Ash-shab yurid isqat an-nizam

Syrian Islamists have appropriated the slogan for their own purposes, altering it to “The People want the declaration of Jihad” (ash-sha’ab yurīd i’lān al-Jihād), as well as "The Ummah wants an Islamic Caliphate" (al-Ummah turīd khilāfah islāmiyyah).[24]

In post-Mubarak Egypt, given the fact that the military government only partially met the demands of the revolutionaries, with the dreaded state of emergency remaining in place, some protesters started using a somewhat different version of the slogan: The people want to bring down the field marshal, referring to Field Marshal Mohamed Tantawi, the Chairman of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.[25]

Uriel Abulof, professor of politics at Tel-Aviv University and a senior research fellow at Princeton University, commented:

Virtually all English renditions of the uprising's call missed its singular, key letter: "The people wants to bring down the regime." This seeming semantics marks a sea-change in political ethics. For in the two long centuries since Napoleon landed in Alexandria, the moral foundation of modern politics -- popular sovereignty -- has been absent from the Arab Middle East. The Arab people became the object for colonizers, dictators and imams, with their call to submission and arms. Never a subject for thought and action, the people lacked political agency, powerless to forge a collective moral self, let alone a nation to demand self-determination: the right to tell right from wrong in the public sphere. Whether Arab popular uprisings will eventually transform political systems – thus nominally qualified as real revolutions – remains to be seen. But one revolution is real and clear: the people (شعب, sha'ab) was born – a collective, rather than a collection, of individuals, a whole greater than the sum of its parts. The uprising's slogan was not simply, as one might have expected, "down with the regime." It is precisely because the demonstrates felt that the existence of such a people, let alone one in possession of agency, is far from obvious, that they added, in a resolute speech-act – an act created by speech – "the people wants."[26]

Benoît Challand, teaching Middle Eastern politics at the University of Bologna, commented on the slogan in the following way:

The rendering of autonomy in Arabic illustrates my point as the term is translated as tasayyir daati [sic] – that is the "self-impulse," or "self-drive." And indeed, once the initial spark was lit, it was as if the Tunisian people moved as a whole, into spontaneous protests. Egyptian, Libyan, and Yemeni people called for the fall of their respective regime. The slogan "ash-sha’b yourid isqat al-nithaam" [the people want the fall of the regime], appearing across the region, captures this social cohesion (the people) and the unity in the project.[27]

Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor of Arab studies at Columbia University and the editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies, commented in the following manner:

It will largely be determined in these streets, as well as in the internet cafes, and in the union halls, newspaper offices, women's groups and private homes of millions of young Arabs who have served notice as publicly as possible that they will no longer tolerate being treated with the contempt and disrespect their governments have shown them for their entire lives. They have put us all on notice with their slogan: "The people want the fall of the regime." They are not only referring to their corrupt governments; they also mean the old regime that has prevailed for decades in the entire Arab world, from the Atlantic to the Gulf.[3]

• El pueblo unido jamás será vencido

• News footage of Egyptian protestors using the slogan
• Ash-sha'ab yurid isqat an-nizam, Bahraini song
• Ash-sha'ab lubnani yurid isqat an-nizam at-ta'ifi, Lebanese song
• Video from rally in Benghazi