Once again about the nation I write
Dr. Abdullah bin Musa Al Tayer
I return once again to the paths of three romantic entities: the Arab nation, the Islamic nation, and the Middle East. Let us take the issue in its historical sequence. Since after World War I, Arab nationalists have sought to unify the “Arab nation” on the ruins of the Ottoman and British empires, justifying themselves by interfering in the affairs of independent Arab states. Gamal Abdel Nasser carried the banner of Arab nationalism, achieving unity with Syria, and launching sabotage campaigns against what he called “reactionary” states. », and he got involved in Yemen, until a setback in 1967 forced him to abandon his ambitions. However, the great ambitions of Syria among the Syrian rulers, especially Hafez al-Assad, did not stop as he sought to annex Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan.
Ultimately the national state survived, and Arab nationalism failed to achieve its goal of unifying the “nation” because this nation did not exist in reality, but was merely a political tool used by successive rulers and regimes in the Middle East to achieve their ambitions for regional control. The commonalities among the Arabic-speaking population of the Middle East, such as language and religion, were not sufficient to create a true sense of a comprehensive Arab identity. Islam is a global religion, and the Arabic language spread among non-Arab peoples, which reduced its connection to the exclusively Arab identity. Some researchers point out the absence of the role of unified historical development in forming a deep-rooted national feeling that could serve as a lever for the idea.
It is not a matter of denial or disparagement to say that the Hashemites had imperial ambitions with an Arab nationalist cover, taking advantage of the historical opportunity to build their empire on the ruins of Ottomanism, and worked to include diverse ethnic and religious groups, transcending the common language and religion. This Arab unionist trend continued in its romanticism until 1990 AD, when Baghdad justified the annexation of Kuwait as correcting a historical error and “returning the branch to the origin.”
Arab thinkers are biased toward the ancient peoples of the Fertile Crescent, such as the Canaanites, Amorites, and others, ignoring the peoples of the Arabian Peninsula, and ignoring clear historical facts, which are that these diverse peoples (Arabs, Canaanites, and Amorites) never formed a unified political entity, and the stories of the Ghassanids and Manathira dominate the pages of history books. Theorists like to Arab nationalism compared Gamal Abdel Nasser to Muhammad Ali Pasha, even though the latter did not speak Arabic. One of the contradictions in the Arabs’ quest for their imagined entity is that the philosophy upon which the League of Arab States was based in defending the Palestinian cause, as expressed by its first Secretary-General, relied on championing Arab heritage and rights. At the expense of the national rights of Palestinian Arabs, which made this issue a political tool to mobilize the Arab street and build a military effort to obscure the absence of local development.
The decline of the claim of Arab nationalism with the steadfastness of modern national governments, especially in the Gulf states, led to the Islamization of the Arab dream, so Khomeini came, relying on the past glory of Muslims as a justification for uniting Muslims into a nation. According to his understanding, the countries of the Middle East are completely illegitimate, and he called on their residents to overthrow their governments, which – as he says – were installed by the colonial West, calling his followers “the Islamic nation.” Since the regime in Iran is based on the guardianship of the jurist, its adherents see it as a sacred entity and the “essence of the nation,” stressing that “the Iranian revolution is not local, because Islam does not belong to any particular people… We will export our revolution to all parts of the world because it is a revolution.” Islamic,” and the preamble of the Iranian Constitution included that the Iranian army was entrusted with implementing divine rule throughout the world.
The Khomeini project was no better than Arab nationalism. It shocked the regional state. Most Sunnis rejected the project as Twelver Shiites. It did not convince all Shiites, let alone other Sunnis. In contrast to the leaders of Arab nationalism in Egypt, Syria, Libya and Iraq, the Guardianship of the Jurist regime turned around its failure by creating arms and armed militias that undermined the sovereignty of the modern national state in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Lebanon, and created for them an entertainment called resistance as a transitional stage before resuming the pursuit of the dream of the Islamic nation that In Iran, they want Tehran to be its center.
Let no one think that I belittle the status of the Arabs, or belittle the nation in Islam, but rather I point out that their use in the Arab nationalist context, and Shiite and Sunni political Islam, are nothing but political slogans to achieve political ambitions. Someone might say that I am forbidding for Arabs and Muslims what America did before, where 50 countries united in the United States of America, and Europe in the European Union. God forbid this is my intention, but there are local, utilitarian justifications upon which America has united, not just slogans, just as Europe created a model by the will of the national states and not by imposing it on them. The most promising model for modern unitary frameworks is the Cooperation Council, which has real ingredients to create a bloc with the will of fully independent national states.
