Voices of the Arab Spring

Asaad Al-Saleh is assistant professor of Arabic, comparative literature, and cultural studies in the Department of Languages and Literature and the Middle East Center at the University of Utah. His research focuses on issues related to autobiography and displacement in Arabic literature and political culture in the Arab world. Peter Sluglett is director of the Middle East Institute at the National University of Singapore.

• Foreword: Understanding Recent Social and Political Developments in the Middle East and North Africa: A Personal Odyssey, by Peter Sluglett Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Tunisia 2. Egypt 3. Libya 4. Yemen 5. Syria Bibliography

There's a wonderful, cumulative power to reading these personal narratives. They are gripping, extremely poignant, often heartbreaking, and astonishing. It is long overdue to finally have unmediated access to 'regular' citizens' experiences and recollections. -- Mona El-Gobashy, Baheyya, of blogblogblog.com This collection is of enormous importance. The speakers in these narratives are not specialist scholars but participants in the process of change and, all too often, victims of the regimes in the countries and regions covered. Their accounts provide the reader with vivid images of events that may have already been 'covered' by the world's media but have not, thus far at least, emerged with the kind of crystalline reality and sheer variety that is to be found within the covers of this book. -- Roger Allen, professor emeritus, University of Pennsylvania Al-Saleh brings together personal stories from the democratic uprisings... The cumulative effect of the pieces is to insist that leaders, in the Middle East and outside of it, must listen to and heed the voices of the Arab Spring before lasting positive change can take place. Publishers Weekly Through the accumulation of personal stories, the reader begins to experience the larger narratives of the Arab Spring. National Journal Valuable... Exhilarating to read... Biographile ...Humane and sensitive storytelling... New Statesman