Arab street
The Arab street is an expression referring to the spectrum of public opinion in the Arab world, often as opposed or contrasted to the opinions of Arab governments. In some contexts it refers more specifically to the lower socioeconomic strata of Arab society. It is used primarily in the United States and Arab countries.
While it is sometimes assumed, particularly in the United States, to have been borrowed from Arabic political discourse, its evolution has followed a circular course from Arabic to English and then back. Lebanese newspapers began referring to just "the street" during the 1950s; later in the decade reports in The New York Times used the term in English to explain Gamal Abdel Nasser's broad appeal not just in his native Egypt but across the Arab world. Later commentators added the "Arab" and eventually dropped the scare quotes to create the current usage, which became widespread in American media during the First Palestinian Intifada in 1987. Arab media began using it themselves a decade later. However, its usage still differs between the two languages. In the Western English-language media, only Arab popular sentiment is referred to as the "street"; Arabic commentators use the expression in the same sense to refer to not just public opinion in their countries but in the West as well.
Due to the many negative connotations attached to the use of "street" as a modifier, the use of the term in English has been criticized as fostering stereotypes of a population easily roused to violence. The "Arab street" thus alternately justifies the need for an authoritarian ruler, or constrains the potentially moderate actions of those rulers. In the wake of the Arab Spring early in the 2010s, the concept of the Arab street has been revisited and challenged. The revolutions that toppled governments have, to some, shown how deficient and outdated Western understandings of Arab public opinion, shaped by the concept of the "Arab street", had been and have even led some to suggest it no longer be used. Others, including some Arabs, saw the uprisings as vindicating the importance of public opinion in their cultures and changing the popular concept of the street within them.
Definition
Attempts to directly define the Arab street have usually equated it with Arab public opinion. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who once covered the Middle East and frequently writes about the region, called it "the broad mass of public opinion" there in 2002, as distinct from extremist opinion, which he calls the "Arab basement". As of 2013, Collins English Dictionary defines "the Arab street" as an informal term for "public opinion in the Arab world."Nevertheless, even as the term came into wide use, there was disagreement about its exact meaning. In 2002 a U.S. State Department official, reporting on a meeting between President George W. Bush and the leaders of Japan and Pakistan, said that the latter, Pervez Musharraf, had referred to the "possibility of trouble in the Arab street, whatever that is" over the upcoming invasion of Iraq. This uncertainty has led to confusion over what the term represents. During the same period of time, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld later recalled, Arab leaders urged him to make sure the operation went quickly as they "were worried about the 'Arab street' erupting in anger at the West's invasion of a Muslim country. I was skeptical of the idea that a monolithic Arab street existed ... but I did understand that popular discontent could cause them difficulties."
File: مظاهرات بانياس جمعة الغضب - 29 نيسان 2011.jpg|thumb|left|A large street demonstration in Baniyas preceding the ongoing Syrian Civil War.|alt=A street between medium-height modern white apartment blocks filled with people, some carrying signs
According to a 2009 paper on the evolution and use of the term by professors Terry Regier and Muhammad Ali Khalidi, some of that confusion results from a frequent second meaning. encompassing the majority of Arab public opinion, they observe, another usage seems to associate it more specifically with "a presumed seething underclass within Arab society, one that is viewed primarily as a source of political trouble." In a 1993 exploration of the Arab street's existence, David Pollock of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy began by acknowledging these connotations: "The very name evokes images of mystery, mobs and mullahs; it sounds vaguely subterranean, if not sinister; and it is most often regarded in the West with a peculiar mixture of fascination, dismissal and fear."
In November 2001, a front-page New York Times article on the Arab street's power in the wake of the September 11 attacks invoked the term's visual connotations and the corresponding power vested in it by fearful Western observers, "The Arab street: the well-worn phrase evokes men clustered around dusty coffeehouse tables, discussing the events of the day with well-earned cynicism between puffs on a hookah—yet suddenly able to turn into a mob, powerful enough to sweep away governments." Ten years later, columnist Edwin Black wrote on the Fox News website, after protesters in Egypt began calling for longtime president Hosni Mubarak to step down, something that had previously been unthinkable, that the leader had fallen afoul of the Arab street,
Arabic
In Arabic, the word for street is derived from a root whose other forms denote a place of entry or beginning, the point of a weapon, and law or lawfulness and legitimacy in both the secular and religious sense. Among those words are sharia, the term for Islamic religious and moral law. Shāriʿ itself can also be used to refer to a legislator or lawgiver, and when used with the definite article al- in a religious context is a reference to God as the source of all religious law.According to Regier and Khalidi, Arabic commentators use the term much as it is used in the West, when they discuss public opinion in the Arab world. However, they also refer to the "streets" of other, non-Arab countries in much the same way—"feelings of anger and shock are running very high in the American street ", for example. And in contrast to the fear of political upheaval frequently implied by Western writers, their use of "the Arab street" often carries positive and respectful overtones, such as when Al-Ayyam praised "the great Egyptian street, which has always been the heart and conscience of the Arabs" in 1997. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah provided an example of both differences in usage when he praised "the Israeli street" for its reaction to the Winograd report on Israel's conduct of the 2006 Lebanon War.
History
"Arab street" arises originally from Arabic usage, but only became widely recognized through English adaptation.English
In English, the earliest use of the word "street" in reference to the political role of popular opinion Regier and Khalidi found was that cited in the Oxford English DictionaryThe earliest use of "street" in a political context that Regier and Khalidi could find was a 1950 editorial in the Lebanese newspaper An-Nahar:
"The street," they wrote, "is here conceived as an aggrieved everyman, manipulated and exploited by the political class," a sense that later manifested itself in Western discourse.
This usage made its debut in the American media early in 1957. Times correspondent Hanson Baldwin, in an article on the personalities in the Middle East in the wake of the previous year's Suez Crisis, focused on Gamal Abdel Nasser, president and prime minister of Egypt. Baldwin credited Nasser's success to "his appeal to 'the street', which
carries great political power in the Arab world." He also inaugurated the concept of the street as a source of political danger to established hierarchies, saying Nasser's prestige was "probably at a new high with the Arab street mobs, by which Arab governments are so often made or broken." Two years later, the title and subtitle of a Times Magazine article made explicitly clear that the Arab mob and the street were related: "Power of 'The Street' in the Arab World; Here is an analysis of that frightening phenomenon, the mob, and the role it plays in the contest between freedom and tyranny in the Mideast."
Nasser himself, in speeches, often cited not the street but "al-gamāhīr" as his political base. The Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic defines it as "the masses", or "the people"; in the singular it can mean "the public" or a crowd or throng of people. Another form of the same root is jumhūrīah, the word for republic.
Gamāhīr, rendered in English as "the masses", carries Marxist overtones of class struggle. Northwestern University professor Joe Khalil, who studies the Arab media, explains that it can "refer to everything from the indoctrinated members of a political party to a group of enthusiasts at a pop performance." Within a political context it most often denotes "several groups of people bound together by a common activity or ideology and easily recognizable within a larger population." The term, like the Pan-Arabism it was also associated with, gradually fell into disuse after Egypt was defeated by Israel both in the Suez Crisis and the Six-Day War of 1967.
"Street" was first grammatically modified by "Arab" in English in a 1970 article in The Review of Politics, a political science journal. The writer, Robert Sullivan, alluded to the role of "radio propaganda aimed at mobilizing the Arab 'street'" during military conflicts. Seven years later, another journal article by Steve J. Rosen argued that Israel's development of nuclear weapons would lead to "a revolution of declining expectations in the Arab 'street.'"
Regier and Khalidi speculate that the use of scare quotes by both Rosen and Sullivan suggest that they are using a term not familiar to them, something they may have adapted from a foreign language. Since both of them were academics specializing in Middle Eastern studies, it could be presumed that they had at least a reading knowledge of Arabic and were familiar with the term's use in Arabic media in the region, Regier and Khalidi argued. The two further speculated that Rosen, who often took strongly pro-Israel positions and later became policy director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, may have also perhaps picked up the term from Israeli media and scholars, as the "street" terminology for popular opinion is also used sometimes in Hebrew.
An Israeli attorney's 1987 comment to The Christian Science Monitor, that his country had never "tried to root out the PLO in the Arab street" was the first modern use in its present sense without the scare quotes. By the end of the decade it came into wide use in both American academic and popular media, as coverage of the First Palestinian Intifada dominated news from the region. This may have been the result of geopolitical shifts taking place at the same time. The New York Times language columnist William Safire anonymously quoted a Middle East expert who told him that before the late 1980s the term "Arab masses" had been used instead. "With the eclipse of the Soviet Union, that phrase disappeared because had too much of a Marxist–Soviet–Communist tilt to it." In his 1992 paper on the Arab street as a political phenomenon, David Pollock uses "Arab masses" only once, and in quotes.