ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I will adopt a type of immanent critique that asks how the terms ‘civil society’ and ‘the public sphere’ have come to be used by political scientists working on the Middle East and South Asia, and compare that to the actual theoretical development of the terms. I will argue that attempts to locate public spheres and civil society in the region have, in their rush to find areas of society that are functionally equivalent to the model of civil society in the literature, overlooked key components of the original theory. The two myths I identify are (1) that civil society does not serve a normative purpose (i.e., that it does not aid in the legitimation of government) and (2) that the way in which discourse occurs inside the public sphere and civil society is irrelevant.
