The Politics of Everyday Survival: Inwardness, Satire, and Seclusion in Times of Political Closure in MENA

Political closure has repeatedly altered the texture of everyday life across the Middle East. In such moments, public activism often recedes, while new practices of coping, critique, and self-management move to the foreground. This paper contends that these shifts should not be read simply as apathy. Instead, it conceptualizes disengagement as a historically recurring psychological and social strategy through which individuals recalibrate agency in contexts marked by fear, repression, and ideological exhaustion. Medieval ethical traditions—most notably Sufi disciplines of retreat, emotional cultivation, and moral self-work—serve as a comparative baseline for examining contemporary responses to political contraction before and after the Arab Spring. The analysis draws on a broad archive that pairs Sufi manuals and hagiography with twenty-first-century satire, memoirs, advice literature, and digital media. Across these corpora, three patterns recur: techniques of ethical self-regulation, indirect political commentary through humor and irony, and the reorientation of aspiration toward private futures shaped by marriage, migration, and career planning. In both eras, such practices mediated relationships to authority and risk, offering ways to manage disappointment, uncertainty, and vulnerability when overt political participation carried high costs. Placing post-2011 therapeutic idioms, meme cultures, and privatized life projects in dialogue with medieval repertoires of spiritual discipline unsettles narratives that treat contemporary disengagement as uniquely modern or merely neoliberal. What emerges instead is a longer genealogy of political subjectivity in which Middle Eastern actors repeatedly reworked the boundaries of public action through everyday practices of endurance, discretion, and emotional recalibration when collective horizons narrowed.