Marwan Bishara, a political analyst for Al-Jazeera satellite news network, wrote an Arab-nationalist perspective essay about the ongoing revolutions in North Africa and Southwest Asia.
The Invisible Arab: The Promise and Peril of the Arab Revolution is an easy read and would be a useful book assignment in college courses on the history of the region.
I read this in the course of preparing for a talk I gave about the revolutions in North Africa and Southwest Asia.
Highlights of the book for me were coverage of the L'Ancien Régime and North American and European support for its regimes, profiles of activists who have been working in these countries for years and explaining the variety hidden by the term Islamist.
I might disagree with Ustaz Marwan about the assertion that these revolutions are Arab, and the corollary that Al-Jazeera had an outstanding role in building the revolutions' Arab character. Recently, there have been popular opposition movements in Ivory Coast, Senegal and Nigeria. What about the movement of South American countries away from the U.S. sphere of influence? What about Hondurans' resistance to the U.S.-organized coup in 2009? In other words, all over the world, people are resisting the Washington consensus and the local stooges enforcing it. Nevertheless, Ustaz Marwan's assertions in this regard are certainly worth discussing.
