Marc Lynch's Reading List

"This is a wonderfully written book. Bayat shows that there has been ongoing popular dissent over the entire modern history of the Middle East. What he does beautifully is take that out of the formal political realm and show how these political engagements take place at all levels of life – everything from neighbourhood politics to labour strikes to contention within universities. He is particularly strong at showing the evolution of a youth culture, and how that youth culture can be political. This is one of the books that got it right and that people really should be reading. It was ahead of the curve in locating politics at the popular level. Sort of, although Bayat also looks at organised politics. James Scott is a place you can look for this notion that just because the formal political realm is closed, it doesn’t mean people simply give up and become apathetic. They adapt, they’re creative, they’re restless and they try to find ways to solve their problems – and that’s politics."

"Yes. There were a lot of books I thought about including that are single country studies which capture the dynamics of authoritarianism, violence and protest. The reason I like this one is it shows that even in a country where – over the last few decades – you had both stifling authoritarianism and horrific civil war, you still have this persistent, regular, almost ongoing popular protest and popular mobilisation. Sometimes it’s Islamic, sometimes it’s more leftist and class-based. It really captures the sense of society in ferment, of people constantly seeking to assert their rights and demand respect even under a stifling military regime. So for people who think [the uprising] came out of nowhere, if you go back and read a historical study like this you’ll be disabused of that view very quickly. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . One thing is that precisely because there is always so much agitation in Algeria, the introduction of more protests hasn’t registered as much as it did in, say, Tunisia. If I had to make a prediction – which is hard – I’d say Algeria is going to continue muddling along. But it’ll be impossible for them to resist the pressures for change if the regional environment continues to go in that direction. Especially in North Africa, Algeria tends to be more interdependent with that subregion than with the broader region as a whole. I would keep an eye on North Africa – what’s happening in Libya and Tunisia, what could happen in Morocco."

"I like this book a lot. Salwa Ismail got inside the Islamic trend – especially in Egypt but also around the entire Middle East – and really broke out the wide variety of different strands in Islamist politics. The differences between the Muslim Brotherhood and the conservative Salafi trend, between official Islam and neighbourhood level, popular Islam. It is going to be an important guide for people who are trying to make sense of the resurgence of Islamist movements in this coming period. What she shows is that there isn’t a single, monolithic Islamist movement. For example, when we look at Egypt right now, or Tunisia, people in general have been stunned at the sudden appearance of these very large, powerful Salafi trends. Salwa Ismail was writing about this years ago. This is a 2006 book. She saw the Salafi trend coming long before Mubarak fell. The other important thing about Ismail’s book is that she shows how deep the transformation of public culture has been. Islamism is not just a shallow political trend – it has fundamentally reshaped identities and public cultures around the region, and people shouldn’t expect that that is going to simply evaporate overnight. This is a process which has been going on for decades. The Islamists didn’t start these uprisings, but they have a wide and deep presence in society. As society becomes more empowered, naturally Islamists will be more empowered also. If these countries become more democratic, they are necessarily going to play a major role. But again, one of the things Ismail points out – I think effectively – is that we shouldn’t expect there to be a single unified Islamist bloc. What you’re already seeing in Egypt, Tunisia and across the region is different Islamist groups competing with each other for the same votes – arguing with each other, splintering, forming competing parties. I think that’s going to be the trend. Islamism and Islam have to play a role if there’s going to be any real democracy there. But I’m less worried than others that you’re going to see an Islamist sweep of elections, or Islamists imposing harsh Islamic law on their countries. Especially in a place like Egypt. The Muslim Brotherhood was able to maintain its unity because it was under so much pressure from Mubarak. With Mubarak gone, the movement is splintering, because there are lots of different trends and internal disagreements."

"I chose The Struggle for Syria partly because it’s a wonderful read and partly because it captures the sense that what’s happening right now is not necessarily historically unique. I suspect there will be a lot of resonances between what happened in the 1950s and what we’re going to see unfold as these authoritarian states open up. The Struggle for Syria is about the great Arab cold war of the 1950s and 60s between the pan-Arabist trend – led by Egypt – and the conservative forces. It played out in the domestic politics of states like Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. It was an intense war of ideas. You had extremely high levels of popular mobilisation and people in the streets. You also had the transnational media. For example, when Egypt’s Voice of the Arabs radio would beam out King Hussein of Jordan, thousands of Jordanians would take to the streets, burn things down and riot. It was a period of intense popular mobilisation within a regional framework. People who read this book and see how turbulent the region was back then will, I think, feel a shock of familiarity. And that’s a very cautionary tale. After the 1967 war, the oil crisis flooded money into the hands of the conservative regimes, and made Saudi Arabia in particular indecently rich. So the pan-Arabist side of the Arab cold war lost, and all of the rulers in the region – whoever was on the throne circa 1970 – used the money to build massive state security apparatuses and patronage networks, and create the stifling repression that we’ve come to associate with Arab politics. In a sense that’s new. If you go back to the period before 1970, it was the opposite. The states were extremely weak. Governments were overthrown at the drop of a hat. To a large degree, the authoritarianism we associate with the region was a response to the instability and turbulence of that Arab cold war. If you really wanted to be a pessimist, you could say that one of the possible pathways we could be walking down is an even deeper return to authoritarianism, at the hands of whoever surmounts this round of turbulence. I am on my good days. Malcolm Kerr wrote the other great book about that period, The Arab Cold War . In the preface to the final edition, which came out in 1971, he writes something along the lines of, “This is going to be the last edition of this book, because Arab politics isn’t fun anymore.” There was this sense of the passing of an era. I think they’ll try. But with the changes in information technology and in the expectations of the mobilised youth, I just don’t think it would be allowed. They’re far more vulnerable than people think they are. They have all the ingredients for instability, but – for now – they also have a huge amount of money to throw at the problem. That does help. I don’t think so."

"No, it’s just coincidence, although Syria is very interesting. They’re very different books. Lisa Wedeen’s Ambiguities of Domination is an absolutely brilliant dissection of the role that the personality cult around Hafez al-Assad played in maintaining authoritarian rule in Syria. It shows how the ability of these states to force people to publicly say things which were absurd was a very deep form of power. This is a notion that’s familiar from Vaclav Havel’s discussion of the Soviet bloc, and even goes back to Orwell – if you can force people to say these things then, in a sense, you’ve forced them to internalise the reality of domination. She goes into this in great depth. What’s especially interesting about the book for me is not just its description of the way Arab authoritarianism worked, but also that the Internet and Al Jazeera exploded that. All of a sudden people were freely mocking Arab leaders who, in the past, they had been forced to pretend to respect. People were making jokes on Facebook, or there would be talk shows on Al Jazeera openly mocking people like Hafez Al-Assad. It really eviscerated those cults of personality, and made it not just legitimate but even encouraged to become critical in public. That’s an extremely underrated precursor of these uprisings. And the fact that people agreed with them. Then they could see that it’s not just that I think Bashar al-Assad is a moron, everybody else does too. It’s a hugely powerful thing to suddenly realise that you are not the lone misfit, that in fact almost everybody agrees with you. People talk a lot about how the uprisings broke the fear barrier. That’s very important. But what happened over the previous decade was that the Internet and Al Jazeera destroyed that public culture of conformity. I think that is one of the most profound things that set the stage for these public uprisings."