Life as Politics is a collection of essays and fieldwork articles originally published by Asef Bayat in a range of academic outlets between the years 2001 and 2009. It is a prophetic work. Published a year before the Arab uprisings, it tells much about how some of the Arab uprisings were launched through leaderless social nonmovements. The second edition of the book was updated and reprinted in 2014 with more two chapters and a foreword about his new writings about the Arab uprising and Iranian Green Movement.
Throughout this book, Bayat makes a double criticism: a critique of the Eurocentric vision that looks at the Arab world as exceptional, and a critique of approaches that are incapable of reading the historicity of Middle Eastern societies and the political actions of their actors. Considering only a classical form of formal social movements (e.g., labor and trade unions, student organizations, political parties) is an example of the Eurocentric approach to the Arab world in Bayat’s critique.
This exceptionalism is embedded in the Orientalist view that overemphasizes Islam as a cultural script that is incapable of coping with democracy and modernity. The most insightful chapter in our reading of Bayat’s book is that of ‘politics of fun’ (Chapter 6). Bayat provide us with two broad approaches that can explain the battle against fun. For him, it is not only religious reasoning that focuses on the diversion from God or faith and constitutes the principal cause for the suppression of fun, but also reasoning that revolves around modernist sensibilities, including bourgeois rationality, according to which modernity discards collective fun because of the latter’s counterdiscipline. Bayat also debunks the correlation between Islamism and violence and provides a subtle analysis of the post-Islamist trajectory in the region (Chapters 12 and 15).