Arab street

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.

[4] 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.

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"[10] over the upcoming invasion of Iraq.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

[20] 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.

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.

Both of these, Regier and Khalidi observe, help strengthen the sense that the Arab street's opinions are uninfluenced and uncontrollable by any official source or body.

Regier and Khalidi note that this has historical connections to the term "street Arab", for a homeless child, now out of regular use but still encountered by readers of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes mysteries, where the titular character relied at times on a network of such individuals as informants.

So I think referring to the "Arab street" in this way suggests that these are riff-raff, the kind of unimportant flotsam and jetsam of a society which is basically made up of barbarians and subhuman people.

"[26] In late 1990 after Iraqi forces under Saddam Hussein invaded and occupied Kuwait, ultimately leading to the Gulf War, American commentators and Middle East experts expressed concern about the possible consequences of the Arab street in the region rising up in support of Saddam against their own governments, many of whom (particularly Egypt) had joined the military coalition led by the United States.

One, he called the "underrated" school, which usually claimed that "in the absence of Arab democratic institutions public opinion in those countries is politically irrelevant.

A small minority considered the Arab street a concept bound with Pan-Arabism, by then largely discredited, and by extension similarly irrelevant.

Officials in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states held regular informal majlises (مجلس) and the Egyptian government took note of what was said at neighborhood discussion centers known as "listening posts.

It was data from those that led him to believe that Jordan and Yemen both stayed out of the coalition in part because their leaders were aware that popular sentiment in their countries was strongly against participating, and they might have faced destabilizing civil unrest if they had.

"This assumption sounds at once pathetic and presumptuous, a sorry combination of self-confessed intellectual ignorance and impotence ... For one thing, it should be self-evident that you cannot dismiss the Arab street just because you don't understand it.

"[31] As for the "exaggerated" school, he first observed that there was, in fact, little history of real popular revolutions deposing governments in the modern Middle East with what he called the "debatable" exception of the 1958 Lebanon crisis, and not even many more unsuccessful attempts to do so via street uprisings.

Millions of Americans would hear about the Arab street in the media and assume that it meant a place where terrorism flourished, danger lurked around every corner and religious and political fanaticism were the norm.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman picked it up, noting that the Arab street, in opposition to the "basement", is "largely passive and nonviolent."

"Young Middle Easterners—typically viewed with trepidation as part of a reactionary 'Arab street' or simply overlooked as masses passively acquiescing to despots—have shattered stereotypes by leading dignified struggles in the face of overwhelming repression.

"[37] Western commentators, particularly after the protests in Egypt forced Hosni Mubarak to step down, reconsidered the concept of the Arab street and whether or not it had, indeed, ever been an accurate representation of public opinion in the region.

"I'm convinced the country has what it takes to build a decent, representative society—one that gives the lie to all the stereotypes associated with that dismissive shorthand 'The Arab Street.'"

"[5] On the English-language website of the Lebanese newspaper Al Akhbar, Syrian journalist Ula Shaybeddine recalled how the uprisings had changed the meaning of the word "street" for his generation.