Arab Spring Revolutions throughout Modern Arabic Poetry

Abstract

One of the core dominant events, in the Middle East in 21th century, was Arab Spring revolutions in 2010-2011. These revolutions aimed to achieve democracy and get rid of the dictator regimes in the Arab countries. No doubt that Arab Spring had political social and economic reasonable and significant impacts. This paper will examine various reflections on the Arab revolutions of the Arab Spring (2010-2011) through modern Arab poetry, focusing on four selected poems as cases of study. In addition to the aimed historical reading, this paper attempts to analyse the selected poems focusing literary and poetic methods, as well as language and diction, comparing between them. For diversity, while all the selected poems are modern Arabic poetry, one of the selected poems is the neo-classic Arabic poetry of Ibrāhīm Obaydī, and the three others are free verse poetry from Ahmed Matar, Musʿab al-Mūrādī, and Ahmad Msāʿdih. Methodologically, this study is analytic, comparative and inductive, relying relevant poems of the selected four poets. This paper suggests not only that the Arab Spring played a significant historical role in the Middle East, leading to intensive civil and non-civil armed conflicts, but also, Modern Arab poetry contributes to historical documenting immortalizing the Arab Spring revolutions including their aims and motivations, as well as their social political and cultural impacts.