Arab Spring

[Qais]

Charles Tripp writes beautiful about the struggles of the people of the Middle East who had enough. His argument that some regimes resembled the colonizers in the way they treated their own people stands out. In fact Middle East has historically been the scene of power struggle between different world powers, oppressions by colonials and their native replacers and in the modern times the proxy wars of regional and international powers. This book is an account of the struggle of the people to free themselves from the chains of oppression and make their own destiny. Tripp creates an image, in that a powerful one, of the regimes and their oppressive machinery that touches every aspect of citizens' lives. He takes the reader back and forth between the public and the private space. He accounts for the everyday events of the revolutions unplanned and uncoordinated but powerful by a people who wants to leave the 20 century and its creations behind to enter the 21st century and start afresh.

A couple of shortcomings: The reader would expect to understand the role of neighbors, regional and far away powers in the affairs of the revolutions. Tripp touches on those but very briefly. One of the major cases in the book focuses on Syrian uprising. While the uprising innocent at the beginning soon fell victim to terrorism, sectarian and religious power struggle between Iran, Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, each of them claiming regional leadership. Tripp does not give enough space for Uprisings in Yemen and Bahrain. And finally, though the books thesis focuses on the transformative power of peoples' resistance to power, it would have been helpful had he explained why in countries like Tunisia and Egypt the armed forces refused to suppress people while in Syria and Libya they stood by the regime and shot at people.

Aside from those, the book makes for a thought provoking read for any student of the modern Middle East.