Islamabad: The Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) will hold a special lecture on “The Arab Spring Two Years On, and the Destruction of Gaza: Results, Prospects, Consequences?” on Monday 24 December. Senator Mushahid Hussain Syed, Secretary General, PML-Q would chair the function.

The other key speakers of the seminar were included, Mr Raza Naeem, Literary Critic and Lecturer of ‘Education and Sustainable Development’, Beacon house National University (BNU), Lahore
The lecture elaborates upon the historical and political context of successful peoples’ uprisings in Tunis, Cairo and Sana’a and its reverberations throughout the region, including, Palestine, Iran, Lebanon as well as the greater Middle East (Syria and Bahrain) & North Africa (Libya).

It would discuss that how this situation may affect Pakistan and Turkey, though that can also be addressed in the Question & Answer session following the lecture. The historical context will take the story from the heydays of Arab nationalism in the 1950s and 1960s under the charismatic Egyptian leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and his confronting actions with both US and French imperialism, as well as Israeli expansionism.

The speaker will be talking about history of uprisings in Egypt and the region (specifically Yemen), which belie Orientalist conceptions of Arab world as some kind of wonderland where people have no agency, therefore the need to be ‘emancipated’ by the West. The talk will also challenge stereotypes of the region which paint it as being dominated solely by Islamist sensibilities, in the context of the West’s funding and encouragement of Islamic fundamentalist organizations against Nasserist and communist parties throughout the 1950s and 1960s, thus giving rise to the growth of Islamism. Speaker would also present some revolutionary Arab poetry on resistance, especially now in the light of events in Cairo, Tunis, Sana’a and Tripoli.