Constitutionalist Movements, Arab Spring, and Justice
Aish, ḥuriyya, karama insaniyya (Bread, freedom, and human dignity).
—ARAB SPRING CHANT
On a nice Sudanese evening in Khartoum on April 8, 2019, a twenty-two-year-old female engineering student Alaa Saleh stood atop a car wearing a traditional white Sudanese gown with her right index finger pointing to the sky. Surrounded by other protesters, Saleh was protesting the authoritarian regime. For many months, protesters took to the streets demanding the resignation of long-reigning president Omar al-Bashir. Amid the protests, Saleh was compared to the ancient Nubian queens, kandake, known for their power and the sacrifices they made for their country.1 Saleh’s iconic image, invoking comparisons with the Statue of Liberty, was shared by millions on social media. That year, hundreds of thousands chanted for freedom, justice, and peace in Sudan. In the end, al-Bashir resigned, and protesters signed a pact with the military leaders to initiate Sudan’s transition to democracy.
To the north of Sudan, the inefficient waste management services sparked massive protests in Lebanon during the summer of 2015. The “You Stink” movement quickly spread as a campaign against corruption and inefficient government and turned into a massive plea for political accountability. To the west of Lebanon, Algerian citizens took to the streets against the candidacy of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika. Also known as the Revolution of Smiles or Ḥirāk, these peaceful protests mark one of the longest-lasting mass mobilization campaigns against an authoritarian regime. Whether the protesters were taking to the streets against repression, corruption, or declining economic fortunes, their primary motivation was justice. These demonstrations echoed the earlier mass uprisings in the Arab region that took many by surprise in 2011. Bouazizi of Tunisia unleashed a popular wave on December 17, 2010, when he set himself on fire protesting the repression and corruption in his country. The spark in Tunisia quickly led to mass mobilization campaigns in the streets and squares of the Arab-majority countries. People were chanting for freedom, the fall of the regime, and justice.
The first wave of the Arab Spring and the last protests taking place in Lebanon, Sudan, and Algeria are extraordinary for a region that has been characterized with an infamous democracy gap—that is, the persistent lack of democratic government in the Middle East.2 These protests provided unequivocal evidence that people of the region want democracy.3 Protesters also attached several other demands to this wish, such as ending economic decline and corruption.4 However, these extraordinary upheavals were hardly new to the region as the history of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is replete with mass protests since the nineteenth century.5 The region, just as other parts of the globe,6 witnessed many protests in the name of constitutionalism, nationalism, socialism, and Islamism throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Many scholars have already studied the causes and consequences of these protests in MENA.7 This chapter employs a different approach and examines the attitudes and behaviors of the protesters rather than the structural underpinnings of contentious politics in the region. It focuses on the protesters’ perceptions about the violation of social and political justice in the Arab Spring using evidence from the second and third waves of the Arab Barometer (2011 and 2013).
For a more informative picture, I provide a brief account of constitutionalist movements during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the Middle East before reporting the findings from the survey data analysis. Of many revolts taking place in Islamic history, the period of constitutionalist movements during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can be viewed as a critical juncture because it represents Muslim encounters with the Western powers that created important social and political transformations. However, in most cases these changes were not solely motivated by colonialism, because domestic political decay was also viewed as a significant source of social problems. Constitutional government was the primary instrument for solving the prevailing social and political injustices. The demands put forth by the leaders of these constitutionalist movements resemble the chants of the Arab Spring protesters.
We lack the microlevel data to compare the perceptions of people in the nineteenth century to those during the Arab uprisings. Luckily, an examination of the discourses of the constitutionalist movements provides many clues about conceptions of justice and democracy in the elites and the public’s imagination a century earlier than the Arab Spring. If we had public opinion surveys carried out in Istanbul during the first and second constitutional governments (1876 and 1908), in Tehran during the age of revolutions (1905–1911), or in Cairo during the Urabi Revolt (1879–1882), we would have probably found that people demanded good government, an end to corruption, and social justice. This is exactly what citizens demanded in the Arab Spring, according to the evidence found in the Arab Barometer surveys.8
This chapter builds on insights derived from the study of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century constitutionalist movements in the Middle East to better understand contemporary public opinion and, especially, perceptions about violations of political and social justice. The analysis focuses on rhetoric and perceptions of injustice as the main drivers of political participation for religious individuals.
Culture, Justice, and Democracy
Students of comparative political history argue that there is a unique path leading to democracy in the West involving a complex set of institutions facilitating the transition from feudalism to democracy.9 Some of these institutions include protection from arbitrary rule, the institutionalization of economic contracts, ruler longevity, and the right of resistance. In his Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Barrington Moore Jr. states, “This complex arose only in Western Europe. Only there did that delicate balance occur between too much and too little royal power which provided an important motivation for switching to parliamentary democracy.”10 This approach does not necessarily capture the whole picture to the extent that cultural factors were also instrumental in the emergence of democratic government. The argument about Western exceptionalism, thus, may be too narrowly focused.
Moore and others11 have primarily focused on institutional development and executive accountability. Although such institutional development did not entirely occur in the Muslim world, the cultural and contentious roots of democracy were present. In effect, the history of contentious politics in the Muslim world contains examples pointing to many possibilities for a transition from the ancien régime to democracy. The constitutionalist movements in the Ottoman and Qajar Empires, the nationalist independence movements throughout the twentieth century, labor movements, and widespread protests demonstrate the potential for democratization in MENA societies.12 Furthermore, the idea of rebellion against tyranny—a common theme in Muslim politics since the early periods of Islam—can be seen as a cultural attribute of democratic thinking.
Islamic conceptions of justice constitute another noninstitutional element that could engender support for democracy among Muslims. For example, the notion of the circle of justice has been a central feature of government in the Middle East.13 Thompson and Darling trace reincarnations of traditional conceptions of justice in modernist Islam, the Iranian Revolution, and various protest waves including the Arab Spring.14 The language of democracy and justice has been visible in the constitutionalist movements and the Arab Spring. The study of these events is likely to shed light on the underlying continuities of Islamic justice discourses in the Middle East.15 Elizabeth Thompson, for example, argues that at the dawn of the twenty-first century, the Middle East is once again witnessing the reincarnation of the constitutional justice model that first appeared in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.16 In Thompson’s words, “Constitutionalism has returned as the dominant model of justice in the Middle East. Turks elected an opposition government that has eased the military out of politics. In Iran, the Green movement rose up in 2009 against religious elites’ control of government. Two years later, the Arab Spring broke out against the petty and pervasive tyranny of governments in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, and Bahrain.”17
A note of caution is in order before the two revolutionary periods are examined. This study does not assume that Islam or religiously inspired justice values have been the only causes of constitutionalist movements or the Arab Spring. Rather, it traces the presence of Islamic justice values in the rhetoric of the constitutionalist movements and the attitudes of the Arab Spring protesters. Overall, this chapter undertakes a difficult task demonstrating historical continuities and rifts in justice discourses, then linking them to the popular demands in the Arab Spring, and, finally, bringing empirical evidence about perceptions of political and social injustices from the public opinion surveys to explain political behavior. Surveys do not directly measure values, but they include questions allowing us to empirically evaluate perceptions of justice such as those concerning violations of justice norms. As the following analysis shows, we can trace the implications of Islamic justice trajectories in the rhetoric of the constitutionalist intellectuals and of the protesters chanting in the Arab Spring. The analysis will show that these implications are consequential for political behavior.
Islam, Constitutionalism, and Justice Discourses
Bernard Lewis views the reformism in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire as a reaction of the elites to the West’s ascendance.18 As the Ottoman elite became increasingly aware of the economic and political decline vis-à-vis the rising status of Europe, they started to view various reforms as the only solution for saving the state. An essential aspect of these reforms was the installation of a constitutional government. Diplomats and students who traveled to European countries believed that freedom and a constitutional government would be a cure-all to the ills of the Ottoman Empire. Initial reforms were top down, and they did not question the authority of the sultan. However, increasingly, the intellectuals of the age, the Young Ottomans, proposed political strategies inspired by Western political models and the notion of popular sovereignty.19
There were several top-down attempts at constitutional government in the Ottoman capital and the periphery, including the Tanzimat reforms, the convening of an elected parliament by the khedive of Egypt, and the declaration of a constitution by the Tunisian ruler, Hayreddin Pasha (A.D. 1861). More significant in paving the way for future popular mobilization was the Ottoman constitutionalist movement that was inspired by the concepts of popular sovereignty and executive accountability despite being confined to a small group of elites.20 This movement eventually gave way to a short-lived constitutional monarchy, Meşrutiyet, in 1876. Notably, Ottoman reformism inspired similar movements in the other parts of the Middle East, especially the Iranian constitutionalist movement of 1905–1911.
The transformation of constitutional revolutions from being an elite business to a grassroots movement—abetted by justice rhetoric—is a highly significant development in the twentieth-century Middle East. For example, the Urabi Revolt in Egypt was initially carried out by some military officers against the government, but it later inspired the ordinary people and motivated their engagement in contentious politics. In Iran, a coalition of religious scholars, merchants, and professional class had been instrumental in carrying out the constitutional revolution of 1905. The leaders of these groups managed to mobilize the masses utilizing the language of Islamic justice and building on an anti-imperialist ideology.21 For example, the anger against the concessions given to the imperial powers during the Tobacco Protest (1890–1891) in Iran22 or the Ottoman intellectuals’ protest of financial imperialism were significant rallying points for the constitutional movements of the age. Other factors leading to public mobilization included anger against the corrupt governments, declining economic conditions, and prevailing injustices. Religious scholars, including Iranian Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i and Egyptian Muhammad Abduh, have taken leadership roles in these revolutions.23
The success of these constitutionalist movements greatly depended on their leaders’ ability to mobilize the public toward their political ideals. In turn, this ability stemmed from their success in framing constitutionalism and freedom within the discourse of traditional ideologies, especially the Islamic conceptions of just government. Thus, these movements conveyed that popular sovereignty, freedom, and constitutional government are not foreign to Islam but elements of Islamic government. In other words, popular support for constitutionalism that gave way to widespread mobilization in the first constitutionalist movements of the Middle East was a product of a creative intellectual strategy that justified such notions as accountability, executive constraints, and freedom with religion.
Modernists like Afghānī and Iqbal argued that belief in science, progress, and democracy was intrinsic to Islam.24 A similar tendency was observed much earlier in the ideas of the revivalist intellectuals of South Asia.25 Justice has been a central problematic in Islamic political philosophy. As such, the language of modernizing reforms and constitutionalism involved frequent references to justice. However, more interestingly, these modernist accounts provide specific solutions related to good government, efficient administration, and political accountability. To be echoed in Tahrir Square and the streets of various Tunisian cities more than a century later, ordinary people were motivated by the same issues to establish systems conforming to the principles of justice in the Muslim lands.
A brief account of the ideas of Namık Kemal (1840–1888), a famous poet, playwright, and ardent supporter of Ottoman constitutionalism, will help demonstrate this point. In an influential essay titled, “And Seek Their Council in the Matter,” Kemal tried to reconcile Western political theory with Islamic law to prevent the Ottoman Empire’s decline.26 He blamed the decay on the lack of democratic institutions such as popular sovereignty and executive constraints. His main argument was that God created man free as his representative on earth. This is significant because of its accordance with one of the legacies of the Islamic political justice trajectory that views man as an agent with free will in the capacity of God’s vicegerent. The public, thus, should have a say in political matters, especially those safeguarding individual freedoms. As Kemal states, “Therefore, just as all individuals have the natural right to exercise their own power, so too conjoined powers naturally belong to all individuals as a whole, and consequently, in every society, the right to sovereignty belongs to the public.”27
In traditional Islamic political theology, sovereignty belongs to the umma—the worldwide community of Muslims. However, for practical necessities, the public should choose an imam but retain the right to hold the leader accountable and depose him if the need arises.28 According to Kemal, power should not be given to an absolute ruler who has no constraint on his power and may conduct injustices.29 To ensure that the state will abide by justice principles, Kemal proposed that state’s executive and administrative duties be open and subject to scrutiny and that the legislative function be given to an elected, representative body. The essay also discusses causes of state’s decay, including inefficient government, corruption, and failing economic policies. These problems could be addressed in a constitutional regime that relies on the principles of executive accountability and popular sovereignty.30 In sum, Kemal justified a democratic system through principles of Islamic law and also addressed the practical ills of the state as impediments to implementing justice.
Kemal’s political theory exemplifies an intellectual strategy also seen in Egypt during the Urabi Revolt and in Iran during the constitutional revolution. During the age of constitutionalist movements, it was essential to convince the public about Western political government’s compatibility with Islam. Intellectuals could have related religious values and the circle of justice to explain this proposition to the public. However, a second element was needed for the success of grassroots mobilization. The leaders of the constitutionalist movements had to inspire the masses by linking these abstract ideas to real-life problems to make them comprehensible. As a result, they discussed corruption, inefficient government, poverty, economic decline, lack of freedom, and inequality and linked these notions to Islamic justice. In other words, the constitutionalist movements necessitated leaders who would use traditional language familiar to the public to motivate the masses. These leaders emerged throughout the twentieth century in the various uprisings, including such names as Ahmad Urabi in Egypt, Nazem Islam al-Kermani in Iran, and Halide Edip in Turkey.31
The constitutionalist movements employed a strategy that linked the social and political problems of the day to the decline of the circle of justice. As Thompson and Darling argue, the circle of justice lost its prominence as a political idea in modern times, however, the underlying principles about public goods provision, security, and legitimacy continued to thrive in the nationalist, liberal, socialist, and Islamist ideologies in the twentieth century.32 As the Middle East descended into authoritarianism in the aftermath of World War II, the ideals stemming from the Islamic justice trajectories continued to survive in popular usage. These ideals included good governance, lack of corruption, freedom, human dignity, and general welfare. Arab Spring is the latest example of mass protests where these ideas thrived once again in the chants and demands of the protesters. The next section traces the continuities of these ideas in these extraordinary upheavals.
Arab Spring and Perceptions of Injustice
The Arab Spring took many by surprise. The protests started in Tunisia and quickly spread to Egypt, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, and other corners of the Arab region. However, the initial wave of enthusiasm about political reform has mostly vanished, leaving the scene to sectarian conflict, repressive regimes, and civil wars.33 Except in Tunisia, no lasting democratic transition took place in the region. Egypt fell back to military dictatorship, and Syria, Libya, and Yemen descended into civil war. In the Gulf region, a combination of economic incentives and repression policies quelled the protests.
Despite this grim picture, a second wave of protests has been underway in Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Sudan since 2015. In both waves, the protesters rallied against the corrupt regimes that have broken their social contracts with their respective societies.34 In Tunisia, Mohamed Bouazizi and millions of young protesters had suffered from a feeling of disempowerment caused by corrupt authoritarian regimes. As discussed earlier, Alaa Saleh led the chants with similar motives in Sudan. Once again, the region might be at a critical juncture, akin to the turning point at the end of the nineteenth century. Just as declining economic conditions, international intervention, and authoritarian regimes led to popular mobilization against injustices at the dawn of the constitutionalist revolutions, corruption, poverty, repression, lack of opportunities for the youth, and inefficient government are currently breeding a strong desire for change through mass engagement in MENA.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the leaders of the constitutionalist movements infused modern ideas into the traditional conceptions of justice. Arab Spring similarly witnessed the emergence of new interpretations of traditional justice ideas in a new context. Freedom and equality were the slogans of constitutionalists in Istanbul, Tehran, and Cairo a century ago. The protesters in the Arab Spring were also chanting for democracy, but they had other demands most precisely captured in the slogan, aish, ḥuriyya, karama insaniyya, that is, bread, freedom, and human dignity. The protesters in the Arab Spring wanted political and social justice against corrupt and inefficient governments. Implementing political justice would end the corruption and hold the authoritarian leaders accountable. The protesters also called for social justice to end the unemployment, poverty, and other problems especially pertinent to the youth.
Although dissatisfaction with the existing political systems and social justice demands were the main drivers of the Arab uprisings, most studies about these extraordinary events have generally focused on the determinants of regime stability, repression, and dynamics of mass mobilization.35 The subsequent analysis attempts to expand the current focus of scholarship by examining the perceptions of injustices in the Arab Spring. To that end, it presents an empirical analysis of conceptions of justice using the Arab Barometer data. The Arab Barometer surveys are based on probability samples of citizens—older than eighteen—and are conducted via face-to-face interviews with an error margin of 3 percent. As of 2020, there are six waves including about sixty national surveys and more than seventy thousand observations in fifteen countries.36 The first wave of the Arab Barometer took place in 2006–2009 and the second wave in 2010–2011. Since then, three more waves of surveys were implemented.
The surveys include many questions that may help in assessing perceptions about political and social justice issues. The survey items do not directly measure justice values or value commitments, but they include questions evaluating government practices, economic conditions, and social problems that could be proxies for measuring perceptions about injustices. Unfortunately, the questions used to gauge perceptions about violations of political and social justice norms are not asked in all waves. Therefore, the analysis relied on the second and third waves of the surveys in which these questions were asked. The second wave took place in Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia, and Yemen. The third wave dropped Saudi Arabia from the sample but added Kuwait, Libya, and Morocco to the surveys. Together, the two waves include twenty-two national surveys from thirteen countries and a highly representative sample of the Arab region.
Although these data are not conducive to evaluating the causal effect of religion on values, the surveys are useful for examining the perceptions of political and social injustices and their relation to piety. Protesters joining the Arab uprisings came from all corners of life and included men, women, young, old, liberal, Islamist, religious, and nonreligious.37 As was the case during the constitutionalist revolutions at the turn of the past century, Islamic values had a powerful presence in the Arab Spring protests.
Arab Barometer includes several questions evaluating individual religiosity and perceptions of injustices. In the following analyses, perceptions about violation of justice are summarized under political and social justice dimensions, following the distinction in the developmental trajectories of justice as explained in earlier chapters. Citizens’ views about violations of political justice are measured using survey questions about the state of democracy and human rights, corruption, access to public services, and political trust. Survey questions about the state of economic conditions and distributive preferences are used to measure individual perceptions about social injustice. Self-reported employment status is also used as a proxy to include a personal account of perceived social injustice. The expectation is that unemployed individuals would be more likely to have grievances and take action against perceived injustices.
Economic injustices and the resulting social justice demands were particularly important in the Arab Spring.38 Table 8.1 reports the proportion of respondents who specify different issues as the most or the second most important problem facing the nation across the five waves of the surveys (2006–2019). Since 2006, citizens in the Arab-majority countries view economic issues such as poverty and unemployment as the most pressing problems with a slight increase in the percentage of respondents after the Arab Spring protests. In the second wave (2010–2011), 63 percent of the respondents see economic issues as the most important problem facing the nation. This number jumps to 68 percent two years later in the third wave of the surveys. Despite a decline in the later waves—especially the fifth wave—the proportion of Arab citizens who view economic issues as the most significant problem remains very high.
Corruption is seen as the most important problem by one out of every five respondents. Finally, only a small proportion of individuals view authoritarianism and the need for strengthening democracy as the most significant challenge. While the desire for democracy has always been high in the Middle East, many people view the political regimes in light of declining economic conditions, corruption, and inefficient government. The chants in the Arab streets certainly invoked freedom as an ideal, but perceived injustices, inefficient government, and corruption also mattered a great deal in the protests.
For all four indicators of political justice perceptions, public opinion is on the negative side as depicted in Figure 8.1. Despite persistent authoritarianism,39 empirical studies show that citizens in Arab-majority countries overwhelmingly support democracy.40 Figure 8.1 shows that more than 30 percent of the respondents have negative perceptions about the state of democracy and human rights in their country. This implies that Arab citizens are sensitive to the lack of democracy and human rights and, presumably, about the political injustices in their country. About half of the respondents are distrustful of the government in both waves. The proportion of citizens reporting difficulty accessing public officials for their complaints has increased from 46 percent to 55 percent from the second to the third wave of the surveys.
Figure 8.1 Perceptions of political injustice in the Arab world. State of Democracy: Percentage of survey participants responding state of democracy is “bad” or “very bad.” Political Trust: Percentage of survey participants responding “trust government to a limited extent” or “absolutely do not trust.” Access to Services: Percentage of survey participants responding “difficult” or “very difficult” to reach an official to file a complaint. Corruption: Percentage responding “yes, there is corruption in the state institutions.” (Source: Arab Barometer, Waves 2 and 3.)
An overwhelming proportion of the survey respondents believe that there is widespread corruption in state institutions. Petty corruption, bribery, and, especially, wasta (connections) are endemic problems in the Arab region.41 According to Transparency International’s 2018 Corruption Perceptions Index, the Middle East is behind the Americas and the Asia Pacific region in the fight against corruption, but it is slightly better than Central Asia and Eastern Europe.42 While countries like the United Arab Emirates appear to be less corrupt according to this index, Yemen and Syria are in the bottom five on a global scale. In 2019, Syria was ranked 178th, Algeria 168th, Iraq 162nd, and Egypt 106th out of 198 countries. Public perceptions about corruption agree with these figures in the Arab-majority societies. In the thirteen countries included in the second and third waves of the Arab Barometer surveys, 82 percent and 84 percent, respectively, of the respondents reported that they believe there is widespread corruption in state institutions. The prevalence of corruption, lack of trust in government, and difficulty accessing state officials for complaints are signs of state weakness because they indicate that the state is failing in public goods provision and is not capable of impartially and efficiently delivering services.43 Corruption and abuse of power by government officials creates a feeling of impartiality among the citizens and such practices also prevents the efficient delivery of public goods.44 Combined with the considerable dissatisfaction with the state of democracy and human rights in the respondents’ country, these figures confirm that respondents are cognizant of prevailing political injustices.
Figure 8.2 Perceptions of social injustice in the Arab world. Economic Perceptions: Percentage of survey participants responding that economic condition in the country is “bad” or “very bad.” Unemployment: Survey-based and World Bank (available at https://data.worldbank.org) unemployment rates. Distributive Preferences: Preference on a scale where 0 means that the government should impose higher taxes on the rich to generate resources to spend on the poor, and where 10 means that the rich already create job opportunities and economic growth and that the government shall lessen the taxes they pay and allow them to retain more of their net worth. (Source: Arab Barometer, Waves 2 and 3.)
Figure 8.2 reports the distribution of responses to the questions related to the perceived social injustices and unemployment status. Although the Arab Barometer does not consistently ask questions capturing distributive preferences and perceptions of economic injustices, it includes several items that could be good proxies such as evaluation of economic conditions and support for egalitarian distributive policy. Evaluation of economic conditions is an indicator of economic grievances linked to social injustices. Egalitarian distributive preferences, on the other hand, may represent individuals’ desire to establish social justice in their society. In both surveys, most citizens believe that current economic conditions in their country are bad or very bad. One source of this pessimistic outlook could be the high unemployment rates, especially among the youth. According to the survey responses, the unemployment rate was 14 percent in 2011 and increased to 20 percent in 2013. The self-reported unemployment rate is slightly higher than the official numbers, which is expected. According to the World Bank indicators, youth unemployment in MENA is the highest globally, reaching 30 percent in some years. Youth unemployment can fuel grievances to increase demands for social justice during social crises.45 Finally, Figure 8.2 reports the proportion of respondents who lean favorably toward egalitarian distributive policies from the third wave of the surveys—69 percent of the survey participants prefer increasing taxes so that the state can help the poor. This result implies a strong desire for social justice in the Arab region.
Together, these indicators show that citizens in the Arab region are very concerned about political and social injustices. The protesters’ grievances and their demands in the Arab Spring arose from reactions to the incompetent governments, failing states, widespread corruption, unemployment, and lack of economic opportunities. Just as corruption and decline in state institutions were significant issues before the constitutionalist revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, today, they continue to be pressing social problems in Arab-majority countries. In the late nineteenth century, the Ottoman intellectual Namık Kemal proposed that popular sovereignty and a constitutional government would facilitate domestic reform and prevent the decline of the Ottoman state.46 Protesters in the Arab street also called for freedom, but they attached their demands of justice to their desire for an efficient state, public services, and democracy.
Correlates of Protest Behavior in the Arab World
After providing a summary of responses to these questions, I proceed to the multivariate analysis to test the effects of perceptions of political and social injustices on protest participation. It is especially crucial to test whether perceptions of social injustices affect the decision to engage in protests against the state for understanding the effects of these perceptions on political behavior.
Mass protests have complicated reasons related to structural inequalities, repression, economic grievances, psychological factors, and modernization.47 Religion may also play a role in the decision to participate in protests. Religion’s influence on protest behavior may stem from communal religious participation that builds civil skills and networks, which, in turn, increase the likelihood of mobilization.48 A second mechanism through which religion may motivate protest participation is the influence of norms and related values. The proponents of this view argue that the world’s major faiths promote justice, which may motivate individuals to change the world around them according to their faith principles.49 A third mechanism is related to grievances. Individual grievances may stem from political injustices as much as they are linked to social injustices. Religious values may inform grievances by shaping perceptions of injustices. Religious networks may build on these values and grievances to shape members’ attitudes and behavior.50 This chapter focuses on overall religiosity and perceptions of injustices to explain protest behavior.
The following analysis focuses on religion’s mobilizing capacity in the Arab Spring and tests the effects of both political and social justice perceptions on the likelihood of protest participation. There have been recurring waves of mass protests in the Middle East since the nineteenth century in reaction to various injustices. People protested against corrupt and inefficient governments, repression, and economic decline.51 Prevailing economic and social injustices presumably played an important role also in the Arab Spring. Social justice demands in these protests were about lack of employment opportunities, poverty, and declining economic conditions.
Hoffman and Jamal found that social justice mattered a great deal in the Arab Spring, especially among the pious who engage with the scripture daily.52 In their article, they do not provide a direct test of social justice values on protest behavior but present social justice values as a mechanism that links piety to protest participation in the cases of Egypt and Tunisia. Building on these insights, I argue that grievances about the lack of social justice related to an individual’s unemployment status will make protest participation more likely. This relationship should be especially strong for the most devout individuals due to Islam’s emphasis on social justice values. Evidence supporting this hypothesis will imply that the Islamic social justice trajectory continues to inform contemporary political preferences.
Although the religion–social justice nexus is important, we also need to consider individuals’ perceptions about political injustices to understand better how religion can motivate political behavior. Corruption, weak government, inefficient public goods provision, and lack of freedom were among the primary political demands of the protesters in the Arab Spring.53 These demands represent people’s outcry against the political injustices in their societies. Therefore, individuals who distrust the government, those who believe that there is widespread corruption, individuals who find it difficult to access public officials, and those who are unhappy with the state of democracy and human rights in their country will be more likely to participate in protests. Moreover, the effect of perceived political injustice on protest participation will be more substantial for highly religious individuals, given Islam’s doctrinal emphasis on removing injustices and assigning a duty on the faithful to fight against tyranny.
Figure 8.3 Protest participation in the Arab world. Sample sizes vary in each wave. The numbers show the average proportions for the protest participation in the full sample. (Source: Arab Barometer, Waves 1–5.)
A series of multivariate statistical estimations were conducted to test these hypotheses. The analysis used the second and third waves of the Arab Barometer surveys based on the timing of the survey fieldwork and the availability of the necessary survey items. The multivariate model estimations used full samples, interaction effects with religiosity, split samples for each wave of the surveys, and a reduced sample of devout individuals. Different estimation strategies allow for testing the robustness of the results and the effect of justice perceptions on protest behavior conditional on religiosity. The analysis is also replicated for Egypt and Tunisia—the two most prominent cases of the Arab Spring—using the survey data collected during the Arab Spring (Wave 2).
The dependent variable, protest participation, is measured with a question asking the respondents whether they participated in a protest, march, or sit-in during the past three years. This item has a slightly different wording in the second wave for the Egyptian and Tunisian samples where the respondents were asked whether they participated in a protest in the last several months. Figure 8.3 shows the trends in protest participation between (2006–2019) in fifteen Arab-majority countries and about sixty country surveys. In general, the proportion of people who attend protests, marches, or sit-ins is stable over time but there are fluctuations between different survey waves. Most people report that they have never participated in any protest (range from 73 percent to 87 percent). Those who participated in a protest once or more are about 20 percent of the survey participants. Reported protest participation is especially high in the first wave (2006) and the lowest (13 percent) in the fourth wave (2016–2017).
The main independent variables measure perceptions of political and social injustices. Additionally, an additive index of religiosity is obtained using the two questions about self-reported religious behavior:54
Q6101: Do you pray daily always, most of the time, sometimes, rarely or never? (prayer)
Q6106: Do you read or listen to the Qurʾan daily always, most of the time, sometimes, rarely or never? (Koran readership)
Both items strongly correlate, and the factor analysis confirms a single dimension of religiosity. Responses to both questions are highly skewed with over 70 percent of the respondents falling at the high end of self-reported religious behavior. This is not an unexpected finding for the Arab-majority countries as religion is a formidable social force with a majority of people reporting to be pious. The following models also include controls for respondents’ age, educational attainment, household income, gender (female), and fixed effects.55
Since the dependent variable, protest, is dichotomous, I use logistic regression as shown in Table 8.2. Model 1 runs the estimation based on the full sample of the respondents from the two waves, whereas Models 2 and 3 use the second and third waves, respectively. Model 4 adds the variable measuring distributive preferences, which is available only in the third wave, and Model 5 uses the two components of the religiosity index. The models show that perceived political injustices affect protest. Distrust in government (Models 1, 2, and 5) and difficulty accessing state officials (Models 1, 3, 4, and 5) significantly increase protest behavior. Perceptions of social injustice exert a more pronounced effect on the likelihood of protest attendance. Individuals with pessimistic economic outlooks (Models 1, 2, and 5) and those who are unemployed (Models 1, 3–5) are more likely to protest. Egalitarian distributive preferences also make protest behavior more likely (Model 4).
Pious individuals are less likely to engage in protests when the samples from the two waves are combined for the statistical estimation. It appears that the sample from the third wave might be driving this result because this variable is statistically significant in the estimations using the third wave (p < .05), but it has no statistically significant effect on protest in the second wave. Interestingly, the less frequently individuals pray, the more likely they are to take part in protests. This result differs from the findings of Hoffman and Jamal’s study that used the second wave of the Arab Barometer in the Egyptian and Tunisian samples. Although the survey data did not allow them to determine causal effects, Hoffman and Jamal found evidence supporting the hypothesis that Koran readership informs perceptions of injustices, including distrust in government, views of state impartiality, and support for democracy.56 The analysis presented here uses a multidimensional measure of religiosity and specifies the exact political and social justice perceptions to test their effects on protest behavior.
When a more suitable measure, distributive preferences, is used in Model 4, religiosity decreases protest participation and only difficulty accessing state officials has a meaningful effect on protest behavior. The explanatory power of distributive preferences as a measure of social justice orientation cancels out the statistical effects of different perceptions of political injustice and even the negative effect of the evaluation of economic situation.
While the samples in the second and third waves of the surveys include countries where protest activity had been significant, such as Egypt and Tunisia, in most countries, protest activity did not reach the levels seen in these two countries. In cases like Algeria, Sudan, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia, either the protesters did not press too hard or the regime managed to suppress the protests. Therefore, the sample in hand is not ideal for testing the effect of religiosity on protest behavior. I employed two strategies to alleviate the concerns that come with this limitation. First, I ran a separate model using the interaction terms between religiosity and all indicators of perceptions of political and social injustices. This strategy tests the conditioning effect of religiosity index on predictors of protest behavior. Second, Tunisia and Egypt are closely examined to provide a more conclusive account of interactions concerning religiosity and perceptions of injustices on protest participation. Figure 8.4 shows the average effects of each indicator of perceived injustices at different levels of religiosity based on interaction terms.57
Figure 8.4 Religion, perceptions of injustice, and protest behavior. Each panel shows the change in predicted probability of protest behavior associated with different indicators measuring perceptions of political and social injustice at different levels of religiosity (interaction effects). The circles represent the predicted probability, and the bars show the 95 percent confidence interval. Full estimation results are presented in Appendix A, Table A8.4. (Source: Arab Barometer, Waves 2 and 3.)
The substantive effects associated with perceptions of political and social injustices are not very large. However, the predicted probability of protest participation is attenuated by the degree of religiosity, especially for evaluation of the economic situation and unemployment status—two measures of perceived social injustices or grievances. At the same time, the confidence bounds get narrower at high levels of piety. Therefore, religiosity makes a substantive difference in the likelihood of protest attendance for unemployed individuals and those with pessimistic economic views, especially for the most pious. A similar effect is also observed for the difficulty accessing state officials. Religious individuals are more likely to protest if they are not satisfied with the ease of access to officials for filing a complaint. Interestingly, at increased levels of religiosity, individuals become less likely to protest when they are not happy with the state of democracy in their country or distrust the government. Evidently, perceptions of political injustices and the conditioning effect of religiosity on their impact are less pronounced than the perceptions of social injustices. This result confirms the viability of grievance-based explanations related to the perceived violations of social justice.58
Figure 8.5 Determinants of protest participation. The circles show the average predicted probability of protest participation in the full sample and the diamonds in the highly religious sample. The horizontal lines show the 95 percent confidence interval. Full estimation results are presented in Appendix A, Table A8.5. (Source: Arab Barometer, Wave 2.)
Additionally, logistic regressions of protest behavior were estimated for Egypt and Tunisia using the second wave of the Arab Barometer. Figure 8.5 shows the average marginal effects from these estimations for the full and the highly religious samples for each country.59 In Egypt, only difficulty accessing state officials increases the likelihood of protest. Religiosity increases protest participation, and this effect amplifies the impact of distrust in government and difficulty accessing state officials. In Tunisia, individuals who perceive widespread corruption and distrust the government are more likely to participate in protest (this latter effect disappears in the highly religious sample). Of social justice indicators, pessimistic economic outlook also increases the protest attendance. The impact of these indicators on protest participation is larger among the highly religious, and religiosity itself increases protest behavior.
These results show that piety motivates people to take action against an authoritarian regime. The analysis identifies the specific mechanisms that link religious doctrine to protest participation. These mechanisms include perceived injustices when it is difficult to file complaints with the state officials and individuals hold pessimistic outlooks about the economic situation. As the theoretical framework suggested, Islam’s doctrinal emphasis on rebellion against tyranny and social justice may result in prodemocratic behavior (i.e., protest participation against the authoritarian government). Although the data in hand are not conducive to dissecting the causal pathways, the findings of past studies and this chapter point to grievances about the state and economic injustice as a possible explanatory factor, at least in the two most prominent cases of the Arab Spring.
Conclusion
The Arab Spring marks one of the most significant junctures in the history of Middle Eastern democratization. People taking to the streets during these extraordinary protests were fighting against social and political injustices. These protests took many by surprise, but observers of the region pointed to ordinary people’s democratic aspirations for an explanation.60 This chapter took a similar approach to empirically evaluate people’s demands in the Arab Spring. The analysis implied continuity in the discourse of the contemporary protest movements and the constitutionalist revolutions in the Middle East in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Both movements represented grievances against social and political injustices, but they were mostly targeting the corrupt, inefficient, and declining states. While the elite championing the constitutionalist regimes called for implementing popular sovereignty and executive constraints, the people in the Arab streets chanted for freedom, human dignity, and social justice. Religion played a significant role in these events as a reference frame. For example, constitutionalists justified the Western political models with traditional ideas including the scriptural principle of consultation and man’s responsibility as the vicegerent of God. Although Arab Spring protesters were not exclusively religious, the language of these protests involved many Islamic symbols represented in a post-Islamist outlook, implying that devotion and support for political rights are compatible.61
According to the Arab Barometer data, economic issues are among the most significant problems for Arab citizens. The data also revealed that corruption, difficulty accessing state services, and political distrust are important indicators of political injustices. The results showed that political and social injustices played a role in motivating protest participation in the Arab Spring. A closer examination of the two most significant cases of the Arab Spring, Egypt and Tunisia, demonstrated that religion mattered in these countries. Highly devout individuals protested due to perceived political injustices related to corruption and lack of access to state services or perceived social injustices measured by the pessimistic economic outlook.
By and large, the results are far from being conclusive. The analysis cannot pinpoint the causal pathways linking religion, justice perceptions, and protest behavior. However, even with less than ideal data, it can be reasonably concluded that perceptions of social and political injustices mattered, especially for the religious individuals in their decision to attend the protests. State decay, corruption, and distrust of government along with perceptions of economic decline and the lack of opportunities were important factors driving the upheaval in the Arab world. The appeal of various Islamist parties in the aftermath was indicative of support for a religiously informed path to solving the mounting problems in these societies. However, the disillusionment came rather quickly in Egypt. For now, the success story appears to be Tunisia, where the Islamist Ennahda movement continues to play an instrumental role in Tunisian democratization. It is important to note that Islamic justice plays a significant role in the ideology of Ennahda as defined by its founder, Rāshid al-Ghannūshī. A closer examination of Islamist party ideologies and determinants of support for these parties will, perhaps, reveal additional mechanisms through which religion, Islamic justice, and political engagement are connected.