In 2010, the Egyptian art historian Bahia Shehab designed an art installation for the Munich exhibition titled "The Future of Tradition – The Tradition of Future," a centennial consideration of Islamic art. Shehab’s finished display consisted of a curtain of Plexiglas panels, each containing a word in a distinct form of calligraphy: “la.” No. A thousand nos, repeating a refusal drawn from the history of Islamic art to articulate both the unity and individuality of protest. When la reappeared during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution spray-painted around Tahrir Square, the form changed to consist of specific refusals: no to military rule. No to emergency laws. No to the new pharaohs. This graffiti physically represents the conflict over the boundaries for the civil subject: who may speak, when, and where; what matters are sanctioned, and what transgresses. This paper attempts to detangle some of the tensions inherent in dominant frameworks for situating the art and language of political protest. My research draws on Shehab’s written and oral accounts alongside critical scholarship on museums, street art, and the culture of the arts. I discuss how discourses in the humanities often include an implicit coding of modernity versus tradition in their discussions of protest, and in contradistinction to this theoretical trend, I assert that forms of contemporary protest critically engage with Arab cultural history. The refusal encapsulated by Shehab’s la protests hegemonic narratives of subject formation and political participation, and I explore the relationship between negation and the articulation of civic presence. My discussion of the lam-alif engages with Jean Baudrillard’s analysis of graffiti as empty signifiers. The la of the museum might be read as the anti-discourse Baudrillard describes in its refusal to name an object, thereby negating once and for all. However, Shehab’s street art uses la to protest specific events, adding an important layer of political signification. In contrast to Baudrillard’s theory of symbolic absence, I turn to feminist scholarship that emphasizes bodily presence. A situated physical act such as stenciling a blue bra on city walls with an accompanying “no to stripping the people” not only names a political demand, but also underscores the body as the site of political subjectivity.