The Invisible Arab: The Promise and Peril of the Arab Revolutions [Hardcover]

Marwan Bishara (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 31, 2012

The Invisible Arab traces the roots of the revolutions in the Arab world. Marwan Bishara, chief policy analyst of Al Jazeera English and the anchor of the program “Empire”, combines on-the-ground reporting, extensive research and scholarship, and political commentary in this book on the complex influences that made the revolutions possible. Bishara argues that the inclusive, pluralistic nationalism that motivated the revolutions are indispensable to their long-term success.

The Invisible Arab is a voyage in time from the Arab world’s 'liberation generation’ through the 'defeated' and 'lost generations', arriving at today’s 'miracle generation'. Bishara unpacks how this new generation, long seen as a demographic bomb, has proved to be the agent of progress, unity and freedom. It has in turn used social networks to mobilize for social justice.

Bishara discusses how Israel, oil, terrorism and radical Islam have affected the interior identity of the region as well as Western projections upon it. Protection of Israel, Western imperial ambition, a thirst for oil, and fear of radicalism have caused many Western regimes and media to characterize Arab countries and people as unreceptive to democracy or progress. These ideas are as one-dimensional as they are foolhardy. Bishara argues that the Arab revolutions present a great window of opportunity for reinventing and improving Arab ties with the rest of the world— notably the West—on the basis of mutual respect and mutual interest.

The revolutions will be judged by how they realize freedom and justice, and how they can pave the way for reconciling and accommodating nationalism and Islam with democracy. Bishara argues that these pillars—liberty and justice reconciled with religion and nationalism, form the bedrock that will allow stability and progress to flourish in the Arab world and beyond.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Christopher Dickey, Newsweek/TheDailyBeast
Marwan Bishara's The Invisible Arab is the single most perceptive and accessible book I've read about the roots of revolt in the Middle East and the brave, chaotic, exciting and frightening new world they have begun to create.”

Kirkus Reviews
“A keen, journalistic look at the making of the Arab Spring and its ramifications.”

Booklist
“[Bishara] brings a long perspective on the factors that have led to the Arab Spring and the challenges ahead as resisters take up the task of securing freedom and justice and reconciling the emerging sense of nationalism with democracy. Bishara captures the spirit and energy of the young resisters and the violent reactions in Yemen, Libya, Bahrain, and Syria.”

Shelf Awareness
“Marwan Bishara’s The Invisible Arab is a clear-headed and thought-provoking appraisal of the precarious but joyously hopeful place so many Arab nations find themselves after the ‘Arab Spring’ of 2010-2011. Bishara…is well-positioned to offer an intelligent appraisal of the forces that brought these revolutions to fragile birth, the political players involved and their capacity to retain power in a relatively benign fashion or succumb to the chaos and corruption that have plagued these nations in recent years….An engaging history of recent Arab revolutions, with a guardedly optimistic look at the future.”

Huffington Post
“An engaging new book…[Bishara] delivers a sweeping, provocative and at times entertaining tale, revolution jokes and all….The Invisible Arab is an insightful and absorbing read for inquiring minds, and a valuable tool for students of the Middle East. As globally resonant events continue to unfold in the region, a sequel is clearly in order.”

Newsweek / Daily Beast
“Avoiding the pitfall of seeing the revolution in isolation, Bishara elegantly charts how the potent forces of national-ism, Islamism, and Western intervention all mixed to create last year’s revolutions.”

ID: International Dialogue, A Multidisciplinary Journal of World Affairs

“[The Invisible Arab] is a must-read for students and scholars of the Middle East and the Arab world….The book does an excellent job of documenting the efforts at change, and suggesting how change might ultimately occur.”

 

Wisconsin State Journal

“There have been few events as consequential in recent history as the Arab Spring, and if one wants to understand its genesis, one should read this book. Engaging in a regionwide analysis with a concentration on Egypt and Tunisia, Bishara brings out little-known aspects of the tremors that have been felt around the world…. Bishara presents a clear-eyed assessment of the dictatorships that have blighted the Arab landscape.”

 

Foreign Policy in Focus 

“Bishara tears down the Western media’s narrative of the Arab revolutions….[The Invisible Arab] helps make all that was invisible to the Western eye about the Arab Spring visible.”

 

London School of Economics Review of Books

“The Invisible Arab is a small book that pulls a lot of punches….Bishara’s analysis is thoughtful and detailed.”

 

Foreign Affairs

“[I]nformed and engaging…”

 

Thinking Fits (blog)

“Marwan Bishara’s The Invisible Arab… sings like a canary…. The Invisible Arab is at its most resonant when reconstructing the building blocs of Arab misery that pinned down much of the 20th century.”

 

Library Journal, Starred Review

“Remarkably informative and thorough.”

 

Publisher’s Weekly

“Bishara…provides a compelling and spirited history of the modern Arab nation, from colonial liberation to the recent revolutions….Fast-paced, impassioned, and eloquent.”

 

Mason County News, Texas

“[The Invisible Arab] is a brilliant analysis on how the Arabs broke their own psychological barrier of fear to kindle one of the first significant revolutionary transformations of the twenty-first century.”

 

Tucson Citizen

“This is a rich exploration of the history of the contemporary Arab world from the colonial period through the present period of liberation.” 

About the Author

Marwan Bishara is Al Jazeera English's senior political analyst and the editor & host of “Empire”, a program on the channel that examines global powers and their agendas. He was previously a professor of International Relations at the American University of Paris and a fellow at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes et Sciences Sociales. Bishara's writing has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, The Guardian, Le Monde and The Nation, among other outlets. He is also the chairman of The Galilee Foundation, a UK based charity that provides over one hundred students annually with university scholarships. He lives in Washington DC, Paris, and Dohar.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Nation Books (January 31, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568587082
• ISBN-13: 978-1568587080
• Product Dimensions: 5.9 x 1.2 x 8.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #798,102 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A promising, insightful book March 25, 2012

By Duane E. Campbell

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

The Invisible Arab.
This is an insightful and well written documentation of the recent political and cultural revolutions in the Arab world. The author Marwan Bishara benefits from his long service as a political writer for Al Jazeera T.V. He was documenting the both the dependency of the Arab states and the apparent docility of the Arab masses before the outbreaks of last years. He new and had interviewed many of the youthful leaders.
I compared the accounts with recent testimonies given for example by Tunisian labor activists touring in the U.S., and with well informed commentary on the revolutionary developments by writers from the area.
Marwan Bishara has it just right. He describes well the over twenty year efforts at organizing against political repression in several key countries including Egypt and Tunisia. The Arab Spring was built upon decades of hard work by sincere democrats. His description of the economic and political dependency of Arab oligarchs on U.S. funding and U.S. policies are well developed.
His own experience at Al Jazeera provides a valuable addition to the Western accounts of a social media revolution. Those watching for a facebook revolution need to recognize the transformative nature of non government satellite T.V. prior to the Arab Spring. This is well document in other sources including the U.S. government's own criticisms of Al Jazeera in covering the war in Iraq. The broad Arab populist first learned of alternative views and options often from AL Jazeera and only later adopted Facebook, Google and You tube technologies to tell their stories. The two inter dependent media forms restructured the narrative of the Middle East and broke the ideological dominance of the repressive states and families. To primarily focus on social media and only the last two years is to misunderstand the social forces in play.
Of course much remains unsettled. The Tunisian revolution opened the doors, and the Egyptian revolution is substantially unfinished. It will probably take years. At the same time it is vital that U.S. readers understand what is transforming the middle east so as to not simply fall in line with the vested interests in the U.S. State Department and U.S. capital that are projecting a particular political line. We don't know how the Arab Springs will be resolved. But, we need to learn and to know that U.S. intervention, both militarily and through advocacy groups are based primarily on the interests of U.S. forces, including oil and military. We should be promoting a democratic, non intervention policy. It will take years, perhaps decades for the several Arab states to resolve their revolutions. We as democrats should respect that. How many Arabs intervened in the U.S. War of Independence.
There are many U.S. and western pundits giving us advice. If we believe in democracy and development we need to read and understand a number of Arab voices on the rapidly changing situations from Baharain, to Iraq, to Syria, Lebanon and the West Bank. Marwan Bishara has provided an introduction to several of the important complex issues.
Much of my own work has been in the area of U.S. relations with Latin America. It has been a constant source of struggle to understand Latin America from sources other than those of the U.S. foreign policy establishment in both political parties.
Reading The Invisible Arab: the Promise and Peril of the Arab Revolution convinces me that we in the U.S. have a similar problem in our understanding of the dynamic changes occurring in the Arab lands. Probably our most important role from the U.S. will be to oppose or prevent U.S. military and economic interventions against the democratic efforts of forces in the Arab Spring.
Author. Choosing Democracy: a practical guide to multicultural education. 2010.

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Introduction to North African/Southwest Asian Revolutions February 28, 2012

By Ayman

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

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.

7 of 12 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Deeply Disappointing March 5, 2012

By Dugan Kern

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

"The Invisible Arab" exemplifies all the risks of writing about sea-changing events in real time with few discernible benefits of timeliness. Anyone who has made an effort to follow the Arab spring beyond the headlines has nothing to gain from this book. Implicitly the book offers to elucidate "The Invisible Arab". What it attempts to make visible is a mystery. Those interested in the current political landscape and a competent rendering of their history will find this book lacking and superficial. Those interested in understand the role of western democracies in the subjugation of arab lands can find many better, detailed, nuanced books which do much more to bringing a human face behind the grand storyline.

Worst, the book has so many internal contradictions that it is impossible to call it anything more than a haphazard collection of opinions and assertions. Technology is simultaneously portrayed as not a factor in the storyline of the Arab spring and central to its development. "The West" (as if it were on nation or easily defined force of a quarter of humanity) is vilified as considering pan Arabism a dream, while at the same time the author writes at length about the lack of genuine pan-Arabism.

Since the book is a somewhat real-time account, I expected the epilogue to help tie together the quickly and loosely cobbled text into a couple themes and speculations. Instead, it is a continuation of the confused monologue from the preceding pages: happy to gratuitously criticize, hedging wherever real risk of judgement is apparent, and returning to tired themes that, despite the author efforts to refute them, seem to be reinforced.