At the start of this year, Sultan al-Qassemi's Twitter account @SultanAlQassemi had around 7,000 followers. Now it has 70,000. The reason why can be summed up in two words: Tunisia, Egypt.

It was Qassemi's rapid translation of Arab language news into English that won him a gobal audience during the uprisings that convulsed the Middle East and North Africa.

Glued to his keyboard and TV screen at his base in Sharjah, @SultanAlQassemi rapidly became a authoratative voice, tweeting by his own account once every 45 seconds at some points.

"For three weeks straight, I wasn't eating, I wasn't sleeping," says Qassemi of the height of the uprisings. "I don't think I had a proper lunch or dinner in that time."



That devotion to spreading the news continued at a wedding Qassemi was obliged to attend, with the Mubarak regime in its final throes. Not wanting to miss the denouement, Qassemi armed himself with portable broadband and discrete headphones, and found himself greeting guests with news headlines: "Welcome, ah, Egyptian police fire on protesters!"

Aspen Ideas Festival logo

Journalists and others trying to follow the fast-moving events in the region began retweeting Qassemi's efforts, and the cascade of new followers arrived. Soon, Time would name him in the magazine's list of the 140 best Twitter feeds.

"This will sound vain but I find there's a lot of people I influenced positively," Qassemi says. "Wherever I go, people come up to me and say, I have been following you and you helped me to understand."

Later, he qualifies his role: "I felt, in a tiny, miniscule way, that I contributed – among with many, many other people – to what happened."

On the now hoary question of the role of social media in the uprisings, Qassemi says that Facebook, Twitter and other forms of digital media helped make protests and uprisings happen "more efficiently":

I think that the revolutions would have happened anyway but I think social media was a tool, a mobiliser, a conduit, that people found each other through.

"For me, the most moving, the most powerful protest was the silent protests in 2010 in Alexandria," says Qassemi. There, with the Mubarak regime at the height of its power, social media enabled protesters to skillfully organise, urging protesters to wear black and spread out along the Corniche so police could not arrest them for illegally demonstrating. "But they could see each other," says Qassemi, "they knew why they were there, and so did everyone else."

For the record: Qassemi is not a Syrian lesbian or even a middle-aged American living in Edinburgh. A fellow at the Aspen Ideas Festival, the slim, hyperactive 33-year-old describes himself as a freelance columnist, rather than a journalist, who studied at the American University in Paris from the age of 16. And yes, his first name is Sultan.

He ascribes his popularity to his tweeting in English, and to his matter-of-fact approach:

I don't put much opinion in my tweets, I put them in my articles. So people are often surprised when they read my articles, and say things like 'I thought you agreed with me that Shia are peasants' or whatever.

After the successful conclusions in Egypt and Tunisia – which he fondly calls "the perfect revolution, it was clean, there was no outside intervention, no sectarianism" – Qassemi said he found it harder to keep up with the rash of uprisings.

After Egypt, all the other revolutions started, in every single country in the region… I couldn't cover all of them, as a one man machine. So suddenly people started judging me, saying 'You didn't cover Syria, is that because the Syrian regime is paying you?'

Syria isn't paying – Qassemi has a host of other business interests outside journalism – and the Sharjah authorities appear to have little interest in his Twitter output.

While Qassemi's frantic pace has slackened, the turmoil isn't going away: "I think the Arab spring is going to continue into 2012. The Saudi women driving, that's the Arab spring."

Once Egypt and Tunisia emerge as democracies, Qassemi believes the uprisings in the region will be even more powerful.

I'm only interested in two countries in the region now: Egypt and Saudi Arabia – and I even include countries like Turkey or Iran or Israel. If Saudi [Arabia] changes, then everything changes. If Saudi empowers women, the rest of the region empowers women. It's a multiplier effect. Saudi is on the cusp of major change – and it has nothing to do with people marching in the streets.

He foresees several, rapid changes in the Saudi head of state (through old age, presumably), and has faith in the 150,000 young Saudi citizens studying at universities overseas – many of them women, many in the US – taking up the cause of reform in the kingdom when they return: