Arab Spring Memoirs: Memoirs of Ibrahim Abdel Meguid and Abdul-Rahman Yusuf as case studies

Early in 2011, the Arab world witnessed widespread protests against dictator regimes which had been ruling over the people there for many decades; this came to be known as ‘Arab Spring’. This anti-dictatorship wave had different names in the Arab world; mainly the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia and January 25th Revolution in Egypt. This huge event ushered the emergence and the prevailing of a new literary genre in the Arab world, diaries/memories. In this paper, we will survey the memoirs of two prominent Egyptian men of letters, Ibrahim Abdel Meguid and Abdul Rahman Yusuf. We will refer to the different narrative techniques and the type of discourse employed by the authors. We will also examine the role they gave to their narrators and how this influenced the way in which the memoirs were presented to the readers.