Monsoon Revolution
▻http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/23468/monsoon-revolution
Abdel Razzaq Takriti’s excellent book will quickly be established as the definitive account of the revolutionary Arab nationalist and third worldist armed struggle in Dhufar, waged against the absolutist sultan of Oman and the British Empire from 1965 to 1976. While this movement has been treated before, such as in Fred Halliday’s Arabia without Sultans, this work draws with considerable maturity and skill on British colonial documents, Arab personal collections, unpublished papers, and interviews, and as such offers unprecedented empirical depth. Takriti’s polished prose illuminates much that was unclear or misunderstood about the revolutionary movement itself, its major organizational changes and strategies, its revolutionary culture, its forms of republicanism and citizenship, and especially its transnational links to the Arab nationalist movement and the third world. The author has certainly struck a blow against the “enormous condescension of posterity” in regard to the Dhufari armed struggle, insisting on the revolutionary nature of the movement, which for ten years sustained a republican and socialist struggle that opposed not only colonial rule, but also forms of absolutist, feudal, capitalist, and, in some senses, masculine domination. Demonstrating the inadequacy of top-down renderings of Omani history, the book successfully extracts the memory of the movement from “imprisonment” in “colonial accounts, counterinsurgency studies, [and] official histories.”
Une référence à noter pour ceux qui, comme moi, ont adoré Warda, de Sonnallah Ibrahim, où cette dimension transnationale de la révolution socialiste est magnifiquement illustrée, et où cette icône d’un féminisme arabe finit, comme Rosa Luxemburg, trahie par les siens qui se tourne vers le Sultan Qabbous.