Life as Politics

The popular view in the West deems the Muslim Middle East as socially and politically stagnant. The Art of Presence challenges this view. It shows how, under often authoritarian rule, the ordinary people discover or create new spaces within which they can voice their concerns and assert their presence. The major venues for social and political change are not simply mass protest or revolutions, even though these do happen; they are rather embodied in what Bayat calls 'non-movements', the millions of dispersed poor, women, the young, and other grassroots who act in common.