A wave of mass protest movements has spread across North Africa and West Asia, including Sudan, Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon and Iran. The mass protests have much in common, from opposing authoritarian regimes and worsening economic situations to demanding radical changes in social relations. Despite their similarities, each protest movement operates under different conditions that cannot be ignored. The specific historic, political and economic contexts of each country have determined who the key actors of the uprisings are and their location across old and new divides. This book elaborates on these similarities and differences to paint a clearer picture of these movements and draw out lessons to inform future struggles.
Sam Salour summarizes A Region in Revolt: Mapping the Recent Uprisings in North Africa and West Asia edited by Jade Saab, a collection of essays that provides a comprehensive review of the 2018-2019 wave of struggle in the region. In the third part of this multi-part series, Salour provides an introduction to the book and then outlines the essay “The Revolutionizing Nature of the Lebanese Uprising” by Jade Saab and Joey Ayoub.
Edited by Jade Saab, a Lebanese/Canadian Researcher at the University of Glasgow, the contributors include Azza Mustafa and Sara Abbas (on Sudan); Hamza Hamouchene and Selma Oumari (on Algeria); Zeidon Alkinani (on Iraq); Jade Saab and Joey Ayoub (on Lebanon); and Frieda Afary (on Iran).
Insightful, timely analysis of the uprisings in Sudan, Algeria, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran. The book … demonstrates that the uprisings…carry the unyielding spirit of people’s resistance and struggle against both imperialism and local oppressive regimes.— Haifa Zangana, Iraqi novelist, author, artist, and political activist and author of Dreaming of Baghdad.
Whereas there is a plethora of books on the 2011 [Arab Spring] upsurge, this book is the only comprehensive overview of the second wave of revolt, which is here analysed from the standpoint of the popular struggle. —Gilbert Achcar, Professor at SOAS, University of London, author of The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising
A rich and informed account of the popular uprisings that have emerged across the Middle East in recent years. … [T]his book is a powerful testament to the new generation of activists who continue to seek long-term revolutionary change in the region. Adam Hanieh, author of Money, Markets, and Monarchies: The Gulf Cooperation Council and the Political Economy of the Contemporary Middle East (CUP 2018).
Last year a wave of militant protests spread across North Africa and West Asia, in a sustained, historic series of popular struggles. Emma Wilde Botta reviews A Region in Revolt: Mapping the Recent Uprisings in North Africa and West Asia edited by Jade Saab. A Region in Revolt: Mapping the Recent Uprisings in North Africa and West Asia edited by Jade Saab is the first and, to my knowledge, only comprehensive review of the uprisings that took place in Algeria, Sudan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran. Each chapter is written by activist-scholars from the respective country who provide an overview of each country’s specific political and economic conditions. They show that, far from being ahistoric spontaneous events, the 2019 uprisings built upon past struggles, by tracing the legacies of resistance in each country and showing how they have impacted the newly emerged movements.
A Region in Revolt captures all of the hope and inspiration of the 2019 uprisings. One of the most significant achievements of these movements is that, in the words of Hamouchene and Oumari, ‘people discovered their political will and realised they are in control of their own destiny.’ These were undeniably class revolts, fueled by anger over poverty, unemployment, austerity, and corruption. Yet, the people in the streets largely imagined themselves as citizens. The challenges of how to bring people into motion as workers, how to develop independent working-class organizations, and how to develop a political alternative to capitalism continue to be pressing. The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown another obstacle in the way. But there is no doubt that future struggles are on the horizon. A Region in Revolt helps us answer the question of what we can do now to prepare for them. —Emma Wilde Botta is socialist activist and writer based in Oakland, California. She has written extensively on the Arab Spring, the Gulf States, Iran, and US imperialism. Her writing has appeared in TruthOut, the International Socialist Review, roape.net and Socialist Worker.
United we stand: anatomy of five revolutions: Mike Phipps reviews A Region in revolt: Mapping the recent uprisings in North Africa and West Asia, edited by Jade Saab, published by Daraja Press (Ottawa) & TNI (Amsterdam): We are nearly ten years on from the Arab Spring, a series of uprisings across the Middle East. When it began, argues Jade Saab in this important new book, it “was presented to the world through an orientalist lens… the awakening of the backwards Arab world.” For the west, it provided retroactive justification for the invasion of Iraq: “All democracy in the region needed was a nudge in the form of an illegal invasion and a million dead civilians.” This narrative allowed reactionary regimes in the region to paint the uprisings as western plots to destabilise their countries. Both these interpretations were bolstered by military interventions in Libya, Syria and Yemen. These military interventions upped the stakes considerably for any nascent popular uprising. If movements called for the fall of the regime, the regime could respond: “Do you want to become another Syria?” Yet the uprisings continued, and it is not too hyperbolic to refer to the last couple of years as a Second Arab Spring. This second wave is the focus of this book. The demands raised by these uprisings go beyond a change of political leadership: they call for a fundamental restructuring of society. The countries in question share similar political economies with an emphasis on extractivism and speculative investment. The spoils of these activities bypass ordinary people, fuelling the migration of skilled labour out of the region and massive rates of unemployment, especially among young people. They also share a common problem: “Debilitating national debt means that foreign finance has a vested interest in maintaining ‘stability’ in the region.” So unlike during the 2011 Arab Spring, “Western nations have refused to withdraw support from the various ruling classes in the region even though the intensity of protests has reached similar levels.” …
A Region in Revolt Edited by Jade Saab, Daraja Press If you’ve enjoyed [RED PEPPER’s] analysis of the ‘second wave’ of uprisings across some of North Africa and West Asia, then this book is a timely exploration of ground uncovered. Looking across Algeria, Sudan, Lebanon, Iran and Iraq, this collection of essays draws out the similarities and differences of the movements that are demanding radical social change under authoritarian regimes. One of the few books to explore the second wave of revolt, it is a fitting testament to a new generation of activists and their ongoing struggle for revolutionary change. RED PEPPER Winter 2020.
J Rose
“Tariq Mehmood has written a powerful tale and his voice in the current political climate is important. Through a strong sense of the spoken word, an under-heard narrative gains momentum. This book is pure entertainment but it is also a cautionary tale. A question embedded in a Song. What happens when people are ignored and suppressed for too long? Where does that energy go? It is the reader’s gain that this particular writer has put his own spark into Song for Gulzarina.”
https://muscattales.com/2016/11/21/speaking-in-bombs-book-review-song-of-gulzarina-by-tariq-mehmood/
Daraja Press
Abeera Khan: Kohl: a Journal for Body and Gender Research, Vol. 2, no. 2, Winter 2016
A novel centred on a Pakistani immigrant’s plan to commit a suicide bombing in Manchester, England, in the wake of the War on Afghanistan, can easily be read as a familiar post-9/11 tragedy. We can assume it is a story of radicalisation, where a character reaches his breaking point in response to a series of unfortunate and unjust geopolitical events. On the outset, then, Tariq Mehmood’s Song of Gulzarina may seem like a predictable political commentary-cum-fable warning against the constraints of ideology and the violence of imperialism. However, it is both the author’s and the characters’ acute self-awareness of the familiarity of the plot, and their insistence on stressing the nuances of Saleem’s journey rather than the gravity of its end, that make for a compelling read.
[…]
Reading Song of Gulzarina as a calamitous tale of vengeance would be an easy interpretation, but it would not do the novel justice. Saleem is advised against his planned suicide bombing by an acquaintance who once similarly sought retribution: “But that peace only lasted the night of my sleep, the pain never stopped in the day. Your pain will never go, no matter what you do” (212). Later in his life, during a tense conversation with his estranged daughter, Saleem echoes this advice to her: “There is us and our past, daughter. This pain will just keep us here” (194). Saleem understands the futility of vengeance for a tragedy-ridden past, yet he still continues to plan the suicide bombing. Saleem’s mission, then, can be simultaneously understood as a broken man’s final attempt to violently confront the systems that have failed him, and a regretful man’s hopeful attempt at redemption for his shortcomings by orchestrating his own end.
http://kohljournal.org/song-of-gulzarina/
Daraja Press
Song of Gulzarina is a highly impressionable book, for it speaks directly and powerfully to the humanness of the reader. Song Of Gulzarina is an absolute worthy read. Lema Abeng-Nsah, Dunia: The Reader’s Magazine
Daraja Press
‘Tariq Mehmood’s Song of Gulzarina (Daraja Press) is a highly involving novel which looks at the life of Saleem Khan, who migrates from Pakistan to Bradford in the 1960s full of expectation and ends up contemplating suicide bombing in 21st century Manchester. The novel ranges between the north of England, where it follows acutely the different sorts of racism confronting Pakistanis, and Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the effects of war and imperialism are never far away. Mehmood deals with some of the really big questions of our time – race, class, oppression, empire and war – through the eyes of a failed father and lover who nonetheless gains our sympathies. The scenes from Afghanistan during the war with Russia are particularly vivid, and show the Mujadeen and Americans working together; later bombing, this time by Nato, helps to explain the bitter opposition to the west which has led to the growth in terrorism in our century.’
Lindsey German in Counterfire
Daraja Press
Claire Chambers, Huffington Post Mehmood is unswerving in his depiction of the racism that existed in Yorkshire mills in the 1970s as well as today’s virulent Islamophobia. After 9/11, a neighbour slams the door on Song of Gulzarina‘s Saleem with the words, ‘When are you lot going to bomb us then, eh?’ Despite the humiliation he suffers at the hands of many white Britons and his eviscerating hatred for Tony Blair, Saleem maintains a lifelong love for Carol, the daughter of his racist employer. … Mehmood’s novel is polemical and full of black humour
Daraja Press
5.0 out of 5 stars That rare breed – an entertaining political novel., 1 Mar. 2017
By Amazon Customer
This review is from: Song of Gulzarina (Paperback)
Political novels that are entertaining as well as thought provoking are a real rarity, but Tariq Mehmood has managed the trick here. The language is deceptively simple but in the telling of the story there are is a great deal of insight to be gained into an area of modern life in the UK that many of us see all around us, but never have access to – the life and loves of a Pakistani “Abroadi.”
This is a novel about alienation and identity, about a man caught between who he is, who he was, and who he wants to be. Saleem Khan leaves his village in Pakistan, his family and the girl he loves, to travel to the UK in order to make money to send home. Once away, he rapidly forgets his roots and becomes embroiled in life in Bradford at the end of the industrial era in the UK, but is unable to to either shed his past or fully embrace his new life. It’s the story of a weak man, always caught between his desires, his loves, the traditions from which he came and the life he is living now. In the course of his life, he wanders from one aspect of modern Pakistani life to the next, taking in leftist politics and trade unionism in the eighties, racial politics, the Taliban and radical Islam in both the UK and abroad. He falls in love with an English woman without ever falling out of love with his old girlfriend, and in doing so alienates himself from both. One after the other he looses or betrays all the things he loves and cares for, including, crucially, the respect of his only daughter.
It’s a convincing story, well told, that brings the reader in contact with elements of the life of a Pakistani Abroadi, that, for this white reader at least, I’d be otherwise unlikely to make contact with. That it manages to do this with conviction and still manages to be entertaining, is a credit to the skill of its author. Tariq Mumood has created a marvellous character in Saleem Khan, who is at once passionate and weak, romantic and cynical, loving and selfish, who looses his principles at the puff of a breeze, but who tells his story with unwavering honesty. His is a journey from naivety to cynicism, in which he never looses his visions of love, even though he is too weak to fulfil any of them. Very much to be recommended!
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Song-Gulzarina-Tariq-Mehmood/dp/0995222355/ref=cm_rdp_product
Daraja Press
5.0 out of 5 stars: This writer has a gift for witty dialogue, switching between registers with pitch perfect precision
By Muscat Tales
Tariq Mehmood has written a powerful tale and his voice in the current political climate is important. Through a strong sense of the spoken word, an under-heard narrative gains momentum. This book is pure entertainment but it is also a cautionary tale. A question embedded in a Song. What happens when people are ignored and suppressed for too long? Where does that energy go? It is the reader’s gain that this particular writer has put his own spark into Song for Gulzarina.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Song-Gulzarina-Tariq-Mehmood/dp/0995222355/ref=cm_rdp_product
Daraja Press
5.0 out of 5 stars: Powerfully gripping and humorous novel that remains mysterious at the same time whilst current issues in the world!
By Matloub Husayn-Ali-Khan on 9 Feb. 2017
I was given a complimentary copy of this very powerful novel Tariq Mehmood entitled: “Song of Gulzarina” and which had taken the author 10 years to complete and in the present political climate the narrative written – not usually heard by the reader. The story encapsulated within the novel and leaves a question mark on the many situations in which people are ignored and suppressed for a long-time – or that lid is lifted and which releases that pent-up anger and resentment.The story revolves around the main character Saleem Khan a Pakistani migrant who leaves his home, his job as a teacher and his woman in rural Pakistan and settles in Bradford, England and the story line also flits between North West of England and Pakistan.
Very early on, as the story progresses – Saleem Khan gains employment at a textile mill in Yorkshire and gets involved in fighting for Asian workers right in the form of requesting better sanitary facilities. As usual, racism rears its ugly head and a white British manager Mr Anderson reacts to an incident related to the issue of unsuitable toilets and he (Mr Anderson) racially belittles the Asian workers:
“….you filthy Paki bastards always sticking together’ Mr Anderson picked up another pipe and hit Salamat Ali Teka across the face!…’’
The rest of the plot I could relate to and this was due to having similar shared experiences to the author and when he (Tariq Mehmood) wrote his first novel ‘Hand on the sun’ that also had a romantic twist in it. So, once again, love featured here in this novel as well and this time two relationships one with a lower caste woman (Yasmin) back in Saleem’s village in Pakistan and in England Saleem fall for Carol Anderson, the daughter of his boss. Both women are committed to him but Saleem ‘is committed to the cause’ and not personal and family ties or needs which both of his love interests reflect.
Spoiler alert:
Half way through the story, the metaphoric build up takes Saleem Khan back to Pakistan during the late 1980s…during the final years of General Zia’s rule and his sudden death in a mysterious Pakistan military plane crash over Bahawalpur in August 1988. The story line builds up to the carnage of the real-life Ohjri munitions dump disaster in Rawalpindi in April 1988 and his fictitious involvement with a group of US backed Mujhadeen in a fight with a camp of soviet soldiers in the Afghan mountains. Here Saleem is clearly unprepared for this precariously dangerous situation which could have easily got him and his cousin Habib killed.The stage is then set, as the jigsaw pieces of the novel come together and the essence of the book title that is encapsulated by: “Song of Gulzarina” – a sort of ‘beautiful mysterious character’ that opens up some of the pre-conceived notions of not just wars, airstrikes and landmines. But it is really about actual humanity and profound sense of spirituality and the precursor of his (Saleem’s) redemption after suffering from many tragedies including loss of his cousin Habib, Yasmin, Carol, Gulzarina’s son Habib Junior and the partial estrangement from his daughter Aisha and Saleem’s ultimate revenge through a planned suicide.
Whilst back in England, Carol Anderson, who is fully aware, of the role of the ‘goree’ mistress she finds herself playing. At page 56: Carol confronts Saleem and lays into him:
“…so you think I wouldn’t understand, eh? So you think your white bit doesn’t understand you lot, eh… and marry your village virgins, isn’t that it?…”
The novel also brings out the issue of alcoholism and love and death as part of the narrative and the usual tragedies associated with it.
The third woman in Saleem’s life is his daughter Aisha and who suffers from racial and Islamaphobic abuse from white men in a passing car and the Muslim youth outside the mosque book stall is stood there and virtually without batting an eyelid – Saleem lays into them: “How can you just carry on selling books? I ask the bearded youth, pointing a shaking finger, you ‘saw what they did to your sisters’. The youth replies: ‘all will be taken care of in the hereafter ‘- view which ignores traditional Islamic belief (which highlights the importance of balance of both – this world – Duniya, earthly matters and deny spiritual matters focussing on the next life and instead of helping his Muslim sister; uses fundamentalist religious rhetoric to do nothing is pivotal moment in the book for me personally.
The story line in the novel keeps us in suspense as Saleem Khan wanders around Longsight/Rusholme Wilmslow Road areas in the state to activate the mobile phone at any moment. There are no prizes for guessing on who is visiting Manchester and addressing a Labour party meeting at the G.Mex centre – the architect of the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and in this final ending in the book shows the woman character confronts the architect of the invasion and whose son fought in Iraq and came back with loss of his arms. “You sent my son to Iraq on a lie, you bastard! You sent him on lie and he came back like this”. Finally, the woman say: “He’s a murderer and a liar”.
In the final paragraphs of the book, Saleem remembers the story when he was a child and the snake and ‘he was urgently warned to move away. As he walks, in the present tense, through Rusholme with explosives strapped to his chest, he remembers his mother telling him of how casually he played with a snake. Hence, adults were afraid of such creatures and not adults.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Song-Gulzarina-Tariq-Mehmood/dp/0995222355/ref=cm_rdp_product
Daraja Press
5.0 out of 5 stars: A must read
By Amanda on 1 Mar. 2017
This is a powerful and moving novel that makes a poetic comment on our time, pointing us to reflect on global dynamics and how these relate to our own lives.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Song-Gulzarina-Tariq-Mehmood/dp/0995222355/ref=cm_rdp_product
Daraja Press
by Helen Goodway
“TARIQ Mehmood’s novel The Song of Gulzarina is multi-layered and beautifully written, covering the period from 1940 to 2006 to the present and is set in Pakistan, Afghanistan and England…. Tariq Mehmood is a master of conjuring up pictures and atmospheres in words. The plenitude and veracity of the detail, be it in the ancestral village, migrant workers’ lodgings in Bradford, the mill, the claustrophobic office of cousin Habib’s Goods Forwarding Agency in Rawalpindi, the Tora Bora caves of Afghanistan, the streets of Manchester. It’s all there and we are there with Saleem. The culmination of the novel includes reconciliations with Carol, Saleem’s great love, and with Aisha, his beloved but conflicted daughter. But there’s a sting in the tail.”
http://www.thetelegraphandargus.co.uk/lifestyle/taleisurebook/15365394.Themes_of_migration_and_radicalisation_under_discussion_at_Bradford_Literature_Festival/?ref=erec
Daraja Press
Changiz M. Varzi Fighting warplanes with words
Tariq Mehmood′s latest novel ″Song of Gulzarina″ is an arresting tale of love, loss and longing set against the backdrop of a never-ending war. In interview with Changiz M. Varzi, the award-winning author addresses issues of identity and how racism and Islamophobia can leave an indelible mark.
https://en.qantara.de/content/interview-with-british-pakistani-novelist-tariq-mehmood-fighting-warplanes-with-words
Daraja Press
Green Left Weekly: Song of Gulzarina, by British-Pakistani filmmaker and author Tariq Mehmood, stands out as a unique piece of literature that intertwines personal issues such as migration, identity crisis and romance, with the impact of racism, Islamophobia and Western imperialism in the Middle East.
https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/song-gulzarina-racism-imperialist-and-terror-converge-pakistani-migrants-tale
Daraja Press
Song of Gulzarina is an engrossing, impassioned and thought-provoking novel touching on some central themes of our times. I think it is Tariq Mehmood’s finest work to date and I thoroughly recommend it.
Esme Choonara in Socialist Review