Reformation on Loop

In 2025, Morocco’s Gen Z population followed their generation around the globe in protest. The largest youth-led protests the country had seen in over a decade swept through the cities of Rabat, Casablanca, Tangier, and Agadir, as well as online, with both videos from the street and AI videos. Similar to the other Gen Z protests, the Moroccan protests were leaderless, without a political party or political opposition backing.

Analysts scrambled to make sense of these youth protests across multiple countries, which, in some cases, successfully toppled regimes. These movements seemed to emerge out of nowhere. A generation accused of apathy suddenly took their online discourse to the streets.

I wrote two pieces last year that explored Gen Z protests, the likely drivers, the clichés to avoid (It’s like the Arab Spring! It’s like Occupy Wall Street!), and the risks to the Middle East. But in this piece, I want to focus on something behind the protests.

I have argued that legitimacy fights, protests, and popular mobilization are a direct result of culture. This is classic Gramsci. What are youth consuming? What and who is shaping their identities? So, in societies where civil and political spaces, and the media landscape, are controlled or closed, how do we understand where youth are, what their priorities are, and where governments and states should engage with them?

My background is on Islamist militant movements and radicalization, so I naturally focus my research on identity formation and the emerging Islamic discourse. You can find some of the public work on it here and here. But Islamists are not the only ones using these processes.

Before I start talking about music, I should say that the use of “independent” here is not a genre or a choice of studio. I am using it to refer to the structure, in the sense of music that is outside formal institutions, state-backed festivals, and commercialized pop. I prefer this term to represent its politically independent form, rather than the term ‘underground’.

Three Things You Should Know

1. The Shrinking Place

Across the Middle East, civic space has shrunk for over a decade. Independent newspapers and channels have consolidated or closed, press syndicates are controlled, and parliaments hollowed out. Political parties now redistribute power within closed elite circles rather than represent the public. CSOs are harder to register and fund, while foreign assistance has largely disappeared due to shifting EU priorities after Ukraine, the closure of USAID, and current US policies. Even basic book festivals require months-long government approvals. Online space is constrained by increasingly authoritarian cybercrime laws. Public political expression is narrower than at any point in my adult lifetime.

Globally, younger generations are also moving away from traditional political institutions. Parties appear outdated, and under-30 voter turnout has declined across most democracies. Trust in parliaments, parties, and traditional media has reached historic lows. Research institutions like the Edelman Trust Barometer, Arab Barometer, Afrobarometer, and Latinobarómetro report consistent trends. Trust in parliaments is below 20 percent in most Arab Barometer waves. Trust in political parties is even lower. Religious institutions, once a backstop, have seen sharp declines among under-30s, especially in Tunisia, Iraq, and Lebanon. This generation has exited the formal political infrastructure that the post–Cold War order assumed it would inherit.

What replaces these institutions varies, but tends toward alternative, decentralized platforms. In the United States, podcasts and Substack. In France: TikTok and comment threads. In the Philippines and Indonesia: livestreamers. Previously in countries like Sudan and Egypt large protests were organized on Facebook.

As youth leave formal institutions, they still face the same pressures that sparked earlier protests. The region has the world’s highest youth unemployment. Water scarcity, food insecurity, rising prices, low public salaries, and exclusion from decision-making persist. The post-independence institutions built to manage politics no longer perform their function, even as the problems remain. Young people have understood this for at least a decade.

A young person in Cairo, Casablanca, Algiers, Tunis, or Khartoum who wants to speak about unemployment, corruption, or bread prices has fewer formal channels each year. Predictably, they shift to spaces that the state has yet to police, like comedy reels, AI memes, encrypted platforms, and the indie music scene. These are cheap to produce, fast to circulate, and difficult to censor.

The music in the region is showing us exactly where the grievances are most critical and specific to the region.

The harraga music has been in the North African scene since the early 2000s, but the themes have evolved. For example, Harraga has been present in Tunisian rap since the early 2000s, but the narratives shifted throughout the years. In Balti’s early work, harga is a personal journey -”I’m twenty years old and already thinking about escape,” he raps, weighing the crossing against staying, measuring Paris against the neighborhood where “out of a thousand, maybe one succeeds.” It is about weighing odds on an individual level; the state is not present. By 2023, the frame is no longer personal or individual. “The system disconnected,” one track states flatly. “This isn’t a protest anymore, it’s survival.” Another line closes the account entirely: “I’m just asking for a visa. That’s the minimum.” Not Europe as a dream. Europe is the floor. By 2023, according to UNHCR, sixty-one percent of arrivals to Italy via the Mediterranean originated from Tunisia.

This is the “emigrate or explode” dynamic I have written about before. Poor job markets, poor governance, high corruption, closed elite system. Emigration becomes the only escape hatch. When the hatch jams, the pressure has nowhere to go.

The regimes know this. That is why Egypt’s Musicians Syndicate issued regulations in October 2022 requiring all rap lyrics to receive Ministry of Culture pre-approval before release and not to contradict Egyptian “values and ethics.” That is why Morocco arrested Gnawi in 2019 for 3acha Cha3b, a track that did not even mention the king by name, just the police. That is also why Algerian authorities systematically targeted rappers after 2019 with concert bans, surveillance, and charges of inciting public disorder. That is why Ramy Essam was tortured in March 2011 and forced into European exile by 2014.

A generation has left formal politics, civic space has closed around them, and they have developed alternative channels and tools to share grievances. We know the regimes clearly understand this because of how much effort they put into controlling the people driving it.

2. Music in Hindsight

Analysts usually focus on the reasons for political upheaval. Some even try to predict when upheaval will unfold. But it is useful to focus on the how and not only the why.

Every generation engages politically, peacefully or otherwise. The circumstances around them determine how. The post 1967 islamic awakening, and the different schools of Islamic resistance, emerged in the context of the humiliating military defeat of Arab armies, and the perceived failure of secular (socialist) regimes to deliver on promises of liberation and victory.

For my generation, the Arab Spring generation, we were shaped by the rise of Al Qaeda, the global war on terror, the 2006 Hezbollah- Israel war, and the 2008 war on Gaza. These events pushed us into a direction of self-discovery, and hope. Our intellectual diet consisted of post-colonial theories, which re-defined Muslim and Arab identity in an Islamophobic world we found ourselves in, fighting against injustice in Palestine. It was very self-reflective, and it was very national. We were watching protests erupt across the world against corruption, injustice, and for freedom and democracy. The better world we envisioned needed to start with a better state, and a better citizen-state relationship. The music rang alarm bells long before we took the first step to mobilization. The music carried all our slogans, demands, and grievances before we waved them in protests.

In Tunis, El General’s, Sidi Al-Rai (Mr. President), a politically charged song against Ben Ali’s corrupt authoritarian rule, and the cost of living, was circulating underground for months before the uprising in Tunis. It gained more and more traction on Facebook and Youtube, prompting the Tunisian regime to ban it and arrest El General. A few months later, the uprising in Tunis would adopt it as an anthem.

El General was not the only artist in Tunis producing political music in the late 2000s. Under Ben Ali, many independent political music groups were forced underground, most notably Awled El Manjim. Rap was operating underground with many collectives and individual singers producing music that circulated among the youth, outside the formal music scene.

The underground music of that era focused on the grievances of Tunisians. It was anti-corruption, anti-authoritarian, and pro-freedom. Independent and accurate polling did not exist in Tunis at that time, so we cannot track the frustrations of young Tunisians at that time, but the music was doing the work. It was the warning shot that no one heard.

Egypt had a similar story. Polling was virtually non-existent pre-2011 revolution. But the music scene carried the messages. Mahragant (carnivals) emerged in Egypt in 2006, in Cairo’s working class neighborhoods. The music was not political in the conventional sense, but the grievances were specific: housing, marriage, and the day-to-day cost of living, police harassment, police brutality, economic inequality, and corruption. Again, the music represented youth grievances, and it was growing increasingly popular in Egypt’s slums.

3. Music in Foresight

The regional independent music scene has gone through a lot of change in the past two decades. Some artists have been co-opted, others regulated under new laws, and others produced music that is more introspective, reflective of themselves and what they have lived through. But after the war on Gaza, we have seen a renewal across different genres. Political grievances and lyrics made a strong comeback, but this time, more confrontational.

From El-Ras in Lebanon, to Al-Fer3i and his collabs with Jordanian rappers, to Palestinian artists in the Diaspora, the message speaks different dialects and over different beats, but it is the same: anger, humiliation, explosion. The music post-Gaza is built around identity; the identity of the state, the identity of a generation, the identity of the region. Who is a collaborator and who is not? Who is with justice and who is not? Who is anti-genocide and who is complicit?

The feelings underneath are betrayal, non-representation, and disappointment in how states and leaders handled the war in Gaza, and its cascading consequences. It repeats on a loop. The music is, once again, carrying the message of a generation. But this is different from the one the previous generation was carrying.

I argued that in the absence of independent and transparent polling, the music was telling us what the grievances were: corruption, injustice, employment, and the cost of living. Disapproval of how the state was running its affairs. Disapproval of the inequality, the state was content to live with. We saw how that eventually played out on the streets, with protests organized around precisely those demands.

Post-Gaza, the independent music scene is telling a completely different story. It is not demanding reform. It is rejecting nation-states. It is rejecting the status quo. It is questioning the legitimacy of these states, and in many cases, the leaders sitting on top of them. Some artists are rapping warnings. Others are issuing ultimatums. Others are saying, in plain terms, that they have already moved on.

One of my favorite new albums, released just six months ago was El Fer3i’s (Tareq Abu Kuwaik) collaboration with several Jordanian rappers titled “Rap of the East Bank”. A favorite track is “حكي” or “Talk’ - a line from the song

“To hell with Abbas’ soldiers, and to hell with the Abbasid-style rule. To hell with all our rulers. Who’s really going to cut off my head?”.

In the same album, a song titled “The Driver”, the rappers communicate the state at play:

“They took over the ideas and corrupted us, handing out smiles while everything rotted underneath.
This is filth, there’s no faith left. Save me, the situation is hell. Total collapse.
Tell the driver. Tell him there’s no time. No time, no time, no time.”

Also, six months ago, El Ras, released his new Album “Sikkat Ar-rouh”. El Ras’s music
A haunting line from a song titled “Adam” he says:

“We are the ones who made this world. We are the ones who killed the martyr. We accepted injustice, and even benefited from it. We are the ones who abandoned the witnesses. Our cause became just another image injected into the bloodstream. We are the ones who worshipped borders. We are the ones who laid out the humiliation.”

The angle is slightly different between the two of them. “Enough is enough” is clear in both. One says that we are exploding because of what is happening, the other says we have to completely change how we perceive things to survive.

We now have regular polling on youth opinions. The questions are the same as the 2011 baseline: unemployment, corruption, and whether the country is going in the right or wrong direction. But the baseline itself has shifted. The conversation underneath the streets has moved into civilizational territory: humiliation, renewal, identity, transnational belonging, the place of the youth in the state, and their states’ roles in the world. That territory can’t be captured through the same old questionnaires.

The questions we need to be asking now are about identity formation. About how the under-30 generation sees itself in relation to the state, and how it perceives its state’s foreign posture. What does it mean, in their reading, to be a citizen of a regime that watched a genocide and stayed quiet, or worse, normalized it? What does sovereignty mean? What does dignity mean? What does the future of this region look like to a twenty-two-year-old in Amman, Tunis, Cairo, or Beirut who has spent two years watching Gaza on a screen?

My Take

The music we were listening to during the Arab Spring was demanding. It was not revolutionary in the strict sense. It wanted more space inside the system. It wanted to “raise the roof”. In this case, the “roof” was freedom and liberty. It wanted more freedom and more breathing room for negotiation of what is allowed.

Today’s music is different. Post-Gaza, post-Lebanon, post-Iran, post-everything-else, the language has shifted. It is no longer asking for breathing room. It is saying the institutions are corrupt. The system is obsolete. The demands have moved up from justice, freedom, and equality to complete transformation. That is a different argument. Reform is a conversation that the state can (reluctantly) have. Transformation is not.

We don’t have surveys or independent research on that. We don’t have the sociological work on a generation living, organizing, and forming its political consciousness outside formal institutions. The music is doing that work. It’s the most honest portrait we have of where youth actually are. For over a decade, trust-in-institutions polling has pointed in one direction: there is no real trust. The music is just saying loudly what the polling has been saying quietly.

The deeper problem is that officials are still misreading the online world. The assumption that young people are online “killing time”, that with entertainment or games as a distraction from real life is definitely outdated.

For this generation, online time isn’t entertainment; it’s reality. The line between the two has blurred to the point of near-irrelevance. It’s what they listen to, watch, discuss, and play. That’s the political incubator, where identity is built. It’s not a precursor to the street. It is the street, on a different surface.

Remember the context is the steady tightening of formal political space through crackdowns on dissent, parties, and online expression. Each time a formal door closes, meaning-making shifts to channels the state hasn’t learned to police, yet. The music, the reels, gaming chats, Telegram channels, and unlicensed podcasts. The street, when it comes, will have been rehearsed somewhere we weren’t watching.

This leaves questions that the power system doesn’t ask itself. Where does this generation’s political energy go when their trust is gone and civic participation is closed to them? What shapes their identity? What are they actually consuming—culturally, politically, religiously—and what kind of political worldview emerges? And most importantly, is the state offering anything that competes with what’s being produced online?

We should be reading the music and watching the reels, (or at least funding the analysts who read them properly). We should be honest: the state’s cultural toolkit (licensed pop, festival circuits, official patriotic playlists) isn’t in conversation with what’s being formed where young people actually live.

These aren’t academic questions. They will decide the next decade. A generation that has rejected the state’s narrative won’t be reabsorbed by tweaking it. The cultural ground has already shifted. The street politics will follow.

The state needs to look into the identity formation of its youth and start having an honest conversation with the younger generation about their aspirations. I don’t mean just the day-to-day topics of jobs, services, and education, but in the larger terms of how they see themselves in a very uncertain world. Because others are doing this identity formation for them. Others have been doing it for a long time.

The music before 2011 showed the grievances people would rally around. It also aired their demand for reform. The music now is telling us what the next mobilizations will be about. The anger at the cost of living and unemployment remains, but the demands change. It will not be calling for an increase in minimum wage. The demand won’t be for reform. It will be for complete reformation.