain principles
that are considered essential to a society and that may not be altered by any rules of that
society. Public order was used to decide on the admissibility of a foreign law, the applica-
tion of which may be rejected if it violates domestic public order, Gerhart Husserl, 1938.
“Public Policy and Ordre Public,” Virginia Law Review 25 (1938): 37–67.
44 www.dustour.eg.
45 Maurits Berger, “Apostasy and Public Policy in Contemporary Egypt.”
46 Maurits Berger, “Public Policy and Islamic Law: The Modern Dhimmi in Contemporary
Egyptian Family Law,” Islamic Law and Society 8 (2001): 88–136, 104.
47 Ibid., 29–30, 118–121.
religion and to advance its own interests in its bid for – and consolidation of –
state power. The Muslim Brotherhood used the concept of public order –
with a more categorical commitment to its religious nature than the Egyptian
courts had, before then, expressed – to legitimise itself as an Islamic group
that is based on Islam. However, it did so in such a way that the group could
distance itself from the accusation that it is preoccupied with a literal applica-
tion of the rulings of the Shariʿa and in so doing show commitment to current
institutional and legal realities.48
In analysing the discourse of secularism in the West, Elizabeth Shakman
Hurd argues that secularism in the West “has been constituted and reproduced
through opposition to particular representations of Islam,” whereby political
Islam “is conceived as a threat to a democratic and laicist public order.”49 Saba
Mahmood and Peter Danchin have argued that the distinction between the
right to “freedom of thought, conscience and religion” and the right to “mani-
fest one’s religious beliefs” is a distinction that is used by many modern nation
states to regulate the principle of religious freedom. They illustrate how “courts
have tended to privilege the values and sensibilities of the majority religion
and discriminate against minority faiths through recourse to the secular con-
cept of public order.” The state’s deployment of the term public order thereby
“authorizes the state’s intervention in the domain of religious belief that it de-
clares to be autonomous and sacrosanct.”50
The 2012 Constitution, Article 3 and the

“Divinely Revealed Religions”
One of the mechanisms by which the state is involved in managing religion,

in defining the relationship between religion and politics and fashioning the
minority and the majority is constitution writing. Constitution writing is also
a useful site from which to examine the interaction between religion, culture,
heterodoxy and citizenship and to look at how the modern state manages the
majority and minorities.
48 Rachel Scott, “Managing Religion and Renegotiating the Secular: The Muslim Brother-
hood and Defining the Religious Sphere,” Politics & Religion 7 (2014): 51–78.
49 Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, The Politics of Secularism in International Relations (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2007), 4 and 10.
50 Saba Mahmood and Peter Danchin, “Immunity or Regulation: Antinomies of Religious
Freedom,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 113 (2014): 130.
388 Scott
After the revolution of 2011, Egyptians voted to craft a new constitution to

symbolise a break with the past. However, the Constitution of 2012, which was
passed by a popular referendum at the end of that year, became a source of
considerable dissatisfaction. There were different, more liberal visions of what
the constitution should look like, which involved different ideas of citizen-
ship. The 2012 Constitution was delegitimised – both in terms of the content of
the constitution and in terms of the process by which it was written – by the
discourse of the religious-secular binary. The constitution was accused of be-
traying the ideals of the revolution and was used as an important justification
for the coup of 2013, which was immediately followed by an interim constitu-
tional declaration and then by a new constitution which was passed in early
2014. Such a binary pitted the 2012 Islamist constitution against its theoreti-
cal secular – and therefore human rights oriented – counterpart.51 Anxieties
about the very question of where to draw the line between religion and politics
were projected onto the constitution. The constitution was treated as an ulti-
mate referendum on the cultural identity of Egypt.
One of the criticisms that were levelled against the constitution was that
it did not respect the equal rights of everyone although particular attention
was paid to the rights of women and religious minorities. Article 3 of the 2012
Constitution states that: “the principles of Christian and Jewish laws are the
main source of legislation for followers of Christianity and Judaism in matters
pertaining to personal status, religious affairs, and the nomination of religious
leaders.” Article 43 of the 2012 Constitution states that: “Freedom of belief is
an inviolable right. The state shall guarantee the freedom to practice religious
rites and to establish places of worship for the divine religions, as regulated by
law.” The reference to “their organization by law” is standard in both the 2012
Constitution and the 2014 Constitution.
These two clauses constitutionally enshrined the rights of Jews and
Christians to follow their own personal status law. While this had long been
established in law and practice, a new constitutional commitment was per-
ceived to give it a level of inviolability.52 The two clauses also constitutionally
enshrined the principle of the divinely revealed religions as forming a key part
51 While such an assumption dominated media coverage, it can also be found in publica-
tions such as: Ragab Saad and Moataz El Fegiery, “Citizenship in Post-Awakening Egypt:
Power Shifts and Conflicting Perceptions” (Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies,
January 19, 2014).
52 Article 46 of the 1971 Constitution had simply stated that: “the state shall guarantee the
freedom of belief and the freedom of practice of religious rites,” but was limited in law
and practice to the divinely revealed religions.
of the relationship between religion and state in Egypt. They appeared to give
formal recognition to Judaism and Christianity and not to others. Article 3 was
proposed by the Islamists and, according to Paul Sedra, was “widely touted by
members of the Constituent Assembly and supporters of the draft constitu-
tion as a ‘concession’ to the sensibilities of the Coptic community.”53 Indeed, it
was welcomed among some Christian circles, since it represented the first time
that a constitution has recognised the existence of other religions in Egypt.54
However, secular Copts opposed grounding these laws in the authority of
the church.55 Secular Copts wanted to have a constitution based on a secular
idea of citizenship, an idea that gained force during the uprisings.56 Such Copts
participated in the January 25 uprisings despite the opposition of the Coptic
Church, and were “driven by the same grievances and demands for bread, free-
dom, and social justice as their Muslim compatriots.” Such Copts participated,
Mariz Tadros argues, in the revolution first and foremost as Egyptians.57
Article 3 gave Jews and Christians the formal recognition of the state, some-
thing that seemed to undercut frequently expressed fears that Islamists wish
to exile Christians, force them to convert, or, wish to impose Islamic law upon
them.58 What the implications of the constitutional article are remain to be
seen, including whether Christian communities will use this article to appeal
for more autonomy over their personal status law.59
However, Article 3 was frequently portrayed as pointing to the Islamisation
of the state, even though it did not revive the dhimma or require Christians
and Jews to pay the jizya. It is perhaps easy to equate accepting the jizya from
only People of the Book in pre-modern jurisprudence with a current constitu-
tional article that only gives formal recognition to Judaism and Christianity.
Certainly, the religious autonomy of religious communities – as opposed to
religious individuals – and the fact that autonomy is given to the heavenly reli-
gions indicates that the article is theologically and juridically informed by the
53 Paul Sedra, “Copts and the Power over Personal Status,” Jadaliyya (2012).
54 Ragab Saad and Moataz El Fegiery, “Citizenship in Post-Awakening Egypt,” 13.
55 Diana Serôdio and Jayson Casper, “The Development of Egypt’s Constitution: Analysis,
Assessment, and Sorting through the Rhetoric,” ed. Cornelis Hulsman (Cairo: Arab-West
Report: The Center for Intercultural Dialogue and Translations 2013), 56–57.
56 Mariz Tadros, Copts at the Crossroads: The Challenges of Building Inclusive Democracy in
Contemporary Egypt (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press), 2013.
57 Ibid., 119.
58 For example, anxieties have been expressed by Christians that Muslims wish to impose
Islamic law upon them in relation to divorce and inheritance.
59 Currently, Christian personal status law is administered in the national courts, often by
Muslim judges since the sharia and millet courts were abolished under Nasser.
390 Scott
Shariʿa. Yet, accepting the jizya from the People of the Book in pre-modern ju-
risprudence did not equate with a positive endorsement of a particular minor-
ity in the context of the modern nation-state. In addition, pre-modern jurists’
law was not codified state law and was therefore more flexible in terms of who
could be included and from whom the jizya could be accepted and what mean-
ing was attached to this. Thus in making a constitutional commitment to the
concept of the People of the Book, a reconfiguration occurred to Islamic law,
whereby the concept of the People of the Book and their religious autonomy
became detached from the jizya/dhimma. The state’s recognition of some reli-
gions over others constituted something rather new.
Article 3 was criticised for explicitly excluding religions other than Islam,
Judaism, and Christianity, although the specific limitations on the rights of
religions that are not seen as divinely revealed would only come into effect
with the passing of particular laws limiting those rights. While the concept of
the divinely revealed religions potentially has an impact upon other groups,
it is, in this particular context, the implications for the Bahaʾi religion that are
particularly significant. It is also by looking at Bahaʾis that one can see how
the concept of the divinely revealed religions has become integral to Egyptian
citizenship, Egyptian cultural identity and Egyptian nationalism.
The Bahaʾi faith originated in nineteenth century Iran, and the presence of
Bahaʾis in Egypt dates from the late 19th century. The Bahaʾis gained their first
Egyptian converts by 1896. Their legal status in Egypt is extremely complex,
and as Johanna Pink has illustrated, is a product of the complex interaction
between Shariʿa and state jurisdiction.60 Pink points out that the Bahaʾi faith
is post-Qurʾanic and thus the issues that the faith raised had no precedents in
classical Islamic law and posed new problems and dilemmas.
However, clearly the Bahaʾi faith – with its emphasis on the notion of con-
tinuing prophecy and a continuing revelation – constitutes a denial that the
Qurʾan is the final revelation and Muhammad is the seal of the Prophets and
therefore could be said to pose a theological threat to Islam. This was clearly ex-
pressed in the Egyptian fatwas on the Bahaʾis that date from about 1910, which
is when Bahaʾis in Egypt gained widespread publicity. Egyptian fatwas on the
Bahaʾis tended to state that the faith of Bahaʾis constitutes unbelief (kufr) so
that Muslims who embrace it are apostates.61
60 Johanna Pink, “A Post-Qurʾanic Religion between Apostasy and Public Order: Egyptian
Muftis and Courts on the Legal Status of the Bahaʾi Faith,” Islamic Law and Society 10
(2003): 409–434.
61 Ibid., 418. However, even this was not so clear cut. Juan Cole illustrates that Muham-
mad ʿAbduh and Rashid Rida disagreed about the Bahaʾi faith. Abduh viewed Bahaʾis as
Such fatwas mostly focused on the status of Bahaʾis as individuals from the
perspective of Islamic law. They tended to focus on the Shariʿa rules for apos-
tasy and the implications that their state of apostasy would have for personal
status law.62 Pink shows that the muftis preferred to avoid more complicated
issues for which classical Islamic law does not provide such definite solutions,
such as the question of Bahaʾis of non-Muslim descent who cannot be consid-
ered apostates, but are to be considered unbelievers. This reluctance was also
due to the fact that muftis were confronted with entirely new questions relat-
ing to the relationship between Shariʿa law and state jurisdiction and how cer-
tain more ethical or theological sensibilities such as the concept of the People
of the Book could be translated into state jurisdiction. It appears to be the case
to this day that muftis and jurists – and some Muslim Brotherhood members –
tend to avoid this question.63
State law, however, while having many overlaps with the content of these
fatwas followed a different trajectory. Before the final independence of Egypt
in 1952, state law was more ambiguous and flexible and this provided a great-
er level of religious freedom for Bahaʾis. For example, in the early twentieth
century, Bahaʾis in Egypt were able to form a Local Spiritual Assembly and a
National Assembly. Bahaʾis also established a publishing house. Bahaʾis were
able to build a Bahaʾi temple in 1924. They also tried to acquire recognition as
an independent religion by codifying Bahaʾi personal status law and petition-
ing parliament to grant them the status of a milla.
a c reative minority which was striving to modernise Shiʿi Islam and whose ideas were
relevant to Islamic reform in general, whereas Rida saw Bahaʾis as a pernicious threat
to Sunni Islam, Juan Cole, “Rashid Rida and the Bahai Faith – a Utilitarian Theory of the
Spread of Religion,” Arab Studies Quarterly 5 (1983): 276–291.
62 Pink, “A Post-Qurʾanic Religion,” 419. One example is the fatwa of Jadd al-Haqq Ali Jadd
al-Haqq on the question of whether a Bahaʾi’s marriage to a Muslim woman is valid or
not. Jadd al-Haqq states that Bahaʾis are not Muslims and that “the Bahaʾi faith is not
an Islamic faith and that whoever joins the faith is no longer a Muslim and becomes an
apostate from the religion of Islam.” He also argues that many jurists agree on the neces-
sity of killing the apostate if he insists upon his apostasy. In any case, he affirms that the
apostate’s marriage is no longer valid and if he was married to a Muslim woman or a
non-Muslim woman then the sexual relations would be considered zinna, Jadd al-Haqq
ʻAli Jadd al-Haqq, “Zawaj al-Bahaʾi min al-Muslima Batil,” al-Fatawa al-Islamiyya min Dar
al-Awqaf al-Misriyya 8 (1982) 23.
63 Muhammad Habib, former Deputy Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood (in 2007)
shows some recognition of it and argues that Bahaʾis clash with the public order, and that
the ulama consider them apostates. When asked what the solution is, he argues that there
is no Islamic law that needs to be put into effect, and that as a party, they are concerned
with other issues. Muhammad Habib interviewed by the Author (Cairo, 2007).
392 Scott
While the petition for recognition as a milla was unsuccessful,64 the very
act of petitioning for such recognition illustrated something about public sen-
sibilities towards Bahaʾis. In 1924, an Egyptian court ruled that the Bahaʾi faith
was a distinct religion, although the same case defined Bahaʾis as apostates.65
This was lauded by Bahaʾis as progress in their recognition as a distinct and
legitimate religion.66 In the 1930s, following controversy over the burial of a
Bahaʾi in a Muslim cemetery, two Bahaʾi cemeteries were created. It was at
this time that it was common for Bahaʾis to register themselves as Bahaʾis in
state documents. In 1944, Shoghi Effendi, the great grandson of Bahaʾuʾllah,
expressed “his firm belief that ‘the establishment of […] [the Bahaʾi] faith on a
basis of absolute equality with its sister religions’ in Egypt was only a question
of time.”67 In 1952, the State Council’s fatwa argued that every citizen has the
right to adhere to the Bahaʾi faith or even to be an apostate, “thus the registra-
tion offices are required to examine all marriage contracts submitted to them,
even if they concern Bahaʾis.”68
However, with the independence of the Egyptian nation-state and the fur-
ther consolidation of the state and nation building process, one can identify
increased restrictions on Bahaʾis and, notably, the increased use of the con-
cept of public order to frame Bahaʾis as heterodox. This must be seen in the
context of the state’s centralisation of personal status law courts whereby the
concern with what religions the state recognises and what religions it does
not recognise became more important. In 1955, the Shariʿa and milli courts
were nationalised. While non-Muslims continued to be given a degree of au-
tonomy in matters relating to personal status, it did so by way of exception.
Thus, “in the first instance, the personal status law of all Egyptians, regardless
of their religion, is governed by Islamic law,” while the exception allowed for
non-Muslims to be governed by their own personal status laws, under the con-
dition that disputes involve people of the same sect and rite and who “at the
time of promulgation of this law have their own organized sectarian judicial
institutions.” In addition, such laws should also, the court stated, fall within the
limits of public policy or public order.69 Such moves paralleled Nasser’s other
moves to increase the state’s power over religious and other forms of identity.
64 Pink, “A Post-Qurʾanic Religion,”411–412.

65 Christopher Buck, “Islam and Minorities: The Case of the Bahaʾis,” Studies in Contempo-
rary Islam 5 (2003) 1–2: 87.
66 Buck, “Islam and Minorities,” 87.
67 Johanna Pink, “Deriding Revealed Religions? Bahaʾis in Egypt,” isim Newsletter October
(2002).
68 Pink, “A Post-Qurʾanic Religion,” 422–423.
69 Maurits Berger, “Public Policy and Islamic Law,” 93.
The state’s centralisation of personal status law courts made the question
of state recognition of Bahaʾism more pressing. Starting in the late 1950s, the
Bahaʾi faith was dealt with collectively and in this sense it became some-
what detached from the Islamic law provisions which relate to the question
of apostasy of the individual of Muslim descent. The concept of public order
was increasingly invoked to argue for the lack of public representation and
state recognition of Bahaʾism. Discourse increasingly distinguished between
the freedom of belief and the public recognition of that belief. In this sense,
Article 3 of the 2012 and 2014 Constitutions (with its accompanying Article 43
which became Article 64 in 2014) marks a continuation and consolidation of
this trajectory with its implicit distinction between freedom of belief and pub-
lic expression of that belief.
The move to restrict the presence of Bahaʾis in the public sphere came in
the context of the newly independent Egypt and was brought about by the
seemingly secular nationalist Gamal ʿAbd al-Nasser. In 1957, Bahaʾi marriage
contracts were declared as ipso facto invalid, as marriage contracts are valid
only if both parties belong to a milla (a religious community recognised by
the state).70 In addition, in 1959, in relation to a case of immigration, the ad-
ministrative court in the State Council argued that the Bahaʾi faith constitutes
apostasy and that an apostate “may not become part of the Egyptian people.”71
This trend culminated in Law 263 in 1960. It was preceded in 1959 by Nasser’s
issuance of a presidential decree that banned Jehovah’s Witnesses under the
accusation of being associated with Zionism. In 1960, Nasser issued Law 263
that banned Bahaʾism, and consequently, the properties of Bahaʾis got confis-
cated, including their libraries and cemeteries. Their temples were shut down
and their historical records destroyed.
Nasser’s reasons for turning against Bahaʾism seem to have been mainly re-
lated to anti-Zionist sentiment. However, such moves were enabled in many
respects because they resonated with Islamic law. This can be seen in further
legal cases that upheld the law. In 1971, the Egyptian constitution specified
“the state shall guarantee the freedom of belief and the freedom of practice
of religious rites” but the 1975 Supreme Court upheld protections only for the
three heavenly religions. In 1977, a state council ruling held that the Bahaʾi
faith, which, it stated, was not recognised by Shariʿa law, contradicts public
order: “thus, every Bahaʾi marriage is invalid, even if it involves two persons
of non-Muslim descent.”72 However, the version of Islamic law that enabled
70 Pink, “A Post-Qurʾanic Religion,” 423.

71 Ibid., 428.
72 Pink implies that the use of the concept of “public order” was a way of overcoming the
fact that the status of marriage between Bahaʾis of non-Muslim descent was an issue that
394 Scott
this legislation to be consolidated was a reconfigured and nationalised one.

The turn against Bahaʾism thus also occurred because the state recognition of
legitimate and illegitimate religion became more pressing during the project
of state centralisation and consolidation.
Citizenship and Public Order in the Islamist Movement
Such cases restricting the public expression of Bahaʾism are frequently invoked
as an example of the Islamisation of Egypt. There is no doubt that such laws
were passed within the context of Islamisation. A look at Islamist literature
illustrates the prominence of the concept of People of the Book in their
thought. Islamist discourse is infused with the bond between the Abrahamic
faiths: there are calls for the “freedom of establishing religious rites for all the
known heavenly religions” and it is emphasised – except in the more radical
interpretations which tend to be hostile – that Muslims are religiously com-
pelled to have good relations with People of the Book and respect them.73 Such
literature tends – in various ways and to varying degrees – to reaffirm the valid-
ity of the dhimma contract.
However, at the same time, within Islamist discourse there is also an im-
portant trend that emphasises – while also invoking the concept of the
People of the Book – that the concept of citizenship should form the basis
for the relations between non-Muslims and the Egyptian state. The Wasati-
yya Islamist intellectuals,74 for example, have emphasised the compatibility
was problematic in sharia law and not usually addressed in fatwas. Pink, “A Post-Qurʾanic
Religion,” 423.
73 Shaykh Muhammad Mutawalli al-Shaʿrawi, Collection of the Fatawa of Al-Shaʿrawi (Jamiʾa
Fatawa al-Shaʿrawi), vol. 1–10 (Cairo: Dar al-Jalil, 1999), 105; Muhammad Al-Ghazali, From
Here We Learn (Min huna naʿlam …!), 6th ed. (Cairo: Nahdat Misr 2006), 120; Muhammad
M. Al-Hudaibi, The Principles of Politics in Islam, 2nd ed. (Cairo: Islamic Inc., 2000), 35;
Muhammad Mahdi ʿAkif, “Muslim Brotherhood Initiative on the General Principles of
Reform in Egypt,” (Cairo 2004), 13.
74 Wasatiyya means centrist or moderate from the word Wasat (center). It refers to a group
of Islamist intellectuals many of whom are former Stalinists or Communists who shifted
to Islamism in the late 1970s early 1980s. They are writers with strong nationalist sympa-
thies who seek to synthesize elements of nationalist ideology and Islam. They argue that
the Western nationalist experiment has failed and that a combination of inclusive nation-
alist ideas with Islam is the answer for Egypt’s political community. This group includes
the writers Fahmi Huwaydi (1936–), Tariq al-Bishri (1933–), Muhammad ʿImara (1931–),
and Muhammad Salim al-ʿAwwa. They have produced a body of literature that advocates
between citizenship and reinterpreted Islamic law.75 Such discourse argues

that the dhimma contract is historically contingent and can be separated from
the broader principles of Islamic law. Such thinkers therefore understand the
dissonance that would be involved in applying the dhimmi rules in the context
of the modern nation state, where Emon argues “the boundaries of contempo-
rary Rule of Law claim spaces [that] are considerably different than … premod-
ern jurists may have imagined.”76
While the Muslim Brotherhood contains members of the old guard who
lean towards the concept of the dhimma, the ideas of the Wasatiyya intellectu-
als have had a considerable influence on the middle and younger generations
of the Muslim Brotherhood who refer to their ideas with considerable respect.
Muslim Brotherhood members associated with the Freedom and Justice Party
have been influenced by their ideas. While the language of these members of
the Muslim Brotherhood emphasises citizenship, it is still done – just as the
Wasatiyya do – within the context of the Abrahamic religions, which is seen by
the Muslim Brotherhood as integral to Egyptian state and nation building. For
example, the 2011 Freedom and Justice Party Platform stated that “we believe
there is a need for us to further support the role of the Egyptian Church in
order to maintain society’s values, morals and ethics” and called for “effective
dialogue between the Church on the one hand and between the al-Azhar, Reli-
gious Endowments Authority and other civil Islamic institutions on the other
hand, in order to maintain the cohesion of the Egyptian national fabric and the
advancement of the community.”77
What is interesting is that such thought is insufficiently accompanied by
a consideration of the implications behind translating ethical or theological
concepts like the People of the Book into state policy backed by the state’s mo-
nopoly on legitimate violence. This aligns with Hallaq’s critique that Islamists
the establishment of Islamic law but in a conciliatory and flexible manner. They discuss
values such as pluralism, democracy, human rights, and issues such as the rights of minor-
ities and women. Their exploration of the concept of citizenship has made an important
contribution to the rethinking of modern Islamic thought. They are a sincere intellectual
trend and a strong intellectual force, although they do not have a great deal of popular
appeal.
75 Muhammad ʿImara, Tolerance of Islam (Samahat al-islam), 1st ed. (Cairo: al-Falah, 2002),
32; Muhammad Salim al-ʿAwwa, On the Political System of the Islamic State (Fi al-nitham
al-siyasi li-l- dawla al-islamiyya) (Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq, 1989), 249, 252 and 262; Muham-
mad Salim al-ʿAwwa, interviewed by the author (Cairo, 2003).
76 Emon, Religious Pluralism and Islamic Law: Dhimmis and Others in the Empire of Law, 22.
77 http://fjponline.com/view.php?pid=80, accessed January 2, 2012.
396 Scott
have not sufficiently theorised the state.78 This can be seen in the way the
concept of public order has been adopted to exclude Bahaʾis as a group from
public recognition. This is despite the fact that pre-modern jurisprudence was
flexible with regards from whom the jizya could be accepted.
Take, for example, the Islamic thinker and writer Muhammad ʿImara, who
argues that pluralism extends beyond the People of the Book. Equal treat-
ment was and still should be applied to other man-made positivist religions.79
However, he uses the concept of public order to distinguish between public
and private freedom of religion and assert controls or limits to the former. He
argues that officially recognising Bahaʾis would go against the public order. He
says that you can do what you want in your own home but to do it in front of
the general public is wrong because it “would harm the feelings and creed of
the general public.” Thus, ʿImara argues, “the freedom of the human being is
limited by respect for the public order.” He argues that this is the same with
homosexuality, which, while practiced, cannot be officially recognised. There
is a difference, ʿImara argues, between individual freedom and official recogni-
tion of that freedom.80
Similarly, the lawyer and former presidential candidate Muhammad Salim
al- ʿAwwa argues that the concept of public order in the sense of defining reli-
gious sensibilities that cannot be transgressed is not just for the protection of
Islam but is also for the heavenly revealed religions. He argues that while non-
Muslims must abide by the values of Islam, Muslims would also not be able
to attack any other religion because that would be going against the public
order and against the morale of a Muslim state which is composed of religious
people.81 Al- ʿAwwa states that while the “Qurʾanic constitution” includes non-
Muslims “whatever their religion,” People of the Book, “have more detailed
provisions concerning the reverence that is due to them.”82
Additionally, the Islamic writer Fahmi Huwaydi argues that the concept of
public order means that it is not possible “to establish a party that calls for
apostasy, freethinking, or atheism, or that discredits the heavenly revealed re-
ligions in general or Islam in particular, or makes light of the sacred things of
78 Hallaq, The Impossible State.

79 Muhammad ʿImara, Islam and Minorities: The Past, Present and Future (al-Islam wa-l-
aqaliyyat: al-madi, wa al-hadir, wa-l-mustaqbal) (Cairo: Maktabat al-Shuruq al-Dawliyya,
2003), 20.
80 Muhammad ʿImara, interviewed by the author (Cairo, 2007).
81 Muhammad Salim al-ʿAwwa, interviewed by the author, 2003.
82 al-ʿAwwa, On the Political System of the Islamic State (Fi-l-nitham al-siyasi li-l-dawla al-
islamiyya), 249.
Islam: its creed, its law, its Qurʾan and its Prophet.” He likens the possible par-
ties to the diversity of schools in Islamic jurisprudence.83 Huwaydi argues that
you have a right to be an unbeliever, but you have no right to change the system
since this would be against the constitution and the public order.84
However, Huwaydi distinguishes between the freedom of religious expres-
sion for those religions and the potential that followers of those religions would
use their freedom of expression to change the system. For most Islamists, free-
dom of expression for Bahaʾis is seen as a threat to the public order because
they are seen as having the potential to change the system. For Huwaydi how-
ever, the beliefs of all non-Muslims, including Bahaʾis should be respected, and
they should have the right to build their own temples although he concedes
that this is a complicated legal issue. He also argues that they should have their
own personal status law and follow instructions according to their own belief,
which, he argues, happened informally in the Ottoman Empire.85
The distinction between the public and the private sphere in Islamic law
is not new.86 However, there are particularly high stakes involved in charac-
terising the public sphere in the context of the modern state. As Van der Veer
argues, the rise of the nation-state and the emergence of the public sphere are
related. Religion creates the public sphere and as such is moulded in a national
form.87
A Broader Project
It has been shown that in some respects Articles 3 and 64 can be seen to con-
stitute part of an Islamisation narrative if one accepts that Islamic law has
been altered and reconfigured in the process. However, it has also been shown
that Articles 3 and 64 represent a culmination in some respects of an already
well-established legal reality within the context of Egyptian nation building
and has facilitated that nation building. The concept of the divinely revealed
religions makes up an intrinsic part of what many parties see as the Egyptian
public order. This is even clearer when one recognises that singling out Jews
83 Fahmi Huwaydi, There is Democracy in Islam (Li-l-islam dimuqratiyya) (Cairo: Markaz al-
Ahram, 1993), 97, 150 and 154.
84 Fahmi Huwaydi interviewed by the author (Cairo, 2003).
85 Ibid.
86 Christian Lange, Justice, Punishment and the Medieval Muslim Imagination (Cambridge:
87 Peter van der Veer, Imperial Encounters.
398 Scott
and Christians for recognition and a level of communal autonomy appeared to

resonate with a broader constituency beyond that of the Islamists. For exam-
ple, when the much maligned Constitution of 2012 was abolished, an Interim
Constitutional Declaration was declared by the interim president, ʿAdly Man-
sour from the Supreme Constitutional Court, a supposed bastion of Egyptian
secularism. One of the only ten articles contained in the declaration stated
that: “The state guarantees the right to religious practice of the three Abraha-
mic religions.” A commitment to the ability of “followers of the other heavenly
religions” “to follow their own religious laws in matters of personal status” also
appeared prominently in the document al-Azhar issued after the revolution.88
In addition, the preamble to the 2014 Constitution makes a particular point
of emphasising the concept of the Abrahamic religions, which is found, al-
though in more muted terms, in the preamble to the 2012 Constitution. The
preamble states that Egypt is where the hearts of its people “looked up to heav-
ens before earth knew the three Abrahamic religions.” It states that “Egypt is
the cradle of belief and the banner of glory of the revealed religions” and goes
on to mention Moses, the Virgin Mary, and Jesus.
In the new constitution that was passed in January 2014, Articles 3 and 43
were retained (a slightly amended version of Article 43 became Article 64)
by the entirely differently configured Constituent Assembly (in which great-
er weight was given to state institutions over elected parties and the Copts
were represented by the three representatives of the three Coptic church-
es). The Salafis and representatives of al-Azhar had an interest in retaining
Articles 3 and 43. In addition, in its memorandum released in late July 2013
about the Constitution of 2012, the Coptic Orthodox Church did not seek to
abolish Article 3, and Bishop Bola the Church’s representative on the consti-
tutional amendment committee requested that it remain.89 There were some
questions as to whether it should be amended to include the category “non-
Muslims.” It appears that this was initially supported by the Catholic and
88 http://www.sis.gov.eg/Ar/Templates/Articles/tmpArticles.aspx?ArtID=48572#.U8clLo
XVxe, accessed July 16, 2014. For an English translation see http://www.sis.gov.eg/En/Story
.aspx?sid=56424, accessed July 17, 2014.
89 Jenna Ferrecchia, “What Do the Copts Want in the Constitution?/Sarkha: A New Christian
Protest Movement,” Arab-West Report, October 28 2013. The Coptic Orthodox Church was
more concerned with Article 219, which, it argued, installs a strict code of Islam. It assert-
ed that Article 2, which states that the principles of Islamic sharia are the major source
of legislation, should remain in the constitution, but requested amendments to Article
4, which stated that the advice of the ʿulama of al-Azhar is sought on matters related to
Islamic sharia.
Evangelicalchurches who then backed down and affirmed the importance of

the article remaining as it is.90 Indeed, there were some reports that suggested
that some Christians along with al-Azhar and Salafis responded with anger to
the suggestion that it be amended to read non-Muslims.91 The Coptic Church-
es did not strongly demand the addition of non-Muslims and certainly did not
support the article’s abolition. In addition, the only amendment to Article 43
that was requested did not do away with the concept of the divinely revealed
religions but simply stated that freedom of belief is absolute as opposed to
guaranteed, also as regulated by law (now Article 64).
Interestingly, the 2014 Egyptian Constitution went further in recognising the
communal rights of Copts in a way that reaffirms the concept of the divinely
revealed religions. Under a section entitled “transitional provisions,” Article
235 states that: “In its first legislative term following the effective date of this
Constitution, the House of Representatives shall issue a law to regulate con-
structing and renovating churches in a manner that guarantees the freedom
to practice religious rituals for Christians” and Article 244, marking a reversal
of the decision made in 1923, states that: “the state shall endeavour that youth,
Christians, persons with disability and Egyptians living abroad be appropri-
ately represented in the first House of Representatives to be elected after this
Constitution is approved, as regulated by law.”92
The Church’s position on Article 3 is perhaps difficult to understand – and
it is not to deny that many secular Coptic groups such as the Maspero Youth
Union rejected it – if the concept of the divinely revealed religions is seen as
simply resulting from the implementation of Shariʿa and the Islamisation of
the state. However, part of the explanation lies in the fact that the Church
had a great deal to gain in retaining these articles. The Coptic Church’s po-
litical and social role, had, since the time of Nasser been strengthened so that
the church emerged from Sadat’s period on as the effective political repre-
sentative of the Copts. While some secular Coptic groups, such as the Mas-
pero Youth Union, after the revolution of 2011, challenged the church as the
90 Ferrecchia, “What Do the Copts Want in the Constitution?” AWR Daily Overview, Septem-
ber 2, 2013: Catholic and Evangelical Churches Welcome Articles 2, 3, of Amended Consti-
tution,” Arab-West Report, November 27, 2013.
91 Sabri ʿAbd al-Hafiz, “The Islamists: An Article of the Constitution Would Allow the Mar-
riage of Homosexuals and Satan Worshippers,” Elaph, September 25, 2013.
92 http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/images/publications/20131206EgyptConstitution_DecAr
.pdf.
For English translation see: http://www.sis.gov.eg/Newvr/Dustor-en001.pdf.
400 Scott
political representative of the Copts93 and advocated a different concept of

citizenship,94 these Copts did not emerge as prominent in either drafting the
Constitution of 2012 or the Constitution of 2014. Article 3 reinforces the idea
that Egypt is made up of religious communities as opposed to self-governing
religiously unaffiliated individuals. It also indirectly leads to the restriction of
Christian citizens’ right to marry and divorce, since it makes them subject to
cannon law and church decrees. The maintenance of separate personal status
law therefore reinforces Copts as Christians and reinforces religious difference
and thus reinforces the control of the church over the Coptic community. Paul
Sedra argues that Article 3 “may well end up having a significant impact on
the balance of power within, and political development of, the Coptic com-
munity” since “to acknowledge the Shariʿa and call for recognition of Coptic
personal status law was simply to reinforce the status of the Church as the
central institution in Copts’ daily lives.”95 Here, the reason Bishop Jeremiah,
head of the Coptic Orthodox Cultural Centre in Cairo, gave for resisting the
insertion of non-Muslims into Article 3 is instructive. Such an insertion, he
argued, “would hurt both Muslims and Christians” since “Christians would not
be protected from the requests of Jehovah’s Witnesses” and other denomina-
tions that are not recognised by the three Coptic churches. The only way to
ensure the interests of the nation, he argued, is to “tighten religious liberties.”96
While Bishop Jeremiah represents one end of the spectrum not only within the
Coptic community as a whole but also within the church, these concerns are
shared by number within the Coptic Orthodox church.
While the Church had a lot to gain from keeping Article 3, so did the secu-
lar military regime that spearheaded the constitution and its preamble. Thus,
the maintenance of Article 3 must be seen as relating to the articulation of a
national culture by certain constituencies, somewhat de-coupled from – but
informed by – Shariʿa law – whereby Egypt is defined as a society that is made
up of specifically recognized religious communities. Thus, it is clear that many
Egyptians have mobilised behind the concept of the divinely revealed religions
to define what being Egyptian means.
93 Nasser, for example, weakened the Coptic laity by removing the religious endowments
from the authority of the laymen’s council and assigning them to the Coptic Orthodox
Church, Mariz Tadros, “Vicissitudes in the Entente between the Coptic Orthodox Chruch
and the State in Egypt (1952–2007),” International Journal of Middle East Studies 41
(2009), 271.
94 Tadros, Copts at the Crossroads: The Challenges of Building Inclusive Democracy in Contem-
porary Egypt (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2012).
95 Sedra, “Copts and the Power over Personal Status.”
96 Ferrecchia, “What Do the Copts Want in the Constitution?”
Conclusion
To conclude, this chapter has explored the convergence between the develop-
ment of the state, national culture, religious heterodoxy, and citizenship, and
argues that the commitment to the concept of the divinely revealed religions
constitutes a form of nationalisation of Egyptian religion. Article 3 of the new
Egyptian constitution is embedded in the theological, historical, and juridical
reality and it is true to say that the move to Islamise, to ground public culture
and law in the principles of the Shariʿa, has contributed to it. However, there is
also something specifically modern, both in terms of the act itself and the im-
plications of including it in the constitution. Indeed, the codification of such
issues as the divinely revealed religions moves the Shariʿa away from its pre-
modern or classical applications. Islamic law has been altered, reconfigured
and nationalised since ethical norms related to the concept of the People of
the Book – with more ambiguous legal implications – have been turned into
enforceable legal norms. This has important implications for citizenship and
community in the country and the region. Just as Peter van der Veer argued
that religion becomes instrumental in the nation building process and is trans-
formed and nationalised in that process, this chapter has illustrated that the
concept of the divinely revealed religions has become nationalised in Egypt. In
this sense, with the concept of the divinely revealed religions as forming a key
part of its national identity, Egypt could be said to be caught up somewhere
between Lebanon with its sectarianism and Tunisia with its French concept of
the nation one and indivisible.
The move to restrict the recognition of Bahaʾis in the public sphere can be
seen to coincide with the consolidation and centralisation of the Egyptian
state after 1952. The project of the modern nation state – including the forging
of a national culture – involves getting entangled in the question of where to
draw the line between religion and politics and what are legitimate and ille-
gitimate minorities. This has involved the concept of public order. The concept
of the divinely revealed religions which has included some and, by implica-
tion, excluded others has facilitated the project of Egyptian state and nation
building. Yet the emergence of the concept of the divinely revealed religions is
also the result of a profound political struggle in which other conceptions of
citizenship have been side-lined. Such side-lining might well be ideologically
motivated but it is also a strategic move by the military since the military has
used the concept of the divinely revealed religions to bolster its Islamic cre-
dentials while at the same time moving against the Muslim Brotherhood. In
the process, what has been established as hegemonic is a communitarian anti-
liberal concept of citizenship that is Islamically informed while anti-Islamist
and which has the full cooperation of the Coptic Orthodox Church.
402 Scott
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in Contemporary Egypt. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2013.
Veer, Peter van der. Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain
Interviews
Muhammad ʿImara interviewed by the author. Cairo, 2007.
Muhammad Habib interviewed by the author. Cairo, 2007.
Muhammad Salim al- ʿAwwa interviewed by the author. Cairo, 2003.
Fahmi Huwaydi interviewed by the author. Cairo, 2003.
Fahmi Huwaydi interviewed by the author. Cairo, 2007.
part 3
Practices of Citizenship
∵
chapter 15
The Effects of Patronage Systems and Clientelism

on Citizenship in the Middle East
Robert Springborg
The Arab upheavals have focused attention on obstacles to the realisation of

democratic citizenship. Prominent among those perceived obstacles is perva-
sive patronage, also known as political clientelism.1 As in other authoritarian
settings, Arab activists and scholars of the region have contended that political
clientelism has constituted a “functional pillar” of these authoritarian regimes,
which have relied upon patronage “in lieu of popular legitimacy to maintain
political stability.” Based on this assessment it has been commonly assumed, as
it previously was in Africa, that with democratisation, “predatory rule, corrup-
tion and clientelistic practices would inevitably recede.”2
In the event, however, democratic transitions in Africa and other regions
have generally not been accompanied by dramatic reductions in political cli-
entelism, thereby giving rise to considerable scholarly research explaining its
persistence and impact. One line of argument in this research is that clien-
telism in general and political clientelism in particular is a “deeply ingrained
political practice,” so “changes in formal political rules” are epiphenomenal,
and are not capable of altering the “underlying structural dynamics.”3 Students
of the Arab world, a region in which the charge of “Orientalism” has made
scholars more wary of what may appear to be “essentialist” explanations than
researchers focused on other regions, may well prefer an alternative argument
put forward in the literature. This argument suggests that political competition
resulting from democratic transitions, manifested most notably in the need
to gain electoral support, exacerbates political clientelism. This argument is
typically accompanied by the explanation that clientelism is to be found in
1 That citizenship has assumed centrality in political struggles in the wake of these upheav-
als is asserted, for example, by a prominent opposition figure in Egypt, George Ishak, in a
long interview on the subject in the country’s leading English language publication. See Dina
Ezzat, “The Road Towards Full Citizenship,” Al-Ahram Weekly, January 12, 2014, http://weekly
.ahram.org.eg/News/5113/17/The-road-towards-full-citizenship.aspx.
2 Nicolas van de Walle, “The Democratization of Political Clientelism in Sub-Saharan Africa”
(paper presented at the 3rd European Conference on African Studies, Leipzig, June 4–7,
2009), 2–4.
3 Ibid.

410 Springborg
most if not all political systems, with the consequence that it is variance in its
magnitude and location, rather than its presence or absence, that provide the
appropriate foci for investigation. A common finding of such investigations is
that democratisation shifts clientelism from the executive toward the legisla-
tive branch and from “political notables” to political parties.4 A third set of
explanations for clientelism’s persistence is based on the proposition that it
results primarily not from the nature of the political system, but from the soci-
ety or the economy in which the polity is situated. Societies cleaved by ethnic,
religious, linguistic, tribal, or other divisions are seen to be more conducive to
clientelism than are more homogeneous ones. Backward, poor economies are
similarly seen to breed more clientelism than advanced, industrial ones.
As far as impact is concerned, the key issue is whether clientelism is gener-
ally functional or dysfunctional for the polity and for economic development.
One view is that clientelism is inherently inimical to democratic citizenship,
so it is both politically and economically dysfunctional as it impedes the vital
accountability that only the proper exercise of citizens’ rights can provide.
Unaccountable political and economic elites are inevitably authoritarian,
corrupt, and disdainful of citizens, clients, and consumers. Contrasting views
are that political clientelism militates against economic stratification through
the very exchange of material goods for political support inherent in patron-
age systems, and that the mobilisation of citizens through patronage based
organisations provides them with political access, and hence at least indirect
influence over policies, including those with distributional consequences.
Yet another favourable view of political clientelism is that it can serve as socio-
political glue to bind together frail political systems and even nations threat-
ened by descent into violence, or recovering from it.
Arabs and Middle Easterners more generally thus confront, in the wake of
recent upheavals, the complex issue of how clientelism impacts their polities,
economies, and societies and what, if anything, can be done either to reduce
or eliminate it or to render its effects more positive, including those relevant to
democratic citizenship. Since democratic transitions have progressed further
in most other emerging regions, their inhabitants and the scholars studying
them have been grappling with this issue for considerably longer. Not surpris-
ingly, scholars of the Middle East and North Africa (mena) have begun to
draw upon this comparative research to better understand clientelism and its
4 Ibid., and Nicolas van de Walle, “The Path from Neopatrimonialism: Democracy and
Clientelism in Africa Today,” in Neopatrimonialism in Africa and Beyond, ed. Daniel Bach and
Mamoudou Gazibo (New York: Routledge, 2011).
Effects of Patronage and Clientelism on Citizenship 411
impacts in their region of interest. This contemporary comparative research

and, indeed, much of that on clientelism previously conducted in the mena
itself is, however, more likely to be suggestive than definitive in the exploration
of relationships between clientelism and citizenship in the mena. One limita-
tion on the direct applicability to the mena of research findings from other
global regions reflects the fact that this research necessarily addresses the par-
ticularities of the region of its focus. So, for example, the voluminous research
on clientelism in Latin America is concerned overwhelmingly with relation-
ships between clientelism and political parties, most notably as regards elec-
tions, obviously reflecting the comparatively developed state of democratic
political contestation in that region. By contrast, literature on post-communist
states tends to be concerned with relationships between clientelism and statist
economies, including their residuals in the forms of perceived entitlements,
networks of former security officers, and weak private sectors. Scholars study-
ing very poor societies, whether in Africa, South Asia, Oceania, or elsewhere,
frequently focus on the relationship between clientelism and development
programs, commonly those operated by international donors. While these
regional literatures inspired by the particular political and economic develop-
ment challenges each faces may provide insights into clientelism and its im-
pacts in the mena, none can provide an “idiot’s guide.”
Nor, surprisingly enough, is much of the mena-specific literature directly
relevant to the investigation of the relationship between clientelism and citi-
zenship. The bulk of research on clientelism in the mena has been anthro-
pological in nature, concerned primarily with describing the phenomenon
in specific settings rather than with generalising to the level of the polity or
economy. Moreover, much of this research has juxtaposed clientelism to pro-
grammatic organisations or rule-bound personal and institutional relation-
ships, suggesting that whereas clientelism is an indigenous, “native” pattern,
the latter are frail western imports. Implicit in this approach is the proposi-
tion that clientelism is culturally rooted, as reference to the Arabic vocabulary
associated with it is claimed to attest; and that clientelism provides alterna-
tive, indigenous methods for performing functions discharged by impersonal,
“rational-legal” structures in developed democracies. Much of this literature,
in other words, is “essentialist,” in that it interprets clientelism as a culturally
based, adaptive mechanism that enables these societies, economies, and poli-
ties to deal with challenges resulting initially from colonialism and now from
globalisation. Frequently it emphasises the alleged positive aspects of clien-
telism, possibly because of an underlying assumption that in the authoritarian
settings of the mena, the best one can hope for is wily citizens, capable of
412 Springborg
extracting patronage from elites, but not aspiring to the unattainable goal of
equality, whether of rights or resources.5
Mindful of these caveats about the applicability of these bodies of research
to the relationship of clientelism to citizenship in the contemporary mena,
I shall draw selectively upon them, as well as on some related macro-data
modelling, in an effort to identify causes of the persistence of clientelism glob-
ally and the implications of these causal explanations for clientelism in the
mena. I shall then speculate on clientelism’s consequences for the potential
emergence of democratic citizenship in the region, before turning to the issue
of whether and how clientelism could be rendered more supportive of demo-
cratic citizenship in the mena.
Socio-Economic Explanations of Political Clientelism
From “Dense” to Impersonal, Instrumental Clientelism

Some of the earliest social science research on clientelism was conducted in
the mena.6 Most of it was concerned with voluntary, dyadic, face-to-face per-
sonal relationships between unequals. As with similar research elsewhere at
the time, much of it was concentrated in rural, low-income areas with limited
market development.7 Referred to as “dense clientelism” because it included a
strong affective dimension and tended to persist over time, even generations,
its existence was explained primarily in terms of traditional, unequal relations
reinforced by the exchange of material resources for loyalty and by associated
status differentials. Dense clientelism was generally assumed to be a subcul-
ture’s coping strategy in the face of needs unmet due to weak states and inad-
equate markets. It was viewed as a pre-modern relationship preserved because
of its inherent appeal within such subcultures, and because relationships of
5 See, for example, Diane Singerman, Avenues of Participation: Family, Politics, and Networks
in Urban Quarters of Cairo (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); and Anne Marie
Baylouny, Privatizing Welfare in the Middle East: Kin Mutual Aid Associations in Jordan and
Lebanon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010).
6 See, for example, Ernest Gellner and John Waterbury (eds.), Patrons and Clients in Mediter-
ranean Societies (London: Duckworth, 1977). For bibliographies of literature on clientelism
in the Middle East, see Shmuel N. Eisenstadt and Luis Roniger, Patrons, Clients and Friends:
Interpersonal Relations and the Structure of Trust in Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1984).
7 See, for example, Steffen W. Schmidt et. al., Friends, Followers and Factions: A Reader in Politi-
cal Clientelism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).
social, economic, and political exchange had yet to be dramatically impacted

by the relatively weak nation-states in which they were situated.8
Not surprisingly Lebanon, with its laissez-faire economy and government,
was the favourite setting for research into mena clientelism, with even urban
subcultures there being assessed as penetrated and structured by dense patron-
client relations.9 Some of the earliest efforts to link pervasive intra-communal
clientelism to the type of nation-state that could be built upon it were also
focused on Lebanon, which was the outstanding example of a “consociational
democracy” in Arend Lijphart’s comparative assessment of states based on ne-
gotiation and compromise between elite patrons.10 Presaging later research,
Lijphart and other early analysts of Lebanese hyphenated democracy noted
its precarious nature, but observed that limited, unstable, yet largely peace-
ful democracy was preferable to endemic political violence. This trade-off has
subsequently been witnessed in other post-conflict settings and continues to
serve as one of the principal arguments in defence of political clientelism; a
second best socio-political glue that holds fragmented socio-political orders
together is better than a complete void of social capital that necessarily would
be filled by violence or absolute tyranny.
Just as Lebanon was not representative of mena states, its dense clientelism
also came to be seen as unrepresentative of evolving political clientelism in
the region. This “new” clientelism was increasingly impersonal, shorter-lived,
and instrumental as a consequence of the extension of post-colonial state
power into societies and economies. Elites in control of those states, typically
military officers and their political allies, drew upon governmental resources
to build clienteles, frequently in opposition to traditional patrons whose re-
source bases were directly attacked.11 It was more or less at this juncture, in the
late 1970s, when the torch of research into clientelism passed from the hands
of those studying the mena into those studying other regions, most notably
8 On dense clientelism, see Jonathan Fox, “The Difficult Transition from Clientelism to Citi-
zenship: Lessons from Mexico,” World Politics 46 (1994): 151–84.
9 Michael Johnson, Class and Client in Beirut: The Sunni Muslim Community and the Leba-
nese State, 1840–1985 (London: Ithaca Press, 1986).
10 Arend Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies: A Comparative Exploration (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1977); and Arend Lijphart, “Consociational Democracy,” World Poli-
tics 21 (1969): 207–25, reprinted in Issues in Comparative Politics: A Text with Readings, ed.
Robert J. Jackson and Michael B. Stein (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1971), 222–34; Michael
Hudson, The Precarious Republic: Political Modernization in Lebanon (Boulder: Westview
Press, 1985).
11 See, for example, Leonard Binder, In a Moment of Enthusiasm: Political Power and the
Second Stratum in Egypt (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978).
414 Springborg
Latin America and Africa. Scholars of these regions observed the unexpected
emergence of a state-centred clientelism called into service by modernising
authoritarian elites, and subsequently of party- and even civil-society-based
clientelisms produced by democratic elites competing for political power
through elections. The global study of clientelism thus shifted from its previ-
ous focus on the so-called dense, traditional variety, for which there tended to
be a sort of nostalgic fondness among scholars, especially those of the mena,
to instrumental clientelism. As the traditional societies and the dense clien-
telism within them withered away, the new concerns with clientelism became
its role in authoritarian and democratic settings, hence the political causes of
its persistence and pervasiveness. Interestingly, however, in recent years the ar-
gument that political clientelism associated with the expansion of state power
is rooted at least in part in indigenous culture has enjoyed a comeback, albeit
in a slightly modified form. Instrumental clientelism in this view is not just a
product of modernising political elites seeking to expand their power, it is the
result of “path dependence,” meaning the inheritance of cultural and historical
factors.
Bringing Culture Back in: Path Dependence and Mass Attitudes

Having been pushed out the front door of respectable academic analysis by
both comparative politics and political economy, culture as an independent
variable, including various subcomponents such as political clientelism, has
come in the back through so-called “path dependence.” Economic historians,
some with interests in the mena, have probably contributed the most to this
rediscovery of the contemporary impacts of cultures and the histories and in-
stitutions by which they are shaped. Acemoglu and Robinson, for example,
have posited that “fixed national effects” explain both economic development
and democratisation.12 These effects in their view are historical, institutional,
and cultural in nature, although their primary focus is on institutional lega-
cies and their economic and political consequences. Other research, however,
has conceptualised culture as a mediating variable between historical and
institutional legacies, in the first instance, and contemporary economic and
political development performances in the second. Operationalisation of the
cultural variable is through longitudinal comparative survey research which
measures variations in mass attitudes that, in these researchers’ views, reflect
different cultural norms and values. The primary assumption underlying the
research is the same as that of Acemoglu and Robinson and other economic
12 Daren Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosper-
ity, and Poverty (New York: Crown, 2012).
historians, namely that “a given society’s institutional and cultural heritage is

remarkably enduring…” and its “religious and historical heritage leaves a last-
ing imprint.”13 Cultural traditions, in short, have returned as viable indepen-
dent variables in social science research.
Analyses of World Value Survey (wvs) and associated, more focused attitu-
dinal survey data suggest to the team of scholars working with Robert Ingle-
hart that the most vital cross-cultural variation can be conceptualised along
two major axes – traditional versus secular-rational values, and a survival ver-
sus self-expression value.14 The survival value places a high priority on material
welfare, as compared to those who value free choice as implied by the term
“self-expression.” Cross-national attitudinal studies have repeatedly produced
clusters of societies reflecting distinctive mixes of these allegedly core cul-
tural values. The cluster of societies in which traditional and survival values
most predominate is the Muslim-majority one, the majority of countries with-
in which that were assessed in the wvs being in the mena. The conclusion
drawn by these researchers is that cultural “path dependence” in these societ-
ies, as reflected in attitudes that value hierarchy and authority over autonomy,
on the one hand, and access to resources over choices about public policies,
on the other, comprises a major obstacle to their economic development and
democratisation.15
Clientelism is not explicitly identified by these researchers as a correlate of
the traditional and survival values so predominant in Muslim majority coun-
tries. Yet, since it embodies both these values, clientelism may well be more
common in these settings. Clientelism in general, especially the dense variety
noted as common in the mena in particular, is based, after all, on unequal,
deferential relations. These in turn structure role behaviour and expectations
in a manner consistent with the sub-dimensions of traditional thinking, key of
which is the acceptance of authority, especially that of status superiors, such
as religious, tribal, or clan leaders. As for the survival versus self-expression
13 Ronald F. Inglehart and Christian Welzel, “Changing Mass Priorities: The Link between
Modernization and Democracy,” Perspectives on Politics 8 (2010): 551–67. For more
information about the World Values Survey, see the wvs websites: http://www.worldvalues
survey.com and http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvs.jsp.
14 For recent books produced by this team, see Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel,
Modernization, Cultural Change and Democracy (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005); and Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Cosmopolitan Communi-
cations: Cultural Diversity in a Globalized World (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2009).
15 Ronald Inglehart, Islam, Gender, Culture and Democracy: Findings from the Values Surveys
(Ontario: de Sitter Publications, 2004).
416 Springborg
dimension, political clientelism is based on the exchange of material resources

for political loyalty, thereby affirming in individual value systems the domi-
nance of “survival” over independent decision making and, indeed, the lack
of importance for the latter. Votes produced through clientelism are choices
for material rewards, not decisions about policies. In the Muslim countries of
the mena, therefore, prevailing values appear more consonant with attitudes
congruent with clientelism than appears to be the case for most if not all other
global regions.
An explanation of the mena’s “path dependence” in the form of lagging eco-
nomic and political development might therefore be found in the mutually
reinforcing roles played by clientelism and prevailing values. Rendered more
potent by this synergy, “culture” in this setting could be imagined to pose sig-
nificant obstacles to the development of effective rational-legal and program-
matic focused governmental institutions and civil-society organisations, both
of which are vital to economic growth and democratisation. In the absence
of such organisations the exercise of democratic citizenship is necessarily
limited.
While this line of thinking is speculative and, in the alleged interactions be-
tween clientelism and values, goes beyond the work of those who have drawn
upon the World Values Survey data, it is consistent with the trend towards
“bringing culture back in” to the study of development, and it does provide a
macro–micro linkage to help explain how culture produces particular types
of behaviour.16 It may well be the case that an earlier generation of scholar-
ship’s emphasis on clientelism, including its anchoring in prevailing value sys-
tems, was an appropriate focus, and might profitably be revived. Moreover, the
strongly embedded nature of mena clientelism, reinforced as it appears to be
by consonant values, may account in part for variations in relative importance
attributed to dense as opposed to instrumental clientelism by scholars of dif-
ferent global regions. Latin Americanists, unlike mena specialists, became
interested in political clientelism primarily as an unanticipated phenomenon
that arose during and after democratic transitions. This “clientelism light,” in
other words, may not have been preceded by a “clientelism heavy.” As for the
mena, having never had, with the slight exception of Lebanon, a “clientelism
16 The case for this is made by Michael C. Hudson, “The Political Culture Approach to Arab
Democratization: The Case for Bringing it Back in, Carefully,” in Political Liberalization
and Democratization in the Arab World, vol. 1, ed. Rex Bryner et al. (Boulder: Lynne Ri-
enner, 1995), 61–76. For an example of the explanation of Arab authoritarianism as being
culturally influenced, see Abdellah Hammoudi, Master and Disciple: The Cultural Founda-
tions of Moroccan Authoritarianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
light” as part of or consequence of a democratic transition, but only either a

clientelism heavy or system of patrimonialism extending from authoritarian,
incumbent elites, one might ask whether the independent variable should be
conceived as the stage of political development, or as clientelism itself. For
the Latin Americanists, it is clearly the former. But in the mena it might well
be that dense clientelism and the values supporting it, further reinforced by
regime-centred patrimonialism, have combined to prevent the light clien-
telism of the Latin American variety from emerging. The relative values of
locally based, dense clientelism and central government patrimonialism might
vary from one mena country to another. But it is not out of the question that
dense clientelism is, at least in some countries, a key independent variable that
has contributed substantially to preventing a lighter version, hence democrat-
ic citizenship, from evolving.
Social Heterogeneity, Inequality, Economies, and Political Clientelism

Evidence suggests that both vertical and horizontal cleavages are positively
correlated with political clientelism. As regards the former, the impact of eth-
nic heterogeneity is best documented, as noted, for example, by van de Walle
for Africa.17 Paul Stubbs and Siniša Zrinščak’s review of the “extended family”
of “Mediterranean welfare states,” a category that includes the mena coun-
tries Israel and Turkey, leads them to conclude that “strong ethnic and regional
cleavages also lead to a securitised state and the absence of a universal model
of social protection cutting across these cleavages.”18 In other words, ethnic-
ity and regionalism produce political communities with attenuated loyal-
ties, which in turn foster states that use patronage as a socio-political glue to
hold their relatively fragile political communities together and/or to reward
the dominant ethnic/regional sub-communities. Indeed, one of the most fre-
quently researched issues of contemporary political clientelism is the patron-
age strategies of political elites toward different constituencies. Are these elites
better off to “reward the faithful” or to buy support from swing constituencies
or even opponents? While the bulk of this research concerns politicians and
voters in democracies with the key divides being party loyalties, some rational-
choice research of this type has been concerned with the strategies of elites
17 Van de Walle, “Democratization of Clientelism.”

18 Paul Stubbs and Siniša Zrinščak, “Rethinking Clientelism, Governance and Citizenship
in Social Welfare: The Case of Croatia,” (paper presented at ESPAnet Conference, Valen-
cia, Spain, September 2011). The same point is made in Daniel C. Hallin and Stylianos
Papathanassopoulos, “Political Clientelism and the Media: Southern Europe and Latin
America in Comparative Perspective,” Media, Culture and Society 24 (2002): 175–95.
418 Springborg
in polities fragmented by vertical cleavages, especially of ethnic and religious

natures. So, for example, one recent investigation in the mena has been of
the patronage strategies of political elites in Lebanon and Yemen.19 Corstange’s
finding is that in these vertically fragmented socio-political systems incum-
bent elites have little incentive to reward co-religionists, whose loyalties are
virtually guaranteed by virtue of their sect membership.20 This logic is then
used to explain the paradox of the relatively large incidence of poverty found
within sects that enjoy substantial or even dominant political power, in this
case Sunnis in Lebanon and Shiʿis in Yemen. The rationale of patronage in ver-
tically divided societies, in other words, reinforces horizontal cleavages.
As for direct relationships between political clientelism and horizontal
cleavages, they appear to be mutually supportive. Inequality is both a cause
and consequence of political clientelism. Joshi and Mason, for example, have
found a strong negative correlation between the proxy indicator of clien-
telism, which is the percentage of rural families whose specific land tenure
relationships render them dependent on landlord patrons, and the state’s in-
vestments in basic services.21 Van de Walle summarises political clientelism’s
impact in A frica as having “overwhelmingly favoured a highly circumscribed
socio-political elite and was rarely economically redistributive in a meaning-
ful sense… We know this because we see that the large number of elite offices
in the capital did not translate into a large number of lower level patronage
positions, or extensive services in the hinterlands.” He further observes that
“evidence of the lack of clientelistic redistribution can be gleamed from the
region’s very high and persistent levels of social inequality.”22 Formal model-
ling undertaken of the economic effects of political clientelism in a democ-
racy reveals that it suppresses “both redistributive policies and economic
development.”23 Jorge Andrés Gallego and Rafal Raciborski found “a two-way
19 Daniel Corstange, The Price of a Vote: Ethnic Clientelism in the Middle East (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, forthcoming); and Daniel Corstange, “Vote Buying under
Competition and Monopsony: Evidence from a List Experiment in Lebanon” (Paper deliv-
ered to the annual conference of the American Political Science Association, Washington,
d.c., August, 2010).
20 Ibid.
21 Mahdav Joshi and John T. Mason, “Peasants, Patrons, and Parties: The Tension between
Clientelism and Democracy in Nepal,” International Studies Quarterly 55 (2011): 151–75.
See also their “Land Tenure, Democracy and Insurgency in Nepal,” Asian Survey 47 (2007)
3: 393–414.
22 Van de Walle, “Democratization of Clientelism.”
23 Luis Fernando Medina and Susan Stokes, “Monopoly and Monitoring: An Approach to
Political Clientelism,” in Patrons, Clients, and Policies, ed. Herbert Kitschelt and Steven
Wilkinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007): 68–83.
relation between clientelism and income inequality and poverty. In a poor

society in which income inequality is high, clientelism will be a natural out-
come. Once clientelism is established, it is harder for democracy to redistrib-
ute income…”24 In his systematic review of the literature, Allen Hicken reports
a strong negative correlation between levels of national wealth and the exis-
tence of political clientelism.25 Stokes and Medina argue that political clien-
telism leads to economic inefficiency because it discourages the government
from pursuing growth.26 It should be noted, however, that various researchers,
especially those focused on specific communities, have found that intense po-
litical competition in democratic settings can lead political clientelism to have
a redistributive effect. María José Álvarez-Rivadulla, for example, reported that
in Montevideo “some squatter neighbourhoods have achieved their right to
the city” as a result of establishing face-to-face relations with politicians driv-
en by “great competition for the votes of the urban poor in the periphery of
the city.”27 Overall, however, the research findings are of causal relationships
between vertical cleavages and clientelism, between vertical and horizontal
cleavages, between horizontal cleavages and clientelism, and between clien-
telism and horizontal cleavages. Clientelism, in other words, seems to pros-
per in heterogeneous, unequal societies and to reinforce that inequality, while
depressing the rate of economic growth. Intense democratic competition ap-
pears to be the one factor that may ameliorate the negative distributional and
economic impacts of political clientelism.
The type of economic system seems also to be relevant to the degree of po-
litical clientelism present. In a nutshell, the greater the government’s share of
the economy, the greater the amount of political clientelism. Indeed, that re-
lationship appears in some research to even border on the tautological, as it
relies upon the proportion of public employment as the proxy measure for
political clientelism.28 As with the relationship between inequality and cli-
entelism, that between size of government and clientelism also seems to be
in both directions. Judith Chubb, for example, notes, in the case of Italy, that
political parties’ need for patronage resources drives them to sustain govern-
mental employment, even as an expanding public debt further intensifies the
24 Jorge Andrés Gallego and Rafal Raciborski, “Clientelism, Income Inequality, and Social
Preferences: An Evolutionary Approach to Poverty Traps,” Unpublished paper, University
of Bogota, 2007, http://ideas.repec.org/cgi-bin/refs.cgi.
25 Allen Hicken, “Clientelism,” Annual Review of Political Science 14 (2011): 289–310.
26 Stokes and Medina, “Monopoly and Monitoring.”
27 María José Álvarez-Rivadulla, “Clientelism or Something Else?: Squatter Politics in
Montevideo,” Latin American Politics and Society 54 (2012): 37–63.
28 For a review of these indicators, see Hicken, “Clientelism.”
420 Springborg
economic crisis.29 Numerous studies have also demonstrated a correlation be-

tween corruption and political clientelism.30 Therefore, large, corrupt govern-
ments are apparently ideal hosts for political clientelism, which in return acts
to sustain those very governments.
Politics, Administration and Political Clientelism
Strange as it may seem, political clientelism is explained as a consequence

of governments being weak, of them being authoritarian, and of them being
democratic. It is as if it is an all-purpose political solvent, applicable across the
range of political systems, from primitive, weak states to established democ-
racies. It holds communities together in the absence of an effective national
market and government. It provides the sinews through which authoritarian
rulers assert themselves over their states and societies. And it provides the
means for mobilisation of citizens by political parties and civil society organ-
isations within democratising and democratic polities. Thus, as noted above, it
is more the location of political clientelism in the political system rather than
its existence or magnitude that appears to result from the nature of the prevail-
ing political order.
In primitive political economies local “big men” operate patronage ma-
chines which are autonomous from or only slightly dependent upon gov-
ernment, and for which the necessary material resources are predominantly
private, such as those generated from access to land. This form of clientelism
was common throughout the mena prior to the consolidation of control by
colonial and post-colonial states and continues to exist in national peripher-
ies into which the tentacles of the state do not reach, or from which they have
withdrawn. Anne Marie Baylouny, for example, argues that state retrenchment
in the Levant that has resulted from the adoption of neo-liberal policies has
resulted in a resurgence of political clientelism within pre-existing social for-
mations, most notably those based in extended kinship.31 Diane Singerman
29 Judith Chubb, Patronage, Power and Poverty in Southern Italy: A Tale of Two Cities (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). See also Judith Chubb, “The Social Bases of
an Urban Political Machine: The Case of Palermo,” Political Science Quarterly 96 (1981):
107–25.
30 For summaries of the literature on the relationship between clientelism and corruption,
see Derick Brinkerhof and Arthur Goldsmith, “Good Governance, Clientelism and Patri-
monialism: New Perspectives on Old Problems,” International Public Management Journal
7 (2004): 163–86; and Hicken, “Clientelism.”
31 Baylouny, Privatizing Welfare in the Middle East.
has chronicled the activities of clientelistic networks that have emerged in the
informal communities of Cairo in the wake of the erosion of the social contract
that formerly underpinned governmental provision of goods and services.32
In these and other accounts of clientelism on the ever expanding peripheries
of shrinking statist political economies in the mena, notable in its absence
is evidence of national political entrepreneurship, other than that by Islamist
organisations, a topic to be taken up below. As the state recedes there is little
evidence that independent patrons, either as individual politicians or politi-
cal parties, have sought to move into the breach, mobilising citizens through
clientelism. Presumably this attests primarily to the relative absence of demo-
cratic space in which to construct clientelistic networks, hence the lack of in-
centives for such politically entrepreneurial behaviour.
Political clientelism under authoritarian, non-oil rich mena governments
thus seems to have traced a bell-shaped curve elongated on the right side. It
expanded rapidly as these post-colonial states consolidated their control, typi-
cally through the institutional vehicles of the military, security services, single
party, and the bureaucracy. In this expansionary phase clientelism extended
down into urban and rural peripheries and served to mobilise populations pre-
viously excluded both economically and politically. It then began a long period
of contraction in which it first ebbed away from the socio-economic periph-
eries and then from the peripheries of the state itself, leaving little more of
the state than its “deep” components enmeshed in tight patronage networks.
Not surprising then were the Arab upheavals, products primarily of the decay
resulting from ever-shrinking clientelism. In those oil rich mena states where
resources have remained sufficient to service the sprawling clientelist net-
works that grew in tandem with the expansion of oil production, there have
been no upheavals.
Political clientelism, at least in the mena context, thus seems to provide the
vital base for authoritarianism, which, in its absence, cannot easily persist. The
implication of research on Arab voting is that authoritarian leaders appreciate
this nexus. In Jordan, according to Ellen Lust, and in Egypt, according to Lisa
Blaydes, leaders have turned adversity, in the form of their feeling compelled
to hold elections, to their advantage, in that they have been able to use those
elections to renew their rule.33 These and other Arab authoritarian states have
32 Singerman, Avenues of Participation.

33 Ellen Lust, “Elections under Authoritarianism: Preliminary Lessons from Jordan,” De-
mocratization 13 (2006): 455–70. Lust argues elsewhere that “elections provide elites and
their supporters an opportunity to compete over special access to a limited set of state
resources that they can then distribute to their clients – a process that I call ‘competitive
422 Springborg
been able to preserve at least for elections the governmental monopoly over
patronage, denying potential competitors access to either private or public
resources that could be converted into patronage. Citizens in Jordan, for ex-
ample, vote primarily if they feel they can obtain material resources or wasta
(influence/access) from candidates, not because of partisan identifications or
policy preferences.34 Access to state resources as mediated by state-dependent
politicians is thus the primary motivation for participation in elections. It is,
moreover, not just the democratic potential of elections that is undermined by
patronage. Research on the attitudes of civil society activists in oil rich Arab
states demonstrates that they are more likely to support incumbent authori-
tarian governments and oppose democratic transitions than are non-activists,
which is precisely the opposite of the anticipated and usual relationship.35
Again the key explanatory factor is political clientelism. In this case it takes the
form of patronage umbrellas extended over civil society, such that its organisa-
tions are rendered dependent upon royal patronage. Civil society activists are
thus either complete opportunists, using their activism to garner resources, or
partial opportunists, in that they are willing to trade subordination to royal will
to attain some independently desired objective. In either case their loyalty is
ensured through clientelist networks that extend up into the regime.
Providing ample evidence of the role of political clientelism under authori-
tarian government, the Arab world offers few examples of it under democracy,
other than the case of Lebanon mentioned above. Authoritarian Arab states
have jealously guarded their hegemony over patronage. They have, for exam-
ple, been willing to suffer the economic consequences of retarding the growth
of independent financial systems, whether secular or Islamic, out of the fear
that more robust, independent financial institutions could generate patron-
age resources for oppositions.36 In some national instances it was probably the
example of Turkey that has caused them to be so wary of the growth of finan-
cial mediation. There the accumulation of capital by the so-called Anatolian
Tigers after Turgut Özal became Prime Minister in 1983 provided the politically
clientelism’.” See Ellen Lust, “Competitive Clientelism in the Middle East,” Journal of
Democracy 20 (2009): 122–35. Lisa Blaydes, Elections and Distributive Politics in Mubarak’s
Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
34 Lust, “Elections under Authoritarianism.”
35 Justin Gengler et. al., “Civil Society and Democratization in the Arab Gulf,” Foreign Policy
(July 25, 2011), http://mideastafrica.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/07/25/civil_society_and
_democratization_in_the_arab_gulf.
36 For comparative assessments of the denial of the “structural power of capital” to private
actors in mena countries, see Clement Henry Moore and Robert Springborg, Globaliza-
tion and the Politics of Development in the Middle East, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2010).
relevant resources upon which the Islamist movement first built its electoral
machine that ultimately brought it into government in 2002. This was a classic
example of political clientelism driving democratisation, thereby constituting
a profoundly negative learning experience for mena authoritarians.37
Arab Islamists have not enjoyed equivalent political or economic space in
which they could draw upon legally obtained, visible capital to support the
growth of a clientelist network to underpin a political party, similarly legal
and above ground. Instead, having typically originated as national liberation
movements and operating in quasi-legal environments at best in post-colonial
states, in which their capital necessarily remained largely hidden, even off-
shore, Arab Islamist movements remained inwardly focused, conspiratorial,
and profoundly suspicious of democracy, willing to use it when it suited their
purposes but not committed to it as a system of values or government. In fact,
the use of material resources by Islamists for political purposes is probably not
best thought of as political clientelism, unless there is such a thing as dense,
dense clientelism. Unlike secular, democratic politicians who “buy” votes with
patronage, Arab Islamists seek to buy souls through total commitment, includ-
ing intense mutual financial relationships. They are in this sense Marxist, in
that they implement the notion of “from each according to his ability, to each
according to his needs.” Just as the individual must commit resources to the or-
ganisation, so the organisation is at least partially responsible for the financial
welfare of its members. This then is not the unequal, dyadic, possibly transito-
ry exchange relationship at the core of clientelism. It is instead the structure of
a totalitarian organisation seeking to control not just the votes of its members,
but their lives. So Arab Islamism does not provide a test case of democratisa-
tion through the privatisation of patronage. Moreover, because Islamism has
occupied much if not most of the opposition political space in Arab polities, it
has squeezed democratic opposition between itself and governments, leaving
relatively little room for alternative political mobilisation, to say nothing of
limiting the possibilities for other, independent opposition elements to gener-
ate patronage resources.
Probably because the Arab world has had comparatively few free and fair
elections and almost none outside of Lebanon that have resulted in chang-
es of government, it has not provided a setting for investigations into the
relationship between electoral systems and clientelism. Elsewhere, however,
this relationship has been studied. The global evidence summarised by Miquel
37 For a summary of the development of the structural power of capital in Turkey following
the 1980 coup, its relevance to that country’s politics, and its use as a model for Egypt,
see Robert D. Springborg, “Egypt’s Future: Yet Another Turkish Model?” The International
Spectator 49 (2014): 1–6.
424 Springborg
Pellicer and Eva Wegner is that when “clientelistic parties are just collections
of local ‘notables’, these parties are more successful in majoritarian systems
than in proportional ones. In proportional systems with higher district magni-
tudes, voters are hardly pivotal in electing their local patron and so they have
more incentives to vote for the programmatic ones.”38 In the Arab world, first
past the post, single member districts are more common than voting systems
based on proportional representation. In Egypt, for example, the issue as to
which system should be used has been politically sensitive since the 1980s
when elections first began to assume some political importance. Twice the Su-
preme Constitutional Court has overturned elections on the grounds that they
were held according to unconstitutional election laws. In the conflict over the
electoral system following the military’s overthrow in July 2013 of the Muslim
Brotherhood government of President Muhammad Mursi, the military and its
supporters backed a majoritarian, single member district system, clearly seek-
ing to maximise the electoral utility of the state patronage they would control.
In the event a compromise solution, whereby two-thirds of candidates would
be elected in such districts and one-third according to proportional represen-
tation of candidates standing on party lists, was adopted. This issue has long
been contested in Lebanon as well, where multi-member districts and the lack
of proportional representation have, despite frequent changes of election laws,
generally maximised the value of patronage.
Another finding of research on the relationship between government and
political clientelism is that the quality of public administration is inversely
related to the amount of clientelism, i.e., the better the bureaucracy, the less
clientelism there is.39 This, of course, begs the question of whether improving
public administration reduces clientelism, or reducing clientelism paves the
way for enhancing the quality of that administration. The general thrust of
the research reports the former finding, with the usual argument being that
fostering the growth of impersonal and effective executive administrations
beyond the reach of those who would use it for clientelistic purposes, is an,
if not the, most effective means of both curtailing the practice and improving
the quality of governance.40 Aid agencies have commissioned various studies
38 Miquel Pellicer and Eva Wegner, “Electoral Rules and Clientelistic Parties: A Regression
Discontinuity Approach,” International Quarterly Journal of Political Science 8 (2013):
339–71.
39 For a summary of this literature, see Hicken, “Clientelism.”
40 On the relationship between clientelism and bureaucratic performance, as mediated
by citizenship, see Aaron Schneider and Rebeca Zúniga-Hamlin, “A Strategic Approach
to Rights: Lessons from Clientelism in Rural Peru,” Development Policy Review 23 (2005):
567–84. See also Philip Oxhorn, Clientelism or Empowerment? The Dilemma of State Decen-
tralization for Securing Peace and Development, unpublished paper, McGill University, n.d.
of bureaucratic clientelism in the hopes of ameliorating at least its effects on

their programs, if not the broader consequences of the malady of clientelism.41
Within the research community, however, there seems to be resignation in the
face of the inevitability of clientelism in large bureaucracies, especially in de-
veloping countries. Hicken, for example, refers to inter-correlations between
clientelism, size of public bureaucracies, inefficiencies of those bureaucracies,
corruption, and budget deficits. As mentioned above, the most commonly used
proxies for clientelism are the relative sizes of government in the economy and
the public sector wage bill.42 Considerable research also demonstrates a nega-
tive relationship between clientelism in the civil service and business dyna-
mism. A survey of Jordanian businessmen, for example, revealed that the need
to cultivate clientelistic relations with bureaucrats was emphasised by nearly
all respondents, as was the deleterious consequences for their business of that
need.43 Yet while clientelism appears to be an almost inevitable by-product of
large government and bloated public administrations, at least in developing
countries, it has also been associated with the downsizing of the government’s
role in the economy, as reported, for example, by Anne Marie Baylouny, also
for Jordan.44 Thus, attempts to reduce the scope of government and size of
civil services may have the unintended consequence of driving clientelism into
civil societies, although there it may be less effective at converting public into
private goods than when it infests the civil service itself.
Causes and Consequences of Clientelism – Implications

for the mena
The mena was a birthplace for research on political clientelism, presumably

at least in part because of its comparative salience there. While it has now
been investigated in virtually all regions of the globe, impressionistic evidence
41 See, for example, Marcus Loewe et al., The Impact of Favouritism on the Business Climate:
A Study of Wasta in Jordan (Bonn: German Development Institute, 2007).
42 Hicken, “Clientelism.”
43 The findings of the study are as follows: “The study shows that the widespread use of
wasta adversely affects the business climate in Jordan by making state-business rela-
tions inefficient and unfair. In addition, the study argues that the use of wasta persists
(i) because many people are not aware of the fact that they can reach many of their goals
without wasta, (ii) because there is little incentive to refrain from using it, (iii) because
of socio-cultural norms which keep it in existence, and (iv) because of Jordan’s political
system, which benefits the political elite.” Loewe et al., “The Impact of Favoritism on the
Business Climate.”
44 Baylouny, Privatizing Welfare in the Middle East.
426 Springborg
would suggest that it remains particularly prevalent in the mena. Moreover,

whereas the locus of clientelism seems to have shifted from executive branch-
es to legislatures, political parties, and civil society organisations in tandem
with democratisation in other regions, in the mena it remains concentrated
in public administrations and ancillary institutions under the control of presi-
dents and monarchs. The underlying force of path dependency in the mena in
the form of cultural and institutional legacies, buttressed by deeply seated val-
ues, has not been diverted by either democratisation or rapid, broadly-based
economic growth, because neither has occurred.
In addition, the above review of socio-economic, political, and administra-
tive factors associated with, if not in fact causes of, clientelism, has produced
a list of such factors that seem present in the mena in greater measure than
most if not all other regions. The region is remarkably heterogeneous ethnical-
ly and religiously and by virtue of various extended kinship groupings, includ-
ing tribes. Although poverty in the mena is not as widespread as in South Asia
or Africa, in some mena countries, such as Yemen and Sudan, as much as half
the populations live in poverty, while in the largest Arab country, Egypt, now
almost 30 per cent lives in abject poverty as measured by income of less than
$1 daily. The mena is also not the worst region for inequality, with even Latin
America having more unequal distributions of incomes and assets, but the
mena nevertheless is afflicted with high and growing inequality. Four of the
ten richest persons in Africa are Egyptians, for example, where in the southern
half of that country more than half the inhabitants live on less than $2 per
day. Economic dependence on government, as measured by public employ-
ment as a percentage of the labour force and/or by government-subsidised
consumption goods as a proportion of all consumption, is higher in the mena
than in other regions, including post-communist ones. The mena overall has
a relatively small middle class and a particularly small entrepreneurial middle
class, as private business activity is comparatively weak. gdp growth per capita
in the Arab core of the mena has for a generation lagged behind the average
for emerging regions, placing it below the major competitors of Africa, Latin
America, and East Asia. The mena’s socio-economic configuration, in sum, is
remarkably, possibly uniquely, conducive to political clientelism.
The region’s governments and politics are similarly clientelism-friendly. As
suggested by virtually all indicators, mena governments are comparatively
authoritarian, large, and inefficient. On what is possibly the most standard
measure of authoritarianism, which is the World Bank’s “Voice and Account-
ability” indicator, the mena’s annual scores since 1997, the first year the Bank
published its governance indicators, has placed it at or next to the bottom of
the world’s regions, contesting only with Sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia
for the annual booby prize. While the region as a whole does better on the
Bank’s “government effectiveness” indicator, if one excludes the gcc states,
Israel, and Turkey, again the score is typically at or near the bottom for all re-
gions. Government revenues as a percentage of gdp and public employment
as a percentage of total employment, the standard indicators of size of gov-
ernment, place mena governments at the top of the pile. These three char-
acteristics of government – authoritarian, large, and inefficient – are noted
in comparative research as being the most congenial to political clientelism.
They are not, however, the only ones, nor the only ones present in magnitude
in the mena. Government centralisation and restricted access to informa-
tion are two other factors conducive to the prevalence of political clientelism
concentrated in the executive, both of which characterise governance in the
mena. Few governments in the world are more centralised than Arab ones,
which have for years resisted internal and external efforts to decentralise.45
The region is “info-shy,” especially as regards government finances, for which
accurate data is notoriously difficult to obtain.46 It is common practice for
ministries and state-owned enterprises to be used as conduits for patronage,
most particularly during elections, a practice made possible by centralisation
and lack of public access to accurate government accounts. As for the politi-
cal system, it is government heavy, opposition light. Opposition political par-
ties have insufficient purchase within government to extract patronage from it
with which to build clienteles. Governments have typically obstructed opposi-
tion efforts to generate autonomous patronage resources. Islamist organisa-
tions are more akin to Marxist-Leninist parties than to patronage based ones
and their objectives appear to be to capture government, not democratise it. In
sum then, government and politics in the mena, like its societies and econo-
mies, are extremely conducive to political clientelism, especially that centred
in the executive branch.
45 Since the early 1980s the United States Agency for International Development (usaid)
has conducted at least four major decentralisation projects in Egypt, investing in them
more than $1 billion. Local administration, including its financial and political dimen-
sions, remains as centralised as it was before these activities commenced.
46 The term “info-shy” was coined by Clement M. Henry in reference to Tunisia. For elabora-
tion of it there and in other settings and the inadequacy of public accounts in the mena,
see Clement M. Henry and Robert Springborg, Globalization and the Politics of Develop-
ment in the Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
428 Springborg
Clientelism and Citizenship
With few exceptions, contemporary research on the relationship between

clientelism and citizenship emphasises the former’s negative consequences
for the latter, an ominous implication for the mena. According to Hicken, for
example, clientelism reverses the accountability relationship fundamental to
democracy in that voters have to surrender their rights, including that to hold
government accountable, in order to participate. He further notes that clien-
telism is inimical to citizenship as it impedes the development of social trust
and other attitudes and values associated with the exercise of its rights. Finally,
he contends that democratic citizenship must operate through civil society or-
ganisations, including political parties, which are themselves democratic, not
clientelistic.47 Gabriela Ippolito-O’Donnell carries the argument for the fun-
damental incompatibility of clientelism and citizenship yet further. She notes
that clientelism absolutely precludes two fundamental rights of citizenship –
equality of voting and autonomy of association – so it “undermines the realiza-
tion of the underlying pillar of democracy, human agency.”48 She further argues
that appreciation of the contradiction between clientelism and citizenshipis
as old as democracy itself. Classical Athenians, for example, “considered cli-
entelism and patronage inimical to democracy….and took specific measures to
avoid clientelism and patronage in public life.”49 Athenians’ interpretation of
clientelism as contradictory to democracy was grounded in their emphasis on
freedom (eleutheria), which they defined as “freedom to do as you like or as you
choose,” a condition they considered impossible to realise were citizens to ac-
cept the dependency and obligation entailed by clientelism and patronage.50
This theme of material dependency inherent in clientelism as inimical to
citizenship runs through the literature. Schneider and Zuniga-Hamlin, for ex-
ample, emphasise the denial of material rights that results from clientelism,
noting that clients “are not citizens with rights to well-being, but dependents
upon patrons from whom they extract a meagre surplus.”51 This theme is also
developed by Brinkerhoff and Goldsmith, who claim that “the rationale through
47 Hicken, “Clientelism.”
48 Gabriela Ippolito-O’Donnell, “Political Clientelism and the Quality of Democracy” ( paper
presented at the annual conference of the International Political Science Association,
Fukuoka, Japan, July 9–13, 2006).
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid. Oxhorn also emphasises the agency component of citizenship as essential, contrast-
ing it with “citizenship as cooptation.” See his “Clientelism or Empowerment?”
51 Schneider and Zuniga-Hamlin, “A Strategic Approach to Rights.”
which the clientelistic relationship is maintained – primacy to the distribution

of individual, selective benefits to citizens, to the detriment of the provision
of collective goods, is itself a prescription for venal use of state resources.”52 In
their study of southern European clientelism, Hallin and Papathanassopoulos
note that the exchange of access to social resources for deference and sup-
port is a form of social organisation “contrasted with forms of citizenship in
which access to resources is based on universalistic criteria and formal equal-
ity before the law.”53 John Cox’s study of clientelism in the Solomon Islands
concludes that “Access to basic services, such as primary schooling, should be
a basic entitlement of citizenship and not contingent on political support…”
He further notes that the proposition that ngos or donor-funded programs
can and should fill these service gaps, which typically happens in the mena,
ignores the negative implications of such programs for citizenship. “Without
the experience of entitlement to basic services, no ethos of citizenship capable
of subverting clientelistic relationships and expectations is likely to emerge.”54
The general consensus that clientelism is antithetical to citizenship is rein-
forced by the further consensus that the transition from systems based on the
former to the latter is inherently a lengthy process. In Jonathan Fox’s words,
“it takes time and effort to transform clients into citizens.”55 Based on African
experience, van de Walle notes that “civic organizations, the press, and the ex-
pectations of the citizenry will not immediately adjust to the new dispensation
(i.e., democratic citizenship rights), but need to be nurtured and encouraged.”
Democracy is not conceivable without political parties, but building demo-
cratic ones requires skill and time, to say nothing of conducive material condi-
tions including economic growth and the reduction of poverty.56 Robert Gay
argues that citizenship requires “distribution of state resources not by favor
but by rights,” but goes on to claim that these are not the opposite conditions
they may seem to be. A “semi-clientelism” that “removes coercion from the re-
lationship” has at least in Brazil expedited an uneven but reasonably successful
transition process.57 In sum, the overwhelming consensus is that clientelism is
inherently inimical to citizenship and that the transition from the former to
52 Brinkerhoff and Goldsmith, “Good Governance, Clientelism and Patrimonialism.”

53 Hallin and Papathanassopoulos, “Political Clientelism and the Media.”
54 John Cox, “Active Citizenship or Passive Clientelism? Accountability and Development in
Solomon Islands,” Development in Practice 19 (2009): 964–80.
55 Fox, “The Difficult Transition from Clientelism to Citizenship.”
56 Van de Walle, “Democratization of Clientelism” (emphasis added).
57 Robert Gay, “Rethinking Clientelism: Demands, Discourses and Practices in Contempo-
rary Brazil,” European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 65 (1998): 7–24.
430 Springborg
the latter, even under favourable conditions, is likely to be a lengthy, complex

process, with various intermediate steps along the way. For the mena, where
clientelism is deeply embedded and conditions for the transition to citizen-
ship are unfavourable, the implications seem ominous. This in turn raises the
question of what, if anything, can be done to expedite the processes whereby
clients are transformed into citizens.
Conclusion: Transforming mena Clients into Citizens
The mena’s “path dependency,” including the pervasiveness there of political

clientelism, does not appear to lead directly to democratic citizenship. Nor has
rapid development intervened to redirect the course of path dependency and
to open new routes to citizenship. Political clientelism in the region remains a
pillar of authoritarianism rather than having become a bridge to democracy. It
also continues to foster the conditions that sustain it, key of which is material
dependency, and hence to thwart the emergence of full citizenship.
Yet other regions have confronted the challenge of transforming clients into
citizens, so the task is not impossibly difficult. But it does require both broad,
systemic changes to the political economy as well as more specifically related
developments in governance and politics. The almost unique preponderance
of government in the economies of the mena must be reduced by the growth
of the structural power of private capital, which in turn can provide the mate-
rial bases upon which independent “voice and accountability” can be built.
As long as access to material resources lies overwhelmingly in the hands of
those who control regimes, clientelism shall continue to obstruct the emer-
gence of citizenship and the accountability dependent upon it. As for gover-
nance and politics, development of the full panoply of rights, institutions, and
practices associated with democracy is ultimately necessary for citizenship to
triumph over clientelism. Key in this regard is the emergence of the rule of law
and associated institutions and practices capable of combatting corruption.
This development in turn requires a re-balancing of the executive – legislative
relationship in favour of the latter. Associated with that re-balancing is the
creation of electoral systems that are free and fair and which militate against
clientelism and in favour of programmatic political parties. Such structural
changes constitute the necessary, if not sufficient conditions for the transi-
tion from clientelism to full citizenship. Awareness of citizenship rights and
responsibilities is also lagging in the mena, so that deficiency also needs to be
directly addressed.
Meeting these preconditions seems overwhelmingly difficult in a mena al-

ready struggling with a host of development challenges recently intensified
by political upheavals and violent conflicts. Awaiting the emergence of dem-
ocratic capitalism as the precondition for converting clients to citizens is to
suggest that many if not most of those mena citizens alive today will never
exercise full citizenship rights. Again, however, the experience of other regions
is relevant. Successful transitions tend to be those of gradual, uneven move-
ment away from an executive centred toward more diversified clientelism. So a
“fight fire with fire” strategy is a more realistic strategy, at least in the short and
medium terms, as the preconditions for full blown democracy and associated
citizenship are gradually established. Clientelistic political parties and civil so-
ciety organisations that operate independently of government, for example,
are certainly preferable to fully democratic ones which remain politically mar-
ginal. The hopes stimulated by upheavals for sudden, dramatic transitions to
democratic citizenship are unlikely to be fulfilled anywhere in the mena, with
the possible and partial exception of Tunisia. But the economic and political
changes these upheavals have stimulated in the mena, to say nothing of the
attitudinal changes they have both caused and reflect, will probably be seen in
hindsight as signalling the beginning of the lengthy transition from clients to
citizens in that region.
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chapter 16
Female Citizenship and the Franchise in

Kuwait after 2005
Rania Maktabi
Introduction
Kuwaiti women received political rights in 2005. Latecomers compared to

women in Western liberal democracies as well as most women in the Middle
East and North Africa (mena) region, the enfranchisement of women in Ku-
wait provides fresh theoretical and analytical insights into how the extension
of political rights impacts on state and society in a fairly conservative albeit
politically dynamic Gulf society.1
Tétreault anticipated that with the enfranchisement of Kuwaiti women
“many new interests would be incorporated […] into the body politic.”2 Indeed,
voting rights for women represents a change both in form, by expanding the
size of the electorate,3 and its substance, by including female citizens as legiti-
mate part of the demos, i.e. those who constitute full members of the polity.4
This chapter seeks to identify and explore which interests related to Kuwaiti
women have been articulated publicly following their enfranchisement. Par-
ticular focus will be given to the various law proposals related to women that
1 In general, women in Western liberal democracies and in mena states were enfranchised by
the first and second half of the 20th century respectively. Seven select dates from each region
provide examples: Finland (1906), Norway (1913), Denmark (1915), usa (1920), Great Britain
(1928), Spain (1931), and France (1944); mena states: Syria (1949), Lebanon (1952), Egypt
(1956), Tunisia (1959), Morocco (1963), Jordan (1974), and Iraq (1980). See Inter-Parliamentary
Union, Women’s suffrage: A World Chronology of the Recognition of Women’s Rights to Vote
and to Stand for Election, http://www.ipu.org/wmn-e/suffrage.htm.
2 Mary Ann Tétreault, “A State of Two Minds: State Cultures, Women, and Politics in Kuwait,”
International Journal of Middle East Studies 33 (2001): 216.
3 The suffrage more than doubled the number of eligible Kuwaiti voters, to around 340,000
in 2006 and 385,000 in 2009, with women comprising approximately 57 per cent of the elec-
torate: Inter-Parliamentary Union, Kuwait, Historical Archives of Parliamentary Election
Results, http://www.ipu.org/parline-e/reports/arc/2171_06.htm.
4 Robert A. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989),
115–119.

436 Maktabi
were raised in parliament. The 2011 Arab Uprisings coincided with the K uwaiti
National Assembly’s (kna) thirteenth session, during which four women –
Aseel al-Awadhi, Rola Dashti, Salwa al-Jassar and Maʾsouma al-Moubarak –
were elected as the first ever female MPs in 2009. What did they do as legislators,
and how did their presence in parliament affect Kuwaiti politics more widely?
Moreover, how did the 2011 Uprisings impact on female citizenship in K uwait,
and how did women’s enfranchisement relate to the changing dynamics of au-
thoritarian rule in the following years?
These questions are addressed by examining parliamentary documents
from the time the four female MPs served, between May 2009 and December
2011.5 At the heart of this investigation lies an interest in looking in greater
detail at how the principle of male guardianship over female citizens in state
legislation was supported, challenged, or opposed through legal amendments
proposed by MPs in the most liberal Gulf state during a volatile period in its
modern history.6
I will first delineate theoretical insights regarding women’s rights and
female citizenship in mena, before sketching the methodology behind the
legalistic approach to scrutinising law proposals on women’s issues raised in
the Kuwaiti parliament. I then point out how women have gained wider civic
rights through courts and the media. In the conclusion I reflect on the impact
of women’s enfranchisement on Kuwaiti society after 2011, and point out future
areas of struggle related to widened female citizenship in Kuwait.
Female Citizenship in Post-2011 mena
The concept of “women’s rights” remains contested and analytically challeng-

ing in post-2011 mena. The notion of citizenship as a container of rights for
women is problematised by the civic status of a female citizen, which – along
with her position and agency within the kinship structure, household, market,
and state – is mediated by and confined to varying degrees through her rela-
tionship to male kin.7
5 Parliamentary documents are accessible at the kna’s website (www.kna.kw) through the en-
try key ibhath fi-l-wathaʾiq al-barlamaniyya. I thank Mr. Ahmad al-Saffar, of the kna’s Docu-
mentation Unit, who instructed me on how to use the website during my fieldwork in Kuwait
between February 20 and March 6, 2014.
6 The Gulf includes here member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (gcc): Saudi Arabia,
Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates (uae).
7 Suad Joseph, “Gendering Citizenship in the Middle East,” in Gender and Citizenship in the
Middle East, ed. Suad Joseph (Syracuse, n.y.: Syracuse University Press, 2000) 15–19; Valentine
M. Moghadam, ed. From Patriarchy to Empowerment: Women’s Participation, Movements, and
Female Citizenship and the Franchise in Kuwait after 2005 437
As of 2015, there is no such thing as an autonomous legal personhood for

adult enfranchised female citizens in the majority of the 22 member states of
The Arab League. But there certainly is for male adult citizens. Two states –
Tunisia and Morocco – stand out as exceptions because of family laws8 that
were codified in 1956 and 1957 and reformed in 1993 and 2004 respectively,
which enable both female and male citizens to stand on fairly equal legal
grounds when it comes to personal status, notably if inheritance issues are left
out.9
The emphasis on female legal autonomy applied here necessitates a clari-
fication of the distinction made between the terms “civic” and “civil”: “civic”
denotes a person’s status and reflects legalistic aspects of personhood as de-
fined in the state’s legislation, such as personal status laws, while “civil” implies
material and immaterial rights a person is entitled to through the state’s regis-
tration and administration of a person’s particular civic status.10
The civic disenfranchisement of female citizens within mena, defined as
women’s confined and contracted personhood as legal minors under the trust-
eeship of males, is my point of departure for theorising female citizenship. It
here implies the set of civil, economic, and political rights as defined by the
constitution, the state’s family law, nationality law, criminal law, and labour
and social security laws. These laws structure the civic legal capacity and au-
tonomy of a female citizen within the polity, and thereby regulate her civil and
social rights as a citizen of the state.
Rights in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia (Syracuse, n.y.: Syracuse University
Press, 2007), see also Moghadam’s chapter in this volume; Center for Arab Women for
Training and Research cawtar, “Al-Marʾa al-ʿArabiyya wa-l-Tashriʿat,” (un Women and
undp, 2015).
8 Family law, also termed personal status law, is a state law that regulates matters related
to marriage, divorce, alimony, custody (wisaya) and guardianship (wilaya) over children,
inheritance, and adoption. The two terms are here used interchangeably.
9 The civic status of women in mena states today can be compared to women’s civic status
in most Western liberal states at the time that women got political rights. In a study of
28 European states, Rodríguez-Ruiz and Rubio-Marín note that “[w]ith the main excep-
tion of Nordic countries, women gained suffrage rights before qualifying as independent
individuals, through the recognition of equal rights with men in the private sphere.” Blanca
Rodriguez-Ruiz and Ruth Rubio-Marín, The Struggle for Female Suffrage in Europe: Voting
to Become Citizens, vol. 122, International Studies in Sociology and Social Anthropology
(Leiden: Brill, 2012), 35.
10 Civic legal autonomy refers here to the ownership of one’s personhood, described as
“a very special kind of property, the property that individuals are held to own in their
persons.” Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), 5.
438 Maktabi
Female Citizenship in Contemporary Kuwait
In Kuwait, as in most states in mena, the principle of male guardianship per-

meates state laws in ways that create legal gaps at both national and interna-
tional levels.
At the national level the constitution proclaims the principle of equality and
human dignity.11 However, in practice other state laws trump constitutional
provisions because a Kuwaiti woman is legally capacitated primarily through
her male kin. In the 1959 Nationality Law, for instance, Article 2 states that
Kuwaiti citizenship is transmitted through a male citizen, depriving a Kuwaiti
woman of the opportunity to transfer citizenship to her children if married to
a non-citizen. In criminal law and family law, a Kuwaiti woman does not have
an autonomous legal personhood because marriage, divorce, custody of chil-
dren, sexual harassment, domestic violence, rape, and the right to independent
abortion are matters conditioned by the consent, mediation, or abrogation of
male kin. In general, social security laws premise that a Kuwaiti family is con-
stituted of a Kuwaiti male head who is perceived as the main provider (muʾil).12
Finally, labour and pension laws allow Kuwaiti female employees in the public
sector to retire at the age of 45 (males at 55). While retirement is optional, early
retirement schemes that push employed women in the public sector out of the
labour market when they reach 45 represent a threat to women’s economic
citizenship as authorities seek to cater for rising youth unemployment.13
At the international level, Kuwait signed the 1979 un Convention for the
Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (cedaw) in 1994,
with reservations pertaining to gender equality in nationality laws (Article 9),
and matters related to marriage and divorce (Article 16) on the grounds that it
conflicts with provisions related to Islamic law (Shariʿa).14
11 Article 29 states that “[a]ll people are equal in human dignity, and in public rights and
duties before the law, without distinction as to race, origin, language or religion.” The Con-
stitution of the State of Kuwait, issued on November 11, 1962, The Secretariat General of the
National Assembly, n.d.
12 Badria Al-Awadhi, al-Huquq al-Siyasiyya wa-l-Qanuniyya wa-l-Insaniyya li-l-Marʾa al-
Kuwaitiyya [Political, Legal and Human Rights for the Kuwaiti Woman] (Kuwait: privately
published, 2006), 55–57, 208–210, 27.
13 Security Laws of 1976 and Law 128 of 1992, Social Security Programs throughout the World,
accessed January 29, 2016, http://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/progdesc/ssptw/2012-2013/
asia/kuwait.pdf.
14 United Nations, “Concluding observations of the Committee on the Elimination of Dis-
crimination against Women – Kuwait,” October 18, 2011, accessed January 29, 2016, http://
www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cedaw/docs/co/CEDAW-C-KWT-CO-3-4.pdf.
A Legalistic Approach to Female Citizenship
The citizenship approach applied here substantiates de jure legal aspects per-
taining to the autonomous personhood of an adult woman, rather than the de
facto relational and kinship-based socio-economic conditions that influence
her life chances and choices.15 The legalistic emphasis is further supported by
a focus on institutionalised forms of communication through Kuwaiti parlia-
mentary documents.
This legalistic institutional perspective is a methodological approach cho-
sen for two reasons: first, the 2011 Arab Uprisings demonstrated the continued
will of citizens in the mena region to promote and support legislative institu-
tions.16 Although authoritarian rule has re-emerged in new ways, pressure for
reforms in Kuwait persists.17 Despite the turmoil, parliament has proved to be
a vital public arena for participation in officially sanctioned institutions and
procedures where national issues are debated and conflicts addressed.18 Sec-
ondly, Kuwaiti parliamentary documents were digitised and made available
to a global audience via the Internet in April 2012, a mere 16 months after the
Uprisings while the parliament was dissolved. From October 2014, the Kuwaiti
parliament has run a live stream of its sessions and issued a 12-page daily news-
paper called al-Dustour.19 These steps signal that the ruling regime sees its
interests as being strengthened by transparency. They also reflect the chang-
ing face of authoritarianism whereby both increased media coverage of
parliamentary politics and rule according to constitutional prerogatives are
seen as part of the Kuwaiti regime’s governance strategy following the 2011
Uprisings.
15 Suad Joseph and Susan Slyomovics (eds), Women and Power in the Middle East (Philadel-
phia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 7–8.
16 Elisabeth Thompson, Justice Interrupted: The Struggle for Constitutional Government in the
Middle East (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013).
17 Mary Ann Tétreault, “Bottom-up Democratization in Kuwait,” in Political Change in the
Arab Gulf States: Stuck in Transition, ed. Andrzej Kapiszewski, Gwenn Okruhlik, and Mary
Ann Tétreault (Boulder, Colo: Lynne Rienner, 2011), 79–90.
18 Nathan J. Brown, When Victory Is not an Option: Islamist Movements in Arab Politics
(Ithaca, n.y.: Cornell University Press, 2012), 5.
19 The first digitised issue of al-Dustour (“The Constitution”) dates from July 29, 2013. The
newspaper came out twice a month until October 28, 2014, when it began to be issued
daily, http://www.kna.kw/clt/run.asp?id=2008#sthash.gJYNbMjJ.dpbs.
440 Maktabi
Kuwaiti State and Society
Among the Gulf states, Kuwait has an unparalleled historical record of politi-
cal participation and a rich heritage of autonomous and semi-autonomous
organisations. Bahrain was the first Gulf state with a representative parliament
to grant female citizens political rights in 2002, but Kuwait’s parliament re-
mains unique, as it is the only elected representative assembly in the region
following the Bahraini regime’s clampdown on protestors in 2011 and Bahraini
parliament’s loss of legitimacy in the eyes of its Shiʿi citizens.20
With the end of the British protectorate over Kuwait (1897–1961), Emir Ab-
dallah al-Salem, a member of the Sabbah family that has ruled Kuwait since
1752, set in motion the election of a Constitutional Assembly in December 1961.
Deriving its legitimacy from the 1938 pact between merchants and rulers, the
Assembly drafted a constitution that was approved by the Emir in 1962. This
constitution laid out the principles of governance for the Emirate and defined
the hereditary powers of the Sabbah family.21
Elections have been held ever since 1963, with interruptions in 1976 and 1986
when the Emir dissolved parliament, although it was later re-opened in 1992
following the Iraqi invasion (1990–1991). The 65-member National Assembly
includes 50 elected MPs and 15 appointed ministers, with Sabbah family mem-
bers in key positions such as Prime Minister and the Ministers of Defence, the
Interior, Information, and Foreign Affairs.
The most significant feature of Kuwaiti political participation is its exclu-
sionary traits, which have historic parallels with Athenian democracy (around
400 bc), where the legal stratification of inhabitants ran along gender lines (as
only males participated), as well as along divisions that marked the legal status
of citizens and non-citizens. The demography of Kuwait is of political impor-
tance for two reasons: first, because citizens form a minority of around 35 per
cent of the state’s total of 3.3 million inhabitants due to the high percentage
20 The other gcc-states have assemblies and councils of a consultative and administrative
nature: Oman has an advisory council, Qatar an appointed consultative assembly, the
uae a mixed system with an indirectly elected and appointed advisory council, while
Saudi Arabia has an appointed advisory council. Rex Brynen et al., Beyond the Arab
Spring: Authoritarianism & Democratization in the Arab World (Boulder, Colo: Lynne
Rienner Publishers, 2012), 175.
21 Jill Crystal, Oil and Politics in the Gulf: Rulers and Merchants in Kuwait and Qatar
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 86; Mary Ann Tétreault, Stories of Democ-
racy: Politics and Society in Contemporary Kuwait (New York: Columbia University Press,
2000), 65.
of a migrant and long-term non-citizen workforce;22 and secondly, because of

the presence of a substantial segment of stateless long-term residents known
as biduns, who number around 100,000.23
Unsettled territorial boundaries since the 1940s, segregated housing policies
from the early 1950s, politically motivated naturalisations in the application
of the 1959 Nationality Law, and the politicisation of census figures before and
after Kuwait’s liberation from the Iraqi occupation are factors that exacerbate
social divisions between citizens and non-citizens. These denizens,24 part of
Kuwaiti social fabric but without citizenship certificates, appear repeatedly in
proposals related to women that were raised by Kuwaiti MPs in parliament
during the period examined here. Consequently, parliamentary documents
reflect the bidun issue as a hotly-contested one, closely linked to tribal kin-
ship affiliation, and in particular to marriage ties between Kuwaiti women and
non-citizens, as well as the status and rights of children of mixed marriages
between Kuwaiti women and non-Kuwaiti men, including citizens of GCC-
states and bidun.
A Note on Kuwaiti Parliamentary Documents
Parliamentary documents are sources in which political issues are articulated

and addressed explicitly. They reflect the range of recorded and publicly acces-
sible venues through which Kuwaiti MPs express opinions and highlight the
four main ways in which requests are addressed: individually, by raising ques-
tions (asʾila) in plenary sessions, which are responded to by the responsible
Minister or Ministry; collectively, through law proposals (iqtirah bi-qanun) ex-
pressions of support (iqtirah bi-raghba) or law proposals (mashruʾ bi-qanun)
that are passed to an appropriate parliamentary committee (lajna). If accept-
ed by the committee, the proposal is presented in a plenary session, voted on
22 Annual Statistical Abstract 2012, p. 47, accessed January 29, 2016, http://www.csb.gov.kw/
Socan_Statistic_EN.aspx?ID=18.
23 Bidun is Arabic shorthand for “bidun jinsiyya,” meaning “without citizenship.” Human
Rights Watch operates with the figure of 105,702 Kuwaiti bidun, though the number is
probably higher due to the politicisation of census figures. Human Rights Watch, World
Report 2014, Kuwait, accessed January 29, 2016, http://www.hrw.org/world-report/2014/
country-chapters/kuwait. More information on the Kuwaiti bidun can be found in Claire
Beaugrand’s chapter in this volume.
24 “Denizens” can be defined as privileged resident aliens: Tomas Hammar, Democracy and
the Nation State: Aliens, Denizens and Citizens in a World of International Migration (Alder-
shot: Avebury, 1990), 12–14.
442 Maktabi
in two separate rounds, and then approved by the government, before being
issued as a law published in the Official Gazette (al-Jarida al-Rasmiyya). In cas-
es where a law proposal gains a majority in parliament but is opposed by the
government, the Emir has the powers to block its passing either by consider-
ing it unconstitutional or by dissolving parliament, provided that elections are
held within 60 days.25
Gaining Political Rights in 2005
Kuwaiti women gained the right to vote and to be elected to the National
Assembly on an equal footing with men on May 16, 2005. The enfranchisement
initiative came through pressures from above, first in 1999 by the Emir whose
decree was deemed unconstitutional, and once again in 2005 through a new
initiative by the Prime Minister.26 The parliamentary session in which women
received the vote made two amendments to Article 1 of the Election Law 35
from 1962: the word “male” was deleted,27 and a sentence added that states a
woman is obliged to adapt to rules and norms based on the Shariʿa, in order to
placate conservative MPs.28
In total 59 votes were cast: 35 were for (21 votes by elected MPs and 14 votes
by ministers) and 23 against (all votes by elected MPs), with one abstention,
while five MPs were not present.29 If we include the abstention and those not
present, elected MPs who opposed women’s enfranchisement numbered 29.30
25 Tétreault, Stories of Democracy: Politics and Society in Contemporary Kuwait, 60.

26 Tétreault, “Bottom-up Democratization in Kuwait,” 77–79.
27 Law 17 of June 4, 2005 reads “every Kuwaiti […] has the right to vote” (li-kull kuwaiti […]
haqq al-intikhab); previously the Election law had stated that “every Kuwaiti male […] has
the right to vote” (li-kull kuwaiti min al-thukur […] haqq al-intikhab), Official Gazette, June
5, 2005.
28 The amendment reads “yashtarit li-l-marʾa fi-l-tarshih wa-l-intikhab al-iltizam bi-l-qawaʾid
wa-l-ahkam al-muʿtamida fi-l-shariʿa al-islamiyya,” Official Gazette, June, 5 2005.
29 In Kuwait, ministers also vote in parliament, which explains why 59 votes were cast, and
not just those of the 50 elected MPs. All the information on the political affiliation and
voting patterns of Kuwaiti MPs, as well as the voting results used here, are drawn from
Michael Herb’s superb Kuwait Politics Database, accessed January 29, 2016, http://www
.kuwaitpolitics.org/.
30 The single abstention was by President of the National Assembly and former Finance
Minister Jasem al-Khorafi (3rd circle). The five absent MPs included the Salafi leader
Ahmad Baqer (5th circle), Basil al-Rashed (10th circle), Abdullah al-Rumi (4th circle),
Ali Khaled al-Saʿid (11th circle), and Walid al-Osaimi (14th circle). They are here counted
as against granting women political rights because their opposition was articulated in
The six pro-women votes that secured the franchise reflect a fairly conserva-
tive societal atmosphere that is, by and large, not attuned to granting Kuwaiti
women political rights. Nevertheless, the regime had important allies in the
small but historically significant women’s movement that had been pressuring
for political rights since 1963.31 Other supporters of women’s enfranchisement
came from urbanised constituencies inhabited by the economically powerful
elites with merchant backgrounds, liberals, and Shiʿi groups, as well as parts
of the Muslim Brotherhood’s women’s branch, led by Suʿad al-Jarallah, who
were in favour of political rights for women, in contrast to the group’s male
leadership.32
Do Women Make a Difference in Parliament?
Do women make a difference when they are elected to legislative institutions?

Simply asserting that the presence of women is a good thing for articulating
women’s interests in politics is a problematic standpoint. Given the short-term
effect of only a decade of enfranchisement, female political representation
and the articulation of women’s interests in Kuwait may be assumed to co-
incide with those of men and thus be treated as unproblematic for politics
overall. Researchers on the impact of women in representative bodies have
differing views on whether it is women’s presence in parliament, often seen
in terms of the number of women present, or whether it is acts – i.e. deeds in
support of women’s issues raised, irrespective of women’s actual presence in
decision-making bodies – that impact on reforms that strengthen female citi-
zenship. Recent research in Western liberal democracies suggests that acts, not
numbers, are critical for such change.33
ublic prior to the voting session. Before the 2008 elections, there existed 25 electoral
p
circles, with 1st–5th circles lying closest to Kuwait City’s centre.
31 Haya al-Mughni, Women in Kuwait: The Politics of Gender (London: Saqi, 2001); Mary Ann
Tétreault, “Kuwait’s Parliament Considers Women’s Political Rights,” Middle East Report
Online (2004), www.merip.org/mero/mero090204. Accessed January 29, 2016.
32 Suʿad al-Jarallah, interview with author, March 16, 2015. On Islamist politics and its impact
on women in Kuwait after 1992, see Tétreault, Stories of Democracy: Politics and Society in
Contemporary Kuwait, 158–164; Haya al-Mughni, “The Rise of Islamic Feminism in Ku-
wait,” Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée (December 2010): 167–182.
33 Joni Lovenduski and Marila Guadagnini, “Political Representation,” in The Politics of State
Feminism: Innovation in Comparative Research, ed. Dorothy E. McBride, et al. (Philadel-
phia: Temple University Press, 2010), 164–166.
444 Maktabi
My investigation of the Kuwaiti parliamentary records supports both stand-

points. Acts, understood here as law proposals that targeted women’s issues,
increased dramatically with the presence of women in parliament, i.e. their
number, as reflected most clearly in Table 16.3, below, which shows that the
number of law proposals dealt with at the “Woman and Family Affairs Com-
mittee” (wfc) increased dramatically with the entry of women into parlia-
ment. For instance, between 22 January 2007 and 27 June 2011 the wfc ad-
dressed 47 cases, of which 38 – i.e. more than eighty per cent – were raised
during the two years the female MPs were the wfc’s main members.34 This
observation reflects the impact of women’s political participation through the
gendering of political issues, and theoretically feeds into a wider discussion on
whether and how women’s presence in parliament, i.e. descriptive aspects of
representation, enhances the focus on women’s issues, i.e. substantive aspects
of representation.35 In Kuwait, women’s presence in parliament between 2009
and 2011 went hand in hand with acts pertaining to women, i.e. the amount
of law proposals that addressed women’s issues. Male MPs were particularly
diligent in raising law proposals that addressed women’s issues as is pointed
out further below.
Feminist theoreticians remind us that the organisation and mobilisation of
women entails contradictions, such as the reproduction of domination, even
though women “work for, and at times succeed in, improving women’s status
and conditions.”36 Moreover, class interests in Kuwait are embedded in strug-
gles for positions in the labour market, where elite women restrain the upward
mobility of women from the middle class, as well as educated males of rural
and Bedouin background.37
Social stratification aside, the democratising impact of Kuwaiti women’s
enfranchisement relates most significantly to the articulation of demands that
target women’s issues specifically, such as reproductive rights, abortion, do-
mestic abuse, rape, sexual assault in the public sphere, conferring citizenship
34 During this period, MPs presented a total of 25 expressions of support (iqtirah bi-righba),
of which 20 were raised while the four women MPs were present in parliament, and 22
law proposals (iqtirah bi-qanun), of which 15 were raised while the four women MPs were
present.
35 Lovenduski and Guadagnini, “Political Representation,” 167–168.
36 Suad Joseph, “The Reproduction of Political Process among Women Activists in Lebanon:
‘Shopkeepers’ and Feminists,” in Organizing Women: Formal and Informal Women’s Groups
in the Middle East, ed. Dawn Chatty and Annika Rabo (Oxford: Berg, 1997), 57.
37 Mary Ann Tétreault, “Kuwait: Sex, Violence, and the Politics of Economic Restructuring,”
in Women and Globalization in the Arab Middle East: Gender, Economy & Society, ed. El-
eanor Abdella Doumato and Marsha Pripstein Posusney (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2003),
222–224.
to children when married to a non-national, job opportunities, social security

and maternity leave schemes, and public childcare facilities.38
I read Kuwaiti parliamentary documents by applying McBride and Mazur’s
distinction between “policy debates” that cover long-term economic and social
issues, and “hot issues” that cover contested questions.39 This broad perspec-
tive is combined by recognising criteria of a legalistic nature for identifying
and categorising women-specific issues pointed out by Htun and Weldon.40
In Kuwait, the main policy areas following women’s enfranchisement re-
late to access to housing, girls’ and women’s education and health, working
conditions for mothers employed in the labour market, and those who work
at home. Contested issues relate to reforms in nationality law, the regulation
of civil and social rights of Kuwaiti women married to non-Kuwaitis, and the
rights of children born of such mixed marriages. As will be seen below, the
entry of Kuwaiti women into the legislature influenced the propensity of law
proposals regarding these issues.
Female Parliamentarians in Kuwait 2009–2011: Who were They?
All four first-time female Kuwaiti MPs hold PhDs from universities in the Unit-
ed States, in fields such as education, political science, and economics.41
38 These are examples of women’s issues that are shared by feminist researchers who, never-
theless, differ on what constitutes an issue related to women. Osborne differentiates, for
instance, between traditionalist, specific, and feminist women’s issues: Tracy L. Osborn,
How Women Represent Women : Political Parties, Gender and Representation in the State
Legislatures (Oxford University Press, 2012), 28–31. Another example into what may con-
stitute women’s issues is provided by Htun, who argues that “women’s rights” or “feminist
policies” should not be treated as single-issue areas. Instead, she stresses the distinctive-
ness of how issues related to gender are processed politically, how groups shape policy
debates, and which ideas pertaining to change are at stake: Mala Htun, Sex and the State:
Abortion, Divorce and the Family under Latin American Dictatorships and Democracies
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 2, 4.
39 Amy Mazur and Dorothy McBride, “The State Feminism Project,” in The Politics of State
Feminism: Innovation in Comparative Research, ed. Amy G. Mazur and Joni Lovenduski
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), 20–22.
40 Mala Htun and S. Laurel Weldon, “State Power, Religion, and Women’s Rights: A Compara-
tive Analysis of Family Law,” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 18 (2011): 151–153. The
authors point out criteria across 71 countries that include minimum marriage age, con-
sent in marriage, spousal rights and duties, guardianship, name, marital property regime,
right to work, divorce, custody and property after divorce, adultery and inheritance.
41 Al-Moubarak (b. 1947) has been a professor of political science at Kuwait University (ku)
since 1982. She earned her PhD in international relations at the University of Denver, and
446 Maktabi
All four also belong to the urban (hadar), population where they ran as
candidates in the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd electoral circles. Al-Jassar and al-Awadhi
have a Sunni background, while al-Moubarak and Dashti belong to Kuwait’s
Shiʿi community. The latter two have personal experience of mixed-marriages
between Kuwaitis and non-Kuwaitis, bringing significant life experience that
was articulated into law proposals aimed at strengthening the civil rights of
children born of such marriages: al-Moubarak is married to a Bahraini and has
four children, all of whom are non-Kuwaitis because citizenship laws in Ku-
wait confer citizenship through the father and not through the mother, while
Dashti is the daughter of a Lebanese mother and a Kuwaiti father, hence she
received Kuwaiti citizenship.
Questions Presented by Female MPs during the 13th

Parliamentary Session
The four female MPs presented 241 questions during the two-year period they
served.42 A review of all these questions indicates that women-specific issues
were hardly articulated at all. Only five questions raised related to “women”
or “girls” as category. These covered the employment of a female lawyer to a
public position;43 statistics on employed and unemployed women;44 informa-
tion on female domestic workers;45 a conflict at a girls’ school involving the
police;46 and the distribution of schools according to gender.47
One explanation for the vague gendered perspective portrayed through in-
dividual questions is probably that the female MPs sought to represent them-
selves as politicians who addressed all sorts of questions pertaining to Kuwaiti
was the first Kuwaiti woman appointed as a Minister, in 2005. She has held the ministerial
posts of Planning (2005), Communication (2006), and Health (2007). Al-Awadhi earned
her PhD in philosophy from the University of Texas and has been professor of philoso-
phy at ku. Dashti (b. 1964) holds a PhD in Population Economics from Johns Hopkins
University. She was Minister of Planning and Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs
(2012–2014). Al-Jassar has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh and is a
professor in the Department of Education at ku.
42 The number of questions raised by each mp individually is rendered in brackets: Rola
Dashti (83), Aseel al-Awadhi (61), Maʾsouma al-Moubarak (46), and Salwa al-Jassar (24).
43 Question posed by Rola Dashti on October 4, 2009.
44 Question posed by Rola Dashti on June 17, 2010.
45 Question posed by Asil al-Awadhi on November 3, 2009.
46 Question posed by Maʾsouma al-Moubarak on December 5, 2010.
47 Question posed by Maʾsouma al-Moubarak on July 7, 2011.
society, and not only those related to women. At a collective level, female MPs
gathered momentum on women-specific issues most clearly in law proposals
they raised together, and with male MPs.
Law Proposals Raised by Female MPs during the 13th

Parliamentary Session
How did these proposals seek to strengthen Kuwaiti women’s legal capacity in
state laws? The four female MPs made their mark as legislators in three ways:
by presenting law proposals individually; by raising law proposals together and
with other male MPs; and by taking over the leadership of the Woman and
Family Affairs Committee (Lajnat Shuʾun al-Marʾa wa-l-Usra, hereafter wfc).
Proposals on Women’s Issues Raised Individually by Female MPs

Proposals raised to all parliamentary committees by the female MPs show a
distinctly articulated focus on strengthening the autonomy of Kuwaiti women
by bolstering civil and economic rights independently of male kin. This is most
clearly reflected in demands that targeted Kuwaiti women married to non-
Kuwaitis: five out of the twelve proposals raised were related to this category
of Kuwaiti women, as indicated in Table 16.1.48
mp al-Moubarak presented the most vocal demands by forwarding four
proposals to different committees demanding: residence for non-Kuwaiti hus-
bands and children of Kuwaiti women; administrative registration measures
that specify the birth of children to Kuwaiti mothers in public documents;
free public education for the children of Kuwaiti mothers and non-Kuwaiti
fathers;49 and the treatment of children of mixed marriages as Kuwaiti until
they reach 18 years, after which they are granted Kuwaiti citizenship. In the
fifth law proposal, entitled “On the rights of the child,” mp Dashti addressed
48 The initials of the four female MPs’ names will be used hereafter when referring to law
proposals raised by them.
49 Proposal raised on June 24, 2011 by mm and rd who suggested that Article 4 of the 1987
law on public education be amended so that “the education of Kuwaitis and the children
of Kuwaiti women married to non-Kuwaitis in public schools [be given] for free.” In an
explanatory note they point out that “there are many children of Kuwaiti mothers who
do not enjoy Kuwaiti citizenship because their father is a non-Kuwaiti, depriving them of
free education in public schools, [and] obliging them to apply to private schools, a step
that is enormously costly for the non-Kuwaiti head of the family (rabb al-usra) and the
Kuwaiti woman.”
Table 16.1 Proposals on women’s issues by the female MPs in all parliamentary committees May 2009–December 2011a
448
Maʾsouma al-Moubarak (mm) Asil Awadhi (aa) Rola Dashti (rd) Salwa al-Jassar (sj)
The Legislation 8.7.2009: Establish a permanent 16.7.2009: Amend Art. 15 (*) 6.12.2010: Law proposal
and Law parliamentary Committee for of Law 11 of 1962 granting On the right of the child
Committee Women and Family Affairs a woman the right to issue a (bi-shaʾn huquq al-tifl).
--- passport without getting the
(*) 24.5.2011: Amend Art. 4 of permission of her male kin
Law on public education of 1987 or husband.
enabling children of Kuwaiti
women married to non-Kuwaitis to
access public education.
Women (*) 10.2.2011: Permit the female 12.5.2010: Amend law on
and Family citizen married to a man whose Social Security of 1976 by
Committee citizenship is unidentified to specifying a woman whose
register her children at school husband is dead, enabling her
through a birth notification. to get a salary when reaching
40 as of 31.12.2004, and not
31.12.2009.
Education, 16.8.2010: Grant teachers 1.4.2010: Female
Culture and the opportunity to develop security guards at
Guidance their knowledge girls’ schools
Committee
Maktabi
Committee (*) 3.2.2010: Grant permanent
addressing the residence to children of a Ku-
situation of waiti woman who is married to a
those whose non-Kuwaiti or with a man whose
citizenship is not citizenship is not identified and
identified whose marriage has lasted for five
years or more.
Health, Social 7.4.2010: Establish special-
and Labour ised sections for women’s
Committee health and reproductive
needs in all national hospitals
and health centres.
Youth and sports 22.4.2010: Establish facilities
Committee for women in all sports
associations
Interior and (*) 15.4.2010: Add an article to the
Defence 1959 Citizenship Law: “those born of
committee a Kuwaiti mother and a non-Kuwaiti
father, and whose regular abode is
Female Citizenship and the Franchise in Kuwait after 2005
Kuwait, be treated as Kuwaiti until

he reaches of age, and then obtains
Kuwaiti citizenship.”
a This table does not differentiate between expressions of support and law proposals. Proposals that address Kuwaiti mothers married to non-Kuwaitis are
449
marked with (*).

450 Maktabi
the issue of children born of Kuwaiti mothers, in Article 1: “this law applies to
Kuwaitis and the children of a Kuwaiti mother married to a non-Kuwaiti.”50
Furthermore, mp al-Awadhi sought to strengthen the legal capacity of wom-
en in a proposal demanding that Kuwaiti women be allowed to issue passports
without the permission of male kin.51
Two reforms were eventually achieved: one strengthened Kuwaiti women’s
legal capacity in mediating welfare to their children following a decision by
the Ministry of Education to allow the children of Kuwaiti women married to
non-Kuwaitis to receive a state education; the other enabled Kuwaiti women
to get a passport following an amendment to the passport regulations.52 The
latter reform was made after a woman raised a case against her ex-husband
that was addressed by the Constitutional Court (al-Mahkama al-Dusturiyya),
which overruled a 1994 decision that prohibited women to be given passports
without the permission of male kin.53 Importantly, these reforms were made
by the administration and through the judiciary, illustrating that pressure
through parliament has not been sufficient for change to occur in gendered
state laws in Kuwait.
2 Proposals on Women’s Issues Raised by Female MPs Together and

with Male MPs
Nearly half of all law proposals relating to women’s issues – five out of eleven –
raised by the female MPs together or with male MPs targeted the legal capac-
ity of Kuwaiti mothers married to non-Kuwaitis: one proposal requested that
a Kuwaiti mother’s citizenship be stated on their children’s birth certificates;54
two proposals addressed housing issues pertaining to Kuwaiti women and
50 Another version of the Law on the Child was eventually presented by Minister of Labour
and Social Affairs, Hind al-Subeih, on December 8, 2014, and unanimously passed in par-
liament on March 11, 2015.
51 On the same day, a joint law proposal was raised by four other MPs: mm, rd, Faisal Saʿoud
al-Dwaisan, and Saleh Mohammad al-Milla; see Table 16.2.
52 Author’s interview with Dr al-Moubarak, April 22, 2012.
53 For the text of the ruling in Arabic, see al-Anbaʾ, October 21, 2009.
54 Proposal raised on June 17, 2009 by rd, mm, Adnan Abdel Samad, Mubarak al-Wuʾlan,
and Mohammad al-Heweila, who point out that “this is important information” as, argu-
ably, registration of the Kuwaiti mother’s citizenship makes the maternal blood-ties of
the child more visible.
Table 16.2 Female MPs collaborating in addressing women’s issuesa
Two female MPs or more One or more female MPs in

in collaboration collaboration with male MPs
The Legisla- (*) 17.6.2009: Amend Art. 2 of

tion and Law Law 36 of 1969 so that the name
Committee and citizenship of both mother
and father be added to birth and
death certificates.
---
16.7.2009: Amend Art. 15 of Law
11 of 1962 granting a woman the
right to issue a passport without
needing the permission of her
male kin or husband.
----
4.11.2009: Civil and Social Rights
of the Child.
----
10.3.2010: Establish Citizen Fund
to help the middle class, as well as
other grants and loans.
---
(*) 14.4.2010: Amend Law 47 of
1993 on Housing, addresses spe-
cifically the problems of a Kuwaiti
woman married to a non-Kuwaiti.
---
5.5.2010: Establish kindergartens
in the public sector
Women and (*) 28.4.2010: All four:
Family Committee Establish a Women’s Hous-
ing Fund (Sunduq al-Marʾa
lil-Iskan)
Education, 28.10.2010: Move the premises
Culture and of a Qurʾan school and establish a
Guidance girls’ secondary school
Committee
452 Maktabi
Table 16.2 Female MPs collaborating in addressing women’s issuesa (cont.)
Two female MPs or more One or more female MPs in

in collaboration collaboration with male MPs
Health, Social (*) 24.11.2010: Amend Law

and Labour 12 of 1999 that requires
Committee foreigners to pay for health
insurance, by adding another
article which exempts a
Kuwaiti mother and her chil-
dren from paying health fees.
----
29.11.2010: Establish kinder-
gartens in the public sector
for children up to four years
of age where 25 women or
more are employed.
Monetary and (*) 21.1.2010: Law proposal to
Financial specify health insurance by add-
Committee ing Art. 2 suggesting that “the
health security system applies to
all citizens, and can be applied to
the children of a Kuwaiti [woman]
married to a non-Kuwaiti, and to
the non-Kuwaiti [woman] married
to a Kuwaiti, by a decision from the
administration.”
a Proposals that address Kuwaiti women married to non-Kuwaitis are marked with (*) in
Table 16.2.
mothers;55 and the remaining two proposals demanded that a Kuwaiti m

other’s
family get free access to public healthcare schemes.56
55 The first proposal was raised on April 14, 2010 by aa, mm, sj, and Ali Fahd al-Rashed. The
second proposal was raised on April 28, 2010 by the four female MPs, and is discussed
further below.
56 The first was raised by mm and rd on January 21, 2010. The second proposal was raised
on November 24, 2010 by rd, sj, mm, Naji Abdallah al-Abdelhadi, and Adnan Ibrahim
al-Mutawwaʾ.
Other proposals were more general, and addressed Kuwaiti women’s employ-
ment opportunities. In two proposals lawmakers suggested the establishment
of kindergartens in workplaces where more than 25 women are employed;57 in
two others they addressed the civil rights of the child58 and a Kuwaiti woman’s
right to receive a passport.59 The remaining proposal suggested the establish-
ment of a Citizen Fund (Sunduq al-Muwatin) to ease the financial burden on
families,60 a Women’s Housing Fund (Sunduq al-Marʾa al-Iskani),61 and a girls’
school.62
Seen in terms of labour market accommodation, the proposal regarding the
establishment of kindergartens in the public sector is particularly important.
In their law proposal raised on November 29, 2010, Dashti and al-Moubarak ar-
gued that the establishment of public childcare institutions “eases the [female]
employee’s opportunity to attend to her family life, and the child’s need for her,
enabling [the working mother] to attend to her duties in an overall manner.”
The two female MPs targeted the Health, Social, and Labour Committee, cov-
ering public sectors that employ almost 90 per cent of Kuwaiti women, most of
whom work as teachers, administrators, and health workers.63
While the kindergarten proposal did not get through parliament, a pro-
posal raised by Islamist MPs demanding a monthly grant for unemployed
mothers – discussed in the next section – was adopted for some categories of
women. These two claims reflect a significant political divide on gender rela-
tions between female MPs and male MPs with conservative views. While the
women were eager to support working mothers, Islamist MPs saw their popu-
larity increase among traditionally-oriented families and tribal groups through
proposals regarding monthly allowances to unemployed women.
57 The first was raised by rd, mm, and Abdel-Rahman Fahd al-ʿAnjari of the Democratic
Forum on May 5, 2010. The second was raised by rd and mm on November 29, 2010.
58 aa with Fahd Abdel-Rahman al-ʿAnjari, Musallam al-Barrak, and Walid al-Tabtabaʾi. The
latter two have Salafi orientations and both voted against granting women the franchise
in 2005.
59 Proposal raised by mm, rd, Mohammad Saleh al-Mulla, and Faisal Saʿoud al-Dwaisan on
July 16, 2009. The text is identical to the law proposal put forward by aa on the same day
(see Table 16.1).
60 rd, mm, Shuʾayb Shabab al-Muweisri, Faisal Saʿoud al-Duwaisan, and Naji Abdallah
Abdelhadi.
61 Law proposal by all four female MPs, raised on April 28, 2010.
62 Proposal raised by rd, aa, Ahmad al-Saʿdoun, Saleh Mohammad al-Mulla, and Naji
Abdallah Abdelhadi on October 28, 2010.
63 Kuwait Annual Statistical Abstract 2010, p. 108.
454 Maktabi
The Woman and Family Affairs Committee under Female

Leadership, 2009–2011
In October 2005, a few months after Kuwaiti women were enfranchised, the
Woman’s Committee (Lajnat al-Marʾa) was established in parliament. Two
years later, “family” was added and the wc became the wfc. mp Saleh Ah-
mad ʿAshour (b. 1953), a vocal supporter of women’s rights and a prominent
Shiʿi representative of the Justice and Peace Alliance (Tajammuʿ al-ʿAdala wa-
l-Salam), was the leader of the wfc between 2006 and 2009. With the entry
of the four female MPs in 2009, they became the committee’s main members,
while ʿAshour served as secretary. In a proposal by mp Maʾsouma al-Moubarak
raised on July 8, 2009, the wfc was transformed into a permanent parliamen-
tary committee.
Tables 16.1 and 16.2, above, show that female MPs raised only three pro-
posals through the wfc: one for establishing a Housing Fund for women (all
four), another regarding amendments to the social security of widows (Dashti
on May 12, 2010), and a third on school registration of Kuwaiti women mar-
ried to a bidun (al-Moubarak on February 10, 2011). Interestingly, other MPs –
particularly Islamist MPs with Salafi orientations and/or a tribal background
– used the wfc as a central arena for raising women’s issues, as indicated in
Table 16.3.
Table 16.3 shows that housing issues were those most frequently raised
through the wfc over the eight-year period. These demands show the eco-
nomic centrality of access to public housing and loans as part of the welfare
services offered to Kuwaiti citizens.
How and why housing and women’s issues intersect is a topic that reflects
the relationship between welfare provision in an oil-rentier state, citizenship
as legal status, and ideological views pertaining to Kuwaiti women’s position
in the family and in society.
Housing as Welfare in Kuwait
The Kuwaiti state’s housing security scheme is stipulated in Law 47 of 1993

and administered by The Public Authority for Housing Welfare (al-Muʾassasa
al-ʿAmma li-l-Riʾaya al-Sakaniyya, pahw). This scheme is part of the state’s wel-
fare program to support the family as the core institution in society, and to
encourage Kuwaitis to marry and establish homes.64
64 Sharifa Alshalfan, “The Right to Housing in Kuwait: An Urban Injustice in a Socially Just
System,” (2013), http://www.lse.ac.uk/IDEAS/programmes/kuwait/documents/The-right
-to-housing-in-Kuwait.pdf. Accessed January 29, 2016.
Table 16.3 Suggestions and law proposals presented to the Woman and Family Committee
(wfc) according to type of issue defined as related to Kuwaiti women 2006–2013a
Parliamentary session 11th 12th 13th 14th Total

12.7.2006– 1.6.2008– 31.5.2009– 6.8.2013–
18.3.2008 17.3.2009 5.12.2011 22.3.2015b
Housing issues 12 11 23
Monthly grant to non- 4 5 6 15
working women
Maternity leave / reduc- 5 2 6 13
tion of working hours
to mothers / increase
in children’s monthly
allowance
Social assistance free 2 2 6 10
access to health and edu-
cation to husbands and
children of K-women
married to non-K
Law on women’s civil 1 5 1 7
and social rights
Woman’s capacity to act 5 5
as kafil and guarantee
residence for her hus-
band and children
Establishment of re- 3 2 5
search centre for women,
conferences, awareness
programs
Financial insurance 2 2
for working women /
widowsc
Consultancy and service 2 2
centre on marital issuesd
Divorced women’s 1 1
capacity to get children’s
allowance if children in
her custody (hadana)
456 Maktabi
Table 16.3 Suggestions and law proposals presented to the Woman and Family Committee
(wfc) according to type of issue defined as related to Kuwaiti women 2006–2013a
(cont.)
Parliamentary session 11th 12th 13th 14th Total

12.7.2006– 1.6.2008– 31.5.2009– 6.8.2013–
18.3.2008 17.3.2009 5.12.2011 22.3.2015b
Restriction of women’s 1 1
working conditionse
Law on the childf 1 1
Total 25 17 40 3
a MPs presented law proposals that sometimes covered several issues. For instance, Dr Faisal
al-Muslim presented an expression of support on June 15, 2009 for the idea that Kuwaiti
women married to a non-Kuwaiti be able to be a guarantor (kafil) for her husband and chil-
dren. In the same proposal he suggested that working mothers be given a raise in children’s
allowance (ʿalawat awlad); this proposal is categorised as relating to two issues. I have therefore
categorised the number of issues raised, and not number of proposals. This methodological
choice explains why the total number of proposals presented by MPs, and the number of is-
sues categorised here are not identical.
b The date March 22, 2015 refers to the date of writing, and not the end date of the 14th parlia-
mentary session. The sparse amount of documentation available for 2012 reflects a turbulent
period in which parliament was dissolved and elections held in June and December 2012.
c Mikhlid Raashid al-ʿAzimi suggested on February 17, 2010 that working mothers who become
widows be exempted from work and receive a full salary until their children come of age.
d Two separate expressions of support, one on March 11, 2014 by Mohammad Hadi al-Heweila
(tribalist Ajman, 5th circle) and the other on March 11, 2015 by Abdelrahman Saleh al-Jiran
(Salafi, 2nd circle).
e Three law proposals were presented, but these were dealt with as one by the wfc, as ren-
dered in the Committee’s report (taqrir al-lajna) dated February 4, 2007.
f Law proposal raised on June 4, 2014 by four Shiʿi MPs (Saleh Ashour, Abdelrahman al-Tameemi,
Khalil Ibl, and Khalil al-Saleh), and one Sunni mp (Jamal Hussein al-ʿUmar, 3rd circle).
In principle, the law grants Kuwaiti couples, upon marriage, a house, apart-
ment, or plot of land, along with an interest-free loan from the Credit Bank
(Bank al-Taʾmin).65 In practice, however, there are long waiting lists for ac-
quiring public houses. Approximately 110,000 Kuwaiti couples are on lists, the
waiting period is between 15 and 20 years, and the yearly distribution rate is
65 In March 2015, 1 Kuwaiti Dinar corresponded to 3.3 usd, 3.2 Euro, 2.24 gbp, or 27.6 Norwe-
gian Kroner.
a pproximately 12,000 houses or plots of land (qasima). As an administrative

measure to reduce the waiting period, eligible Kuwaitis – i.e. married couples –
receive a monthly payment of 150 kd called badal al-ijar (literally “compensa-
tion for rent”), and 70,000 kd if they choose the land and loan scheme ( al-ard
wa-l-qard) instead of waiting. Most Kuwaitis rely heavily on these rent-free
loans, credit grants, and publicly funded housing, which constitute a signifi-
cant part of monthly expenditure and life savings.66
The Housing Law requires that a loan be registered in the names of both
the husband and the wife. However, gender enters the housing equation be-
cause another administrative measure regards the registration of the head of
the household, which is normally a male, as the main provider (al-muʾil), re-
sulting in the de jure and de facto empowerment of men, be they husbands,
fathers, brothers, sons, or uncles in the home, and consequently, in many cases,
in housing loans too.67
Between 2009 and 2011, Islamist MPs and MPs with liberal views demand-
ed amendments in the 1993 Housing Law. Both groups, from opposite ends
of the political spectrum, suggested reforms that challenged administrative
measures, societal norms, and state laws that explicitly or implicitly take as
their point of departure a male as the main provider (muʾil) and head of the
household (rabb al-usra). However, the two groups differed in their style of ar-
gumentation. For instance, the four female MPs argued for the establishment
of a separate Woman’s Housing Fund and argued specifically for measures to
safeguard female autonomy in state laws. They suggested amendments regard-
ing the size of loans, grants, and conditions pertaining to Kuwaiti women be-
cause the Housing Law
does not address a range of problems related to divorced Kuwaiti moth-

ers, widowers, Kuwaiti women married to non-Kuwaitis, and Kuwaiti
women over the age of 40 who have lost both her parents. […] In the
case of divorced and widowed women, her husband may have benefitted
66 Interview with head of the Insurance Bank, Salah al-Midf, in al-Qabas, March 15, 2015.
During the waiting period each Kuwaiti head of household – i.e. the husband – receives
150 kd. See “Mashakil al-Iskan”, al-Anbaʾ, March 8, 2015. Kuwaitis who do eventually re-
ceive public plots of land are announced in the newspapers; see, for instance, the names
of 396 citizens who received a 400m2 plot of land in an area called Tusat al-Wifra in al-
Anbaʾ, March 7, 2015.
67 Author’s interview with lawyers Nivine Maʿrifi and Laila al-Rashed, who deal with per-
sonal status cases in court where housing issues are part and parcel of custody cases over
children, and right of abode in the marital home, March 16, 2015.
458 Maktabi
from the Housing Scheme (al-Riʾaya al-Sakaniyya) or from the Credit

Bank loan, and used it to his own advantage, or by means of inheritance.68
The latter argument reflects a social practice and a trend among young males
in recent years where a husband signs private bank loans in his own name,
giving him the right to have ownership of the house through the house cer-
tificate (wathiqat al-tamalluk), although the house is technically registered in
the names of both spouses, as required by law. Female lawyers who raise such
cases in court on behalf of women point out the husbands’ misuse of preroga-
tives in ways that impoverish divorced women and their female kin.69
The housing proposal raised by female MPs reflects that the legal position
of women in the 1993 Housing Law did not conform to the ideal of life-long
marriage, or to traditional and conservative notions of males as breadwinners
and females as homemakers. Among the reasons for the female MPs’ law pro-
posal are Kuwaiti women’s growing participation in the labour market and cor-
responding strengthened economic status, rising divorce rates in society, and
the incapability of males – for various health or employment-related reasons
– to be the main financial providers for a household.70
Female MPs substantiated women’s economic interests and legal status in-
dependently of male kin. So did Islamist MPs, although their points of refer-
ence and arguments differed, as highlighted in the following section.
Parliamentary Acts by Male MPs: Support for Kuwaiti Women

Married to Non-Kuwaitis
The most interesting feature regarding the wfc during the period in which
the four female MPs were its main members was the interest shown by male
Islamist MPs, here seen as legislators with Salafi leanings, Muslim Brother-
hood (Hadas) affiliations, and/or tribal backgrounds, many of whom had voted
against female suffrage in 2005. After women got the franchise, however, they
raised numerous proposals demanding reforms pertaining to women’s issues,
and in particular reforms that addressed the situation of Kuwaiti women mar-
ried to non-Kuwaitis, including bidun.71
68 Law proposal raised by the four female MPs to the wfc on April 28, 2010, p. 5.
69 Author’s interview with Dr Badria al-Awadhi, professor of law, March 15, 2015, and author’s
interview with lawyer Nour Bin Haidar, March 17, 2015.
70 Author’s interview with Dr Maʾsouma al-Moubarak, April 22, 2012.
71 Rania Maktabi, “Reluctant Feminists: Islamist MPs in Kuwaiti Parliamentary Documents
after 2005” (paper presented at the annual conference of the British Society for Middle
Eastern Studies, London, June 24 – 26, 2015).
Table 16.3, above, indicates that Islamist MPs reformulated demands per-

taining to poverty alleviation and social assistance by focusing on women as
mothers, widows, and caretakers. In law proposals raised through the wfc,
Islamist MPs emphasised gender relations in ways where Kuwaiti women, par-
ticularly those married to non-Kuwaitis and stateless bidun, were seen as ca-
pacitated citizens. Kuwaiti women, many Islamist MPs argued, should be able
to act as legal guardians (kafil) for their husbands and children, be brokers of
material welfare services such as free education and health services, and have
access to financial commodities such as public housing schemes and jobs in
the public sector. For instance, the issue of Kuwaiti women married to non-
Kuwaitis figured explicitly in six of eleven proposals raised by MPs between
2009 and 2011, i.e. in nearly half of all issues and suggestions related to housing.
This segment is specified explicitly in the reformed Housing Law 2 of 2011: two
of the five categories identified were Kuwaiti women married to non-Kuwaitis.
The legislative change affects an estimated 68,000 women and their families,72
and, in total, targets at least 150,000 people who – given that the overall size of
the electorate in Kuwait is only around 400,000 – is a substantial percentage of
the population.73
Numbers aside, a qualitative assessment of Islamist MPs’ claims for sup-
porting Kuwaiti women’s social and economic rights is directly related to
kinship ties between Kuwaitis and non-Kuwaitis, which, to a large degree,
intersect with class and tribal affiliation. Al-Nakib indicates how the Ku-
waiti state’s housing policy since the 1950s created dwellings based on socio-
economic background. As a result, there was segregation between well-off
inhabitants of merchant and urbanised backgrounds, who lived in central ar-
eas surrounding Kuwait City, and the less affluent inhabitants of peripheral
areas, outside the city centre.74
In their proposals, Islamist MPs raised the case of Kuwaiti women mar-
ried to, or having family ties with, non-Kuwaitis and bidun, of which a large
proportion live in impoverished urban areas, or on the outskirts of Kuwait City.
72 The reformed law affects an estimated 27,500 divorcees, 21,200 widows, 11,000 women
married to non-citizens, and 8,600 unmarried women over the age of 41; The World Bank,
“Opening Doors: Gender Equality and Development in the Middle East and North Africa,”
in Mena Development Report (Washington: United States: World Bank Publications,
2013), 71.
73 The figure of 150,000 is my suggestion of the minimum number of women affected. I
rounded up the figure 68,000 to 70,000, and then doubled and rounded it up to 150,000,
estimating that each Kuwaiti woman has one person under her care.
74 Farah Al-Nakib, “Revisiting Hadar and Badu in Kuwait: Citizenship, Housing, and
the Construction of a Dichotomy,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 46 (2014):
5–30.
460 Maktabi
In other words, the socio-economic basis of tribal affiliations and housing pat-
terns in Kuwait is of importance here because it reflects the concerns of MPs
who represent marginalised sections of the Kuwaiti population.
From another perspective, Islamist MPs perceived the wfc as being a sig-
nificant political arena for addressing issues pertaining to their ideological
views of women’s role as care providers for the family. This view was most
clearly manifested in their demands that homeworkers, i.e. those outside the
labour market, be given a monthly grant (mukafaʾa shahriyya). This proposal
was raised repeatedly after 2006,75 and was eventually settled by a decision
issued by the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs that granted women over
55 years old a monthly grant of 550 kd.76 The policy regarding monthly grants
for unemployed women was strongly opposed by MPs with liberal views, in-
cluding the female MPs, who saw it as a “pull-factor” that discouraged female
citizens from seeking work outside the home.77 The Ministerial decision de-
manding that women be 55 years old can be read as a way of placating cases
related to poverty alleviation among older women, including those forced to
retire at the age of 45, and avoiding the more politicised side-effects of a grant
supporting non-working younger women.
In short, parliamentary documents provide evidence that Islamist MPs rode
two horses simultaneously: with one they pressured for the economic rights of
women who were not employed in the labour market, and with the other they
championed wider social and economic rights for Kuwaiti women married to
75 Salafi mp Mohammad Hayef al-Mutairi first raised a law proposal suggesting a monthly
grant of 250 kd for unemployed women on September 8, 2009, and another proposal on
September 17, 2010 demanding the sum of 200 kd. Other Salafis, such as Mikhlid Rashid
al-ʿAzimi and Faisal al-Muslim, also raised similar law proposals, on June 21, 2009 and July
6, 2009, respectively.
76 Author interview with mp Saleh ʿAshour, leader of the wfc, March 18, 2015.
77 Although this policy can be seen as “Islamist,” similar policies that aim at safeguarding
a financial basis for homeworkers are well-established tax-based “familial policies” in
Western welfare states. Conservative Christian democrats in Germany, the Netherlands,
and Belgium, for instance, tend to support policies that safeguard the interests of women
as homemakers and regard husbands as the primary financial guardians of the family’s
financial welfare through employment in the labour market. See Walter Korpi, Gender,
Class and Patterns of Inequalities in Different Types of Welfare States, no. 224, Working
Paper Series (Walferdange: lis, 2000); Anne Revillard, “Work/Family Policy: From State
Familialism to State Feminism?” in Gender Mainstreaming and Family Policy in Europe:
Perspectives, Researches and Debates, ed. Isabella Crespi (Macerata: Eduzioni universita
macerata, 2007), 137–140.
non-Kuwaitis. Their claims in the latter by far outnumbered the former, indi-
cating that socio-economic concerns were pivotal, and in particular those con-
cerning Kuwaiti women married to non-Kuwaitis, including bidun, and their
families.
Enter the Arab Uprisings: Law 2 of January 2011
Proposals for an expanded female citizenship by liberal and Islamist MPs in

2009 and 2010 gained unprecedented political momentum with the 2011 upris-
ings. By March 2011, the government had issued decrees and laws in response
to some of the proposals raised by MPs that had been pending in parliament
for over twenty years.
Law 2, issued on January 24, 2011, was one such fundamental reform. It
amended the 1993 Housing Law by including many categories of Kuwaiti wom-
en who had previously been incapable of accessing public housing, such as:
Kuwaiti women married to non-Kuwaitis who had been naturalised and whose
housing applications had been accepted in the year 1989; a Kuwaiti woman
married to and having children with a non-Kuwaiti; a Kuwaiti woman mar-
ried to a non-Kuwaiti who was residing in Kuwait without children, provided
that the couple have been married for more than five years; divorced Kuwaiti
women; and, finally, single Kuwaiti women over 40 years of age.78
This reform strengthened Kuwaiti women’s autonomy significantly, and
should, I argue, be qualitatively differentiated from the populist financial
grants handed out by rulers in the Gulf as immediate saturating responses
when the first waves of the Arab Uprisings hit the Gulf states.79 Importantly,
Law 2 reveals the uniqueness of parliamentary politics in Kuwait compared
to other GCC-states because it shows that housing reform can be seen as the
government’s response to long-term demands raised by MPs, social actors
such as women’s movements, and charities such as the Muslim Brotherhood’s
Jamʿiyyat al-Islah.80
78 Official Gazette, January 30, 2011.

79 The Kuwaiti government issued several one-off financial handouts in 2011, of which Law 3
of 2011 granted the largest sum – a 1000 kd Emiri grant (al-makrama al-amiriyya) to each
Kuwaiti (li-kull fard kuwaiti); Official Gazette, February 20, 2011).
80 Author’s interview with Suʿad al-Jarallah, leader of the Women’s Committee at the
Jamʿiyyat al-Islah who participated in forming a Law on women’s civil and social rights
through the wfc between 2007–2009, March 16, 2015.
462 Maktabi
The Impact of the 2011 Uprisings on Female Citizenship in mena:

Kuwait as a Case-Study
Analytical approaches towards discerning dimensions pertaining to women’s

civic disenfranchisement in mena after 2011 can be grouped into five main
aspects: a) the impact of the transnationalisation of human rights following
the 1995 Beijing un summit on women;81 b) the ensuing judicialisation of
women’s civic and civil rights at the domestic level, which have been expanded
through court decisions and constitutional reframing alongside parliamentary
deliberations;82 c) the politicisation of body politics as a response to domes-
tic abuse and violence against women in the public sphere;83 d) the mobilisa-
tion of girls and women in articulating their interests and formulating claims
through social media;84 and e) the triple governance agendas among rulers in
the region – particularly in the Levantine and Gulf states – of supporting gen-
der equality, sustaining neoliberal economic policies, and bolstering support
for doctrinal values and views on gender roles as reflected in religious tenets
and texts.85
81 Ann Elizabeth Mayer, “Internationalizing the Conversation on Women’s Rights: Arab

Countries Face the Cedaw Committee,” ed. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Barbara Freyer
Stowasser (2004); Lynn Welchman, ed. Women’s Rights and Islamic Family Law: Perspec-
tives on Reform (London: Zed Books, 2004); Valentine M. Moghadam, Globalization and
Social Movements: Islamism, Feminism, and the Global Justice Movement (Lanham, Md.:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2009).
82 Rania Maktabi, “Female Citizenship in the Middle East: Comparing Family Law Reform in
Morocco, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon,” Middle East Law and Governance 5 (2013): 280–307.
83 Charles Tripp, The Power and the People: Paths of Resistance in the Middle East (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Deniz Kandiyoti, “The Tripple Whammy:
Towards the Eclipse of Women’s Rights,” Open Democracy (19 January 2015), https://www
.opendemocracy.net/5050/deniz-kandiyoti/triple-whammy-towards-eclipse-of-women
%E2%80%99s-rights.
84 Courtney Radsch, “Unveiling the Revolutionaries: Cyberactivism and the Role of
Women in the Arab Uprisings,” (2012), http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract
_id=2252556; Annabelle Sreberny, “Women’s Digital Activism in a Changing Middle East,”
International Journal of Middle East Studies 47 (2015): 357–361.
85 Ann Elizabeth Mayer, “Rhetorical Strategies and Official Policies on Women’s Rights: The
Merits and Drawbacks of the New World Hypocrisy,” Al-Raida xv (1998) 12–21; Tétreault, “A
State of Two Minds: State Cultures, Women, and Politics in Kuwait”; Eleanor Abdella Dou-
mato, “Women in Civic and Political Life: Reform under Authoritarian Regimes,” in Politi-
cal Change in the Arab Gulf States: Stuck in Transition, ed. Andrzej Kapiszewski, Gwenn
Okruhlik, and Mary Ann Tétreault (Boulder, Colo: Lynne Rienner, 2011); Deniz Kandiy-
oti, “Fear and Fury: Women and Post-Revolutionary Violence,” (Open Democracy, 2013).
All five dimensions can be discerned in Kuwait following women’s suffrage

there in 2005. Kuwaiti women’s participation in international conferences,
such as the 1995 Beijing un conference on women, influenced their strategic
skills in addressing women’s issues at the domestic level.86 The number of
female lawyers has increased significantly in the past decade, impacting on
how women’s legal rights are being articulated in public and processed in
court. Civil society groups are pressuring for laws on domestic violence, sexual
harassment, and electronic crime to be drafted.87 Finally, improvements in the
right to residence, education and health services to the children of Kuwaiti
women married to non-Kuwaitis, including bidun husbands, are important
steps to strengthened female citizenship in Kuwait. At the same time, Kuwaiti
rulers contribute to “hardening of the core”88 through deeper social and eco-
nomic divisions among stateless bidun according to who has a documented
kinship relationship to a Kuwaiti citizen. Gender equality measures undermine
thereby the building up of interest-based alliances among Kuwaitis who sym-
pathise with the plight of the sizeable stateless bidun population in Kuwait.
The aftermath of 2011 Uprisings has seen a mixed outcome when it comes
to assessing female citizenship in Kuwait. With the exit of the four female MPs
from parliament, the focus on Kuwaiti women’s legal autonomy and women’s
issues as part of the political agenda in the National Assembly diminished
sharply. After 2011, courts and the media emerged instead as significant arenas
of debate.
The Judicialisation of Politics: Courts and the Media as Arenas of

Struggle, 2009–2015
Courts in Kuwait have become important arenas for expanding women’s civic
status and civil liberties. It was a judges’ ruling at the Constitutional Court in
2009 that created the precedent that enables Kuwaiti women to independently
get their own passport. Another court ruling allowed female lawyers to be ad-
mitted as public prosecutors.
Kuwaiti women are clearly reaping the fruits of the government’s invest-
ment in higher education. Female students have become certified lawyers at a
https://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/deniz-kandiyoti/triple-whammy-towards-eclipse
-of-women%E2%80%99s-rights.
86 Author interview with Khawla al-Atiqi, a board member of the Kuwaiti Teachers’ Union
and a leading figure within the Kuwaiti Muslim Brotherhood (Hadas), March 25, 2015.
87 Meeting at the Kuwaiti Lawyers’ Union where lawyers and police officers discussed the
issue of electronic crimes, in particular sexual harassment against women through social
media, March 17, 2015.
88 See James Sater’s Chapter 8.
464 Maktabi
remarkable rate in the past two decades. In the late 1980s, only 20 women were
registered as law students at the Faculty of Law at Kuwait University. In 1999,
120 women and 60 men were students. Data for the academic year 2011/2012
indicates that 60 per cent of law students at Kuwait University are women: out
of 2,520 students, 1,520 were female and 990 male.89
With this enfranchisement, a new generation of female lawyers has become
more emboldened to cross professional barriers, such as lawyer Shuruq al-
Failakawi, who sought a position at the Administrative Court in 2009 where
she could become a public prosecutor (mutdaʾi ʿamm). Her application was
rejected on the grounds that the position was only open to male candidates.
Al-Failakawi got immediate support from mp Rola Dashti who raised her first
question on this issue in parliament on October 4, 2009:
What are the reasons that the Ministry of Justice relied on for not accept-
ing Shuruq Fawzi al-Failakawi’s application for primary legal researcher
[…], and why did the announcement condition that applicants should be
males in contradiction to Art. 19, 61 of the Judicial Administration Law?
The issue was widely covered in the media after al-Failakawi filed a case against
the Ministry of Justice arguing that there are no regulations barring qualified
women from entering a legal sphere which – in time – would enable female
lawyers to acquire the necessary qualifications to become a judge.90 The case
was rejected by a judge in April 2010, who explained that female prosecutors
are not in accordance with the Shariʿa, as postulated in Article 2 of the Kuwaiti
Constitution.91 A year later, in July 2011, the Administrative Court published a
new advertisement for vacant jobs. Six female law graduates applied. When
their applications were rejected, all six filed separate lawsuits against the Min-
istry of Justice, arguing that barring women from public jobs was unconstitu-
tional. Less than a year later, a court decision on 22 April 2012 cancelled the
Ministerial Order that excluded women from jobs at the Ministry of Justice.
89 Annual Statistical Abstract 2012, p. 192, http://www.csb.gov.kw/Socan_Statistic_EN.aspx?

ID=18.
90 At the time of writing, no Kuwaiti woman has been appointed as judge: “Kuwaiti woman
fights for prosecutor’s job,” Kuwait Times, April 21, 2010, http://issuu.com/kuwaitnews/
docs/kt20100421/3. For an example of support in social media, see https://snowinq8
.wordpress.com/2010/04/21/shuruq-al-failakawi/.
91 “al-Istiʾnaf ayyadat hukm daʿwa Shuruq al-Failakawi qubuluha wakil niyaba,” [Court of
Appeal supports the decision to deny Shuruq al-Failakawi’s case to be admitted as le-
gal prosecutor], al-Watan, January 25, 2012, http://alwatan.kuwait.tt/articledetails
.aspx?id=167436.
The decision enabled the newly-appointed Minister of Justice, Yacoub al-Saneʾ

to announce two years later – in May 2014 – that 22 female lawyers were to be
admitted to entry-level positions, which would eventually allow them to be-
come public prosecutors.92
The case of female lawyers’ employment in judicial positions shows how
the Kuwaiti authorities supported higher education and encourage the nation-
alisation of the workforce, but failed – initially – to identify female law grad-
uates as equally capable actors as their male counterparts. It also illustrates
how pressures, exerted through individual courage, in parliament, and in the
media, over a period of nearly five years, eventually led to a judicial review in
court, and then acceptance by a ministerial decision.
The case also shows how Kuwaiti media and networking activities have be-
come significant arenas and sites of struggle for addressing women’s issues at
an extraordinarily rapid rate since the liberalisation of the Kuwaiti media in
2006.93 Sisters are indeed doing it for themselves, judging from Kuwaiti wom-
en’s propensity for using the abundant number of technological facilities and
media platforms at the domestic level.
As such, Kuwaiti women are engaging in media activism and thereby
“challenging prevailing social attitudes (…) [they] are breaking social taboos,
raising new issues, and showing the enduring power of patriarchal values that
lie before and behind state power.”94
A new generation of practising lawyers is using the media through weekly tv
programmes. Particularly popular are legal programmes such as Raʾiyuhunna
92 The Minister’s announcement was posted on @KhalfNews on May 11, 2014. The 22 fe-
male lawyers were appointed as public prosecutors later in a ceremony, along with 40
male lawyers; al-Hayat, November 6, 2014, http://alhayat.com/Articles/5540714. For
an informed comment on the reforms, see Noura al-Malifi, “al-Yawm Wakilat Niyaba,
Ghadan Qadiya,” [Today legal prosecutor, tomorrow a judge], Wikalat Akhbar al-Marʾa
[Women’s News] January 24, 2015, accessed January 29, 2016, http://wonews.net/ar/index
.php?act=post&id=13174.
93 As of 2014, there exists a plethora of privately owned media outlets, including 14 Arabic-
and three English-language newspapers, and 16 television stations. The state owns five
local radio stations and nine television channels. A total of 75 per cent of Kuwaitis are
thought to use the Internet Freedom of the Press Kuwait: Freedom House, 2014, https://
freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-press/2014/kuwait#.VcG-wrWzmac. On the impact of
media liberalisation on Kuwaiti politics, see Kjetil Selvik, Jon Nordenson, and Tewodros
Kebede, “Print Media Liberalization and Electoral Coverage Bias in Kuwait,” The Middle
East Journal 69 (2015): 255–276.
94 Radsch, “Unveiling the Revolutionaries: Cyberactivism and the Role of Women in the
Arab Uprisings,” 359.
466 Maktabi
(Their Opinion),95 Magazine96 on Scope tv, and Sada Sawt al-Muwatin (Echo
of the Citizen’s Voice)97 on al-Shahed tv. In these programmes, Kuwaiti women
address and debate a wide variety of issues such as divorce, domestic violence,
and housing. Matters that were, only a decade ago, regarded as sensitive, such
as the interpretation and application of religious tenets embedded in personal
status laws, are discussed in public in new ways.
Conclusion
The extension of the franchise to Kuwaiti women in 2005 sheds light on the
interplay between three factors that impact on female citizenship and Kuwaiti
politics. Firstly, political rights strengthened societal pressures that sought to
bolster women’s legal capacity through various venues: in parliamentary pro-
posals on access to public housing and loans; by raising cases in court where
judicial reviews granted Kuwaiti women the right to get a passport indepen-
dently and access to legal positions such as that of public prosecutor; and in
various media outlets, where previously sensitive issues related to personal
status laws are being discussed and debated in public.
Secondly, the presence of women in parliament between 2009 and 2011 cor-
related strongly with the number of law proposals raised targeting women’s
issues. Female agency in parliament was important not only in terms of the
law proposals raised by the four female MPs; simply the presence of the female
parliamentarians impacted on the behaviour of male MPs, particularly those
with Islamist and tribalist backgrounds, and triggered their propensity for rais-
ing more law proposals in support of women-specific issues.
Thirdly, seen from a state formation perspective, the enfranchisement of
Kuwaiti women delineates the demographic constitution of the Kuwaiti
95 For an example of the problems facing Kuwaiti women married to non-Kuwaitis, see
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wG-V3e3c4sM, posted February 1, 2015, accessed
January 29, 2016.
96 Magazine is a weekly legal program presented by lawyers Nivine Maʿrifi and Abdel-ʿAziz
al-Banwan. For a discussion on the application of the 1984 Personal Status Law with legal
experts Laila al-Rashed and Dr Saʿd El-Enezi, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oo
rdM2yLKVU&feature=youtu.be, posted March 17, 2015, accessed January 29, 2016.
97 For a program on divorce issues, see the discussion between lawyers Noura al-Raqm and
Suʿad al-Shamali, posted on September 29, 2014, accessed January 29, 2016, https://www
.youtube.com/watch?v=qCMvbIasIIY. For an interview with al-Shamali, see al-Anbaʾ,
March 2, 2014, http://www.alanba.com.kw/ar/kuwait-news/449219/02-03-2014, accessed
February 2, 2016.
c itizenry. However, potential reforms in the 1959 Nationality Law that would
enable women to pass over their citizenship to their children plays deeply into
sensitive political considerations related to intermarriage between Kuwaitis
and non-Kuwaitis, including the stateless bidun.
This chapter has shown how women-specific issues related to housing and
the welfare rights of female citizens married to non-Kuwaitis play into Kuwaiti
politics in important ways and how citizenship status, political rights, and eco-
nomic rights are intertwined and broadly conceived in a Gulf setting.
A decade after Kuwaiti women were enfranchised, Kuwait’s oldest women’s
association – The Women’s Cultural and Social Society (est. 1963) – fronted an
alliance of civil society organisations under the banner “solidarity in support
of the rights of children of a Kuwaiti female citizen married to a non-Kuwaiti”
upon marking International Women’s Day on March 8, 2015.98 The issue of
marriages between Kuwaiti women and non-Kuwaiti males, and the legal, so-
cial, and economic rights of children born of these mixed marriages are likely
to be some of the most politicised issues with regards to strengthening female
citizenship in Kuwait in the future.
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chapter 17
The Narrow Path: Acts of Citizenship by the

Arab Youth
Lessons from Egypt and Morocco
Assia Boutaleb
All commentators agree that the youth played a crucial role in the Arab Upris-
ings of winter 2010–2011. It is true that these uprisings can partly be seen as a
reflection, one neither spontaneous nor mechanical, of qualitative changes in
the sociological structures and relationships that have taken place as a result
of demographic changes in Arab societies.1 Long-term demographic develop-
ments have weakened the patriarchal structures and led to the questioning
of authority in general and of politics in particular. The youth has become a
significant aspect of demography and an important socio-political factor,
one that has put forward claims for dignity and civil rights. Its activism has
changed the political map in a number of countries. At the same time, poli-
tics has become increasingly interested in youth. The notion that youth is the
driving force behind current political mobilisations and the promotor of new
forms of participation has become axiomatic.2 As political freedom and socio-
economic rights were at the heart of the uprisings, and because the youth had
suffered the most from social, economic, and political exclusion, it is unsur-
prising that they stood at their foreground.
Despite this, one important factor must be highlighted. The Arab youth is no
different from the rest of the population; it makes the same claims to dignity,
social justice, and equal rights. It may express them more loudly, capturing the
attention of the media, but it plays the role of spokesman rather than consti-
tuting the avant-garde. It is important to bear this in mind because the distinc-
tion between the youth and the rest of the population is a political and social
1 Youssef Courbage and Emmanuel Todd, Le rendez-vous des civilisations (Paris: Editions du
Seuil, 2009).
2 See the special issue edited by Emma Murphy, “The Arab Youth and Politics,” Mediterranean
Politics 17 (2012), and especially the introduction: Emma Murphy, “Problematizing Arab
Youth: Generational Narratives of Systemic Failure,” 5–22; and, on Morocco, Thierry D esrues,
“Moroccan Youth and the Forming of a New Generation: Social Change, Collective Action
and Political Activism,” 23–40. On the youth during the Arab Spring, see also Stephanie
Schwartz, “Youth and the ‘Arab Spring’,” United States Institute for Peace, April 28, 2011, ac-
cessed May 20, 2014, http://www.usip.org/publications/youth-and-the-arab-spring.

472 Boutaleb
construction. It has its own social motivations and serves political objectives,
but these can be, and often are, misleading. As Irene Bono demonstrated in the
case of the Moroccan February 20 Movement, “the qualification of groups as
youth movements, expressing a desire for specific participation contributes to
the negation of the universalist character of the demands that the movements
promote.”3 The struggle for citizenship is the key to understanding the Arab
Uprisings and explains the wide-ranging public involvement in it.4 Conveying
the message that the Arab youth has specific claims for rights only narrows the
scale of the popular uprisings; if youth does play a unique role this lies more in
forms of organisation and modalities of participation.
According to a report on Egypt, whose conclusions can be extended to other
Arab countries that experienced popular uprisings, over the last four years the
changing power structures and the predicament of political transition “have
influenced the evolution of citizenship rights […] This evolution has not been
linear and the rights discourses of political actors were not consistent at all
times.”5 In this chapter, I will argue that this statement can also be made about
youth acts of citizenship. They are neither continuous nor permanent, and
they face constraints and interruptions as well as experiencing periods of re-
vival and moments of enhancement. In this sense, they can be seen and un-
derstood as strongly linked to and influenced by political and social contexts.
For argument’s sake, and to avoid the trap of generalisation, I will mainly focus
on Egyptian and Moroccan youth, with some examples from other countries.
The concept of “acts of citizenship” is one of the key contributions c itizenship
studies has made to the field. It allows one to revisit the concept of citizenship
and to establish its “dynamical, projective and relational nature as well as is-
sues about political subjectivation that it contains.”6 Acts of citizenship and
political subjectivation interact with the legal dimension of citizenship, but
due to its anthropological approach citizenship is no longer considered strictly
as a status.7 Seen from an anthropological perspective, citizenship is a set of
3 Irène Bono, “Une lecture d’économie politique de la ‘participation des jeunes’ au Maroc à
l’heure du printemps arabe,” Revue internationale de politique comparé 20 (2013): 145–166.
4 Roel Meijer, The Struggle for Citizenship: The Key to Understanding the Arab Uprisings, Norwe-
gian Peacebuilding Resource Centre Report, February 2014. The February 20 Movement has
been designated the Moroccan version of the Arab spring; see note 20, below.
5 Ragab Saad and Moataz El Fegiery, Citizenship in Post-Awakening Egypt: Power Shifts and Con-
flicting Perceptions, European Policy Centre, January 21, 2014, accessed March 23, 2014, http://
www.epc.eu/pub_details.php?cat_id=1&pub_id=4087.
6 Catherine Neveu, “E pur si muove! Ou comment saisir empiriquement les processus de citoy-
enneté,” Politix 26 (2013): 207.
7 Catherine Neveu, “Les enjeux d’une approche anthropologique de la citoyenneté,” Revue eu-
ropéenne des migrations internationals 20 (2004): 89–101.
Arab Youth: Evolving Participation and Acts of Citizenship 473
practices of co-construction and dialogical space, more or less asymmetrical,

between “actors” and “subjects.” Defined as “acts that produce citizens and
their others,”8 acts of citizenship may be punctual or limited but they always
imply the significant and concrete exercises of civic freedoms. Following the
theorists of those acts, “the first principle to investigating acts of citizenship
is to interpret them through their grounds and consequences, which includes
subjects becoming activist citizens through scenes created.”9 Although it is not
easy to extensively analyse the consequences of acts of citizenship, I will pay
particular attention to the created scenes and their meanings.
First, I will give a brief snapshot of the Arab youth and its participation in
the uprisings. Secondly, I will try to present a few examples of youth acts of
citizenship that occurred in the aftermath of those uprisings, which will en-
able me to highlight some of their characteristics. Finally, the idea of their re-
versible nature, or, at least, the constraints placed upon them due to political
contexts will be explored and discussed. In other words, even if “youth is only a
word,”10 for political authorities and actors it definitely exists as a category and
social reality. If it is true that the Arab Uprisings have liberated the voices of
the youth it is also true that these voices reached the ears of the powers-that-
be, for better or worse.
A Snapshot of Arab Youth and Their Participation in the Uprisings
Some brief demographic facts, without being too specific on the exact defini-
tion of youth, are crucial for understanding the position of the Arab youth.
The proportion of the youth within the population of each country in the
Middle East is extremely large, the second highest in the world – only in sub-
Saharan Africa is it larger. Sixty per cent of the Arab world’s population is un-
der thirty, twice the percentage of North America.11 Thirty per cent of the Arab
population is between the ages of 14 and 24,12 and more than half the people in
8 Egin F. Isin, “Theorizing Acts of Citizenship,” in Acts of Citizenship, ed. Engin F. Isin and
Greg M. Nielsen (London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008), 37.
9 Ibid., 38.
10 Pierre Bourdieu, Questions de sociologie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1992 [1984]), 143.
11 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, The Future of Global Muslim Population: Projec-
tions for 2010–2030, January 27, 2011, accessed March 23, 2014, https://www.google.nl/?gws_
rd=ssl#q=Pew+Forum+on+Religion+and+Public+Life%2C+The+Future+of+Global+Mus
lim+Population:+Projections+for+2010-2030.
12 usaid, “usaid Convenes Conference of Arab Youth Development,” press release,
November 14, 2011, accessed May 20, 2014. http://www.usaid.gov/news-information/press
-releases/usaid-convenes-conference-arab-youth-development.
474 Boutaleb
the region today are under the age of 25.13 Moreover, youth unemployment is
extraordinary high in the mena region; four times higher than in other regions
of the world. In some areas youth unemployment rates are as high as 80 per
cent.14 According to the data available for the years 2004–5, Tunisian youth
represented more than three-quarters of the country’s total unemployed, and
30 per cent of those aged between 20–24 were unemployed.
On a more qualitative level, Michael Hoffman and Ameney Jamal have sum-
marised some characteristics of the Arab youth, based on an analysis of the
Arab Barometer.15 The chances are that they are, comparing to youth from 20
years ago, on average, better educated, unemployed, more prone to protest,
and less inclined to vote.16 Young Arabs are generally more supportive of politi-
cal Islam and the implementation of Shariʿa than older citizens. Likewise, they
are more likely to identify themselves primarily as Muslims than older genera-
tions. The data collected by the two authors suggest that youth mobilisation
against the regime was not caused by grievances against the regime; “on the
contrary, it appears that opportunities created by the uprisings – both real and
perceived – may have motivated the youth to mobilise. The young are more
connected with the rest of the Arab world and the international community
than any generation that preceded it, and seems to be highly optimistic about
what ordinary citizens can do.”17
To understand the Arab Uprisings, the youth can be considered “not only
as developing beings or proto-adults but mostly as present beings and social
agents with their own reality.”18 Their social and political exclusion is a ma-
jor characteristic behind their rationales for and narratives of mobilisation.
Nevertheless, while they may have been the most vocal, they were not the
only actors. Rather, they played the role of spokesmen (and women) for the
13 Mounira Chaieb, “Young in the Arab World: Lebanon,” bbc World Service, February 8,
2005, accessed March 23, 2014, https://www.google.nl/?gws_rd=ssl#q=Mounira+Chaieb%
2C+%E2%80%9CYoung+in+the+Arab+World:+Lebanon+%E2%80%9D%2C+BBC+Worl
d+Service.
14 Jack Shenker et al., “Young Arabs Who Can’t Wait to Throw off Shackles of Tradition,”
The Guardian, February 14, 2011, accessed March 23, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/
world/2011/feb/14/young-arabs-throw-off-shackles-tradition.
15 Even if the data used in their analysis predate the Arab Spring by several years, it can be
assumed that they are still valid.
16 Michael Hoffman and Amaney Jamal, “The Youth and the Arab Spring: Cohort Differ-
ences and Similarities,” Middle East Law and Governance 4 (2012): 168–188.
17 Ibid., 187–188.
18 Filip de Boeck and Alcinda Honwana, “Faire et défaire la société: enfants, jeunes et poli-
tique en Afrique,” Politique Africaine 80 (2000): 6.
rest of the population. Nothing expresses this idea better than the following
statement, made by a member of the February 20 Movement:19 “So far, the
achievement of the movement is not that the king made promises. The true
accomplishment is to have sent a clear message to all Moroccans: ‘we want to
be citizens and not subjects’. And they have to do the same, because our mes-
sage is theirs as well. We crossed red lines, we challenged the words and the
position of the king. We gave the right to speak – with our constant presence
in the streets – to those who never had it. People inside and outside the move-
ment are no longer afraid to ask for their legitimate rights.”20
The Uprisings led to two situations: in the first, the country witnessed a
change in political leadership and began political transition; in the second, the
mobilisation failed to generate political changes. In both situations, however,
youth political activism witnessed an unprecedented revival. In the first case,
the youth’s participation can be strongly linked to the shifting political phases
of the transitional period after the Arab Spring. Or, to put it another way, it was
strongly influenced by the changing political configurations that dominated
the transitions and their aftermath. That led to what can be called a “hiccup
pattern” in youth participation: fully present and deeply involved during dem-
onstrations and other forms of protest,21 it was conspicuously absent during
elections and seriously under-represented in elected institutions. On an organ-
isational level, this form of participation is reflected in the rapid formation
and equally quick dissolution of youth political organisations or groups, such
al-ʿAdl (Justice), al-Tayyar al-Misri (the Egyptian Current), or Misr al-Hurriyya
wa-l-Waʾy (Free and Awakened Egypt) in Egypt.22 However, when results are
meagre the dynamic engendered by protests dissipate quickly. Consequently,
19 This broad coalition of Moroccan activists was not associated with any political party or
specific civil society groups. It is named after the demonstrations that took place in more
than fifty cities in the country, calling for democracy and a new Constitution, on February
20, 2011.
20 Omar, 25 years, attac Morocco, quoted in Cédric Baylocq and Jacopo Granci, “‘20 Févri-
er’: discours et portraits d’un mouvement de révolte au Maroc,” L’année du Maghreb 8
(2012): 239.
21 In Egypt the demonstrations and riots in Mohamed Mahmoud Street during November-
December 2011, and in Tunisia the occupation of the central square in Tunis in front of
the prime-minister’s office in March 2011, so-called Kasbah i and ii, as well as during the
summer of 2012, were led by youth movements.
22 Nadine Abdalla, “Egypt’s Revolutionary Youth: From Street Politics to Party Politics,”
Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, March 11, 2013, accessed March 24, 2014, http://www
.swp-berlin.org/en/publications/swp-comments-en/swp-aktuelle-details/article/
egypts_youth_from_street_politics_to_party_politics.html; see also Azzurra Meringolo,
476 Boutaleb
the youth often deserted the political field to invest instead in social activi-
ties, through what can be called moral affairs. As such, the protests against the
“Daniel Gate” in Morocco23 during the summer of 2013 are emblematic: they
were organised through communication channels previously used by the Feb-
ruary 20 Movement and considered by former members of the movement as
a revival of its spirit. This distinction between the two cases (or situations) is,
however, theoretical, and the two types of participation can, in reality, overlap.
Considering the experiences of uprisings in the Arab world, very few politi-
cal groups used the label “youth” during and after them: the Yemeni Shabab
al-Thawra can be regarded as an exception.24 Strikingly, at a particular point
in time the most vocal and important youth groups stopped choosing names
that referred to their youthful following: the April 6 Group in Egypt and the
February 20 Movement in Morocco were named after the day they called for
demonstrations. Besides this convenient mnemonic practice, the choice clear-
ly reflects their strategy of making claims that go beyond those that are related
purely to the youth itself. Indeed, the usual pattern was that the youth took
up those themes they shared with older generations, as was the case with the
Egyptian Kifaya movement, the Algerian Barakat movement,25 and the Moroc-
can February 20 Movement. None of the groups that became famous before
and during the Arab uprisings were exclusively youth groups; their strategy of
choosing common generational themes has been considered as having signifi-
cantly enhanced their impact.
However, it remains true that such movements, hastily and carelessly re-
ferred to as youth groups, have, in common, the fact that they behave more as
“Revolutionary, Creative, Heterogeneous and Unorganized: Young Egyptians Facing Elec-

tions,” Egypte/monde arabe 10 (2013), accessed March 23, 2014. http://ema.revues.org/3132.
23 Called after the Spanish paedophile Daniel Galván Viña, who was sentenced to thirty
years in prison in 2011 for the rape of 11 children in Kenitra. On the occasion of Throne Day
(July 31, 2013) in Morocco, King Mohammed vi, according to a well-established tradition
in the Kingdom, pardoned 1,000 detainees, among them Daniel Galván Viña. The ensuing
outrage spread like wildfire on social networks and massive popular mobilisations oc-
curred in several cities.
24 Marine Poirier, “De la place de la libération (al-tahrir) à la place du changement (al-
taghyir): transformations des espaces et expressions du politique au Yémen,” in Au cœur
des révoltes arabes, ed. Amin Allal and Thomas Pierret (Paris: Armand Colin, 2013),
31–50.
25 Meaning “enough” or “it’s enough,” this grassroots movement was founded on March 1,
2014 to protest against President Bouteflika’s announcement to run for a fourth term, and
its Facebook page quickly attracted 32,000 fans. However, its horizontal nature and lack
of leadership weakened the movement after the re-election of President Bouteflika.
protest groups than opposition forces. It is necessary to make this division in

order to understand their dynamics26 and the reasons they failed to transform
themselves into sustainable movements.27 They simply lacked the resources
to win elections. They were, however, extremely capable of explaining and
analysing the political game and its rules, and the ins and outs of the electoral
system. The innovative means of communications they introduced, such as
use of the Internet and social networks, about which much has been written,
have deepened this division, because they are far more capable of mobilising
protest, disseminating indignation, and analysing the political situation than
they are of mobilising people for electoral purposes.
Following the uprisings and during the transitional phase, youth activists
followed different paths and made varying choices. Nevertheless, in Egypt, for
instance, the category of “the revolutionary youth” remains “quite a problem-
atic category that lumps together different types of youth that have part in
successive and simultaneous uprisings over the past three years in an unified
political ‘bloc’.”28
Nevertheless, the uprisings and their aftermath produced various initiatives
that enhanced the participation of the youth in the public sphere. Despite the
meagre results of the Uprisings, something irreversible has occurred in the
Hirschman’s “voice” with regard to youth.
Youth Acts of Citizenship, Horizontal Bonds, and Dialogical Work
The examples that follow are based on several field trips conducted during the
Spring of 2012 in Egypt and from the beginning of 2014 in Morocco. In these
two countries the youth initiated several projects aimed at promoting dialogue
26 The distinction between opponent and protester is based on the classic definition of op-
position. See, for instance, Leonard Schapiro, “Foreword,” Government and Opposition
(1966): 2, where he argues that the main characteristic of the opponent is to gain power.
As such, the Arab youth can hardly be described as an opponent, as it did not seek power.
For more on this topic, see Assia Boutaleb, “L’enjeu égyptien: protestataires, opposants et
ruse de la raison autoritaire,” Les Temps Modernes 664 (2011): 41–54.
27 Assia Boutaleb, “Ce qu’un soulèvement fait aux espaces politiques: dynamiques de la pro-
testation et de la mobilisation en Egypte,” in Les soulèvements populaires dans le monde
arabe, ed. Michel Camau and Frédéric Vairel (Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Mon-
tréal, 2014), 201–220.
28 Chaymaa Hassabo, “Les illusions perdus des ‘jeunes de la révolution’,” Orient 21, March 20,
2014, accessed May 20, 2014, http://orientxxi.info/magazine/egypte-les-illusions-perdues-
des,0544.
478 Boutaleb
and discussion between themselves and with society at large. As well as be-
ing political activists and youth who were or became political militants, many
young Moroccans and Egyptians practised activism in a more civic sense, or, in
other words, performed what Engin Isin calls “acts of citizenship.” In fact, not
focusing on the more “visible” youth allows us to see other youth profiles and
therefore other means of engaging with them.
One of the problems the uprisings revealed was, according to some of the
youth, the distance that separated activists and “the street,” or ordinary people.
If an emotional unity existed during the occupation of Tahrir Square, main-
taining this unity over time turned out to be much more complicated. Such
was the general feeling of the youth I met in Cairo. Finding a way to reach
people, or the “street,” as some of them called it, was, therefore, a major chal-
lenge. As Ashraf, a volunteer from a group calling itself “tweetshare3,” put it:
“In the beginning, we were three, three that followed the events, who were pas-
sionate about them without any political involvement or experience. However,
we soon realised, after discussions with our siblings and neighbours, that the
gap between people on the internet (activists) and the ‘real’ people was widen-
ing. So we decided that we, the youth, have to go (into the street) and explain
the situation to the people.” During this process they employed various cre-
ative ways to reach the people. Tweetshare3 first set up a website, after which
they attracted volunteers to set up a sensibilisation programme and organise
an awareness campaign. One of their strategies was to select, a few days before
the first round of the legislative elections of 2011–12, a big gas station in the
al-Abbasiyya neighbourhood of Cairo, and for a week a group of six or eight
volunteers dedicated three hours per evening to “explaining the situation to
the people.” This station is famous as a meeting point for taxis, and the vol-
unteers’ strategy was to distribute flyers explaining the function and meaning
of the electoral process. On these flyers they printed charts explaining issues
such as the composition of the parliament, the national topics it discusses, and
electoral procedure. What they did not do was canvas for a particular political
group; they did not “run for someone.” Instead, they explained that “we tar-
geted the taxis because taxi drivers talk to everyone. In our country, for many
people the taxis have the same function as the media.” “Take a cab and you’ll
have all the information you need to know, not just about the city but also
about politics,” explained Hassan, another member of the group. Through dis-
tributing flyers the group members created the opportunity to discuss politics
with the drivers. They sometimes had to explain certain issues, but mainly they
engaged in dialogue about the current political situation. Most importantly,
this allowed them to engage in the patient work of sensibilisation of the value
of voting, which led to the (re)appropriation for the people of the political
issues that concerned them. As Amani explains: “The revolution has taught
us that politics is ours. Not theirs. I can do something myself; I don’t have to
wait for the elders to realise that something has to be done and to do it.” These
acts of citizenship are not heroic transgressions of the political order or radi-
cal disruptions of civic norms. They are instead minor, everyday acts, such as
discussing or arguing about issues of public interest, but through them a civic
relationship between ordinary citizens is produced.
Members of Tweetshare3 came from different social backgrounds but they
pooled their resources and skills: one member knew a printer, another was an
expert in computers or infographics, while a third made his car available to
the group. Their activities were fairly modest, but repeated on a regular basis
they gained clout. In the months before the elections they met on a daily basis
to discuss their plans. After the election of Morsi as president their activities
concentrated on the explication of the constitutional draft, and flyers were
produced highlighting the importance of the constitution, entitled “Your Con-
stitution is your Future,” while important newspaper articles were commented
upon and explained. The example of the Cairo group had, by this time, been
emulated by other groups, and in the Spring of 2012 no less than five other
Tweetshare3 groups had sprung up in different provincial towns. Even if cer-
tain actions were specific to local circumstances, the general idea was to en-
gage in general discussions with common citizens with whom the youth does
not usually engage. Through these acts, this youth group gained experience
in participating in public affairs and working for the common good. As one
member remarked, “through the group, I met people whom I would never have
spoken to before; I discovered that others think like me, or at least that others
want to do things. I discovered that together with others (as a group) we have
something to say and even to teach.”29 Their activities opened up a new world
for the activists. Choosing the appropriate form of action, and evaluating its
effects and meaning, led to intensive discussions among the group-members,
defined their relationship with the public sphere, and determined their en-
trance into the civic arena.
The same experience was analysed by Laila Abu Lughod during fieldwork in
a village in Upper Egypt. There, she discovered that “youth were galvanized by
the uprising to solve local problems in their own community, feeling themselves
to be in a national space despite a history of marginalization. They also used
a particular language for their activism: a strong language of social morality,
29 All the quotations are from my personal fieldworks notes of October 2012.
480 Boutaleb
not the media-friendly political language of ‘rights’ and ‘democracy’.”30 In the

discourses and acts of the members of Tweetshare3, the emphasis was on their
dialogical work and their relationships with others. This can be called the hor-
izontal dimension of their activism, as opposed to the vertical, hierarchical
relation of power, which is regarded as exclusively the state’s sphere. As such,
the activities of the groups differ from those of other social movements, whose
various politics are directed at the authorities upon whom claims are made.
Citizenship acts are fostered at the margins of the state, as the latter is regarded
as a subject of critical debate and suspicion, not an interlocutor and source of
rights.
If, in Egypt, the focus was on the learning process itself and how to com-
municate with other citizens, in Morocco the issue was explicitly formulated
by some youth as “citizenship training.” In Morocco, the act of citizenship is
formulated primarily in terms of self-expression; debate in itself is regarded as
the beating heart of citizenship. This is especially significant for projects initi-
ated by the February 20 Movement. As in Egypt, the idea that “something has
to be done” was very strong, and was expressed in a host of different activities,
ranging from the artistic to the educational. However, they had one character-
istic in common: they always avoided official party politics. As in Egypt, the
Moroccan uprisings, even if they were less distributive, were a triggering event.
Their long-term effect was expressed by Hosni, a member of the “Theatre of
the Oppressed” (Théâtre de l’Opprimé): “after 2011, we kept the spirit, but we
changed the tools.”31 A few examples of significant discussion initiatives were:
Falsafa fi 9zanqa (Philosophy in the Alley/Street), Capdema,32 the Promé-
théus Institute for Democracy and Human Rights,33 and Women Choufouch.34
Their common aim was to encourage people to think about and d iscuss
30 Laila Abu Lughod, “Living the ‘Revolution’ in an Egyptian Village: Moral Action in a
National Space,” American Ethnologist 39 (2012): 21.
31 Quoted in Camille Dupire, “Les Formes alternatives de participation populaire au len-
demain d’un mouvement social: Étude de cas dans le Maroc ‘post-20 Février’,” (Master
Dissertation IEP, Lille, 2014), 50.
32 This is an abbreviation of “Cap Démocratie,” which can be translated as “towards
democracy.”
33 The institute was created on June 1, 2013 by 9 young Morrocans, most of whom were previ-
ously members of the 20 February group. The purpose was to conduct various activities to
raise awareness of democratic values/human rights among the youth.
34 Created by Majdouline Lyazidi and initially named “SlutWalk Morocco,” Women Chou-
fouch is a feminist movement campaigning against sexual harassment in Morocco and
for the promotion of women’s rights.
“their relationships with each other, with the state, and with this culture of
subordination,” to quote Tarik, a member of CapDema. As he explains, “we
promote a participatory formula through which we aim to make people realise
that they have something to say and that they have ideas about who they are,
what they want […] and what kind of citizen they are. That’s why our last sum-
mer session will be about citizenship. The previous one was about the society’s
project, what society we want.”35
Founded in 2008 by Moroccan students in France, CapDema started its ac-
tivities in Morocco in 2011 with a summer camp. A brief look at its program
and activities shows the pedagogical nature of its activities. For instance, it
organised a regular “democafe” (démocafé), with critical discussions of issues
such as national security, the role of the media, national pride, the function of
democracy, and the foreign policy of Morocco. It also organised conferences
on topics such as the “European Union and Morocco” and “The Monarchy and
its Future,” as well as summer workshops. Debates were organised as a means
of creating social networks and stimulating participants to engage in other are-
nas and to exert themselves further. It was quite common, for instance, to meet
the same people in different activities, motivated by a desire to discuss and
debate various topics. This marked, for some participants, the first step toward
regular activism; on the other hand, greater self-consciousness, self-assertive-
ness, and outspokenness among the youth has become a general feature of
the past two decades. Other initiatives were based on the need to discuss and
deal with youth-specific issues. For example, the Student Union for Change
in the Educational System (Union des étudiants pour le changement dans le
système éducatif), known as uecse, or X with their members, was created
during the summer of 2012, via social networks, to discuss and propose reforms
to the Moroccan educational system. One of its main initiatives was the Popu-
lar University, which, in its approach and aims, resembled the initiative Falsafa
fi 9zanqa. Open to all, and mostly organised in public spaces such as parks (for
example, the Cervantes Park in Rabat), the courses of the Popular University
covered themes including “good and bad,” “freedom,” and “morals or religion.”
Often specialists are invited (lawyers, human rights activists, or professors),
and their presentations are followed by a debate. Apart from the participatory
dimension, these meetings have a clear pedagogical aim: each presentation
is transcribed and made available on the organisation’s website, which also
includes lessons on major philosophers or explications of philosophical issues.
According to Anas Hmam, the founder of the Popular University, “discussing
35 Personal interview with Tarik, March 12, 2014.

482 Boutaleb
philosophical issues and subjects is important, first of all because they make
people think, but also because in Morocco philosophy was repressed during
the 1980s, the ‘years of led’. The state preferred to open departments of Islamic
thought rather than philosophy. During these years, the state did not want us
to think […]. In my view, (critical) thinking is the first and essential step to
citizenship.”36 The number of participants varied considerably (from about 20
to 100), but, as with Tweetshare3 in Egypt, the initiative was taken up by groups
in different cities, and in 2014 popular universities were established in Casa-
blanca, Marrakech, and Tangiers.
In all these initiatives the key words have been open discussion and freedom
of speech. Everyone is allowed to speak and express their ideas. In this sense,
the discursive dimension is essential to these acts of citizenship; through de-
bating in such ways, the youth enact citizenship even when the official po-
litical establishment does not take them seriously and excludes them. These
activities enabled youth activists to overcome their exclusion. For instance,
Capdema did not limit its meetings purely to speeches, but also drew up con-
crete proposals for reforms and produced draft laws that were disseminated
through social networks and on social media.37 The documents produced by
Falsafa fi 9Zanqa, as well as the courses it put online, were primarily meant to
be to be circulated in order to engender discussion among the youth and to
serve as examples to be emulated. In all of these, the main idea was to convey
that the youth not only have ideas but are aware of the major issues with which
society is confronted. This ability to express their opinion is precisely what had
been denied to them up to then. The discussions and debates they organised
are dialogical acts of citizenship that allow them to re-appropriate issues of
public interest.
This re-appropriation is far from being a linear or irreversible process. Four
years after the uprisings Tweetshare3 only continues to exist in two cities, and
had to face accusations of being pro-al-Sisi. In the political arena the upris-
ings changed little, and the social position of the youth has not improved. The
youth are still stigmatised and have been turned into a cause for exclusion,
marginalisation, or, still worse, repression. While the advantage of acts of citi-
zenship is that they are not as visible or prejudicial to public order as political
activism, they suffer from their volatility and sensitivity to political contexts.
36 Personal interview with Anas Hmam, December 13, 2013.

37 For instance, they presented a memorandum about the constitution, while their most
recent work is focussed on the societal issue of abortion in Morocco.
Youth: A Convenient Scapegoat
In a recent issue of the journal Anthropologie et Sociétés devoted to citizen-

ship38 many authors underlined the fact that the construction of citizenship
is, historically, a process that evolves “from below,” but one that also can be
stopped or constrained from below as well. For instance, in that volume, Fran-
cine Saillant analyses how the Afro-Brazilian movement lacks an intermediary
for the urban and educated elite to formulate and defend its claims, which con-
strained its ability to promote the citizenship rights of its members.39 In the
case of the Arab youth, on the other hand, the limits and constraints should
also be sought in the strategies and actions “from above.”
It is not possible to speak about youth activism or civic activism without
talking about repression. Indeed, if the youth are portrayed as spokesmen (and
women) they will also be the target of coercion. In general, the police are high-
ly suspicious of the youth, and of young men in particular. The youth are often
portrayed by the state as a threat to the stability of society. In recent years, re-
pression has increased to such an extent that the youth as a societal group has
been put on trial, accused of a variety of crimes and seen as the main source of
the deep societal crisis, increasing national insecurity, growing political chaos,
and rampant cultural decay. The ambivalent attitude of the general public to-
wards the uprisings is often associated with the role the youth played in them.
In more concrete terms, political activists in general and the younger
generation in particular are systematically put on trial on fabricated evi-
dence. For instance, the charges brought by the public prosecutor against the
Algerian activists of the Barakat movement were that they had organised a
“non-military gathering that may disturb public safety,” a curious accusation
that goes back to a decree of 1975, the time of the one-party system, which
relates to Articles 97 and 98 of the penal code.40 In Egypt, arrests are often
made on charges of selling drugs. In Morocco, in May 2014 eleven members of
February 20 Movement were condemned on charges of “illegal participation
in a non-authorised demonstration.” They had been arrested during April 6
38 Natasha Grangé and Catherine Neveau (eds), “Citoyennetés,” special issue of Anthropolo-
gie et Sociétés 33 (2009).
39 Francine Saillant, “Droits, citoyenneté et réparations des torts du passé de l’esclavage:
perspectives du mouvement noir au Brésil,” in “Citoyennetés,” Anthropologie et sociétés
33 (2009): 141–165.
40 Ghania Mouffok, “Á Alger, 20 ans n’est plus le plus bel âge de la vie,” MondAfrique May
12, 2014, accessed May 25, 2014. http://mondafrique.com/lire/politique/2014/05/12/a-alger
-vingt-ans-nest-pas-le-plus-bel-age-de-la-vie.
484 Boutaleb
labour union d emonstrations but they were able to prove the legality of and
the authorisation for taking part in that demonstration. In the same year,
the well-known rapper al-7aqad was arrested for illegally selling tickets to a
football match. In a recent article Mâati Mounjib revisited a series of cases
of resistance leaders and activists who had participated in or supported the
February 20 Movement, ranging from members of the Islamist al-ʿAdl wa-l-
ihsan to members of secular organisations, demonstrating that accusations
were always related to sexual, financial, or drug scandals, and states that “for
each activist, a ‘crime’ was fabricated, playing on the taboo of their ideology in
order to discredit and undermine the Moroccan version of the ‘Arab Spring’.”41
Since the end of the summer of 2014, nearly 85 of the activists of the Moroccan
Association of H uman Rights (amdh) have been banned in the country. This
general atmosphere of repression has sent a clear message that no-one is safe
from prosecution, and created a climate where public initiatives are no longer
seen as harmless.
Acts of citizenship, partly because they are spontaneous and elusive, are, in
such an atmosphere of repression, particularly discouraged. With so few vis-
ible and concrete results, the public sphere can become erratic, and in this re-
spect the Egyptian case is the most revealing. Not everything can be explained
by repression from above alone; in many cases it was supported by repression
from below as well. In other words, not only do youths have to face societal and
political suspicions, they have to accomplish social requirements such as find-
ing a job, getting married, and, lastly, becoming adults and being considered
as such by society. Because the youth are at a time of life when much has to be
done, Arab youth acts of citizenship are, more than those of other categories
of the population, dependant on the political and social context. They follow
the ups and downs of Arab political transitions and their own socio-economic
background. The paradox in the Arab world is that the demographic major-
ity – the youth – has continued to be reduced to an activist minority trying
to claim its place. For the Arab youth, the Arab Spring constituted a historical
opportunity to drastically change its position in society, one it unfortunately
missed. Nonetheless, it is clear that something has changed.
Neither immutable nor predetermined, citizenship is strongly determined
by asymmetrical power struggles. While this asymmetry seems to impose
certain limits, at the same time it may be full of possibilities, as it does not
exclude anything that is possible. As the French philosopher Jacques Rancière
41 Mâati Mounjib, “Setups and Slander against Morocco’s Dissidents: Sex, Drugs, Money
and Videos,” Jadaliyya, April 14, 2015, accessed May 25, 2015. http://turkey.jadaliyya.com/
pages/index/21370/setups-and-slander-against-moroccos-dissidents_sex.
stated, “political invention occurs in acts that are at the same time argumen-
tative and poetical, shows of strength that open and reopen as frequently as
may be necessary the worlds in which those acts of community are acts of
community.”42 What Rancière refers to as acts of community (“actes de com-
munautés”) can be called, in my view, acts of citizenship. However, one must
not forget that citizenship is also a status, and that the struggle for it remains
an important issue for the Arab youth, particularly after the Uprisings.
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chapter 18
The Bidun Protest Movement as an Act

of Citizenship
Claire Beaugrand
It is not about naturalisation (tajnis), it is about existing (wujud)

Dr. abdul hakim al-fadhli, member of the bidun movement Muwatinun/
Citizens
⸪
Introduction
A particular category in the sociology of Kuwait, and increasingly used in

other Gulf states, the term biduns refers to people from nearby regions (Iraq,
Syria, Saudi Arabia) seeking naturalisation in a state that considers them as
being foreigners and thus “illegally” on its territory.1 The case of the biduns is
peculiar as they do not constitute a consistent ethnic or religious group per se.
Rather, the term refers to a state-imposed and administratively-based status,
and illustrates a phenomenon of exclusion based on a criterion that cannot
be described as a primitive affiliation, although the bulk of the biduns do ar-
guably belong to straddling tribes including both sects of Islam.2 More accu-
rately, the category is defined by an original failure – an offence passed on from
1 The number of biduns in Kuwait is subject to controversy. The official institution set up in
November 2010 to close the file on this particular type of “illegal residents,” the Central Sys-
tem to Resolve Illegal Residents’ Status (later referred to in this chapter as the Central Sys-
tem), said it inherited 105,702 individual registered cases from the preceding organisation
specialised in bidun affairs. Yet some bidun activists state that the real number of biduns in
Kuwait is closer to 240,000, reflecting the government’s failure to update its statistics – based
on the fact that many children of biduns, lacking proper birth certificates, do not appear in
the figures (interview with the author, Kuwait, April 26, 2014).
2 This is due to the fact that branches of various tribes from southern Iraq converted to Shiʿism
during the nineteenth century in order to avoid the Ottoman conscription. Yitzhak Nakash,
“The Conversion of Iraq’s Tribes to Shiism,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 26
(1994): 443–63.

The Bidun Protest Movement as an Act of Citizenship 489
g eneration to generation – to comply with either the registration process of

the Nationality Committees (between 1961 and 1965) or, up to the end of the
1980s, the appropriate rules of the 1959 Aliens Residence Law, hence its casting
as “illegal” by the government in 1986.
Since 1986, and particularly following the February 1991 liberation of Ku-
wait, the government’s repressive stance towards the biduns has come to play
a particular role in Kuwaiti politics. Firstly, in a country deeply traumatised
by the Iraqi invasion, where the basis of the emir’s power was seriously ques-
tioned both from within the royal family (the new generation of princes) and
the Kuwaiti political class,3 the group – along with Palestinians – played the
role of scapegoat, as it became conflated with the image of the alien and, in
particular, of the Iraqi alien.4 As the cultural proximity between biduns and
nationals may have somehow blurred the lines between citizens and aliens,
their representation as foreigners also reinforced the boundary that the state’s
generous welfare policies had gradually drawn between Kuwaitis and non-
Kuwaitis,5 creating a sense of superiority among the former that has become
entrenched in the Kuwaiti national identity.6 Omar al-Shehabi shows that the
impermeable boundary between citizens and non-citizens is fundamental for
the stability of the imbalanced and heterogenous Gulf societies: “citizens and
expatriates often became embedded in a network of control against each other
as well as against members of their own groupings.”7 Secondly, the various Ku-
waiti political actors, particularly the opposition, have often raised the bidun
imbroglio and the government incapacity to definitively solve it in Parliament
in order to use it as a political tool to embarrass the rulers, if not as a bargaining
chip to obtain advantages for themselves and their constituencies. While the
3 Fatiha Dazi-Héni, “Coups de théâtre à Koweït-City,” Outre-Terre 1 (2006): 281–94.

4 Human Rights Watch, The Bedoons of Kuwait: “Citizens without Citizenship” (New York:
Human Rights Watch, 1995). Amnesty International looked at the period under martial law
in Kuwait Cases of “Disappearance,” Incommunicado Detention, Torture, Extrajudicial Execu-
tion under Martial Law (London: Amnesty International, October 1992).
5 Jill Crystal, Oil and Politics in the Gulf: Rulers and Merchants in Kuwait and Qatar (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990); Jill Crystal, Kuwait: The Transformation of an Oil State
(Boulder co: Westview Press, 1992).
6 The phenomenon is analysed as “contra-distinction” by Anh Nga Longva, “Neither Autocracy
nor Democracy but Ethnocracy: Citizens, Expatriates and the Socio-Political System in Ku-
wait,” in Monarchies and Nations: Globalisation and Identity in the Arab States of the Gulf, ed.
Paul Dresch and James Piscatori (London: i.b. Tauris, 2005), 114.
7 Omar Al-Shehabi, “Histories of Migration to the Gulf,” in Transit States: Labour, Migration &
Citizenship in the Gulf, ed. Abdulhadi Khalaf, Omar Al-Shehabi and Adam Hanieh (London:
Pluto Press, 2014), 16.
490 Beaugrand
issue has long been seen as intractable in Kuwait, biduns’ protests erupted in
the context of the broader social mobilisation that swept through the Middle
East and North Africa as a response to the long-standing impasse; between 2011
and 2014, biduns took part in a number of demonstrations on the outskirts of
Kuwait City, where the majority live.
This chapter explores the way in which the protest movement affected the
role that this issue plays in Kuwaiti society and politics. While bidun activism
predates the Arab Spring, despite being less generously covered in the press,
the organisation of a sustained demonstration movement represents a rela-
tively new form of contention in the biduns’ repertoire of action. Before this,
their strategy had been mainly non-confrontational, using patronage links to
try to obtain favours. Like other disenfranchised groups in Kuwait – for ex-
ample, Kuwaiti women – they had relied on allies in Parliament, tried to exert
pressure on MPs, organised peaceful rallies, and built networks to reach deci-
sion-makers at the top. While the women’s movement gained real momentum
in the first half of the 2000s8 and its fight was eventually successful in obtain-
ing voting rights for women in May 2005, the distance gradually built between
biduns and Kuwaitis and the lack of incentive for the Kuwaiti elites to solve
an issue that would not gain support amongst Kuwaiti citizens, led the bidun
movement to adopt a different strategy in their search for citizenship.
This chapter attempts to go beyond the positivist, legalistic approach to citi-
zenship as a formal, legal category since the option of naturalisation for the
biduns (even though it would only have been for a small proportion of them)
has so far failed to materialise. Rather, it uses a different theoretical framework
and analyses the 2011 bidun protest movement as a struggle of abject people
that, in the academic literature on citizenship, refers to undocumented or il-
legal immigrants excluded from the body politic and with no formal existence.
Scholars of critical citizenship studies have advocated a shift in the theoretical
approach to citizenship that could accommodate the practices carried out by
abjects, who, by virtue of their acts, constitute themselves as legal or political
subjects, hence carrying out “acts of citizenship.”9 This approach, positing the
8 Mary Ann Tétreault and Haya al-Mughni, “From Subjects to Citizens: Women and the
Nation in Kuwait,” in Women, States and Nationalism: at Home in the Nation, ed. Sita Ranchod-
Nilsson and Mary Ann Tétreault (London: Routledge, 2003), 147–67; Mary Ann Tétreault, “A
State of Two Minds: State, Cultures, Women, and Politics in Kuwait,” International Journal of
Middle East Studies 33 (2001): 203–20.
9 Engin Isin and Greg M. Nielsen (eds), Acts of Citizenship (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008);
Engin F. Isin, Citizens without Frontiers (London-New York: Continuum, 2012), 108–46.
agency of individuals or groups as political entities, takes the frontier between

inclusion and exclusion as its main area of investigation in order to analyse
how the understanding and recognition of rights evolve and how legal and
political boundaries can shift. Such research originated in the analysis of the
struggles of undocumented immigrants, clandestine workers, and illegal per-
sons for rights and regularisation in Western contexts.10
In Kuwait, biduns, after two decades of the deprivation of their rights, cer-
tainly qualify as abjects, falling beyond the scope of the law and disturbing the
social dichotomy that is fundamentally based on nationality. However, unlike
other disenfranchised groups, their struggle has had little influence on govern-
ment policies towards them, let alone put them in the position of interlocutors
with decision makers. Despite the fact that their actions did not lead to the res-
olution of the bidun issue, the question arises as to whether their actions have
transformed the biduns into political and legal subjects. How did their protest
movement change the Kuwaiti politics of intermediaries, patronage, and cli-
entism? Did it manage to influence perceptions and norms in Kuwaiti society?
As some Kuwaitis temporarily joined the disobedience movement, what kind
of impact, if any, did the momentum of the movement have on the society?
What kind of symbolism was invented during the period of contestation?
These are the questions that this chapter intends to tackle when analysing the
internal dynamics of the bidun movement, its relationship with Kuwaiti soci-
ety, and its ties to international solidarity networks in terms of organisation
and, even more so, of the debates it triggered concerning the ideas of national
belonging and transnational activism. This chapter will make a contribution to
the scholarship on social movements emanating from non-citizen groups, but
10 For an overview of the literature on the struggle of illegal migrants in Europe, see
oopmans et al., Contested Citizenship Immigration and Cultural Diversity in Europe (Min-
K
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Anne McNevin, “Political Belonging in a
Neoliberal Era: The Struggle of the Sans-papiers,” Citizenship Studies 10 (2006): 135–51; Iker
Barbero, “Expanding Acts of Citizenship: The Struggles of Sinpapeles Migrants,” Social &
Legal Studies 21 (2012): 529–47. For the French case of sans-papiers, see Etienne Balibar
et al., Sans papiers: l’archaïsme fatal (Paris: La Découverte, 1999); Julie Siméant, La cause
des sans-papiers (Paris: Presses de Sciences-Po, 1998); Pierre Barron et al., (eds), On bosse
ici, on reste ici. La grève des sans-papiers: une aventure inédite (Paris: La Découverte, 2011).
For North America, see Anne McNevin, “Undocumented Citizens? Shifting Grounds of
Citizenship in Los Angeles,” in Citizenship, Migrant Activism and the Politics of Movement,
ed. Peter Nyers and Kim Rygiel (New York: Routledge, 2011), 165–83; Peter Nyers, “The Reg-
ularization of Non-Status Immigrants in Canada: Limits and Prospects,” Canadian Review
of Social Policy 55 (2005): 109–14.
492 Beaugrand
in a non-Western, non-liberal democratic context, where the understanding of

being political is itself largely constrained.11
The empirical material of this chapter is based on fieldwork conducted in
April 2014 in Kuwait. In addition to the press archives held at the Information
Centre of the newspaper al-Qabas, it includes interviews with key actors from
the bidun movements, conducted both before and after 2011, and with lawyers,
politicians, members of parliament, and Kuwaiti activists.
Abject Spaces and the Manufacturing of Aliens
It was a secret cabinet decision in 1986 that forced the biduns into a position of
non-existence or “abject” existence: claiming to be Kuwaitis but unrecognised
as such, their right to have rights was suspended until the government could
ascertain their original identity. After the Iraqi invasion of 1990, the b iduns
were gradually stripped of all the rights they had previously enjoyed when
the government had tolerated their presence on Kuwaiti soil. The goal of this
new strategy was to compel them to confess their “true origin” and to dissuade
many others from hiding their passports and thereby join the ranks of those
claiming to be of Kuwaiti nationality.12 Contrary to other countries whose im-
migration regimes created illegal people,13 Kuwaiti state policies contributed
to the alien-ness of the bidun population, de-legitimising their claims to be
entitled to Kuwaiti nationality. Here, their abject existence stemmed not so
much from an irregular status in a specific territory as from an irregular claim
to nationality in the eyes of the state.
The thoroughly-researched policies of rights deprivation towards the
biduns14 in the 1990s must be understood against the background of the cre-
ation of abject spaces and the manufacture of alien-ness. In human rights
literature on the biduns, marginal spaces where rights deprivation took place
11 Anh Nga Longva, “Citizenship in the Gulf States: Conceptualization and Practice,” in
Citizenship and the State in the Middle East: Approaches and Applications, ed. Nils Buten-
schøn, Uri Davis, and Manuel Hassassian (Syracuse ny: Syracuse University Press, 2000),
179–97.
12 As a result, the bidun population was estimated at around 220,000 in 1990, according to
the Central System.
13 Iker Barbero, “Orientalising Citizenship: The Legitimation of Immigration Regimes in the
European Union,” Citizenship Studies 16 (2012): 751–68.
14 See reports of Human Rights Watch, in particular since the first 1995 report: The Bedoons
of Kuwait.
have often been overlooked, yet they are an essential part of their reduction to
non-existence.
Abject Spaces
The majority of biduns are today concentrated in three particular areas of low-
income housing located in the outer areas of the country: Tayma, Sulaybiyya,15
and the oil town of Ahmadi, in the south of the country. Although they are
not, strictly speaking, camps, as they never were designed as such, these spaces
nevertheless have a different history from the “official” one of modern urban
development in Kuwait. They constitute the flip side of this modernity, when
the emerging state was struggling to keep pace with the mushrooming shanty
towns on the periphery of the main urban centres. This applies even more
strongly to the oil city of Ahmadi, where the Kuwaiti Oil Company functioned
as the main job provider. With a stronger assertion of state sovereignty on both
people and territories, these spaces developed in the 1990s into de facto “abject
spaces” of a kind – i.e., “spaces in which the intention is to treat people neither
as subjects (of discipline) nor as objects (of elimination) but as those without
presence, without existence, as inexistent beings, not because they don’t exist,
but because their existence is rendered invisible and inaudible through abject
spaces.”16 Contrary to camps, where undesirables are put aside after denatu-
ralisation, as described by Hannah Arendt, “abject spaces” are places where
subjects are “processed” as inexistent beings.17 The link between informality,
the rapid development of peripheral and marginal housing spaces, and the
emergence of abjects requires investigation.
While it is not clear how and where the 20 percent of biduns who are not
in these areas live, the spatial distribution of biduns is estimated roughly by a
bidun activist as follows: 25 per cent each in Tayma and Sulaybiyya, 10 per cent
in Ahmadi, and 20 per cent in Jleib al Shuyukh (next to the former Shadadiyya,
historically an area of informal housing north of Kuwait airport).18
15 Tayma is located in Jahra, 33 km west of Kuwait City, while Sulaibiyya’s “popular housing”
(see note 26, below), 18 km from the capital, off the main road to Jahra, constitutes a dead-
end area.
16 Engin Isin and Kim Rygiel, “Abject Spaces: Frontiers, Zones and Camps,” in The Logics of
Biopower and the War on Terror: Living, Dying, Surviving, ed. Elizabeth Dauphinee and
Cristina Masters (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 184.
17 Isin and Rygiel, “Abject Spaces,” 184.
18 Interview with the author, Kuwait, April 26, 2014.
494 Beaugrand
The biduns were first found in the oil town of Ahmadi. Built in 1946 dur-
ing the British mandate at the beginning of the Kuwait Oil Company (koc),19
Ahmadi is a self-contained city, divided into a northern part for management
employees and a southern sector for those less qualified (e.g., firefighters and
security guards). The northern area comprises concrete residential properties
with gardens, while the houses of the southern part, where the bidun now live,
consist of corrugated iron. Fieldwork interviews retracing biduns’ genealogy
showed that, as a rule, the first generation of biduns worked in the oil sector
that developed after 1948, being paid on a daily basis. Yet after a while they
generally left this type of work for more stable employment in the Ministries
of Defence or the Interior. Sometimes this transition towards more stable work
occurred within the second generation, with the father working in koc and
the children as ministry employees.
The history of the biduns is closely linked with the influx of regional labour-
ers who, in search of employment, came to live in informal housing, known in
Kuwait as ʿashish.20 The growth of shanty towns, mainly populated by Bedou-
ins during particular periods of economic development and mass migration,
raised the crucial question of integration and the exclusion/isolation of new-
comers. Farah al-Nakib has shown how urban policies have helped shape Ku-
waiti social identities, and eventually entrenched the badu/hadhar (Bedouin/
urbanite) dichotomy. She demonstrates how badu housing at the periphery of
Kuwait City in self-contained areas with relatively poor state services led to
the social construction of the category of badu as a “backward” underclass.21
Likewise, the settlement of residents with undefined status in informal hous-
ing partly accounts for the construction of the bidun as a social category and
their “transition from one subjecthood to another”22 – i.e., from undefined
subjects to abjects.
Despite constant attempts by the government to demolish the informal
housing structures in several areas of south and west Kuwait City, these kept
on being developed up to 1978. As the government rushed to circumscribe
and suppress the phenomenon, the resettlement of the citizens marked the
19 Founded in 1934, the Kuwait Oil Company was a 50–50 joint venture between the Anglo-
Persian Oil Company and Gulf Oil Corporation. A subsequent agreement gave the British
control over the koc.
20 During the interviews the ʿashish figure prominently in the recollection of bidun family
histories.
21 Farah Al-Nakib, “Revisiting Hadhar and Badu in Kuwait: Citizenship, Housing and the
Construction of a Dichotomy,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 46 (2014): 5–30.
beginning of an increased differentiation on the basis of entitlements and

privileges. Holders of Kuwaiti nationality of Bedouin stock were given prior-
ity and granted better housing conditions than other non-citizen residents.
Among the latter, those holding permanent jobs were also eligible for specific
housing schemes. For instance, during the period of ʿashish clearing in the late
1970s employees of the army and police force were provided with housing in
buyut shaʿbiyya or “popular housing.”23 A 1978 study published in Al-Raʾy al-ʿ
Amm24 mentioned that the government planned to build 4,150 housing units
in Jahra (each unit based on a 8-member family, to 33,200 people) as well as
5,546 (45,000 people) in Sulaibiyya, in order to eradicate the phenomenon of
ʿashish by December 1979.25 According to this plan, police were to be housed
in Tayma, located in Jahra, while Sulaibiyya’s popular housing was to be dedi-
cated to the military. This was the period in which the category of biduns, who
filled the rank and file of the security forces, came to be associated with this
type of housing.26 In the shaʿbiyyat, as they came to be known, different people
of various origins lived together, despite having little or no cohesiveness apart
from their common employment.
The Manufacturing of Aliens

Since it became almost impossible to disentangle the different claims – as some
biduns would be genuinely without nationality while other p assport-bearers
expected to be naturalised if they merged with the former – the government
resorted to a policy of lumping everybody together, tarring the whole b idun
23 “Popular” here does not refer to any “preferred” type of housing, but derives from the
Arabic “people” (shaʿb). It denotes a lower-class sort of accommodation, comparable to
“council housing” in the uk or “public housing” in the us, with the difference that in
Kuwait housing is state-provided to all citizens but with different quality levels among
nationals – and thus all the more substandard for biduns.
24 “Dirasa ʿan mushkilat al-ʿashish fi-l-Kuwait,” al-Raʾy al-ʿAmm, March 17, 1978.
25 “Lajnat al-ʿAshish tajtamuʿ al-sabt li-wadhaʾ khata izalat al ʿashish,” al-Anbaʾ, September 7,
1978.
26 The 1968 law on the military provides some explanation for this phenomenon: while the
law permitted non-Kuwaitis (that is, mostly Westerners) to be employed in a technical
capacity or as experts on a temporary basis, it required citizenship for all other military
positions – whether officers, soldiers, or policemen. This provision, however, remained
silent as far as the recruitment of stateless people was concerned. The large number of
Bedouins who were hired by the armed forces were perceived at the time as enjoying an
undefined “limited citizenship,” a word used in a 1989 piece of research on the history of
the Kuwaiti police. Muhammad Al-Fahed, “An Historical Analysis of Police in Kuwait:
Prospects for the Future” (PhD diss., University of Exeter, 1989), 230.
496 Beaugrand
category with the same brush. This policy started in 1986 and continued
throughout the 1990s. The concept of illegality is here used on a “class” rather
than an individual basis. It is worth noting that Kuwait is not the only country
to have implemented such policies based on “national origins.” It is sufficient
here to cite the example of the United States which, despite its boast of be-
ing a nation of immigrants, has also turned certain immigrants into aliens;27
between 1924 and 1965 in the us, the creation of the idea of national origin
as a racial category and identifier – compounded by the new post-1924 defini-
tion of illegality among immigrants (until then all of whom were welcome) –
eventually became the basis for the exclusion of Mexicans, Filipinos, Chinese,
and Japanese nationals along the country’s southern, western and eastern
borders, while law enforcement on the border with Canada was much more
lenient. Similarly, in Kuwait the idea of “national origin” – or, more precisely,
“original nationality” – became crucial in drawing the line between insiders
and outsiders: it defined the inhabitants residing in the country in 1920,when
the small city-state repelled an attack launched by the ikhwan forces of Abd al-
ʿAziz ibn al-Saʿud from the Arabian Peninsula, against other migrants from the
same region who were naturalised on a tribal basis.
In the Kuwaiti case, an entire class of more or less long-term immigrants28
was, therefore, redefined as illegal after 1986. It is interesting here to trace the
genealogy of the idea of “illegality” and its application in Kuwait. The classifi-
cation of the biduns as illegal residents took place against the background of
a general struggle against lawlessness in the country’s periphery. In 1985, for
instance, the municipal council of Kuwait City used the term “illegality” in its
attempt to bring the ʿashish under control by licencing them.29 The idea of
illegal residents evokes the image of workers who have crossed the border il-
legally in search of jobs, but ignored the early fight against poverty and shanty
towns near oil fields, the airport, and the oases; it conceals the history of the
now-disappeared ʿashish and the popular cheap housing projects built far from
the sight of citizens and foreigners alike. The state-sanctioned narrative por-
trays the biduns as coming to Kuwait to take advantage of the generosity of the
Kuwaiti state, hiding or destroying their original documentation in order to
27 Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America
(Princeton nj: Princeton University Press, 2003).
28 Despite the fact that the word “immigrant” (muhajirun) is banned from the Kuwaiti
vocabulary, it must be said that it is an appropriate term for the people under discussion.
29 al-Qabas, August 5, 1985.
obtain the benefits of Kuwaiti nationality, and thereby it simply reduces them
to their economic dimension and deprives them of agency.30
The government added a cultural stigma to this initial geographical seclu-
sion by casting the biduns’ illegality after 1986 as an existential threat. The 1980s
was not only marked by the Iran-Iraq war (1980–88), from which Kuwait tried
to shield itself while supporting Iraq, but also witnessed a series of Shiʿite ter-
ror attacks on the emirate.31 Ironically, it was the government’s policy of stig-
matisation that gave the bidun some sort of consistency and substance. In the
absence of any real prospect for naturalisation, the discourse of the authorities
with regard to the management of illegal immigrants was to refer to them as
a collective and undifferentiated entity while at the same time dealing with
people on an individual basis, leading to a mentality of “every man for himself.”
In attempting to justify the reduction of biduns to their status of abjects
confined to a status of invisibility, from the 1990s the government constructed
the category as a security, economic, and cultural threat. Before 1986, perceived
government inaction towards this “grey” category of residents in Kuwait had
led to some criticism. In a famous speech made in 1985 at the National Assem-
bly, Ahmad Saʿdun, the then-speaker of Parliament, used the image of a “time
bomb” to refer to the bidun issue, an idea that has become a topos amongst
politicians to embarrass the government. Following the Iraqi invasion of 1990–
91, the government cast the biduns as a fifth column, the “enemy within,” giv-
ing more weight to the previous image of the “alien within,” while the small
number of biduns enrolled in the Iraqi Popular Army added credibility to this
perception of the biduns as traitors. According to the Central System’s spokes-
person, 900 individuals had been rejected from becoming naturalised as a re-
sult of their cooperation with the Iraqi Popular Army.32 Moreover, as a result of
their illegal status many biduns had been forced to break the law (driving while
not having a drivers’ licence, working without permits, etc.),33 and some of
30 Vora denounces, in the case of the Indian diaspora, exactly the same practice of de-
humanising people by reducing them to their economic contribution. See Neah Vora,
Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora (Durham nc: Duke University Press, 2013),
117–44.
31 See Lori Plotkin-Boghardt, Kuwait amid War, Peace and Revolution: 1979–1991 and New
Challenges (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006).
32 al-Qabas, Kuwait, April 29, 2014.
33 Until the Council of Ministers’ Decision No. 409/2011, promulgated on March 6, 2011, re-
storing to them a previous set of civil and human-rights.
498 Beaugrand
them have been flagged as a security risk (given the status quyud amniyya).34
Furthermore, the question of the economic cost of naturalisation is extremely
vexing for ordinary Kuwaitis, who regard the question as a “zero-sum game,”
reinforcing the dichotomy between citizens and non-citizens and thereby
making the status of Kuwaiti citizen all the more enviable. Finally, cast as
Iraqis, the biduns have been culturally stigmatised while the southern Iraqi
cultural influence on Kuwaiti society has been completely denied. The bidun
issue takes place against the backdrop of an already-divided Kuwaiti society in
which Bedouin culture has not been positively valued. In the aforementioned
article, Farah al-Nakib demonstrates that the badu stereotype is the tangible
result of public policies towards housing, education, and health services, as
well as equal opportunity in employment. As one bidun commented,35 there
has been an erasure of the Bedouin identity: for instance, Kuwaitis cannot wear
the shmakh (the chequered headdress) during tv broadcasts. The biduns are at
a greater disadvantage since they are not from the same tribes as the majority
of the Kuwaiti badu; they belong to tribes of mixed sectarian composition as
well as to the so-called “Northern tribes,” which are in national terms Iraqi. The
sectarian mix of the tribes to which they originally belonged has furthermore
been used to cast them as Shiʿites. As a result, the biduns have been forced to
hide all their Iraqi cultural aspects, starting with the local Iraqi dialect.36
The Emergence of a Bidun Movement: From Public Meetings to

Street Demonstrations
The First Organised Committees for Bidun Issues

The first attempt at organising a consistent platform to denounce state poli-
cies towards the biduns emanated from Kuwaiti citizens themselves who were
ashamed of their treatment.37 In a context in which mainstream Kuwaiti public
opinion has been hostile to the biduns, depicting them as tricksters, the initia-
tive came from a very small cultural, social, and intellectual elite who had been
34 As an example, a bidun who tried to seek Egyptian nationality in order to regularise his
situation was forced to confess to fraud (that is, perjury, considered a crime) when the
Egyptian Embassy denied having him on its citizens’ list. Interview with a bidun lawyer,
Rashid al-Anezi, December 13, 2005.
35 Interview, Kuwait, April 25, 2014.
36 Another example is the traditional southern-Iraqi dance, the husa – the object of mock-
ery on YouTube and derogatory comments on the Internet.
37 Interview with Sheikha Fawzia, the founder of the Popular Committee, April 28, 2014.
exposed to international influences and who had enough influence of their

own to speak out.38 One of the daughters of Emir Jaber (1977–2006), Sheikha
Awrad, another female member of the royal family, the human rights lawyer
Sheikha Fawzia bint Salim al-Sabah, and several scholars (including Ghanim
al-Najjar) and politicians (for example, Hassan al-Jawhar) created the Popular
Committee for Bidun Issues in 2006. Their aim was to raise awareness of the
situation of the biduns and clear their reputation, which had been sullied by
government-disseminated accusations of treachery during the Iraqi invasion.
This Popular Committee’s main activity was holding public meetings at
prestigious historic clubs in Kuwait, such as the Graduates’ Society and the
Kuwait Bar Association, places that traditionally form a political counter-
weight to the royal family’s rule. However, as the heartland of the Kuwaiti
hadhar culture and considered the foundation of the modern state of Kuwait,
such associations had also been rather distrustful of others who wanted to
become Kuwaiti citizens.39 These meetings thus had the purpose of “chang-
ing mentalities,” instructing a Kuwaiti public that was very seldom exposed to
the presence of the biduns, and making it aware of the country’s peripheries
where they were “invisible” to those living in central districts.40 They offered
the biduns a platform from which to present their own narratives and life sto-
ries in order to counter the official stigmatising propaganda. On November
4, 2006, the Popular Committee provided an unprecedented opportunity for
silenced biduns to speak out: along with the Kuwait Society for Human Rights,
it organised an event called “The Biduns Talk” in the lecture theatre of the
Kuwait Bar Association. In order to redress the subsequent accusation of dis-
loyalty, the Popular Committee also organised a “Day of the Bidun Martyr” on
February 12, 2007, which commemorated those biduns who had died while
serving in the armed forces. The impact of these activities, along with meetings
held in front of the parliament building in the centre of Kuwait City, was im-
portant: the Popular Committee obtained public funds to establish two charity
38 Most of them were hadhar, stemming from old Kuwaiti families.

39 The clubs in Kuwait have historically played a role as a counterweight to the royal family’s
power. For instance, in the early days of Kuwait’s independence they exerted pressure for
a constitution and parliamentary elections to be granted. See Fatiha Dazi Héni, “Coups de
theatre,” 282.
40 In an interview, Hassan al-Jawhar, one of the founding members of the Popular Commit-
tee, stated, “I said at the meeting of the Popular Committee in a big tent in Jahra where
we invited Khudhair al-Anazi: ‘we need to move the bidun issue from the peripheral ar-
eas to the centre’ (min al-manatiq al-kharijiyya ila al-manatiq al-dakhiliyya).” After this
conference, the next one was held in the capital city, with Dr. Ghanim al-Najjar. It was a
considered a “breakthrough.” Interview with the author, Kuwait, April 29, 2014.
500 Beaugrand
organisations for biduns, concerning health and education, with a yearly bud-
get of kd 4 million.41
The activities of the Popular Committee constituted the first phase of the or-
ganisation of the bidun movement – a period in which claims for bidun rights
were formulated and voiced by Kuwaitis. After 2008, the bidun movement was
taken over by biduns themselves. Most of them had worked with the Popular
Committee but they then started to organise themselves as political subjects.
To break with what they felt was a paternalist approach, bidun members of the
Popular Committee formed bidun-run (and unregistered) societies. In Febru-
ary 2008, twelve biduns founded the Kuwaiti Biduns’ Gathering (al-Tajammuʿ
al Kuwaitiyyun al-Bidun), with the aim of alleviating the biduns’ suffering and
demanding the recovery of human rights for all biduns, while leaving the issue
of their naturalisation for later.42 In May 2008 another bidun organisation, the
Kuwaiti Biduns’ Committee (Lajnat al-Kuwaitiyyun al-Bidun), emerged, with
the aim of securing naturalisation or civil rights for those biduns who were
best placed to obtain them. While both these organisations emphasised their
Kuwaiti character in their titles, they acknowledged their differences through
their tactics. Like the Gathering, the Committee was composed of biduns with
some sort of advocacy experience as event organisers, lobbyists of Kuwaiti
MPs, or managers of webpages.
The 2011 Protest Movement: A New Repertoire of Actions

2011 marked an important rupture in the established order and practices of the
bidun struggle. On February 18, 2011, a week after the fall of Hosni Mubarak in
Egypt and just a few days after the Bahraini and Libyan uprisings, biduns also
took to the streets to demand basic rights and their naturalisation, transfer-
ring their struggle to their own territory in the Kuwaiti periphery: Tayma in
the oasis of Jahra, where most of them live.43 Just as border areas are locations
of contestation that reveal political agency,44 so the bidun “popular housing”
(buyut shaʿbiyya) areas also provided destitute spaces for politicisation and
41 Claire Beaugrand, “Statelessness and Transnationalism in Northern Arabia: Biduns

and State Building in Kuwait, 1959–2009” (PhD diss., London School of Economics and
Political Science, 2011) 169–71.
42 One founder of the Kuwaiti Biduns’ Gathering recalled: “The problem is that the face of the
Popular Committee was only Kuwaitis,” interview with the author, Kuwait, April 27 2014.
43 Claire Beaugrand, “Urban Margins in Kuwait and Bahrain: Decay, Dispossession and
Politicization,” City 18 (2014): 737–40.
44 Heather L. Johnson, Borders, Asylum and Global Non-Citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge
the performance of transgressive acts.45 At the end of the Friday prayer in the
Shaʿbi Mosque46 that borders the exclusively buyut shaʿbiyya area, a handful of
politically-aware biduns gathered, soon joined by a hundred more, demanding
a solution to their legal status. Their mobilisation and protests lasted for three
consecutive days, and was met with forceful crowd-control measures – i.e., wa-
ter cannon and tear gas.
February 18 was the first instance of a spontaneous street demonstration.
Only one earlier occurrence of protest in the bidun areas has ever been men-
tioned; in 1996, the bidun of Ahmadi protested in front of the Kuwaiti trade
union after the koc housing authorities ordered the biduns to return their low-
income accommodation. The incident ended with the authorities rescinding
the order.47 Nobody had foreseen the 2011 bidun uprising, and it was consid-
ered to have been spontaneous even though the government later started to
search for ringleaders in Kuwait and among the most vocal political exiles in
London. According to interviewees, the mobilisation had been called for via
social media; neither the Kuwaiti Biduns’ Gathering nor the Kuwaiti B iduns’
Committee acknowledged calling for the protest, although its members and
followers recognised that they had participated in it.
Two major changes in this bidun protest movement are worth noting: the
first concerns the sociology of participants while the second involves a reori-
entation of the movement. Firstly, in contrast to the members of the organised
movements, who had advocacy skills, the majority of the people who gathered
at the exit of the Shaʿbi Mosque in 2011 were male, young and middle-aged
biduns from the second and third generations. They chanted various slogans
such as: “Bidun until when?”; “Kuwaitis! Kuwaitis!”; “Death rather than humili-
ation”; “Freedom”; “Dignity”; and “When the people want to live” (Iza al shaʿb
yuman arada al-hayat), the last verse of the Tunisian national anthem.48 These
particular biduns had little education, since most of them would have reached
the age of secondary schooling in the 1990s–2000s when access to public
schools was gradually denied to them.
Secondly, the target of the biduns’ protest messages shifted from Kuwaiti
public opinion towards the government, which now became the object of
defiant actions. In the weeks following the February 18, 2011 protest the bid-
uns offered a gesture of goodwill to Kuwaiti public opinion and organised a

46 The name of the mosque refers to the Imam Shaʿbi, from the early times of Islam.
47 Interview with a bidun, April 22, 2014, Ahmadi. “This was a circumscribed event. Since it
involved the first generation of biduns who built the country, the government felt some
compassion”
48 Interview with the author, Tayma, April 22, 2014.
502 Beaugrand
assive campaign of blood donation to the Kuwaiti blood bank, the “Friday of
m
Blood Donation,” and handed out fresh flowers during a “Flowers Day.” While,
on July 19, 2011, biduns organised the release of white balloons in Jahra, this
approach lost momentum as it failed to attract attention at a time when Ku-
waitis became more and more preoccupied with their own anti-corruption
campaign against the prime minister.49 The bidun protest regained momen-
tum in December 2011 with landmark dates such as the “Day of Non-violence”
(2 October), the “Human Rights Day” (10 December), and the “Day of Dignity”
(yawm al-karama) on 19 December. With the anniversary of the first demon-
stration approaching, “protests were held every week.”50 According to a bidun
activist, “the number of protesters reached thousands, which is a high propor-
tion compared to the total number [of biduns].”51 At the beginning of 2012, in
an attempt to cool things down, the Ministry of the Interior issued a statement
saying that it would not authorise the continuation of public demonstrations.
On February 13, 2012, biduns defied the ban and went ahead with their sched-
uled protest, which was eventually repressed by Special Security Forces.
As “illegal residents” the biduns are not allowed to organise or even
demonstrate – a right that, according to the 1979 Law on Public Gathering, is
also denied to foreigners. However, in a context in which Kuwaiti citizens also
called for unprecedented protest marches in the centre of Kuwait City, the bid-
uns enacted and performed this right in a mimetic way that no other foreign
community would have dared. More than an awareness-raising campaign to
seek support from amongst the citizens, this sustained demonstration cam-
paign, at a time when citizens’ street protests led to the fall of the prime min-
ister (November 28, 2011), constituted a clear gesture of political contestation.
As a result, the entire leadership of the two bidun activist groups of the
Gathering and the Committee who took part in the banned demonstration
was arrested before later being released on bail. Although the groups were un-
registered, their leaders were fairly well-known and had become public figures.
However, due to persecution the Kuwaiti Biduns’ Gathering lost a third of its
founding members, who sought asylum abroad.
Moreover, on February 19, 2012 three Kuwaiti nationals who were present
at the prohibited demonstrations were also arrested. One was a founder of a
new all-female Kuwaiti organisation created in June 2012 and named Group 29
in reference to Article 29 of the 1962 constitution, which states, “All people are
equal in human dignity, and in public rights and duties before the law, without
49 Interview with Abdul Hakim al-Fadhli, bidun activist, April 25, 2014.
50 Interview with a bidun activist, Kuwait, April 19, 2014.
51 Ibid.
distinction as to race, origin, language or religion.” This group seeks practical

and tangible solutions to the position of the biduns through their piecemeal
integration into society, as it is convinced that wholesale “naturalisation is not
going to happen.”52 For instance, in 2012, Group 29 successfully led a campaign
for bidun admission to Kuwait University and lobbied the government for the
state recognition of stateless people during a conference in April 2013. In this
way, it hoped to force the state to issue official identification papers for the
biduns, which, according to Group 29, has still not been done for those who are
not registered with the Central System.
A further consequence of the crackdown on the pre-2011 bidun movement
was the arising of a new generation of bidun activists that displayed greater
charisma than before and who did not hesitate to continue taking to the
street, being arrested, and contesting judicial decisions – or, in other words, to
break and brave the bans. A new informal group of bidun youths, calling itself
Muwatinun (Citizens) emerged in June 2013 from the void left by the repres-
sion of February 2012. The members of the movement, the two Abdul Hakim
al-Fadhlis and Ahmad Attiah,53 are biduns of a generation born in the second
half of the 1970s who do not have experience in either advocacy or activism.
Nonetheless, they are inspiring and are able to articulate a new discourse on
citizenship, do not hesitate to tour bidun areas, to convince and give advice,
and are fearless of the government.54
Biduns and Alternative Forms of Understanding Citizenship
Undeniably, the biduns have not achieved their goals of outright naturalisa-
tion and the recognition of their full rights. On March 6, 2011, the Council of
Ministers promulgated Decision No. 409/2011, which granted them “eleven
facilities” – a set of civil and human rights, including access to health and
52 Interview with Sheikha al-Muhareb, Group 29, Kuwait, April 16, 2014.
53 The two Abdul Hakim al-Fadhlis hold the same name: both were born in 1976, one
(referred to as Doctor Abdul Hakim) is a dentist and studied in the Ukraine, while the
other studied Automotive Engineering in a local institute for industry and benefited from
Volvo’s employer-training programme. Dr. Abdul Hakim al-Fadhli was arrested and de-
tained during the early stages of the protest in February 2011 as he was suspected of being
the initiator of a Facebook call to demonstrate. Interview, Kuwait, April 25, 2014.
54 For instance, Abdul Hakim al-Fadhli led the campaigns (entitled sakhr al-watan – “Cry
of the nation” – or katatib al-bidun – Biduns’ Schools) for the teaching of bidun children,
with sit-ins in front of the Ministry of Education and, together with Group 29, for univer-
sity admission for bidun students.
504 Beaugrand
e ducational services (under certain conditions of registration), and the issuing

of birth, marriage, divorce, and death certificates, as well as driving licences.
Yet although the decision implemented by the Central System gradually and
selectively reversed the state of non-recognition, it still considers biduns “illegal
residents,” and their access to such services remains dependent on the posses-
sion of cards issued by the Central System.
Furthermore, the Central System divided the biduns into three categories:
34,000 were deemed eligible to receive nationality and could hold a green card,
valid for five years. Another 8,000 received a red card showing that they are
disqualified from naturalisation because they have criminal records or hold
documents dating only up to 1980. Finally, the remaining biduns received a
three-year yellow card and were requested to come forward and regularise
their status on the basis of their foreign nationality. To add to the complexity,
the Ministry of the Interior made an announcement on November 9, 2014 stat-
ing that biduns would be granted “special application forms for Comoros’ eco-
nomic citizenship,” which would help them regularise their status as Comorian
citizens – i.e., that they would become foreign residents in the emirate and be
given free residency permits.55
Yet, at the same time, the protest movement initiated in 2011 resulted in the
broadening of the debate on rights that was initiated by Kuwaiti human-rights
activists in the mid-2000s through the creation of new Kuwaiti organisations or
forms of activism and the questioning of the meaning of national belonging, as
biduns articulated a completely different vision. Several scholars of citizenship
studies have argued that citizenship, as an evolutive rather than fixed concept,
can be interpreted in a way that accommodates actors who, although unrec-
ognised as such, constitute themselves as political and legal subjects through
concrete acts of claiming their rights. This is the meaning of the concept of
“acts of citizenship.” Engin Isin and Greg Nielsen suggest that
to investigate citizenship in a way that is irreducible to either status or

practice, while still valuing this distinction, requires a focus on those acts
when, regardless of status and substance, subjects constitute themselves
as citizens or, better still, as those to whom the right to have rights is due.
But the focus shifts from subjects as such to acts (or deeds) that produce
such subjects.56
55 See the article from the newspaper al-Jarida by Mohamed al-Sharhan: “Al-Jarrah to al
-Jarida: biduns to the Comoros islands,” http://m.aljarida.com/pages/news_more/20126
93535 (accessed July 9, 2015).
56 Isin and Nielsen, Acts of Citizenship, 2.
Yet more often than not this approach has been applied to societies where
rights are granted rather than favours bestowed, particularly in the context of
the struggles of undocumented people in the West. The question is: how to as-
sess the impact of the biduns’ actions, which, although falling short of bringing
them out of illegality, turned them nevertheless into political subjects?
In their struggle, biduns performed some acts through which they articu-
lated political subjectivities to claim rights that they were not entitled to exer-
cise. The first of these was the right to demonstrate, prohibited for foreigners
in Kuwait and a fortiori for the “illegal” foreigners that the biduns represent
in the eyes of the state. As a result of the bidun protest, Kuwaiti lawyers de-
manded that the Constitutional Court clarify whether biduns were allowed to
demonstrate;57 they obtained a mitigated judgement that did not positively
assert the right to demonstrate but that emphasised the absence of sentences
stipulated in the 1979 law regulating demonstrations.58 Secondly, the biduns
used new juridical means unavailable to them before: their leaders were sent
to jail and had to face courts59 and, in an act of defiance against the inability
to make claims, Abdul Hakim al-Fadhli led a 47-day hunger strike.60 These acts
of resorting to the judicial system disrupt the way in which the Central System
tries to prevent the biduns from having contacts with the rest of the public
administration.61 In this way, the biduns force the state to recognise them and
57 Article 44 of the 1962 Constitution states that, “Public meetings, processions and gather-
ings shall be permitted in accordance with the conditions and manner specified by law,
provided that their purpose and means are peaceful and not contrary to morals.”
58 For want of the exact judgement, this information is based on two interviews that
brought it to my attention: interview with Group 29, April 16, 2014 and with a Kuwaiti
lawyer, Kuwait, April 28, 2014.
59 In October 2012, for instance, the protest led to at least 25 arrests. See Amnesty Inter-
national, “Urgent Action: Bidun Arrested After Peaceful Protests.” www.amnestyusa.org/
sites/default/files/uaa30712.pdf (accessed July 9, 2015).
61 The Central System has greater powers than the previous committees from which it in-
herited the bidun files, which were affiliated with the Ministry of the Interior. The head
of the Central System has ministerial rank and the agency liaises with all the concerned
ministries. “Under Article 2 of the decree establishing the Central System, this agency
may take all executive measures to resolve the status of this class. In turn, the agency is
in constant, active contact with all government bodies, agencies, public institutions, and
competent security bodies, which provide the Central System with the data and informa-
tion it needs, derived from these bodies’ records and official files. These files indicate the
true nationality of the person claiming to belong to this class.” Government of Kuwait’s
letter, “Report on the Human Rights Watch Report and Response to its Questions and In-
quiries,” 6 – further to the June 13, 2011 Human Rights Watch publication, “Prisoners of the
506 Beaugrand
acquire the status of legal subjects, moving from a position where they were
neither subjects nor objects of the Kuwaiti laws. Some biduns now claim that
they are “not afraid to go to ministries or to court” or “to cast a complaint at the
local police station.”62 In a sense, the biduns’ accumulation of security blocks
(or flags) during the demonstrations defied the classifying logic of the Central
System: in the words of one of them, “the holding power of the first [bidun]
generation has eroded: now everybody is security flagged.”63
This leads us to the characteristics put forward by Isin for investigating
acts of citizenship:64 by enacting the right to protest in the deprived space of
popular housing – and, in particular, on the wasteland adjacent to the Shaʿbi
Mosque, which they renamed “Freedom Square” – biduns created both the
novelty of an event that could be replicated and a site dedicated to contesta-
tion. The bidun protest also intertwined different legal scales and attempted
to shift their boundaries: as demonstrated before, the biduns’ legal interaction
is almost always handled by the Central System. Kuwaiti lawyers and activists
have tried to break this monopoly by making the biduns subject to national law
(in the case of the Constitutional Court seizure) or international law (in the
case of the status of statelessness).
The new strategy of the biduns is to place themselves more and more at the
level of natural law. Having seized for themselves the right to demonstrate,
the protesters claimed universal values such as dignity, freedom, and equal-
ity in order to counter the systematic discrimination from which they suffer.
The leaders of the Muwatinun resent how Kuwaitis interact with international
organisations, as they pay lip-service to human-rights “language” in order to
satisfy their international interlocutors while not jeopardising the interests of
the government.65 “We operate underground, as intellectuals,” states Dr. Abdul
Hakim al-Fadhli.66 The claims of Muwatinun are non-negotiable: they demand
fully-fledged naturalisation for all biduns – apart from those who broke the
united struggle and went to solve their own cases by purchasing faked p assports
Past, Kuwaiti Bidun and the Burden of Statelessness.” www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/

reports/Response%20of%20the%20Kuwaiti%20Government%20to%20HRW_0.pdf
(accessed July 9, 2015).
62 Participant observation in Jahra, April 22, 2014.
63 Interview in Ahmadi, April 22, 2014.
64 Isin “Enacting,” 131–34.
65 Interview with Mona Kareem, a bidun who sought asylum in the us where she is studying,
January 15, 2014. She is a great source of inspiration for the biduns who remained trapped
in Kuwait, and for their movement.
in the 2000s. Muwatinun members seek support from foreign activists and ar-
ticulate a new discourse that they know signifies a complete rupture with the
prevailing conception of citizenship in Kuwait. According to Dr. Abdul Hakim
al-Fadhli, who is multilingual and possesses a dentistry diploma, “nationality is
different from identity. I don’t need a document from the state to ascertain my
identity; your real identity is your capabilities. Education is the element that
will subvert the given order/hierarchy.”67 This new conception of citizenship
breaks with passive citizenship practices like voting or participating in the pro-
cesses of wealth allocation, as it asserts itself outside the multiple networks of
authority and patronage prevailing in Kuwait. The few educated bidun activists
debate how to conceive of citizenship. They criticise, for instance, those biduns
who, at the outset of the protests, exhibited portraits of the emir and symbols
of the emirate in order to prove their loyalty and counteract the suspicion that
they were foreigners. For them, this illustrates the lack of multicultural under-
standing of citizenship interiorised by the biduns themselves, who feel that de-
spite their most radical claims to outright naturalisation they have to emulate
hadhar Kuwaitis – look like them, behave like them, and talk like them; to be
more Najdi than Iraqi. Indeed, the internalisation of a stigmatised origin from
northern Arabia or southern Iraq is still so powerful that it leaves no room for
diversity of origin in the national identity.
Conclusion
As in the cases of sans-papiers or sinpapeles,68 this article has shown how the
community of biduns, excluded from all forms of political belonging in Kuwait,
has devised alternative forms of making claims on the Kuwaiti polity through
its acts – and, in the process, has constituted itself as being political. Yet, while
in instances of migration regimes in Europe protests have usually created
the conditions for regularisation, in the case of the biduns there has been al-
most no qualitative change in the way in which the government has handled
them as a separate category of abjects who are neither subjects nor objects of
the law. Worse, with regard to their quest for recognition as belonging to the
country, Kuwait announced on November 8, 2014, as part of a broader regional
trend, its intention to grant the biduns Comorian economic citizenship, follow-
ing in the footsteps of the United Arab Emirates. Yet, in the process by which
biduns have constituted themselves as political beings, the new generation has

68 Barbero, “Expanding Acts,” 533; McNevin, “Political Belonging,” 137.
508 Beaugrand
travelled some distance with the paternalist approach that had greatly helped
raise general awareness of their plight by mobilising support for their cause.
But this effort reached its limits when Kuwaitis became preoccupied with their
own political struggle. Reflecting a trend in Kuwait of the erosion of the role of
clientist intermediaries and the increased popularity of acts of disobedience,
the new generation has broken with their elders who held them back and has
become more vocal, more confrontational, and more creative in the way in
which it imagines itself as a collective. It has become more independent in its
struggle by adopting new sites of contestation, using the popular housing sites
as symbols of its struggle, and by adopting new, daring modes of action that
put people and bodies at risk.
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chapter 19
Citizenship Studies and the Middle East

Engin F. Isin
Citizenship Studies: Conventional and Critical
The contestation or struggle over the uses and meaning of citizenship have al-
ready indelibly marked the 21st century. Whether it is the question of the rights
of migrants or refugees or undocumented migrants or Indigenous peoples or
protesters, mothers, workers, queers, or prisoners and whether their rights are
protected or guaranteed by national law, international law, supranational law
or human rights law and indeed whether these rights should be conceived as
citizenship rights at all are basic political questions of our century. Perhaps the
21st century should not be seen as exceptional. As James Tully says, “many of
the central and most enduring struggles in the history of politics have taken
place in and over the language of citizenship and the activities and institu-
tions into which it is woven.”1 Yet, it is difficult to avoid the sense that we are
experiencing a particularly intense period of struggles borne out of the recon-
figuration of states, territories, sovereignties, and arrangements that undergird
citizenship and render it as an object of both study and struggle.2 It is not sur-
prising then to discover that although many struggles in and over the language
of citizenship may have focused on Euro-American states we now find that
such struggles are increasingly involving other places in Asia, Africa, and South
1 James Tully, On Global Citizenship: James Tully in Dialogue (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 3.
2 It is important to see citizenship as both a field of political struggle and a field of study.
Knowledge on and about citizenship and its producers are inevitably woven into the fab-
ric of power relations. There are different ways of seeing citizenship as a field of study but
T.H. Marshall’s work is still considered a key contribution. Its Anglo-American perspective
and Eurocentric historical outlook have been widely criticized. T.H. Marshall, Citizenship
and Social Class, ed. T.B. Bottomore (London: Pluto Press, 1992). See S. White, The Ethos of
a Late-Modern Citizen (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2009); John Clarke et al.,
Disputing Citizenship (Bristol: Policy Press, 2014); Martin Bulmer and Anthony M. Rees (eds),
Citizenship Today: The Contemporary Relevance of T.H. Marshall (London: ucl Press, 1996).
Also see Bryan S. Turner, Citizenship and Capitalism: The Debate over Reformism (London:
Unwin, 1986); Bryan S. Turner, “Outline of a Theory of Citizenship,” Sociology 24 (1990):
189–217.

512 Isin
America.3 The Middle East, or more precisely, struggles over citizenship in the
Middle East, which is the subject of this volume, as both Roel Meijer and Nils
Butenschøn have suggested, have accelerated with the Arab Uprisings and pro-
ceeded with the uncertain reconfigurations of the meaning and function of
citizenship in the region.4
Throughout the world the struggles over citizenship have become incred-
ibly diverse and it would be a folly to impose a particular characterisation on
them. Nonetheless, as we witness and participate in these struggles, it is indeed
possible to identify, in broad strokes, two approaches to understanding citi-
zenship that have emerged. I will designate these as conventional and critical
approaches not to argue that the latter displaces the former but to bring into
sharper relief some differences that emerged in studying citizenship partly
because of the complexities of citizenship in this century and partly because
of the developments within the field of citizenship studies.5 Both conven-
tional and critical approaches are needed to account for the complexities of
the politics of citizenship. The conventional approaches typically begin with
citizenship defined as rights, obligations, and belonging to the nation-state.
Three rights (civil, political, and social) and three obligations (conscription,
taxation, and franchise) often describe the relationships between citizens and
states. Civil rights include the right to free speech, to conscience, and to dig-
nity; political rights include voting and standing for office; and social rights in-
clude unemployment insurance, universal health care, and welfare provisions.
All these rights are predicated on a fundamental right of equality before the
law regardless of belief, background or origin that governs the relationship be-
tween citizens and their states.6 As regards obligations, although c onscription
is rapidly disappearing as a citizenship obligation, taxation is still fundamental;
voting, although declining, especially amongst the youth, remains vital. Con-
ventional approaches to citizenship also draw our attention to the fact that
3 Engin F. Isin and Peter Nyers (eds), Routledge Handbook of Global Citizenship Studies (Lon-
don: Routledge, 2014).
4 Roel Meijer, “Political Citizenship and Social Movements in the Arab World,” in Handbook of
Political Citizenship and Social Movements, ed. Hein-Anton van der Heijden (London: Edward
Elgar, 2014), 628–660; Nils A. Butenschøn, “Arab Citizen and the Arab State: The ‘Arab Spring’
as a C
ritical Juncture in Contemporary Arab Politics,” Democracy and Security 11 (2015): 111–28.
5 Tully characterizes these two approaches as civil and civic modes of citizenship: civil citizen-
ship is understood as a set of rules originating in the West and disseminating from it and
civic citizenship as diverse, multiple, negotiated, and local practices of political subjectivity.
See Tully, On Global Citizenship, 7–10. My characterization of conventional and critical
approaches to citizenship strongly resonates with his civil and civic modes of citizenship.
6 Charles Tilly, “A Primer on Citizenship,” Theory and Society 26 (1997): 599–602.
Citizenship Studies and the Middle East 513
these rights have been declining in Euro-American states and the future of
civil, political and social rights remain contested and uncertain.7 For conven-
tional approaches state-citizen relationship remains the key aspect of studying
citizenship, which is considered as a membership of the nation-state.
Critical approaches to studying citizenship make two basic interventions to
the conventional approach to citizenship. First, critical approaches typically
recognise new rights, such as sexual rights, cultural rights, and environmen-
tal rights, and study struggles over their institutionalisation (e.g., the struggles
over same-sex marriage in the United States and Europe).8 The focus on rights
maintains a more dynamic sense than in conventional approaches and strug-
gle (agon or contestation) is a core concept for understanding rights. Second,
critical approaches also recognise that increasingly, whether traditional (i.e.,
civil, political, social) or expanded (cultural, economic, environmental, sex-
ual, transnational, and urban), rights and obligations are negotiated through
supranational and international institutions such as the United Nations
(e.g., Universal Declaration of Human Rights), the Council of Europe (e.g.,
European Court of Human Rights), and the European Union (e.g., European
Court of Justice) as well as devolved institutions such as regional parliaments
(e.g., Quebec or Scottish parliaments) and traditions of minority communities
(e.g., applications of Shariʿa law) that question the assumption that citizenship
is membership in only a nation-state.9 Critical approaches emphasize broader
repertoires of rights that people draw upon in their struggles for citizenship
rights. These struggles over rights are no longer contained (or for that matter
7 The literature of declining citizenship rights is voluminous and is often associated with
the narrative of the decline of the welfare state and the rise of neoliberalism. See Bryan
S. Turner, “The Erosion of Citizenship,” British Journal of Sociology 52 (2001): 189–209;
Margaret R. Somers, Genealogies of Citizenship: Markets, Statelessness, and the Right to Have
Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
8 Umut Erel, Migrant Women Transforming Citizenship (Ashgate, 2009); Shane Phelan, Sexual
Strangers: Gays, Lesbians, and Dilemmas of Citizenship (Philadelphia, pa: Temple University
Press, 2001); Alex Latta, “Environmental Citizenship,” Alternatives Journal 33 (2007): 18–19;
Toby Miller, Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitanism, Consumerism, and Television in a Neolib-
eral Age (Philadelphia, pa: Temple University Press, 2007).
9 Anne McNevin, Contesting Citizenship: Irregular Migrants and New Frontiers of the P olitical
(Columbia University Press, 2011); Kim Rygiel, Globalizing Citizenship (Vancouver: ubc
Press, 2010); Peter Nyers, “In Solitary, in Solidarity: Detainees, Hostages and Contesting the
Anti-Policy of Detention,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 11 (2008): 333–49; Peter Nyers,
“Abject Cosmopolitanism: The Politics of Protection in the Anti-Deportation Movement,”
Third World Quarterly 24 (2003): 1069–93; Aoileann Ní Mhurchú, Ambiguous Citizenship in
an Age of Global Migration (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014); Vicki Squire, The
Exclusionary Politics of Asylum (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
514 Isin
containable) in a single sovereign jurisdiction. Critical approaches recognise

that such struggles are waged through a multiplicity of legal and political or-
ders and borders and that state-citizen relations are mediated through these
multiple political forms.
Taken together, these two interventions widen the focus from citizenship as
already instituted arrangement with certain conventions to the figure of the
citizen as a political subject at the center of struggles for rights who questions,
if not breaks, these conventions. There are a number of theoretical consid-
erations that follow this characterisation but in this chapter I will only and
briefly focus on the figure of the citizen and the difference it may make in ap-
proaching citizenship in the Middle East.
The Figure of the Citizen
It would be fair to say that critical approaches to citizenship draw our attention
to a performative understanding of rights and that the polities that give rise
to and protect those rights are multiple and overlapping.10 If we begin think-
ing about citizenship as “a membership in the nation-state,” we are already
approaching it in conventional ways. Rather, critical approaches often begin
with the citizen as a historical and geographic figure – a figure that emerged
in particular configurations and a dynamic, changing, and above all contested
figure of politics that comes into being by performing politics.11 How does the
figure of the citizen function in critical approaches to citizenship?
We recognise that the figure of the citizen as it is inherited from the
Euro-American tradition plays out two inherent, unresolved, and probably ir-
resolvable, tensions: a tension between freedom and obedience and a tension
between universalism and particularism. Étienne Balibar has, with exception-
al clarity, drawn attention to both of these inherent tensions in the figure of
the citizen. In what follows, I will present his basic argument in my own words
to articulate the figure of the citizen as a performative figure. Balibar says that
it is conventional political thought that created a divide between tradition
and modernity where a subject to power (tradition) was replaced by a sub-
ject of power (modernity). To put it differently, if on the one side of the divide
stood a subject of the sovereign (subject to power), on the other side stood the
10 Mary McThomas, Performing Citizenship: Undocumented Migrants in the United States

(London: Routledge, 2016); Inbal Ofer and Tamar Groves (eds), Performing Citizenship:
Social Movements across the Globe (London: Routledge, 2016).
11 Clarke et al., Disputing Citizenship: 9–11.
s overeign subject (subject of power). Conventional political theory hailed the

arrival of the latter as the displacement of the former (i.e., the celebrated trope
of “from subjects to citizens” or the overthrow of despotism). Critical political
thought questions both the divide and displacement narratives. Instead, we
see the political subject as a sedimentation of multiple forces, identifications,
affiliations, and associations with a composite structure. Against the first nar-
rative, the political subject is divided by these elements rather than by the bi-
nary dichotomies of tradition and modernity. Against the second narrative, the
political subject is a site of multiple modes of power (sovereign, disciplinary,
and control) that embodies composite dispositions (obedience, submission,
and subversion).12 For critical approaches to citizenship as political subjectiv-
ity the familiar, all-too familiar, trope that traditional states had obedient sub-
jects and that modern states have sovereign citizens needs interrogation. The
question is, then, if we reject the sovereign citizen behind every act or deed,
how can we understand the acting subject today composed of, as it were, these
multiple identifications, powers, and dispositions?
Balibar’s response to this question was, rather than continuing to oppose
subjects to citizens, to contract them into one phrase: citizen-subjects.13 This
has the advantage of reminding ourselves that we are working with a para-
doxical figure. To begin, Balibar says, the very idea of the rights of the citizen
institutes a historical figure that is not merely subject to power or the subject of
power but embodies both.14 This move is quite significant: if being a subject
to power requires obedience, being a subject of power requires disobedience.
But these are not pure forms; rather, the citizen-subject embodies these as po-
tentialities. Being a subject to power is marked by the citizen’s domination by
the sovereign, and her rights derive from that which is given to her by the (pa-
triarchal) sovereign. Being a subject of power means being an agent of power,
even if this requires submission. Moreover, there is an important difference be-
tween obedience and submission. If being subject to power means obedience
to the sovereign, then it requires domination as a mode of power. Whether
this is total obedience or resistant obedience depends on the c ircumstances.
12 See Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (London: Routledge,
1997), 14–16.
13 Étienne Balibar, “Citizen Subject,” in Who Comes after the Subject?, ed. Eduardo Cadava,
Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (London: Routledge, 1991), 38.
14 Ibid., 46. Balibar puts it the following way: “The idea of the rights of the citizen, at the
very moment of his emergence, thus institutes a historical figure that is no longer the
subjectus, and not yet the subjectum.” I translate his “subjectus” as “subject to power” and
“subjectum” as “subject of power.”
516 Isin
By contrast, being a subject of power means submission to authority in whose

formation the citizen participates and its potential subversion. What distin-
guishes the citizen from the subject is not that the citizen is a sovereign sub-
ject but that the citizen is this complex and composite subject of obedience,
submission, and subversion. The birth of the citizen as a subject of power does
not mean the disappearance of the subject as a subject to power. The citizen-
subject embodies these forms of power in which she is implicated, where
obedience, submission, and subversion are not separate dispositions but are
always-present potentialities.
This shifts our attention to how subjects become citizens through various
processes of subjectivation that involve relations between bodies and things
that constitute people as subjects of power. If we focus on how people en-
act themselves as subjects of power, it involves investigating how people use
language to describe themselves and their relations to others and how lan-
guage summons them as speaking beings. To put it differently, it involves in-
vestigating how people do things with words and words with things to enact
themselves.15 It also means addressing how people understand themselves as
subjects of power when acting. For Balibar “the citizen’s becoming-a-subject
takes the form of a dialectic, this is because there are necessary contradictions
between founding a definition of the citizen and the contestations over it.”16
The citizen-subject that we inherit as a figure of politics is not only capable
of being obedient but can also be simultaneously a submissive (to authority)
and a subversive (of authority) figure. The essential insight here is that the
figure of the citizen always carries within it the possibility and danger of the
obedient subject of sovereign power. The citizen is a subject who submits to
government in which she is implicated. This submission makes this figure a
subject of subversion capable of questioning the terms of her own submis-
sion. To put it differently, the agency of the citizen appears in the gap between
the capacity to submit to authority and yet the ability to act in dissent. This is
not a sovereign subject in the mastery of her destiny but an embodied subject
formed through multiple affiliations and of submission and subversion. The
rights that the citizen holds are not the rights of an already-existing sovereign
subject but the rights of a figure who submits to authority in the name of those
rights and acts to call into question its terms.
The second tension concerns its universalism against particularism.
For the subject to become a citizen, the conditions must be equal for everyone.
15 I am drawing on Engin F. Isin and Evelyn S. Ruppert, Being Digital Citizens (London:
owman & Littlefield International, 2015).
R
16 Balibar, “Citizen Subject,” 53.
To become a citizen is predicated on this equality. This equality is ostensibly

universal. Balibar says that the citizen is a person who enjoys rights in com-
pletely realising being human and is free because being human is a universal
condition for everyone.17 We would say the citizen is a subject who performs
rights in realising being political because becoming political is a universal
condition for everyone. There is, however, a contradiction here. It is that, his-
torically speaking, while some subjects are considered capable of conducting
themselves as citizens, such as white, male, propertied, able-bodied, Christian,
and heterosexual beings, the opposites of each of those subject positions will
remain subjects. This contradiction of the figure of the citizen can be expressed
in another paradoxical phrase: universalism as particularism. We are all equal
before the law in theory but differentiated in practice.
From a critical perspective on citizenship, these tensions are constitutive of
the struggles over the figure of the citizen. These tensions constitute the figure
of the citizen as a subject of claims for rights. Each claim that a citizen articu-
lates against an authority puts her under demands of that authority. If rights
of citizenship come into being in law, the citizen comes into being through
the performance of that law or performance of the right to claim rights. If the
citizen comes into being performatively through rights, the imaginary of citi-
zenship mobilises this figure of the citizen as a subversive subject. She is a sub-
ject of power whose acts of citizenship are simultaneously of submission and
subversion. Acts of citizenship embody these two tensions. On the one hand,
acts produce universalism because its subjects claim that everyone can act;
on the other hand, and simultaneously, acts produce particularisms against
those who are rendered unable or incapable to act or whose acts cannot be
recognised.
If making rights claims is performative, it follows that these rights are nei-
ther fixed nor guaranteed: they need to be repeatedly performed. Their coming
into being and remaining effective requires performativity. The performative
force of citizenship reminds us that the figure of the citizen has to be brought
into being repeatedly through acts (repertoires, declarations, and proclama-
tions) and conventions (rituals, customs, practices, traditions, laws, institu-
tions, technologies, and protocols). Without the performance of rights, the
figure of the citizen would merely exist in theory and would have no mean-
ing in politics. So what is it that people do when making rights claims? We
need to make two points here. First, performing citizenship both invokes
and breaks conventions. Conventions are arrangements that embody norms,
values, affects, laws, ideologies, and technologies. They involve agreement or
17 Ibid., 45.
518 Isin
even consent – either deliberate or often implicit – that constitutes the logic
of any custom, institution, opinion, ritual, and indeed law or embodies any
accepted conduct. Since both the logic and embodiment of conventions are
objects of agreement, performing these conventions also produces disagree-
ment. Another way of saying this is that the performativity of conduct such as
making rights claims often exceeds conventions. Second, while articulating a
particular demand (for inclusion, recognition), performing citizenship enacts
a universal right to claim rights.
I have condensed a complex argument on the figure of the citizen into a
few paragraphs but I hope that this sufficiently provides a glimpse of what is
at stake in making a distinction between conventional and critical approaches
to citizenship studies. If we start studying citizenship with the assumption
of a given or self-evident institution that has acquired a stable shape over
time (18th to 20th centuries) and space (Euro-America) we would be neglect-
ing that this assumption is called into question by critical approaches. This
is important because approaching citizenship in the Middle East, if we take
an ostensibly stabilised Euro-American citizenship as our starting point, we
are already participating in narratives of citizenship that constitute the fig-
ure of the citizen in conventional terms which are successive idealisations of
Euro-American citizenship.18 As James Tully says, conventional approaches to
citizenship often proceed with two assumptions. First, it is often assumed that
“the modernization of the West into modern nation states with representative
governments, a system of international law, the decolonization of European
empires, supranational regime formations and the development of global civil
society” is a universal and uniform process.19 Second, “the dependent mod-
ernization and citizenization of the non-West through colonization, the Man-
date System, post-decolonization nation-building and global governance of
18 I am merely stating these arguments here but I have developed them elsewhere: Engin
F. Isin, “Citizenship’s Empire,” in Citizenship after Orientalism: Transforming Political The-
ory, ed. Engin F. Isin (London: Palgrave, 2015), 261–81; Engin F. Isin, “Claiming European
Citizenship,” in Enacting European Citizenship, ed. Engin F. Isin and Michael Saward
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 19–46; Engin F. Isin, “Citizenship after
Orientalism: Genealogical Investigations,” in Comparative Political Thought: Theorizing
Practices, ed. Michael Freeden and Andrew Vincent (London: Routledge, 2013), 110–25;
Engin F. Isin, Citizens without Frontiers (London: Bloomsbury, 2012); Engin F. Isin, “Citi-
zens without Nations,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 30 (2012): 450–
67; Engin F. Isin, “Citizenship in Flux: The Figure of the Activist Citizen,” Subjectivity 29
(2009): 367–88; Engin F. Isin, “The City as the Site of the Social,” in Recasting the Social in
Citizenship, ed. Engin F. Isin (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 261–280.
19 Tully, On Global Citizenship: 8.
the former colonies” constitutes its diffusion moment.20 Tully sums up these
two assumptions as “citizenisation” to indicate that a modular process of dif-
fusion from Euro-America under its tutelage to the rest of the world where we
look for the instances of the original. To put citizenisation differently, we really
ought not to assume that the figure of the citizen has become a sovereign sub-
ject in Euro-America in modernity (as opposed to the complex and composite
subject we described above) and it has spread elsewhere. And, if in fact it did
spread, this was through imperial and colonial forms of rule such as tutelage
and mandate.21
Citizenship in the Middle East
As Roel Meijer has recently illustrated a few years ago it would have been quite
difficult to imagine a burgeoning field of citizenship studies in the Middle
East – or the region of the world that came to be known as the Middle East des-
ignated by what came to be called the West.22 This highlights the challenge of
deploying categories of political thought in the Middle East without the pres-
ence of imperialism and colonialism in how the region came to be defined and
by whom.23 It is a region of the world that embodies several layers of imperial
and colonial history. If we accept a broader conception of “empire” it can be
said that the first empires were themselves born in the region. If we narrow our
definition of “empire” then we can still enumerate several imperial histories
and geographies involving the Roman Empire, Persian Empire, Ottoman Em-
pire, and British, French, Spanish, and American empires. “The Middle East” is
a region of the world deeply infused with histories and geographies of imperi-
alism and colonialism.
Yet, this complexity cannot fully explain why it would have been difficult to
imagine citizenship studies and the Middle East. After all the Middle East is no
more or less complex than how Europe or America came to be defined, each
featuring various imperial histories. But the Middle East was defined by the
20 Ibid.
21 James Tully, “Lineages of Contemporary Imperialism,” in Lineages of Empire : The Histori-
cal Roots of British Imperial Thought, ed. Duncan Kelly (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2009), 3–29; D.K. Fieldhouse, Western Imperialism in the Middle East 1914–1958 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2008).
22 Meijer, “Political Citizenship and Social Movements in the Arab World.”
23 Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orien-
talism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
520 Isin
victorious imperial powers at once simultaneously as the birthplace of ancient

civilisations, including major religions such as Islam, Judaism, and Christian-
ity, and its eventual backwardness or lack of progress. It is perhaps inadver-
tently that Bernard Lewis revealed this paradoxical perspective of the West
on the Middle East with his What Went Wrong?24 That Eurocentric narrative,
for so long and perhaps still dominant, designated the Middle East with a ci-
vilisational history but modern backwardness. Arguably, it is this paradox that
hindered the emergence of citizenship studies in the Middle East since citi-
zenship, along with democracy, nation, state, liberty, rights, and law would not
have been indigenous to the region but always disseminated from the West.
The Middle East – or the region of the world that came to be known as the
Middle East designated by what came to be called the West – is indeed a poi-
gnant region to reject performing Tully’s citizenisation assumption.
The subject of the Middle East and its relations to the West has been ex-
tensively debated but from the perspective of studying citizenship the most
significant question is to what extent we can use theoretical, analytical, meth-
odological tools from the field of citizenship studies especially developed over
the last two decades for understanding the contemporary political develop-
ments in the Middle East? There are many vexed issues wrapped within that
relatively straightforward-sounding question particularly if we remember, or
perhaps more accurately, refuse to forget, that European colonial and imperial
histories are part of contemporary Middle East.
One of these issues is what we understand by the figure of the citizen. As
I already emphasized above, one of the difficulties in the field over the last
two decades has been to begin with a sovereign conception of the citizen as a
member of a sovereign state. This can be witnessed often when scholars pro-
viding a presumably incontestable definition: “citizenship is …” The trouble is
that any definition of citizenship already embodies its contested histories and
any attempt to simplify it falls short of accounting for its complexities. When
we combine this difficulty with the complexity of the region called the Middle
East we can appreciate how difficult it is to study citizenship in the Middle
East. We can declare that “citizenship” did not exist in the Middle East and
that it was disseminated by Western nations or assume that “citizenship” has
always existed in the Middle East. Either way, and in any other way that begins
with citizenship as already given, the problem of interpretation remains acute.
To put it differently, rather than approaching citizenship as given citizenship
(in) law, a performative or critical approach would approach citizenship (in)
24 Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? The Conflict between Islam and the West in the Middle
East (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002).
practice through rituals, routines, and norms that people inhabit in their ordi-
nary or extraordinary lives to understand how citizenship might be performed
to bring “it” into being. A critical perspective would approach citizenship (in)
acts to ascertain the extent to which individuals or groups take liberties and
risks to perform citizenship. This is one of the reasons why I think convention-
al approaches to studying citizenship need to be expanded with the dynamics
of the political subject – the figure of the citizen and its performativity – in the
Middle East. I have discussed various aspects of this problem elsewhere and
conducted a project on “citizenship after orientalism” to address specifically
this problem.25 We have recently approached citizenship as an institution me-
diating rights between the subjects of politics and the polities to which these
subjects belong or with which identify or affiliate.26 We argued that a minimal-
ist definition such as this would provide for a space to think critically about
the struggles over the meanings and functions of citizenship.27 The question is
how do we approach citizenship outside the Euro-America critically without
already holding a static definition?28
To return to Tully, he suggests approaching citizenship critically without the
citizenisation assumption means to recognise citizenship as a multiplicity of
practices anywhere in the world.29 For Tully “citizenship is not a status given by
the institutions of the modern constitutional state and international law, but
negotiated practices in which one becomes a citizen through participation.”30
So then, how do we identify multiplicity of negotiated practices through which
people enact themselves as citizens? This suggests that approaching citizen-
ship involves recognising that “citizenship” (as an institution mediating rights
between the subjects of politics and the polities to which these subjects b elong
25 Engin F. Isin (ed.), Citizenship after Orientalism: Transforming Political Theory (London:
Palgrave, 2015); Engin F. Isin (ed.), Citizenship after Orientalism: An Unfinished Project
(London: Routledge, 2014); Engin F. Isin, “We, the Non-Europeans,” in Conflicting Humani-
ties, ed. Rosi Braidotti and Paul Gilroy (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 229–44; Isin, “Citi-
zenship after Orientalism: Genealogical Investigations”; Engin F. Isin, “Citizenship after
Orientalism,” in Handbook of Citizenship Studies, ed. Engin F. Isin and Bryan S. Turner
(London: Sage, 2002), 117–28.
26 Engin F. Isin and Peter Nyers, “Globalizing Citizenship Studies,” in Routledge Handbook of
Global Citizenship Studies, ed. Engin F. Isin and Peter Nyers (London: Routledge, 2014), 1.
27 Ibid., 2–3.
28 Nils A. Butenschøn, Uri Davis, and Manuel S. Hassassian, Citizenship and the State in
the Middle East: Approaches and Applications (Syracuse, n.y.: Syracuse University Press,
2000).
29 Tully, On Global Citizenship: 8–9.
30 Ibid., 9.
522 Isin
or with which they identify or affiliate) exists at least in four distinct, irre-
ducible yet overlapping forms. These are citizenship (in) law, citizenship (in)
practice, citizenship (in) theory, and citizenship (in) acts. The importance of rec-
ognising the multiplicity of citizenship through these forms will be borne out
by my argument that these forms are often discordant and incongruous: there
are inevitable gaps between them. But these gaps provide really the urgent and
pressing issues for research in citizenship studies.
Citizenship (in) law exists in legislation, courts, constitutions, treaties, con-
ventions, and declarations as rights. It is not only in modern states but also in
early modern and earlier states that various laws specified the rights, liberties
and duties of legal subjects and these inevitably shape conduct of subjects and
the dividing line between legal and illegal. Citizenship (in) law designates not
only rights and duties and legal and illegal conduct but also the subjects of this
law and who are excluded from it. Whether it is by birth, descent, or residence
many polities have inscribed citizenship (in) law separating citizens from non-
citizens. Arguably, this is one of the fundamental functions of citizenship (in)
law in that it simultaneously creates both citizen and non-citizen categories.
The way in which I described citizenship (in) law depends on its incongru-
ous relationship with citizenship (in) practice. People take up their citizen-
ship (in) practice as rights in a variety of ways, mixing and matching different
rights, making claims to new ones, grieving about the disappearance of others,
and in the process traversing jurisdictions, borders and boundaries. It may be
hard to accept it, especially if we like tidy and organised ideas, but people don’t
bother much about the sources of their entitlement or claim making. To put it
differently, citizenship (in) practice is a lot messier than citizenship (in) law.
(Let’s not forget that it is messy in law too.) But this gap between citizenship
(in) law and citizenship (in) practice gives it a vitality that it is impossible to
study citizenship (in) law without documenting how it is observed, enforced,
transgressed, subverted, or even perverted.
Then citizenship also exists (in) theory: ideas, ideals, interpretations, expla-
nations, contentions about what citizenship is and ought to be produce citi-
zenship (in) theory, which never quite matches either citizenship (in) law or
citizenship (in) practice. Citizenship (in) theory always falls short of describing
what transpires in citizenship (in) practice and citizenship (in) law. The field
of citizenship studies is only a part of citizenship (in) theory, which features
broader political discourse than an institutionalized academic field. These
political discourses involve public statements by activists, artists, authorities,
bureaucrats, citizens, intellectuals, journalists, politicians, professionals, and
all opinion makers who interpret citizenship in multiple ways. Citizenship
(in) theory is neither reducible to nor can exhaust citizenship (in) law or on
citizenship (in) practice. The field of citizenship studies participates in citizen-

ship (in) theory by developing theoretical, analytical and methodological tools
with which to understand citizenship (in) law and citizenship (in) practice.
There is much disagreement amongst scholars in the field as to the precise
articulations of citizenship in both national and international laws and prac-
tices and this is largely due to the contentious and contested nature of citizen-
ship. For these reasons it is impossible to approach citizenship with certainty
as though its multiplicity of forms can ever overlap perfectly.
To make matters even more complicated, I have argued that citizenship
also exists in acts. Citizenship (in) acts symbolises the performative politics
of citizenship: in and by making rights claims people constitute themselves
as citizens without regard for any convention that may yet exist to authorize
their act. Thus, citizenship (in) acts introduces rupture into both citizenship
(in) law by transgressing or subverting it and citizenship (in) practice by break-
ing conventions. This has been a subject of studies that illustrated how people
perform as citizens regardless whether they are designated as citizens or non-
citizens.31 Citizenship (in) acts always occur in the gap between citizenship
(in) law and citizenship (in) practice or between citizenship (in) theory and
citizenship (in) practice. Citizenship (in) acts is irreducible to citizenship (in)
practice for the latter involves habits and routines that the latter break or rup-
ture. It is significant to recognise this element of rupture precisely because it
gives us a valuable glimpse of a gap between how citizenship (in) law regulates
subjects of rights and how citizenship (in) practice shapes and transforms citi-
zenship (in) law. In a way, citizenship (in) acts enables fissures, conflicts, con-
tradictions, dilemmas of becoming citizens (in) practice and (in) theory to get
reflected in citizenship (in) law.
Making these distinctions enables us to recognise that citizenship (in) law,
citizenship (in) practice, citizenship (in) theory and citizenship (in) acts are
essentially sites of political and social struggle through which people make
31 Nyers, “Abject Cosmopolitanism”; Ranu Basu, “Negotiating Acts of Citizenship in an Era

of Neoliberal Reform: The Game of School Closures,” International Journal of Urban and
Regional Research 31 (2007): 109–27; Leah Bassel and Catherine Lloyd, “Rupture or Repro-
duction? ‘New’ Citizenship in France,” French Politics 9 (2011): 21–49; Iker Barbero, “Orien-
talising Citizenship: The Legitimation of Immigration Regimes in the European Union,”
Citizenship Studies 16 (2012): 751–68; Michael Saward, “The Dynamics of European Citi-
zenship: Enactment, Extension and Assertion,” Comparative European Politics 11 (2013):
49–69; Alessandra Marino, “‘The Cost of Dams’: Acts of Writing as Resistance in Postco-
lonial India,” Citizenship Studies 16 (2012): 705–19; Jonathan Darling, “Another Letter from
the Home Office: Reading the Material Politics of Asylum,” Environment and Planning D:
Society and Space 32 (2014): 484–500.
524 Isin
claims involving belonging, identity, inclusion, exclusion, and participation,

influence, engagement, and so on. These claims always involve rights ranging
from civil, political, and social rights to labor, sexual, cultural, environmental,
consumer, and other rights. Citizenship (in) theory is both a participant and
observer in these struggles and it is difficult to draw a line between these two
types of involvement. So when we are talking about citizenship from within
the field of citizenship studies as scholars we are presented with the paradoxes
of being both observers and participants in these struggles over the meanings
and functions of an institution that organizes, regulates, and distributes rights
in contemporary polities and across them. This is especially important in ap-
proaching citizenship in the Middle East as it obligates us to ask ourselves as
scholars as to what conception of citizenship we are performing.
If I were to approach citizenship in the Middle East with these four inter-
related and interwoven forms of its existence I think I would be avoiding the
citizenisation assumption: that is, the burden of having to provide a definition
of citizenship before investigating negotiated practices, making an investment
in it, and then looking for its instantiation through absence or presence. The
difficulties of citizenisation are evident in the debates over Arab Spring. The
languages of interpretation widely oscillated across “revolutions,” “revolts,”
“awakening,” “democratisation,” “freedom,” and so on.32 And yet, strangely,
citizenship has been a rather quite (though not entirely absent) concept in
these contemporary interpretations of these events in the Middle East. There
are complex reasons for this. To begin, “citizenship” is not the most familiar
term with which public discourse is conducted neither in the Middle East nor
in fact in Euro-America. Often “rights” much more easily roll off the tongues
of both interpreting and acting agents of events. This might change in the fu-
ture but the political discourse on citizenship or citizenship (in) theory mostly
exists in the language of rights. And rights involve multiple and overlapping
legal orders ranging from national and international laws and treaties. But it
also involves “citizenship” being absorbed into “democracy” as the dominant
concept of interpretation.
32 Valentine M. Moghadam, “What Is Democracy? Promises and Perils of the Arab Spring,”
Current Sociology 61 (2013): 393–408; Meijer, “Political Citizenship and Social Movements
in the Arab World”; Butenschøn, “Arab Citizen and the Arab State: The “Arab Spring” as
a Critical Juncture in Contemporary Arab Politics”; Benoît Challand, “Citizenship against
the Grain: Locating the Spirit of the Arab Uprisings in Times of Counterrevolution,” Con-
stellations 20 (2015): 169–87.
This problem in part owes its existence to Eurocentric understanding of the

figure of the citizen. Citizenship (in) theory in its modern variety has always
examined citizenship as a Western institution in the sense that it has either as-
sumed that citizenship (in) law and citizenship (in) practice did not and could
not exist in non-European societies, of which the Middle East societies would
certainly constitute a prime example, or if it did only in forms that would have
been taken from Europe as a derivative and transplanted institution. There are
hard and soft versions of this assumption as well as manifest and latent ver-
sions. All these can be traced back to the very origins of social sciences and
humanities in Europe and America and certainly the origins of modern citi-
zenship (in) theory. These origins are implicated in colonialism, imperialism
and orientalism. We have to remind ourselves that we are speaking about a
region whose name was invented as a result of colonial and imperial struggles
over it. We cannot extricate ourselves or the region from these histories. So the
difficulty is when using the concept citizenship to interpret political develop-
ments in the Middle East remaining silent about this problem is really not an
option. Even if a scholar considers it an act of defiance against orientalism and
bypasses a discourse of absence or presence of citizenship in the Middle East,
the question still remains whether it is an institution that’s disseminated to
“oriental” societies or these societies also have authentic (though perhaps not
necessarily indigenous) citizenships (in) law and citizenship (in) practice and
if not citizenship (in) theory?
These are some of the challenges of approaching politics in/of the Middle
East from the perspective of citizenship. The chapters in this volume feature
engrossing and telling examples of how we are responding to these challenges
and the analytical tools we are developing. I hope this chapter provides a use-
ful way to approach struggles over citizenship (in) theory against the back-
ground of struggles in citizenship (in) law and citizenship (in) practice and
perhaps an invitation to consider citizenship (in) acts.
Challenges of Studying Citizenship in the Middle East
By distinguishing conventional and critical approaches to citizenship stud-

ies I have attempted to draw attention to the fact that many issues that seem
settled as regards meanings and functions of citizenship as an institution are
effectively contested and contestable issues. By highlighting the gaps amongst
struggles over citizenship (in) theory, struggles in citizenship (in) law, citizen-
ship (in) practice, and citizenship (in) acts, I have argued that the figure of
526 Isin
the citizen is a political site where these contestations are taking place. When
approached critically, meanings and functions of citizenship are much more
varied and dynamic and belie attempts to stabilize its definition.33 By way of
conclusion, let me recapitulate the challenges in studying citizenship in the
Middle East as substantive questions of citizenship in general. I have experi-
enced these challenges during my studies on the Islamic institution of waqf or
trust especially during the 16th-19th centuries in Ottoman Empire and I will
give examples where possible.34
The basic challenge is identifying who the subjects of citizenship are. This
is a challenge, I think, because it involves determining what kind of a subject
the citizen is: passive, active, giving, receiving, claiming, demanding, contract-
ing, struggling, enjoying, suffering, and so on. We observe seemingly contradic-
tory if not mutually exclusive modes of practicing agency in several studies on
citizenship in the Middle East.35 Citizens appear in all these modes. Questions
arise as to what extent subjects such as youth, women, migrants, and under
more specific categories such as indigen, bidun, Sunni, Shiʿi, Salafi, and so on are
included or excluded from citizenship.36 Who are the emerging subjects of cit-
izenship in the Middle East and documenting the ways in which social agents,
modes, and ascriptions are mobilised requires addressing the figure of the citi-
zen as a complex figure. If indeed, various marginalised, dominated, oppressed,
or subaltern political subjects such as the refugees, migrants, sans-papiers,
youth and others are subjects of struggles over their rights and obligations
in Euro-America, as James Sater illustrates, whose study concerns citizenship
in Arab Gulf Monarchies, differentiated categories of citizenship also function
33 Isin, “Citizenship in Flux: The Figure of the Activist Citizen.”

34 Engin F. Isin, “Beneficence and Difference: Ottoman Awqaf and ‘Other’ Subjects,” in The
Other Global City, ed. Shail Mayaram (London: Routledge, 2009), 35–53; Engin F. Isin,
“Ottoman Awqaf, Turkish Modernization, and Citizenship,” in Remaking Turkey: Global-
ization, Alternative Modernities, and Democracy, ed. Emin Fuat Keyman (Lanham, md:
Lexington Books, 2007), 3–15; Engin F. Isin and Alexandre Lefebvre, “The Gift of Law:
Greek Euergetism and Ottoman Waqf,” European Journal of Social Theory 8 (2005), 5–23;
Engin F. Isin, “Citizenship after Orientalism: Ottoman Citizenship,” in Citizenship in a Glo-
balizing World: European Questions and Turkish Experiences, ed. Fuat Keyman and Ahmet
Içduygu (London: Routledge, 2005), 31–51.
35 Anver M. Emon, Religious Pluralism and Islamic Law: Dhimmis and Others in the Empire
of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Rania Maktabi, “Female Citizenship in
the Middle East: Comparing Family Law Reform in Morocco, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon,”
Middle East Law and Governance 5 (2013): 280–307; Saba Mahmood, “Religious Freedom,
the Minority Question, and Geopolitics in the Middle East,” Comparative Studies in Society
and History 54 (2012): 418–46.
36 Salwa Ismail, “The Syrian Uprising: Imagining and Performing the Nation,” Studies in
for both domination and empowerment. Sater says how the relative disempow-
erment of migrant workers is related to the lack of civil and political rights that
official citizenship holders enjoy is a struggle over the figure of the citizen.37
These dynamics are prevalent in Euro-American states as well albeit with dif-
ferent actors and power relations. Similarly, in my studies on Ottoman waqfs,
I have realised how both benefactors and beneficiaries of waqf endowments
encountered each other as citizens not in the sense of an existing citizenship
(in) law but rights and obligations instituted through citizenship (in) practice
that was performed by founding waqfs as citizenship (in) acts.38 Here rather
than juxtaposing citizens to subjects, it is more effective to think of the con-
traction citizen-subject as a performative figure. This does not render the chal-
lenges of citizenship in Euro-American and Middle Eastern states identical but
they involve theoretically and conceptually fundamentally similar problems.
The second challenge, which is also broadly consistent with critical ap-
proaches to citizenship, is recognising that citizenship is an object of struggle
itself. That citizenship is not given (but is taken) as a matter of political and
social struggle and that these struggles often express themselves as claims and
demands as the right to articulate rights.39 These struggles occur in all forms of
citizenship – (in) law, (in) practice, (in) theory, and (in) acts – but also between
and across them. The struggles over the idea or imaginary of citizenship are
also struggles over how it is expressed in law. Many political struggles in the
Middle East are, amongst other things, also struggles over rights to citizenship
(i.e., rights to practice citizenship without fear of intimidation or persecution)
as much as they are about citizenship rights (i.e., civil, political, and social
rights). There is a recognition that xenophobia, homophobia, discrimination,
marginalisation, oppression and domination render citizenship (in) practice
far from citizenship (in) theory with its principle of universal equality of all
citizens.40
37 James N. Sater, “Citizenship and Migration in Arab Gulf Monarchies,” in Migration, Secu-
rity, and Citizenship in the Middle East: New Perspectives, ed. Peter Seeberg and Zaid Eyadat
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 40.
38 Engin F. Isin, “Ottoman Waqfs as Acts of Citizenship,” in Held in Trust: Waqf in the Muslim
World, ed. Pascale Ghazaleh (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2011), 209–29.
39 Mahmood, “Religious Freedom, the Minority Question, and Geopolitics in the Middle
East”; Meijer, “Political Citizenship and Social Movements in the Arab World”; Larbi Sa-
diki, “The Search for Citizenship in Bin Ali’s Tunisia: Democracy Versus Unity,” Political
studies 50 (2002): 497–513; Challand, “Citizenship against the Grain Locating the Spirit of
the Arab Uprisings in Times of Counterrevolution.”
40 Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, n.j.: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1990).
528 Isin
Yet, the concept of struggle can often invoke repertoires that we are most
familiar with such as street protests, demonstrations, marches, petitions, oc-
cupations and so on. Studying diverse and negotiated citizenship (in) practice,
however, can also include less familiar repertoires. Everyday citizenship (in)
practice can, for example, include waqf foundations where benefactors, espe-
cially women benefactors, literally make their way into performing citizenship
as law-givers in the sense of being involved in drawing up waqf deeds and their
legal requirements.41 So the challenge is always identifying and documenting
struggles over rights and the ways in which these struggles accumulate and
transmit effective practices for resistance and empowerment.
The third challenge is often brought up in citizenship in the Middle East and
it is the tension between individual and communal rights: or rights that are
expressed and bestowed on the basis of individual versus communal ascrip-
tive qualities. This is an extraordinarily complex theoretical and political chal-
lenge that would deserve a much longer discussion. Arguably, it is also one of
the most fundamental questions of citizenship (in all its four forms) and can
be traced back to at least 1776 and 1789 declarations that announce citizenship
to be universal (humanity) and particular (nationality) at the same time – a
paradox that we inherit. It is a paradox that brings histories of colonialism,
imperialism, patriarchy, slavery, and orientalism to bear on histories of citizen-
ship and its dividing practices through inclusions and exclusions. It is signifi-
cant to stress again that there is no reason to assume that this is an exceptional
issue in citizenship studies of the Middle East.42 To assume that the Middle
Eastern states are essentially marked by communal rights can be questioned
by, for example, waqf endowments where the rights bestowed on benefactors
to create them and the rights that accrue to their beneficiaries involved both
individual and group or communal rights.43
41 Engin F. Isin and Ebru Üstündağ, “Wills, Deeds, Acts: Women’s Civic Gift-Giving in
Ottoman Istanbul,” Gender, Place and Culture 15 (2008): 519–32.
42 It is important to remember that the debates over multiculturalism and recognition in
the 1990s that still reverberate today under different terms were broadly speaking about
the paradoxes of universalism and particularism of citizenship. Amy Gutmann (ed.), Mul-
ticulturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton, nj: Princeton University
Press, 1994); Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism: Examining
the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press,
1994), 25–74.
43 Richard L.A. van Leeuwen, Waqfs and Urban Structures: The Case of Ottoman Damascus
(Leiden: Brill, 1999); Miriam Hoexter, S N Eisenstadt, and Nehemia Levtzion, The Public
Sphere in Muslim Societies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002).
The fourth challenge is a variation on the third but it has its own histori-
cal trajectory: sectarianism or tribalism. There has always been a fear about
the threats posed to citizenship’s ostensible universalism by social groups
identified as its “others.” This is not only in the Middle East but also in Europe,
America, and Asia as witnessed by debates over citizenship and identity.44 The
generic problem, regardless of ascriptive groups involved in the specific con-
text, is how to reconcile power relations between dominant and dominated so-
cial groups. Again, this recalls extraordinarily complex theoretical and political
issues but they are by no means unique in the Middle East. Arguably, the de-
bates over multiculturalism, integration, identity and difference, diversity and
cultural politics that permeate struggles over citizenship in Euro-American
states are quite fundamentally similar to the questions of sectarianism or trib-
alism though admittedly with different histories. The Middle East clearly in-
volves colonial and imperial histories and it is within those histories that the
generic problem of the relationship between dominant and dominated social
groups and their citizenship claims are being addressed.45
The fifth challenge is the tension between religion and secularism. It is very
difficult to address substantive rights in the Middle East without attending to
the problems presented by individual versus group rights and universalism
versus particularism as key elements of citizenship (in) theory. But, clearly re-
ligion complicates these even further. In studies on citizenship in the Middle
East this is especially illustrated by how “religious” social groups such as Mus-
lim Brotherhood, Salafis, Hezbollah or Hamas constitute various forms of citi-
zenship by organizing social services through new waqf foundations.46 This is
undoubtedly one of the most vexed issues concerning citizenship in the Mid-
dle East and yet strangely should also be approached from a broader perspec-
tive on the question of religion and secularism in genealogies of citizenship.47
44 Geoffrey Brahm Levey, Secularism, Religion and Multicultural Citizenship (Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2008); Engin F. Isin and Patricia K. Wood, Citizenship and Identity (London:
Sage, 1999).
45 This issue has been widely debated as regards Max Weber’s conception of citizenship as
an institution than enables individuals to be individuals rather than members of family,
tribe or kin. See Bryan S. Turner, Weber and Islam: A Critical Study (Routledge, 1978).
46 Samantha May, “God’s Land: Blurring the National and the Sacred in Waqf Territory,”
Politics, Religion & Ideology 15 (2014): 421–41.
47 Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and
Islam (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Talal Asad, Formations of
the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 2003);
Bryan S. Turner, “Religion in a Post-Secular Society,” in The New Blackwell Companion to
the Sociology of Religion, ed. Bryan S. Turner (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 649–67.
530 Isin
The ways in which citizenship (as an institution mediating rights between

the subjects of politics and the polities to which these subjects belong or with
which they identify or affiliate) has developed in the Middle East are not only
related to how Euro-American citizenship (in) theory developed but also has
been transformed in practice. Scholars who are now approaching the politics
of the Middle East from the perspective of citizenship by documenting the
gaps between citizenship (in) theory and citizenship (in) law, (in) practice and
(in) acts, as the chapters of this volume attests, are simultaneously contribut-
ing to our understanding of political subjectivity in the Middle East as well
as the changing politics of citizenship in Euro-American societies and states.
This is perhaps an ambitious claim that I am making on behalf of those who
are studying citizenship in the Middle East but that ambition arises from the
burden of using the concept ‘citizenship’ and its paradoxical heritage.
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my thanks to Nils A. Butenschøn and Roel Meijer for
inviting me to the conference where the chapters featured in this book were
presented and for subsequently inviting me to contribute to this volume. The
chapter has greatly benefitted from their generous and constructive comments
on earlier drafts and the challenges they put to me on questions of citizenship
in the Middle East.
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Index
ʿAbd al-Ghafour, Emad al-Din 355 Authoritarian resilience 2, 12, 16, 248;

Abd El-Fattah, Alaa 310 critique of, 1, 16, 198
ʿAbd al-Fattah, Muhammad 354–5 Authoritarian state (authoritarianism) 1, 12,
ʿAbd al-Malik, Anwar 307 20, 27, 80, 247; and clientelism, 420–422
ʿAbd al-Wahhab, Muhammad 206 Autocracy (liberalised): in Jordan 184, 186;
ʿAbdallah I (King) 181, 211–2, 218 in Morocco, 149–50, 251
ʿAbdallah ii (King) 186, 259 al-Awadhi, Aseel 436, 445–6
ʿAbduh, Muhammad 299–300, 322 ʿAwda, Salman 209, 216
Abu Dhabi 24, 236 al-Azhar 365
Abu Magd, Kamal 323 al-ʿAzm Sadiq 26, 110, 303–4
Agrama, Hussein Ali 385 al-ʿAwwa, Muhammad Salim 26, 323,
Ahali Group 51 332, 396
al-Ahmad, Yusuf 216
Ahmadiyya 377 Baʿath Party 182; in Iraq, 89; in Syria, 83,
al-Ahmari, Muhammad 216 106–110, 121–8, 322
Ahrar al-Sham 122, 123 Badawi, Raif 214
Alawis 107, 108–9, 121, 123 Badiou, Alain 308–9, 312
ʿAmara, Muhammad 323 Bahaʾi 28, 390–401
Alexander, Anne 9 Bahaʾuʾllah 392
Alexandria 71–2 Bahrain 11, 41, 97, 230, 237, 240, 248, 262,
Algeria 11, 70, 71, 72, 83, 86, 91; “dark de- 440; and labour movement, 59; and
cades,” 90; and fln, 86; and nationalist Shiʿis, 97
movement, 76; and Kabyle Berbers, 88, Balibar, Étienne 514–8, 525
97; and National Charter 82; and social al-Barawi, Rashid 84
contract 82 Bassiouny, Mostafa 9
Allahim, ʿAbd al-Rahim 213 baʿya, in Morocco 155; in Saudi Arabia,
Almestad, Ida 23 203, 206
Amazigh 7, 88, 97 al-Bayanuni, Ali 327
amdh 96 Beaugrand, Claire 31
Amir, Abd al-Hakim 87 Belghawat, Mourad 151
Arendt, Hannah 130 Belhaj, Ali 168
Armenians 79, 107 Belkeziz, Abdelilah 305
ʿasabiyya 110 Belmoudden, Fatima 163
al-Asad, Bashar 113, 115–6, 251, 261 Ben Ali, Zine Eddin 93, 129, 130–1, 168, 170
al-Asad, Hafez 87, 109, 115, 116, 251–2, 255 Ben Bella, Ahmad 86
Assyrians 49, 79 Ben Himma, Fouad Ali 155, 165–6
Attiah, Ahmad 503 Ben Youssef, Salah 139
Auda, Jasser 335 Bennabi, Malik 302–3, 316
Authenticity 139 Benmessaoud, Rachida 163
Authoritarian bargain 14, 23, 67–8, 79–83, Benzekri, Driss 158
248; in Egypt, 81, 301; in the Gulf, 230; Berbers 75, 88, 97 (see also Amazigh)
in Jordan, 183–4; Saudi Arabia, 204, Berger, Maurits 385
206; in Syria, 111; in Tunisia, 81, 133–4; Bidun 7, 30, 31, 230, 441, 458–61, 463,
restoration of, 98; and unravelling of, 488–508
90–2, 95–6, 184, 254 al-Bishri, Tariq 26, 307, 323, 332
536 Index
Bourguiba, Habib 86, 131, 133, 139; conceptu- 329; concepts (notions and theories)
alisation of citizenship, 134 of citizenship, 6, 20, 25, 76, 131, 133,
Boutaleb, Assia 30 142, 185, 297–316, 322, 329–30, 349–53,
Brahimi, Mohammed 141 356–8, 359–67, 379, 383, 474, 476–85,
Browers, Michaelle 26 503–7, 522–4; and crisis of, 1, 2, 3; cross-
bssc 117–8 class coalitions, 132; cross-ideological
al-Burhami, Yasir 354 coalitions and, 9, 322; cross-sectarian
Butenschøn, Nils 24, 178, 189, 196–7, 377 coalitions, 111; and cultural rights, 8, 78,
91, 513; democratic citizenship, 131, 150,
Capitulations 46, 68 152, 161, 171, 248, 263, 409–10, 416; and
ccdc 117–8 demos, 130, 133; and de-politicisation,
Chambers, Samuel 308 88, 90, 183; and de-mobilisation, 183;
Chamoun, Camille 264 and dignity, 137; and discourse of
Christianity (Christians) 47, 75, 107–108, rights, 53, 76, 506, 511; and discrimina-
302, 320, 324, 328, 379, 388 tion, 28, 68, 98, 225; and duties of, 27,
Circassians 48, 107 298; and equal duties, 59, 206, 303,
Citizenship: and accountability 93, 142; and 324, 328; and economic rights, 55, 78,
active (citizenship), 15, 30, 42, 185; and 91, 98, 133, 137, 300–1, 437, 438, 447,
acts (performativity) of citizenship, 459–60, 471; economic citizenship,
15, 17, 30, 96, 311, 471–3, 478–85, 523–9; 504, 507; emergency laws, 61; everyday
and agency, 2, 16, 526; and alienation, citizenship, 96–7, 125; equal rights, 10,
229; and anti-sectarianism, 118; and 11, 12, 69, 75, 76, 88, 91, 99, 112, 115, 116,
Arab Uprisings, 2–3, 98, 175, 247, 251, 118–9, 253, 297–8, 301, 324, 328, 334–35,
254, 266, 296, 308–16, 333, 421, 436, 439, 445–52, 459, 502; exclusion, 2, 6, 12, 14,
461–3, 471–4, 490, 500–3, 512, 524; and 20, 27, 28, 68, 70, 78, 79, 88–9, 98, 225–6,
assimilation, 14; and civic identity, 123; 344–52, 377, 459, 474, 490–1; extent,
and citizenship regimes, 6, 12, 14, 20, 28, content and depth 12–38, 176, 178, 189–
75, 79, 80, 99, 235, 246–50, 263, 265, 384; 99, 353; and family law, 437; foreign
definition of, 67; citizen rights, 6, 7, 8, intervention, 12; and foreign privileges,
10, 14, 20, 22, 45, 62–63, 130, 134, 144, 46, 49, 263; foreign residents, 504; and
230–5, 274, 298, 324–8, 358, 377, 473, freedom of association (assembly), 59,
488–508; citizenship studies (theory), 137, 143, 204; and freedom of speech
3–5, 16, 17, 31–32, 67, 175–6, 178, 198, 219, (press), 10, 14, 25, 51, 53, 59, 62, 137, 143,
512–30; civility (civic spirit, civicness), 204, 208, 218, 301, 482; and freedom
6, 48, 60, 92, 137; ideological history of, of religion, 143, 381, 385, 387, 388, 393;
26; and civil (civic) state, 10, 26, 92, 116, graded citizenship, 70, 83, 208–9, 227,
117, 216, 323, 330, 335; and civil society, 232, 234, 498; hierarchy of 24, 230–35;
5, 9, 16, 89, 105, 115, 142, 149, 162, 251, and housing, 454–8; human agency
355, 422; and civil rights, 13, 14, 21, 30, and, 10; human rights, 51, 96, 142, 156,
98–9, 183, 203, 207, 231, 328, 447, 503, 493, 500, 503; and identity (politics),
512; class (struggle), 22, 83, 105, 112, 121, 8, 14, 79, 80, 88–9, 105, 107, 111–112,
122, 134, 138, 444; and clientelism (and 116, 226, 307 (cultural/authenticity),
patronage) and, 12, 22, 29, 74, 77, 82, 234–5, 307; illegal residents, 502–4; and
87, 110, 112, 115, 149–171, 248–54, 263, Islamic identity, 123; inclusion and, 3,
409–431, 490–1, 508; and collective 6, 11, 12, 21, 22, 68, 78, 91, 99, 106, 115,
rights, 234; and colonial bargain 73, 126, 152, 306, 312, 321–22, 490–1, 518;
99, 248; and colonialism, 41–63, 67-; individualism, 140, 306, 321; jinsiyya,
107, 248, 518–525, 528, 529; and the 179, 189, 193, 253, 450; and justice, 298;
common (general) good, 17, 25, 304, and legitimacy, 12, 24, 110, 130, 138, 139,
479; and community (religious), 207, 146, 248, 257, 266, 383; liberalisation
Index 537
(economic), 185; and marginalisation, 182, 204, 219, 248, 356–7, 440; and social
225; migrant rights, 230–234, 440, engineering, 84; and social media, 151,
495–6, 511, 526; and migration, 18, 224; 204; and social rights, 8, 11, 14, 21, 23,
minorities, 68, 234, 377–8, 387, 388, 30, 91, 98–9, 133, 134, 183, 203, 301, 453,
495–6; and minority rights, 47, 49, 97; 459, 471, 512; and social justice, 6, 26,
minority studies and, 4–5; and 80, 188, 302; and social movements,
migration and, 4, 224–238; mobilisa- 94–5, 105, 488–508; and sovereignty of
tion (see also contestation), 132, 252, the people, 27, 43, 76, 82, 130, 216, 297,
254; and differences between mon- 312, 334, 358; and state boundaries,
archies and republics, 80, 176, 248; 251; subjects, 274, 514–8, 526; and thin
muwatana (muwatin), 6, 25, 26, 179, citizenship, 15; and statelessness
189, 210, 305, 325, 331, 338, 353, 503, (see also bidun), 7, 30, 31, 230, 232; and
506–7; and nation (watan), 105, 133, 189, legal status, 70, 235, 274, 488–9; and
227, 299, 325; and nation-building, 105, terrorism laws, 144; transparency, 439;
133–4, 384, 392; nationalist movement, tribalism, 230, 303, 529; and trust, 248,
67, 74–6; and nationalisation, 83–4, 89; 266; umma, 305; and unemployment,
and nationality laws, 45–6, 59, 445–52, 132, 184; and weak states, 250; and the
495–6, 488–508; and naturalisation, welfare state, 91, 135, 203; and women’s
226–7, 229, 231–2, 240–1, 491–2, 498, rights, 4, 19, 21, 25, 28, 30, 74, 82, 143, 152,
503; and natural law, 506; and non- 160, 211–2, 225, 232, 286, 322, 327–8, 388,
citizens, 17, 31, 68, 438, 440, 488–508, 439–67, 502
522; and non-Muslims, 300, 305–6, Citoyennité 76
320, 322–4, 328, 334–5, 398–99; and Civil rights movement in the United
obedience, 206, 514–8; and parliamen- States 13
tary system, 439; passport, 253 (see Civil society (see citizenship)
also jinsiyya) patriarchy (paternalism), Civil society 5, 9, 16, 89, 105, 115, 142, 149, 162,
87, 153, 155; and patronage (see also 251, 355, 422
clientelism); personal status law, 381; Coalition of Revolutionary Opposition
performativity, 517–8; and planning, Forces 120
83–5; and pluralism, 130; and political Colonialism (see citizenship)
participation (political citizenship, Communism 302; in Egypt, 52, 83;
politicisation), 60, 93–4, 156, 181, 183, in Iraq, 53
248, 301, 321, 323, 440, 443–45, 475, 480– Communitarianism 15, 383
5; and political rights and, 13, 14, 21, 23, Constitutions 18, 25, 28, 42; after the Arab
48, 83, 89, 98–9, 135, 181, 183, 186, 203–4, Uprisings, 97–8; in mandate Iraq,
234–5, 253, 300, 328, 512; (state) politics 42–45, 59; under the Egyptian
of citizenship, 247, 385, 512; in practice, monarchy, 43, 50–1, 59; and Egyptian
522; primordial bonds, 5, 248; and pub- Constitution of 1923, 384; and Egyptian
lic order, 385–87, 393, 395; public sec- Constitution of 1971, 383; and Egyptian
tor, 83–4, 111, 184; and foreign privileges, Constitution of 2012, 329–30, 375–7,
69–71; refugees, 253, 511, 526; regional 387–91, 397; Egyptian Constitution of
rivalries, 257–62; and rentier-state, 204, 2014, 398–99; in Jordan, 182; in
207, 226, 228–35, 249–50; and religious Morocco, 150; in mandate Palestine,
rights, 142; and repression, 90, 252; and 43–45, 59; in Saudi Arabia (Basic Law
rule of law, 10, 11, 12, 74, 112, 142, 144, of Governance), 206; in Trans-Jordan,
274–5, 282, 287, 322; and sectarianism, 43–5; in Tunisia, 129–30, 142–3; in
12, 110, 112, 118, 121–3, 232, 529; security, Dubai, 236; Ottoman constitution,
226; and segregation, 236; sexual rights, 321–2; in Syria, 331; Medina Constitu-
513; and Shariʿa, 274; social contract tion, 325, 331
(pact), 11, 67–8, 79–81, 91–9, 111, 129, 132, Consular jurisdiction 68–9
538 Index
Contestation (mobilisation) 8, 16, 17, 94–95, Elections 22, 93–4, 475; in Tunisia, 130
105, 150, 252, 254, 296, 309–11, 523–4; Ennahda 10, 11, 93, 139
in Morocco 475–85; in Egypt, 475–85; Exclusion (see citizenship)
repertoires of, 8, 296, 478–80, 500–8; of
bidun in Kuwait, 488–508 al-Fadhli, Abdul Hakim 503
Copts 49, 75, 97, 320, 384, 398–400 al-Failakawi, Shuruq 464
Corporatism 83, 95; in Syria, 112, 115; in al-Fassi, Allal 79
Tunisia, 133–4 al-Faysal, Saʿud 205
Cosmopolitanism 71 Free Syrian Army 122
Cromer, Lord 50 Ferguson, Michaele 308, 311
Crony capitalism 91, 113, 116, 135
gcc 262–5
al-Dajani, Ahmad Sidqi 307 Gender rights (women’s rights) 4, 19, 21, 25,
al-Dakhil, Khalid 211, 213 28, 30, 74, 82, 143, 152, 160, 211–2, 225,
Dashti, Rola 436, 444–5, 453, 464 232, 286, 322, 327–8, 388, 439–67
Democracy 1, 14, 41, 63, 247, 302, 308; de- Ghannouchi, Rachid 335
mocratisation, 16, 185, 409, 414; lack of Gorman, Anthony 20
democracy, 263, 265; Islamic democ- Greater Syria 106
racy, 322 Greeks 71, 79
Dhimmi (ahl al-dhimma) 28, 215, 286, Gulf: authoritarian bargain 230, 235; and
305–6, 323, 325, 353, 358, 378, 394 citizenship, 24, 63, 224–236; migrant
Dubai 24, 236, 239 laws, 234; and migrants, 224–238,
230–4; and nationality 225; kafala
Economic liberalisation 16 system 230–1, 234, 237, 239; and high
Effendi, Shoghi 392 modernism, 227, 237; and naturalisa-
Egypt 7, 8, 28, 30, 46, 50, 94, 248, 252, 255, tion of migrants, 226–7, 229, 231–2;
258–9, 375–401; Arab Socialist union, and rentier-state, 204, 207, 226, 228,
83; Arab Uprisings, 310–13; and clien- 232–6; and graded citizenship, 232;
telism, 421, 426 (see also citizenship); as “besieged” society, 233–5, 242; and
Egyptian Constitution of 2014, 398–99 identity, 234–5
(see also constitutions); and Copts 7;
Britain in 42; and elections, 93–4; and al-Haj Saleh, Yassin 315
fellahin, 71; foreigners in, 71; freedom of Hallaq, Wael 377, 382
speech 53; and judges in 7; and labour Halliday, Fred 178
movement, 55–6, 77–8; minorities in, Hamed, ʿAbdallah 214
74; National Charter, 82; and political Hammoudi, Abdallah 155
rights under the British 50; and unrav- Hanafi, Hasan 306
elling of the authoritarian bargain, 91 Hassan ii 154, 158, 165
(see also authoritarian bargain); and Hawwa, Saʿid 322
Salafi reformists, 215–7; and the Wafd Heikal, Mohammed Hasannein 304
Party 74; youth, 471–485 Hinnebusch, Raymond 21
Elalamy, Moulay Hafid 158 Hizb al-Nour 354–55, 357–8, 365
El Fassi, Abbas 164 Hizb al-Wasat 356
El Himma, Fouad Ali 159, 165–6, 169 Hizb al-Watan 355, 357, 359
El Kheil, Fatna 163 Hmam, Anas 481
El Ouadi, Salah 168 Horizontalism 311
El Yazghi, Mohamed 164 Hudson, Michael 1
Emir Abdallah al-Salem 440 Human rights organisations 96; Morocco 9,
Emon, Anver 378, 380 96; Tunisia 9, 96
Eisenhower 264 Hurd, Elizabeth Shakman 384
Index 539
Hussein (King) 182, 264 Jordan (Trans-Jordan) 22–3, 41, 47–8, 94,

Hussein, Louay 117 175–199, 262–3; and Arab Uprisings,
Hussein, Saddam 90 187–9; and austerity measures, 91; and
Huwaydi, Fahmi 305, 323, 332, 396–7 clientelism, 421; and elections, 93–4;
Liberal democracies 5 constitution of 1952, 182; de-politicisa-
tion, 183; 187; National Charter, 185–6;
Ibn Khaldun 110 and national identity, 190–97; and eco-
Ibn Taymiyya 280, 299 nomic liberalisation, 186; and political
ʿImara, Muhammad 396 parties, 183; and political rights, 181;
imf 134 and politicisation, 185; “Transjordan for
Intellectuals 14, 85, 253, 297–316 the Transjordanians,” 182
Iran 258–60, 262–6, 305, 323 Judiciary 112
Iraq 20, 43–48, 51, 73, 78, 83, 248, 258–9, 261; Judaism 28, 329, 388
and Ahali Group, 51; and Great Britain Justice and Freedom Party (fdp) 27
in 41; and colonial rule, 73; and labour
movement, 56–8, 78; and republic of kafala system 230–1, 234, 237–8
fear, 89; and Shiʿis, 97; and isis, 98 Kacem, Mehdi Belhaj 311
Isin, Engin 31–2 Karpat, Kemal 382
Iskander, Adel 310–312 al-Kawakibi, ʿAbd al-Rahman 322
Islam: Islam and politics 273, ʿulama, 273, Khaddam, ʿAbdul-Halim 110
232–5; and subjects, 274; turath (heri- Khalid, Khalid Muhammad 79
tage), 306; asala (authenticity), 307; Kifaya 476
Medina Constitution, 325 Koudama, Fetoum 163
Islamic identity 123 Al-Khayir, Abdelaziz 117
Islamic movement 9, 14, 19; and discourse Kurds 47, 48, 89; in Syria, 114, 116
of citizenship 14; cultural exclusion 14 Kuwait 7, 29, 30, 230, 236, 237, 239; Arab
Islamic law 10, 19, 25; common good (al- Uprisings, 500–3; and bidun, 488–508;
maslaha al-ʿamma), 17, 25, 333; hisba bidun social movement, 500–3; and
25; equal rights non-Muslims 26, housing, 454–456; and migrants, 441;
323; kuffar 26, 323; duties 27; civil state, nationality laws, 447, 495–6; naturali-
335 sation, 503; and social contract, 440;
Islamic state 324 and women rights, 440–67
Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (isis) 98, 122,
125, 261, 347, 357, 364 Labour (movement) 55–6, 62, 132, 134; and
Islamism 25, 79, 114, 118, 320 nationalism, 59; migrant labour (the
Islamists 26, 91, 139, 143, 151, 160; and Gulf), 224–243
citizenship, 383; and clientelism, 423 Lachguer, Driss 164
Ismail, Salwa 310 Lahjouji, Abderrahim 168
Israel 253, 258, 417 League of Nations 41
Lebanon 75, 252–3, 262–3, 413, 418
Jbabdi, Latifa 163 Liberalism (liberals) 85, 91, 116; in Saudi
Jabhat al-Nusra 122, 124 Arabia, 203, 212–5
al-Jabri, Muhammad ʿAbid 301, 307 Libya 11
al-Jassar, Salwa 436, 444–5
al-Jawhar, Hassan 499 Al-Madi, Abu al-ʿAla 356
Jews 89; in Egypt, 74–5; in Iraq, 49, 74; in Maghraoui, Driss 151
Tunisia, 75; in Algeria, 75 Mahmood, Saba 377, 387
Jihadism (jihadis) 119, 122–23 Makiya, Kanan 87
jinsiyya 179, 189, 193, 445–52 makrama 82, 90
jizya 122, 277, 379–80, 390 Maktabi, Rania 29
540 Index
Makhlouf, Rami 114 al-Moubarak, Maʾsouma 436, 444–5, 453

Makhyun, Yunus 365 Mourtada, Fouad 151
al-Maliki, Abdullah 216 Mubarak, Hosni 11, 98, 170, 320
Manaʾ, Haytham 117 Mounjib, Mâati 484
Mansour, ʿAdli 398 Muqaddam, Muhammad Ismaʿil 354
March, Andrew 378–9 Muslim Brotherhood: in Egypt 6, 10, 11, 18,
Marshall, T.H. 203, 230 21, 25, 26, 83, 258, 261, 264, 386–7, 424;
al-Mawardi 280 and authoritarian state, 81 (see also
Meijer, Roel 20, 176–9, 181–5, 187, 189, 199, authoritarianism); and civil state, 323;
383, 519, 530 and democracy, 320–1; and concepts
Migrants, position in the Gulf 24, 495–6 of citizenship, 322, 326–8, 329–30, 351,
(see also citizenship) 395–6; and Egyptian Constitution of,
Millet (milla) 28, 107, 329, 380; and 212, 229–30, 321; eviction from power,
nation-state, 382 321; in Jordan, 183; in Kuwait, 458; and
Minorities 69, 74–5, 109, 116 (see also legitimacy, 321; political participa-
citizenship) tion, 323; political reform programme,
Mohamed vi 156; and concessions civil 326–8; and post-Islamism, 92; in Syria,
rights, 156 10, 89, 93, 112, 116, 123, 322, 327, 330;
Monarchies 80–2; Moroccan monarchy, Freedom and Justice Party, 328, 365;
152–5 and secularism, 529; shura, 323
Morocco: in general 7, 8, 9, 10, 22, 30, 68,
76, 83, 91, 95, 250–51; al-Adl wa-l-Ihsan, Nabulsi, Suleiman 182, 183
169, 306, 484; Amazigh (Berbers), 8, 97; Nahda 297, 306
amdh, 8; and austerity measures, 91; Naʿini, Muhammad Husayn 305
and civil society, 9, 22, 162, 165-; colo- Najjar, Ghanim 499
nial rule, 72, 74; democratic citizen- Nasser, Gamal Abd al- 86, 255–6, 301
ship, 150, 161, 171; and elections, 93–4; Nation 105
Equity and Reconciliation Commis- Nationalism 75, 79
sion, 165; and exclusion, 158; February Nationality laws 46 (see also citizenship)
20 Movement, 9, 10, 11, 22, 150, 152, 167, Naturalisation 46, 226–7, 229, 231–2, 240,
472, 475–6, 483; and freedom of press, 243, 498 (see also citizenship)
156; al-Istiqlal Party, 78–9, 156, 163–4; Neo-Destour Party 83, 86, 133, 139
and the monarchy, 152–5, 165–7; and Neo-liberalism 2, 21, 114, 188
Moudawana, 156, 160; and neo-patri- Neo-patrimonialism 110, 115, 153, 248,
monialism, 153; Party of Authenticity 253, 261–2
and Modernity (pam Party), 155, 165;
Party of Progress and Socialism (pps), Obama 265
156; Party of Justice and Development Orientalism 1, 50, 72, 409, 519–21, 528
(pjd), 10, 11, 156, 158, 165–7, 251; increas- Ottoman Empire 46, 68–9, 79, 526–7;
ing strength of the monarchy, 159; and Tanzimat, 69, 106; and millet, 381–2
political parties, 152–171; and Socialist
Union of Popular Forces (usfp), 157, Palestine 20, 41, 53–4, 58–9, 61, 63
164; and Tamazight, 98; tansiqiyyat, 9, Palestinians 79
96; and trade unions, 95; women rights, Pakistan 377
160–7; youth, 30, 471–85 Pan-Arabism 107, 110, 113, 116, 181, 255, 257–8
Morsi (Mursi), Muhammad 11, 261, 321, 332, Pan-Islamism 107
424, 479 Pan-Syrianism 107
Mortada, Leyl-Zahra 314–5 Patriarchy 87
Index 541
Patrimonialism 417 Saʿadun, Ahmad 497

Patriotism 300 al-Sabah, Sheika Fawzia bint Salim 499
Peres, Shimon 192 al-Sadat, Anwar 87, 258, 322
pkk 122 Salafism 22, 25, 27, 77, 81, 93, 114, 116, 122,
plo 192–4 338; and ahl al-dhimma, 353; and al-
Pluralism 130 legiance, 344, 364–5; civic virtue, 354;
Political liberalisation 113 and civility (rifq), 340; and conceptu-
Political parties 93–4, 183 alisation of citizenship, 349–53, 356–8,
Political participation: in Morocco 105; in 359–67; and exclusion, 344–52; and
Saudi Arabia, 204; in Egypt, 354 (see “friend” and “enemy,” 338–9, 343–46,
also citizenship) 366; and hisba, 341; and inequality,
Politicisation 203 345, 364–67; in Kuwait, 454, 458; and
Poljarevic, Emin 27 manhaj, 343; and the Egyptian military,
Popular Committee for the Bidun 499–500 357; and the nation-state, 340, 347,
Public sector 111 349; and Nour Party, 354; and people’s
pyd 122 sovereignty, 349, 358; and the political,
Post-Islamism 92 343–46; and political participation,
Pluralism 47 348; and politics 27, 343–7, 352–56;
Public order 28 practices and doctrine, 338–41; in
Saudi Arabia, 218, 359–62; and state
al-Qahtani, Muhammad 214 sovereignty, 349; in Syria, 113, 116, 122; in
al-Qahtani, Muhammad bin Ghanim 217 Tunisia, 138, 139, 140, 143; and secular-
Qaradawi, Yusuf 26, 305, 320, 332; on ism, 529; al-walaʾ wa-l-baraʾ (loyalty
non-Muslims; 323–5; on shura, 324; and disavowal) 27, 346, 348, 366; and
reform in Egypt, 327; common good wali al-amr, 27
(al-maslaha al-ʿamma), 333; in defence Sater, James 22, 24
of Mursi 333 Saudi Arabia 11, 23, 203–220, 230, 237,
Al-Qarni, ʿAyidh 216 257–61, 264, 359–362; Arab Uprising,
Qasim, Abd al-Karim 87, 88 97; Basic Law of Governance, 206;
Al- Qassemi, Sultan Sooud 224, 232, 239, 243 citizen rights, 203–5, 206, 208; concepts
Qatar 24, 224, 236, 239, 332 of citizenship, 218; economic liber-
Qutb, Sayyid 79, 302–3, 322, 327 alisation, 110; and freedom of speech,
218; graded citizenship, 208; Islamic
al-Raggal, Aly 311 Umma Party, 209; and liberals, 209–11;
Ramadan, Oula 119 makrama 23, 27, 360; and mobilisation
Rançière, Jacques 309, 311, 313 (lack of), 205; and modernists 11; and
rawafid 209 naturalisation, 241; and political rights,
rcd 135, 139 203, 209; and rule of law 11; and reli-
Refugees 253 gious establishment, 205; Shiʿis in, 97,
Reimer, Michael 71 203, 209–11; social contract, 203, 207–8;
Repression 90 social media, 204, 217; social rights, 203,
Republics 80 217; repression uprisings in Bahrain
rhizomatic 311 12; gender rights, 211–2; and Salaf-
Rida, Rashid 300 ism, 215–8, 359–362; Saudi Civil and
Rifai, Ola 21 Political Rights Association (acpra),
Rifai, Samir 187 214; Saudi-Egyptian axis, 257–62; and
Rouissi, Khadija 168 sectarianism, 216; wali al-amr, 203, 206;
Ruedy, John 72 women’s rights, 211–3
542 Index
al-Sayf, Tawfiq 209 Damascus Spring, 21, 113; and identity,

Schmitt, Carl 227 111, 117, 123; and isis, 98; and land
Scott, Rachel 28 reform, 83; militarisation of the
Sectarianisation 122 Uprising, 118; public sector, 83; nation-
Sectarianism 12, 21, 27, 113–114 building, 105–7; regime repression 11;
Secularism (secularists) 139, 529 rule of Hafez al-Asad, 87–8; and sec-
Shaqfa, Muhammad 327 tarianism 118–23; Syrian and National
Shariʿa 122, 274, 321, 438, 474; apostasy, 214; Congress, 120; and Tsunami Freedom
and citizenship, 274; codification of, Movement, 118–9; and tansiqiyyat,
378; dhimmi, 286; and (hadd) hudud, 125; unravelling of the authoritarian
276, 280, 283, 288, 335; and huquq Al- bargain, 91
lah, 275–80, 285, 287–8; and istihsan, Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party 83, 108
282; justice, 287; and kufr, 390; in
Kuwait, 438, 442, 464; and maqasid, Tahrir Square 478
278–81, 335; and maslaha (istislah), al-Tahtawi, Rifaʿi Rafaʿa 298, 300
282; and mazalim courts, 281–5, 288, Tangier 71
290–92; muhtasib, 285–6; non-Mus- Taylor, Charles 307
lims, 122; and rights 274–5; rule of law, Tizini, Tayyib 307
274, 282; and the ruler (imam), 277–9; Traboulsi, Fawwaz 312
al-siyasa al-sharʿiyya, 279–286, 290–92; Trade unions: and Arab Uprisings 95–6;
“spirit of the Shariʿa,” 279–80, 288; and in Egypt, 8, 9, 77, 81, 95; in Morocco,
status, 274; and taxes, 277 95, 150; in Tunisia, 8, 9, 77, 81, 95,
al-Sharif, Manal 212–3 131, 142
Sheikha Awrad 499 Trucial States 41
Shiʿa (Shiʿi) 23, 47, 60, 97, 230, 264; in Iran, Tully, James 518–9, 521
323; in Saudi Arabia, 203, 209–11; in Tunisia 7, 21–22, 69, 71, 72, 75, 76, 78, 88,
Kuwait, 440 129–48, 252; citizenship rights, 144;
Schmitt, Carl 344 civil society, 142; elections, 144; and
Sidqi, Aziz 85 family law, 437; ferghala uprising,
al-Sisi, Abd al-Fattah 261–2, 332, 365, 366, 90; freedom of religion, 143; National
482 Pact, 82; national unity, 130, 134, 137–8;
Skovgaard-Petersen, Jakob 26 political rights, 135; Salafism, 138, 139,
Social contract 5, 11, 21 (see also authoritar- 140, 143; social pact, 129, 132, 134–5, 138;
ian bargain) sovereignty of the people, 130–144; sur-
Social movements (see also contestation) 8, veillance, 136; utica, 142; tunisianité,
15, 62, 347; in Tunisia, 132, 136; social 22, 88, 131, 140–4
movement theory, 17, 150; and Turkmen 47, 93, 107
Arab Uprisings, 94–5; in Jordan, 182;
and Salafism, 347 United Arab Emirates (uae) 224, 237
Springborg, Robert 29, 151–2 United States of America (usa) 264
Stenslie, Stig 23
Sudan 426 Valbjørn, Morten 22
Syria 7, 10, 21, 105–28, 248, 251–3, 258–60, Vikør, Knut 25
261, 322; anti-sectarianism, 118–120; and Vilayet e-faqih 323
Arab Uprisings, 310; Baʿathism, 114; and
civil society, 105, 113, 115; civil state, 124; wali al-amr 203, 206, 359
civil war, 253, 310; and colonial rule, 73, Wedeen, Lisa 96
75; and cross-sectarianism, 113, 117; and Willis, Michael 86
Index 543
Working class 3 168, 471; and parliamentary elections,

Wasatiyya 7, 10, 26, 93, 94, 305, 394–5 475, 478; and police repression, 482–5;
political participation, 475–9; in Saudi
Yazidis 47 Arabia, 203; in Syria, 117–25; in Tunisia,
Yemen 248, 261, 426 135, 136, 188
Youssoufi, Abderrahman 154, 164
Youth 2, 7, 28, 30; acts of citizenship, 471– Zemni, Sami 21
85; and economic rights, 471; in Egypt, Zionism 393
471–85; exclusion 474–5; in Morocco, Zizek 308, 313–5

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The Crisis of Citizenship in the Arab World

Social, Economic and Political

Fariba Adelkhah (SciencesPo/ceri, Paris)

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/seps

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Meijer, Roel, editor. | Butenschøn, Nils A. (Nils August), 1949-,

Copyright 2017 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands.

This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Introduction: The Crisis of Citizenship in the Arab World 1

1 The British Legacy in the Middle East 41

2 Citizenship, Social Pacts, Authoritarian Bargains, and the

3 Syria: Identity, State Formation, and Citizenship 105

4 The Tunisian Revolution and the Question of Citizenship 129

5 Patronage and Democratic Citizenship in Morocco 149

6 Like but not Same as… : Arab Citizenship and the

7 Social Contract in the Al Saʿud Monarchy: From Subjects to

8 Migration and the Marginality of Citizenship in the Arab Gulf Region:

10 Muslim Subjects and the Rights of God 273

11 The Struggle for Equality and Citizenship in Arab Political Thought:

12 Brothers and Citizens: The Second Wave of Islamic Institutional

13 The Ambiguity of Citizenship in Contemporary Salafism 338

14 Citizenship, Public Order, and State Sovereignty: Article 3 of the

15 The Effects of Patronage Systems and Clientelism on Citizenship in

16 Female Citizenship and the Franchise in Kuwait after 2005 435

17 The Narrow Path: Acts of Citizenship by the Arab Youth

18 The Bidun Protest Movement as an Act of Citizenship 488

19 Citizenship Studies and the Middle East 511

8.1  g dp per capita in uae compared (1999–2012) 231

Ida Nicolaisen Almestad

Roel Meijer and Nils Butenschøn

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004340985_002

11 New ground-breaking studies have appeared in the Journal of Citizenship Studies.

general,12 comparative studies,13 minority studies,14 gender studies,15 political

­focus on citizenship as central themes in the mena region by exploring what

19 Quintan Wiktorowicz, “Introduction: Islamic Activism and Social Movement Theory,” in

­ olicies, their implementation and range, as well as the varying responses of

doctors against the political hijacking of the professional organisation of doc-

33 Abdelrahman, Egypt’s Long Revolution, 38.

Guiding Elements Extent, Content and Depth

43 Keith Faulks, Citizenship (London: Routledge, 2000), 7.

­ rinciple of equal rights supplanted privilege. The “people” as a whole emerged

independent horizontal o­ rganisations that individuals could join voluntarily.

We believe that the citizenship approach as outlined here allows us to

51 Heydemann, Upgrading Authoritarianism; Oliver Schlumberger, “Arab Authoritarianism:

perception they have labelled “democrazy.”54 The advantage of citizenship

54 Morten Valbjørn and André Bank, “Examining the ‘post’ in Post-democratization –

Content of the Book

I­slam and citizenship,64 Arab political thought,65 migration,66 the position

64 March, Islam and Liberal Citizenship.

­Abdallah had wider regional ambitions, hampered the development of citi-

In Chapter 8, James Sater analyses how the high percentage of migrants

The ­picture that emerges is a complex multi-level pattern of interdependen-

is u ­ pheld as an alternative to the failed attempts to construct nationalist, pan-

performative level. The emphasis is on expressions, actions, symbolism, per-

colonial period to the present? How does it apply to Islamist movements, or

Valbjørn, Morten. “Upgrading Post-Democratization Studies: Examining a Re-

The British Legacy in the Middle East

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largely qualified by concerns about political stability and calculations made

3 Abdeslam M. Maghraoui, Liberalism without Democracy: Nationhood and Citizenship in Egypt,

deliberation, negotiation, and occasionally insistence on the part of the man-

The National Citizenry

9 Palestine Royal Commission [henceforth Peel Commission]: Report, 1937, 56.

11 The Struggle for Equality and Citizenship in Arab Political Thought:

12 Brothers and Citizens: The Second Wave of Islamic Institutional

13 The Ambiguity of Citizenship in Contemporary Salafism 338

14 Citizenship, Public Order, and State Sovereignty: Article 3 of the

15 The Effects of Patronage Systems and Clientelism on Citizenship in

16 Female Citizenship and the Franchise in Kuwait after 2005 435

17 The Narrow Path: Acts of Citizenship by the Arab Youth

18 The Bidun Protest Movement as an Act of Citizenship 488

19 Citizenship Studies and the Middle East 511

8.1 g dp per capita in uae compared (1999–2012) 231

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focus on citizenship as central themes in the mena region by exploring what

olicies, their implementation and range, as well as the varying responses of

rinciple of equal rights supplanted privilege. The “people” as a whole emerged

independent horizontal o rganisations that individuals could join voluntarily.

Islam and citizenship,64 Arab political thought,65 migration,66 the position

Abdallah had wider regional ambitions, hampered the development of citi-

The picture that emerges is a complex multi-level pattern of interdependen-

is u pheld as an alternative to the failed attempts to construct nationalist, pan-

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de la Justice et Développement in Morocco (pjd),138 Ennahda in Tunisia,139

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