Debate

The Arab Spring and its Surprises

Asef Bayat

ABSTRACT

The occurrence, speed and spread of the ‘Arab revolutions’ took almost
everyone by surprise, including the protagonists. But the real surprise lies, this
essay suggests, not in how or why these revolutions came to fruition; it rather
lies in revolutions’ particular attributes — their ideological orientations and
political trajectories. The essay discusses the revolutions’ key (unexpected)
characteristics, arguing that the Arab uprisings occurred in new ideological
times.

EVERY REVOLUTION IS A SURPRISE

It is now common knowledge that almost no one had anticipated the Arab
revolutions, not even those whose business is monitoring such events. In-
telligence agencies, political establishments and think tanks were reportedly
taken by surprise by the monumental events which began in Tunisia and
Egypt and then spread like wildfire throughout the region. Even the US
intelligence services seemed to be confident that the Mubarak regime was
safe enough not to be crumbled by a handful of ‘usual’ demonstrators who
appeared in the streets of Cairo every so often (Norton-Taylor, 2011). The
well-known survey of scholarly literature on Middle East politics over the
past decade by the political scientist Gregory Gause offers a similar conclu-
sion — that no social scientist was able to foresee what happened (Gause,
2011). I suggest that surprise lies not in the unexpected arrival of these
revolutions, but in their character, their ideological make-up and political
trajectories.
After all, every revolution is a surprise, no matter how convinced the
protagonists or observers may be of their coming. Alex de Tocqueville
famously wrote how the French Revolution caught everyone off-guard. De
Tocqueville found the whole episode surprising even though he thought,
albeit in retrospect, that it was ‘inevitable’ (de Tocqueville, 2011: 11–12).
Even a revolutionary like Lenin in early 1917 stated to an audience that

Development and Change 44(3): 587–601. DOI: 10.1111/dech.12030


C 2013 International Institute of Social Studies.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and
350 Main St., Malden, MA 02148, USA
588 Asef Bayat

he would not live to see Russia’s great revolution (Shapiro, 1984: 19). Nor
were the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, or foreign observers expecting the fall of
the Tsar (Shapiro, 1984: 39). Or take the Iranian revolution of 1979: just
a few months before the fall of the Shah, President Carter at a dinner in
Tehran announced that Iran, based on the CIA’s assessment, was an ‘island
of stability’ in a troubled region. For his part, Ayatollah Khomeini in 1970
thought it would take two centuries to topple the Iranian monarchy; even
by 1978 he still doubted if the Shah would relinquish power (Bakhash,
1984). I recall how my revolutionary friends and I were utterly surprised
by the unfolding of the Iranian revolution, even though we never shed our
teleological conviction that ‘history is on our side’. The story of the 1989
revolutions in Eastern Europe seems not much different. Only 5 per cent of
East Germans had anticipated a revolution a year before it actually happened.
The vast majority of Germans were in a state of total disbelief (Wong, 2011).
So, why the surprise? The economist Timur Kuran has argued that revolu-
tions come as a surprise because the dissenting population did not reveal their
discontent in public. Consequently, the opposition remains hidden from the
ears and eyes of both adversaries and observers, who then assume that things
are stable. But when an accident triggers a protest, the hidden dissenters join
forces to create formidable public protestation that may undo authoritarian
systems (Kuran, 1989). This sounds like an intriguing argument, but to what
extent it resonates with the Arab revolts remains the question. In my own
experience of living and working in both Iran and Egypt prior to their rev-
olutions, I could not help noticing how people publicly complained about
a range of issues. From high prices and power cuts to police brutality and
traffic jams — and incidentally, they mostly blamed, rightly or wrongly, the
government for these misfortunes. Indeed, the practice of ‘public nagging’
appears to be a salient feature of public culture in the Middle East, serving
as a crucial element in the making of public opinion, or the ‘political street’.
This refers to the collective sentiments, shared feelings and public opinions
of ordinary people in their day-to-day utterances and practices which are ex-
pressed broadly and casually in urban public spaces — in taxis, buses, shops,
streets and sidewalks, or in mass demonstrations (Bayat, 2013a). While the
‘Arab street’ echoed the dissenting voice of the Arab public, certain seem-
ingly ordinary practices of everyday life became increasingly contentious in
the political arena.
Since the 1980s, activism had remained limited to traditional party politics,
a tired method that lost much of its efficacy and appeal by the mid-2000s.
Radical Islamists had resorted to Leninist-type underground organizations;
student activism was forced to remain on campus; labourers, going be-
yond conventional organizations, launched wild-cat strikes; middle-class
professionals resorted to NGO work; and all embraced street politics when
permitted, for instance during demonstrations in support of the Palestinian
cause. But the vast constituencies of the urban poor, women, youth and oth-
ers resorted to ‘non-movements’ — the non-deliberate and dispersed but
The Arab Spring and its Surprises 589

contentious practices of individuals and families to enhance their life

chances. The urban poor made sure to secure shelter, consolidate their com-
munities, and earn a living by devising work in the vast subsistent and street
economy. Muslim women strove to assert their presence in public, go to
college, and ensure justice in courts. And youths took every opportunity to
affirm their autonomy, challenge social control and plan for their future, even
though many remained atomized and dreamed of migrating to the West.1
So, while the regimes were able to subdue ‘collective actors’ or organized
movements, they were unable to prevent ‘collective actions’, the diffused but
simultaneous practices of the ‘non-movements’. The non-movements had
emerged largely to lower the cost of mobilization in the face of tyrannical
regimes, but when some political opportunities arrived in the late 2000s,
some of these dispersed struggles assumed coordination and clamour. The
Egyptian urban poor protested against the high price of food, especially
bread, against the demolition of illegal homes, and the shortage of drinking
water in the neighbourhoods. Cairo’s garbage collectors waged a series of
unprecedented collective protests in 2009 leaving piles of trash in the streets
and at homes, exposing the failure of the state to ensure a modicum of sanitary
urban life. Labour protests against the eroding traditional perks and security
reached a new height in 2009 and 2010, and the young got involved in
civic activism and voluntary work on a scale seen never before. When social
media became available for them, the young began to connect, with some
getting involved in mobilizing protest actions. In Tunisia, self-immolations
and labour unrest had previously occurred in the central provinces of Ghabes,
Qasarain and Sidibouzid, and the Tunisian younger generation — some 40
per cent of them unemployed — were already in the business of online
networking and building political identities (Ayeb, 2011; Shaqroun, 2011).
These largely disparate voices and practices seemed to coalesce by the end
of the 2000s to form the backbone of what came to be known as the Arab
spring.
A great deal, then, was happening within the underside of Arab societies,
which remained unnoticed by Middle East observers. Middle East watchers
were concerned less with the theme of change than continuity, less with ex-
ploring internal forces of transformation than explaining how authoritarian
rules endured. Many observers, wearing the ‘exceptionalist’ lens, focused on
a narrow and static notion of culture — one that was virtually equated with
the religion of Islam — to explain the status quo. Others who found little
explanatory power in the ‘culturalist’ paradigm (because after all the major
opposition to the pre-revolution regimes came from the rank of Muslims,
especially the Islamists) pointed instead to oil and the rentier state as factors
that presumably ensured stability and continuity. Certainly, oil money, es-
pecially lots of it, does matter in buying off dissent by helping to establish

1. See Bayat (2013a) for a documentation of some of these practices.

590 Asef Bayat

social contracts, creating labour aristocracies, funding efficient institutions

of political control and, most importantly, creating a ‘regime class’, a class
of loyalists who lend strong support to the incumbent regimes in exchange
for state handouts, as in the Islamic Republic or Gaddafi’s Libya. But the
rentier state is also developmental; it ‘modernizes’, helping to establish the
infrastructure of economic and social change, and classes of political actors
who may come to question the very authoritarian states which assisted to
create them. The development processes under the Shah and the Islamic Re-
public in Iran, or those in Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait and the United Arab
Emirates exemplify the regenerative facet of oil income.2 Surprisingly, such
structural factors barely figured in the analyses of the prevailing scholarship
on the Middle East.
Consequently, those who did point to the potential of popular dissent as
a source of change could not find much potency in the doings of ordinary
people. If anything, they viewed popular activism as little more than sporadic
angry protestation, with most of it directed by Islamists mainly against the
West and Israel, rather than their own repressive states. Even the celebrated
Arab Human Development Report, arguably the most significant manifesto
for change in the Arab Middle East, could not envision any other alternative
to the depressing state of Arab development but a ‘realistic solution’ of
a ‘western-supported project of gradual and moderate reform aiming at
liberalization’ (UNDP, 2004: 164). If there was any formidable dissent to
reckon with, it came only from the rank of the Islamists, not ordinary people.

POST-ISLAMIST ORIENTATION

In truth, Islamist politics was such an unrivalled trend prior to the uprisings
that, for many observers and policy makers, any real challenge to the despotic
regimes would unleash Islamist revolutions in the region (Bayat, 2011).
Contrary to expectations, this was not the case. Surprisingly, the Arab revolts
espoused the kind of aura, idioms, culture and constituencies that radically
distinguished them from the earlier Islamist movements. Of course most
participants were pious Muslims who fought along with seculars, leftists,
nationalists and non-Muslims. Many protestors appeared to deploy religious
rituals (such as praying in streets and squares), utilizing religious times
(Fridays) and places (like mosques); but these religious rituals are all part
of the regular doings of all pious Arabs who perform them in everyday
life, rather than carrying them out to Islamize the uprisings. Instead of
Islamist revolutions, the uprisings championed ‘post-Islamist’ convictions.
Even though the Islamist activists were certainly present during the uprisings,

2. I am indebted to Kaveh Ehsani for bringing this to my attention. Recently Timothy Mitchell
has discussed the wider democratizing potential of oil and other extractive industries; see
Mitchell (2011).
The Arab Spring and its Surprises 591

they never determined the direction — after all, there was hardly central
leadership in any one of these movements. Some Islamist groups, as in
Egypt, initially were even reluctant to join in the protests; and the major
religious groups, Salafies, al-Azhar and the Coptic Church, initially opposed
the revolution. The Muslim Brothers’ old guard joined in reluctantly only
after being pushed by the group’s youths who defied their leaders to cooperate
closely with the liberal and leftist protagonists. In Tunisia, supporters of the
Islamic al-Nahda did take part in the revolution, but their leader, Rashid
al-Ghanoushi, made it clear that his party did not want a Khomeini-type
religious state; he favoured a non-religious and civil state. The leadership of
the Libyan uprising, the National Transitional Council, was composed not
of Islamists or al-Qaeda members, but doctors, lawyers, teachers and some
defectors from the Gaddafi regime who suddenly found themselves leading
a revolution. In Yemen, the key participating religious group (Islah Party) in
the revolutionary coalition remained moderate, while al-Qaeda only used the
disruption in the security control to launch its own sporadic anti-government
attacks in the provinces. Even in Bahrain, where conflict appeared religious
(Shi’a opposition versus Sunni ruling family), the opposition rejected a
religious take-over of the state. Broadly, the Arab revolts called not for a
religious state, but for ‘freedom, dignity and social justice’.
These overwhelmingly civil and non-religious revolts represent a sharp
departure from the region’s politics of the mid-1980s and 1990s, when the
political class was consumed by the nationalist and moral politics framed
overwhelmingly by an Islamist paradigm. But Islamist politics had begun
to lose its hegemony in the post 9/11 Middle East. The Iranian model had
already faced a deep crisis for its repression, misogyny, exclusionary atti-
tudes and unfulfilled promises. Al-Qaeda’s brutal violence and extremism
had caused a widespread Islamophobia from which largely ordinary Mus-
lims suffered. The challenge faced by Turkish Islamism in its encounter with
strong secular sensibilities and the Turkish military had brought about the
emergence of a post-Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP). Thus,
Islamist politics in the region encountered serious challenges from without
and within — from seculars and faithful alike who felt the deep scars Is-
lamists’ disregard for human rights, tolerance and pluralism had left on the
body politic and religious life. The faithful could no longer accept Islamists’
exploitation of Islam as a tool to procure power and privilege. It was time to
rescue Islam and the state by abandoning the idea of the Islamic state. This
line of thinking broadly underscored the post-Islamist orientation of a ‘new
Arab public’ (young, educated, post-ideological and variously marginalized)
who utilized expanding electronic communication (satellite dishes, mobile
phones, Internet, weblogs and then Facebook) to initiate the uprisings.3

3. This ‘new Arab public’ shared with their counterparts in the rest of the world many features
of what Biekart and Fowler, in their Introduction, call ‘transforming activisms 2010+’.
592 Asef Bayat

A surprising element here is that on the morrow of these overwhelmingly

civil and non-religious uprisings, it was mainly the Islamic parties that
assumed parliamentary and governmental power. In Morocco, the Islamic
Justice and Development Party scored the highest number of votes and its
leader, Benkirani, became the Prime Minister. The Tunisian al-Nahda Party
won 40 per cent of the seats in the parliamentary elections and became
the dominant power in the Constituent Assembly. In Egypt, the Muslim
Brothers and the Salafi parties together captured 60 per cent of the seats in
the Parliament, and Muhammad Morsy of the Muslim Brothers became the
President. Are we not then on the verge of yet another wave of Islamism in
the Middle East? Was the ‘Arab spring’ after all not the season of Islamic
revolutions in the region?4
The concern over ‘Islamist resurgence’ is partly understandable, but has
for large part to do with the common practice of lumping together under
the rubric ‘Islamism’ quite different kinds of religiously-inspired trends,
as if any Muslim man with beards and galabiya, or woman with hijab,
or a volunteer in a religious association, is an ‘Islamist’. In fact, many
of the religious parties which seem to cause anxiety in the mainstream
media are not actually ‘Islamist’, strictly-speaking; they are ‘post-Islamist’,
even though they all self-consciously remain ‘Islamic’. By Islamism I mean
those ideologies and movements that seek to establish some kind of an
Islamic order — a religious state, Sharia law and moral codes in Muslim
societies and communities. An association with the state is a key feature
of Islamist movements. Islamist movements are adamant about controlling
state power, not only because it ensures their rule, but especially because they
consider the state to be the most powerful and efficient institution that is able,
whether through da‘wa (preaching) or duress, to ‘command good and forbid
wrong’ in Muslim societies. This means that the Islamists’ normative and
legal perspective places more emphasis on people’s obligations than their
rights; people are perceived more as dutiful subjects than rightful citizens.
So, Islamism is broadly a duty-centred religious polity. Examples include
the Iranian hardliners led by the supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei; the
Jama‘at-e Islami or Lashkar-e Tayyubah in Pakistan; Lashkar-i Jihad in
Indonesia; Al-Shibab in Sumalia; and Hizbul-Tahrir in many parts of the
world.
Post-Islamism, however, is different. It is not anti-Islamic, nor un-Islamic
or secular; it is religious. But it represents a critique of Islamism from within
and without. It wants to transcend Islamist politics by emphasizing people’s
rights rather than just their obligations; people are seen more as citizens than
mere subjects. Post-Islamism hopes to mix religiosity and rights, faith and
freedom (with varied degrees), Islam and democracy. It seeks to establish an

4. The fear is so pronounced that some have called the trend the ‘Islamist Spring’; see for
instance Walt (2012).
The Arab Spring and its Surprises 593

electoral democracy, a secular/civil state, while promoting a pious society.

The Iranian Reform Movement under Mohammad Khatami, the Indonesian
PKS, and the Turkish AKP represent variants of the post-Islamist trends in
the Muslim world today.5 What has been unfolding in the aftermath of the
‘Arab spring’ is not ‘Islamist resurgence’ per se, but rather a new religious
polity with a post-Islamist proclivity. After all, in the Algerian and Libyan
post-uprisings elections, the religious parties lost to the secular and liberal
counterparts; the Libyan Abdel-Hakim Belhaj’s Islamist party did not get
any seats in the General National Congress in 2012, which elected the secular
Mostafa Abushagur as Prime Minister. In the cases of both Morocco and
Tunisia, the religious parties which captured most power are not Islamist,
strictly speaking, but rather post-Islamist. Al-Nahda in Tunisia and Justice
and Development Party (PJD) in Morocco remain committed to electoral
democracy. They wish to follow a similar line as the Turkish AKP. They
are interested not in a religious state, but in a civil and secular one, but they
also wish to see religion play an active role in civil and political society.
In Egypt things are more complex. The Muslim Brothers (MB) are in the
throes of a transformation, and remain in an ideological quandary. While the
old guard still utters the language of Islamism and the Sharia — with some
even subscribing to the ideas of the radical Sayyid Qutb — their political
party, the Freedom and Justice Party, is officially committed to a civil state,
and many of their youths embrace post-Islamism of the AKP type. The
differences of vision within the movement have led to a number of splits
since the revolution; the prominent Abdel Monem Aboul-Fotouh has formed
his own party, while the younger activists, upon splitting from the Muslim
Brothers, have established five political parties including Tayar Masry and
al-Adl Party.
Beyond the change in the formal organizations, there appears to be an ide-
ological shift among the Arab publics in general. A value survey conducted
in June–August 2011 in Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia seems to
confirm a move towards post-Islamism. Some 85 per cent of Egyptians
said the aim of the revolution was democracy, economic prosperity and
equality, while only 9 per cent said the goal was an Islamic government. An-
other poll by TNS reported in Al-Masry al-Youm in 2011 suggested that 75
per cent of Egyptians favoured a civil, rather than religious, state. In 2001,
68 per cent of Egyptians favoured democracy; this increased to 84 per cent
in 2011 (Moaddel, 2012).6 After all, in the first round of presidential elec-
tions in Egypt, the Muslim Brothers’ Islamist candidate scored less than 25
per cent of the votes, and in the final round (against the pro-Mubarak Ahmad
Shafik) just over 50 per cent. Nevertheless, the visibility of Salafies in the
public arena has caused a real surprise and concern. Even though Salafism

5. For a detailed conceptualization and historical accounts of post-Islamism see Bayat (2013b).
6. The value survey interviewed 3,500 Egyptian adults; see Moaddel (2012).
594 Asef Bayat

remains a heterogeneous entity — some favour the status-quo, others focus

on enhancing the ethical self, while still others embrace a Jihadi and mili-
tant path — the sporadic and violent intrusions into artistic expressions or
women’s rights have caused serious disquiet and debate about the future of
Salafi groups in the new Arab political landscape.

LIMITS OF STREET POLITICS

Whatever their nature, how did it transpire that the religious parties in par-
ticular, rather than the revolutionaries, ascended to the helm of power? Why
were the protagonists — including the leftists, liberals and post-Islamists —
who initiated and pushed through the uprisings sidelined on the morrow of
the uprisings?
In times of revolution/insurrection, the fiercest battles take place in the
streets, the locus where revolutionary breakthrough is achieved. Street poli-
tics, then, becomes the most critical battle-frame in the ‘exceptional episode’
of the revolution’s long life-course. This ‘exceptional episode’ is marked
by a swift transformation of consciousness, utopia and euphoria. It is this
extraordinary moment (with its unique spatial, temporal and cognitive el-
ements) that espouses awe, inspiration and the promise of a new world.
Revolutionaries become the master of the streets at these transitory times.
Their unremitting initiatives, bravery and sacrifices appear as if they signal
the coming of a new historical order. This represents the street politics of
the revolutionary times.
However, ‘revolution’ (as insurrection) is different from ‘post-
revolution’ — or the day after the dictators abdicate. Whereas the ‘street’
matters most in times of revolution, in ‘post-revolution’ it is political society
and the state that rule the day. While the ‘exceptional episode’, the insurrec-
tion, echoes the mastery of revolutionaries, ‘post-revolution’ times are the
occasion of the ‘free riders’. The free riders — those non-participants, the
well-wishers, the benign and the watchers of events, if not opportunists —
assume immediate power the day after the dictators relinquish power. They
come out, get visible and vocal, and make claims. Most crucially, they them-
selves become the target of intense mobilization by the already-organized
and equally free-riding groups and movements.
A paradox of the ‘post-revolution’ period is that either the revolutionaries
(banking on their political capital) impose their agenda through exclusionary
populism (as in Iran, Russia, China or Ethiopia) without much regard for the
will of the majority (‘We did the revolution, so we have the right to rule’).
Or, if electoral democracy did matter, they might lose political society to
the free-rider majority whose votes can bring non-revolutionaries to the
centres of power. The fact is that revolutionaries are always in a minority;
and revolutions are always carried out by a minority, albeit a ‘spectacular
minority’ — exceptional and extra-ordinary players who master the art of
The Arab Spring and its Surprises 595

insurrection. Revolutions are won not because the majority of people fight
the regimes, but because only a tiny minority remains to resist.7
The street politics of revolutionary times shows its limitations when it is
deployed in an electoral democracy. The protests in Tahrir square, in Madrid
or in New York’s Liberty Square have truly been the most extra-ordinary
expression of street politics in recent memory. But they are precisely that —
extra-ordinary, which in ordinary times reveal their limitations; they cannot
be sustained for a long span of time, for they would be costly, while their
routinization would diminish their clout and effectivity. Ironically, these
spectacular and extra-ordinary street showdowns are too feeble to carry on
for long when compared to the ‘street politics’ of the non-movements whose
practices are part and parcel of the ordinary practices of everyday life (such
as street vendors spreading their merchandise in streets, or poor households
incorporating public spaces into their private lives). In this latter case, ‘street
politics’ is not an extra-ordinary performance; rather it is an incessant but
ordinary practice of everyday life for sustenance, where the very deed of
appropriation of public space is a gain itself, rather than a means to achieve
a political goal. Consequently, post-revolution, winners are not those who
once created the wonders of Tahrir and its magical power, but those who
skilfully mobilize the mass of ordinary people, including the free riders, in
their small towns, farms, factories and unions.
In Tunisia and Egypt, the religious parties began to mobilize the free riders
as soon as the dictators fell. Al-Nahda along with its leader al-Ghanoushi
travelled to the provinces, urban neighbourhoods and villages to hold meet-
ings, establish branches and build networks. Thousands attended these meet-
ings (Lynch, 2011). In Egypt, groups like Gama‘a al-Islamiyya, banned and
banished under Mubarak, as well as the unassuming Salafies, emerged out
of seclusion and began to mobilize in earnest. The Muslim Brothers al-
ready held a well-established organization and vast network of cells, cadres
and local leaders throughout the country. They revitalized those networks
in a more aggressive fashion in mosques, villages and neighbourhoods,
often deploying their messages along with typical populist dispensations —
handouts, food and fuel. When the Gama‘a al-Islamiyya held its first ever
free rally in Masjid Adam in Ain al-Shams of Cairo, some 4,000 attended.8
Through such relentless work far away from Tahrir or Bourqiba Boulevard,
the religious parties managed to score impressive victories in the constituent
assemblies and parliamentary elections in 2011. They dominated political

7. During the Cuban revolution, while a handful of Castro’s group took over the mountains of
Sierra Mystera, Che Guevara began to conquer the rest of the country with 148 men; see
Hobsbawm (1996: 438). John Adams famously stated that only a third of the population
supported the revolutionaries; just imagine how many were revolutionaries themselves.
Adams also believed that another third supported the British, and the remaining third were
neutral. See Fisher (2003) for a detailed account of the ‘American Revolution’.
8. As reported in al-Masry al-Youm [Egypt Independent], 16 April 2011.
596 Asef Bayat

society through side-lining the left, liberal and post-Islamist revolutionaries,

not to mention women whose mass presence in the revolutions need not be
emphasized, but who ended up being excluded from the centres of power.9
Thus, pushed away from the state and political society, and with street
politics running its course, the revolutionaries were bound to move into
associational life in civil society if they were to continue their activism. But
even this is not guaranteed if the state, once it consolidates itself, extends
its surveillance into oppositional civil associations. And it will do so in the
name of ‘safeguarding the revolution’. We saw how the military rulers in
Egypt (SCAF) in 2011 went after Human Rights organizations and non-
conformist NGOs, banning a number of them. The SCAF went as far as
bringing 14,000 revolutionaries before a military tribunal, subjecting many
to prosecution and torture. Not just civil society organizations, but even the
sanctuary of the ‘private realm’ should not be taken for granted, if there is
anything to learn from the experience of the Iranian revolution of 1979. In
Iran, the secular revolutionaries and ordinary citizens were pressed so hard
by the new regime that they found themselves struggling to defend the most
mundane human rights — what colour clothing to wear, what kind of music
to listen to, or how much hair to show off beneath their headscarves.

REFORMIST REVOLUTIONARIES

The fact that revolutionaries were subjected to prosecution and torture just
after the uprisings by the remnants of the old regime reveals something pe-
culiar about the nature of such ‘revolutions’. The fact is that, and this is the
most significant surprise, the Arab ‘revolutions’ failed to bring about a radi-
cal transformation of the state — a step necessary to realize the revolution’s
objectives. While the protagonists succeeded in creating the magic of Tahrir
square, little changed in state institutions. In Egypt, Yemen, and to a lesser
extent in Tunisia, some of the key institutions of the old regimes — the
security apparatus, the judiciary, the state media, political networks of pow-
erful business circles, cultural organizations, and especially the military —
remained largely unaltered.
In this sense, the ‘Arab uprisings’ are different from the twentieth century
revolutions in Russia, China, Cuba, Iran, or even those in 1989 in Eastern
Europe, where revolutions came to mean a rapid and radical overhaul of the
state, driven from below by popular uprisings. In the Arab world (barring
Libya which went through a revolutionary, albeit destructive, war and vi-
olence aided by NATO), the protagonist revolutionaries remained outside

9. Only eight women managed to enter Egypt’s parliament of 480 members in the 2011
elections. Thanks to a quota system, the Tunisian assembly accommodates a more reasonable
number of women deputies.
The Arab Spring and its Surprises 597

the centres of power, because they were not supposed to seize state power;
they were not planning to. When, in the later stages, they realized that they
should, they lacked the resources — the kind of organization, powerful lead-
erships and a strategic vision necessary to wrest power from the old regimes
or the free riders. Thus, there was no dual power, no parallel governments,
no revolutionary provisional governments. In a sense then, these were the
revolutions without revolutionaries. For the Arab Spring came to fruition
at a political time in the world when the very idea of revolution had faded
and revolutionary utopias had ceased to exist. Consequently, what came to
transpire in the end were not revolutions in the twentieth century sense of
the term, but ‘refo-lutions’ — the revolutionary movements which aimed to
compel the tyrannical incumbent states to reform themselves on behalf of
the revolutionaries.10
Until the mid-1990s, three major ideological traditions carried the idea of
revolution as the strategy of fundamental change in societies. They included
anti-colonial nationalism, Marxism–Leninism and Islamism.11 Anti-colonial
nationalism — as articulated in the ideas of such figures as Fanon, Nasser,
Nehru and Nkrumah — imagined post-colonial societies as radically trans-
formed to end the colonial domination and the supremacy of comprador
bourgeoisie. But the nationalist revolutions had come to a halt in the post-
colonial era. While the post-colonial regimes did make some inroads in
state building, education, employment and agrarian reform, for the most part
they failed to secure democracy, deep social justice and the independence
that they had promised. Most turned into autocracies, military populists and
developmental failures, if they were not overthrown by military coups. By
the late 1980s, these post-colonial states were shedding their distributive
socialism, ‘social contracts’ and populism by embracing neoliberal policies.
Palestinian nationalism remains perhaps the last of the nationalist revolu-
tionary movements to overcome its state of colonization.
Marxists were perhaps the most significant revolutionaries in the Cold War
era, with the key Marxist–Leninist organizations continuing to embrace the
revolutionary ideal. Many of them inspired a guerrilla-type strategy of social
revolutions in developing countries, including the Middle East. The iconic

10. In their Introduction to this Debate, Biekart and Fowler correctly stress the ‘newness’
of these movements and wonder about their particular character. ‘Refo-lution’ is how I
characterize the Arab trajectory; and I attempt to explain why they were so. I understand
the term ‘refo-lution’ differently from Timothy Garton Ash who used it first in reference
to the 1989 Polish and Hungarian revolutions. Writing as early as 15 June 1989, Garton
Ash’s term refers to the initial stages of change where the ruling Communist Parties, pushed
by popular mobilization, agreed to some political reforms; yet these reforms entailed in a
matter of months a radical overhaul of the states, political systems, economic models and
Eastern Europe as a whole. In this sense, the Eastern European experience of 1989 resonates
more with ‘revolutions’ than ‘refo-lutions’.
11. For more extensive discussions see Bayat (2013a: Ch. 13) and Bayat (2013c).
598 Asef Bayat

images of Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh with the legends of revolutions in
Cuba and Vietnam found passionate receptions not only in the universities
and factories of the Third World, but also in the streets of Paris, New York
and London. Despite the appeal of social democracy and the Eurocommu-
nist reformism in Europe, the radical left and Trotskyist organizations had
retained their elaborate theories of revolution with the blueprints of state
takeover. Even though some strands within the Third World left pursued the
reformist course of ‘non-capitalist road to development’, Marxist–Leninists
continued to advocate revolution passionately.
All of this changed drastically after the collapse of the USSR and the
Socialist Eastern Block. The anti-Communist revolutions of Eastern Europe
and the end of the Cold War terminated the utopia of revolution as a rapid
and radical socio-political transformation. The rhetoric of ‘revolution’ was
so integral to socialism that the demise of ‘actually existing socialism’
meant the end of revolution as radical change. The failure of socialism
meant the failure of state-centred policies and perspectives; étatism was
equated with centralism, repression, inefficiency and erosion of individual
autonomy, initiatives and freedom. This certainly had a profound impact
on the legitimacy of ‘revolution’ given its emphasis on the take-over of the
state. So ‘revolution’ became a bad word, identified with Marxism, strong
state and authoritarianism — all features of the defeated Communism. The
spread of neoliberalism around the globe beginning with Ronald Reagan in
the US and Margaret Thatcher in Britain enormously aided this change of
discourse.
In place of socialism, state and revolution, came an intense interest in
‘the individual’, NGOs, public sphere, civil society, rational dialogue, non-
violence and, in a word, ‘reform’. ‘Reform’ became the name of the game
and the strategy of the time. International NGOs, aid agencies and govern-
ments played a key role in spreading the new discourse at the global level,
as did business and conservative think tanks. The impact was impressive.
If in the 1970s, Christian socialism found expression in the collectivist and
revolutionary movements of Liberation theology, the 2000s saw the up-
surge, in Africa and Latin America, of a new Evangelist Christianity whose
individualist ethics embraced the spirit of neoliberalism, mixing faith and
fortune.
Marxism–Leninism and its idea of revolution had declined, but it had
left its revolutionary mark on its archetypical rival — Islamism. Since the
1970s, the revolutionary ideas of Sayyid Qutb dominated the various strands
of political Islam. Informed by the political theology of the Indian Abul-ala’
Maududi (who had learnt the organizational strategy of the Indian Com-
munist Party), Qutb’s ideas formed the ideological foundation for Muslim
militants to forcefully seize and refurbish the Jahili state to establish an
Islamic order. Indeed, Qutb’s Ma‘alim fi al-Tariq (Signposts) (1964) held
the same value for militant Islamists (such as Gama‘a Islamiyya, Hizbul-
Tahrir or various Jihadi groups) as Lenin’s What is to Be Done (1902)
The Arab Spring and its Surprises 599

did for Marxist–Leninists. In Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the current

supreme leader, had translated the Signposts into Persian, while Ali Shariati,
a student of French leftist George Gorwitch, had advocated revolution
in Marxist–Islamic idioms to realize the idea of the ‘divine classless so-
ciety’. Thus, unlike the Muslim Brotherhood which favoured a gradu-
alist strategy of Islamization, militant Islamism stayed passionate about
revolution.
This also began to shift, however. With the crisis of Islamism and the
rise of post-Islamist trends, the idea of revolution began to lose its allure.
Post-Islamist criticism of Islamism also meant a departure from the Islamist
discourse of violence, militancy and revolutionary rhetoric. Post-Islamists
advocated non-violence, gradualism and a reformist path towards political
and social change. In Iran, for instance, the idiom of ‘revolution’ that was so
revered in the 1980s lost its appeal by the late 1990s. ‘Revolution’ literally
became a stigma, identified with violence, destruction and authoritarian
rule. While Islamism had roots in Cold War politics, post-Islamist politics
is shaped by the prevailing idioms of the post-Cold War period — the free
market, civil society, non-violence and reform.
So, the Arab uprisings occurred at a time on the global stage when the
idea of revolution had dissipated. The decline of the key grand ideologies —
revolutionary nationalism, Marxism–Leninism and Islamism — had left the
protagonists with no revolutionary utopia to imagine. It is not surprising then
that few in the Arab world had really envisioned, strategized or prepared
for the unfolding of the revolutions, even though they might have dreamed
about them. These, then, seem to be very different times to my youth in the
Iran of the late 1970s when my friends and I would often invoke the image
of revolution in our conversations, even if it looked very far-fetched. Biking
through the opulent neighbourhoods of north Tehran, we always wondered
how the Shah’s palaces would be taken over, how those lavish mansions
would be distributed. We were thinking about ‘revolution’.
In the Middle East of the 2000s hardly any group imagined change in terms
of revolution. They had been preoccupied with reform; meaningful change in
unjust and tyrannical regimes. In the Tunisian police state, the political class
had gone through a ‘political death’. In Egypt, the Kifaya movement and later
the April 6 movement, despite their political innovations, were essentially
reformist — they were lacking the strategy to completely overhaul the state.12
And there was hardly anything revolutionary in the kinds of training that
some activists had reportedly received in Qatar or Serbia. Consequently,
what transpired when the uprisings unfolded were not revolutions per se,
beginning with the radical shift in the state power, but ‘refo-lutions’, that is,
revolutionary movements that wished to compel the incumbent regimes to
reform themselves.

12. On the Egyptian case see also Maha Abdelrahman’s contribution to this Debate section.
600 Asef Bayat

In truth, people may or may not have an idea about revolutions before
they actually happen, for the occurrence of a revolution has little to do
with the idea (and even less with a ‘theory’) of revolution. Revolutions
‘simply’ happen; but having or not having an idea about revolutions will
have a marked impact on the aftermath. The political field in the Arab world
remains open. There are still real possibilities for a profoundly emancipatory
transformation of the region. Indeed, we might encounter yet another surprise
in the coming years by the gradual realization of what propelled the Arab
uprisings in the first place —‘freedom, dignity and social justice’. But this
may not transpire unless activists and the subaltern subjects continue their
incessant mobilization in civil society, the streets, communities and in the
private realm.

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Asef Bayat, the Catherine and Bruce Bastian Professor of Global and
Transnational Studies, teaches Sociology and Middle East Studies at the
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 910 South Fifth Street, Cham-
paign, IL 61820, USA. His areas of interest range from political sociology
and social movements, to religion and society, and urban space and poli-
tics. His most recent books include Life as Politics: How Ordinary People
Change the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2013, 2nd edn), and
Post-Islamism: The Changing Faces of Political Islam (Oxford University
Press, 2013).