Syriano, Mufid Bitar: 

     It is rare to find societies in this era as attached to their past as is the case with Arab groups, where the essence of the past holds the essence of the present and determines the shape and features of the future. Here, the dead sit upon the living, drawing their path and determining the nature of their ambitions and their future.

  Despite the tremendous scientific progress and intensive communication between peoples thanks to modern technologies, it seems that the Arabists have decided to close themselves off and withdraw from history and be content with what was produced in the past, despite the poor quality of what was made in this past. The Arabists are not concerned with making the present and the future, but rather with remaining in the swamp of stagnation and surrendering to cultures that were backward in their historical context, and whose relative backwardness increases with time despite some appearances of modernization, which does not mean modernity, because modernization is bought with money, and the money in this region is oil, which the Arabs did not make, they did not even discover it or extract it from the depths of the earth, while modernity is not bought, but is made in the mind and thought.

  The Arab reality can be described as a type of culture that resides in the past, that is, it is backward-looking. This backward-looking culture has features, causes, consequences, and manifestations. The causes are not innate and are not related to any special membership of the person called an Arab (the Arabs are only the inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula). This person was born like others, but the circumstances of his life are different from the circumstances of the life of others. Some of the circumstances are geographical, such as his presence in the desert, which he cannot change and which can change him. That is, by virtue of the overwhelming circumstances of the desert, he must practice submission to it. 

 1440 years ago, a religion was born with a desert model, expressed in the phrase “Submit and you will be safe.” Just as the desert resists change, this religion was also bound to resist change and development. Hence, it was labeled “sacred.” The attribute of the sacred is inherently resistant to reform and development. Preventing reform and development requires neutralizing or paralyzing reason, treating it as superfluous and unnecessary—that is, rendering it absent or imprisoned. Logically, then, reason is guarded in its prison by unreason to prevent it from escaping, metaphorically speaking, from liberation. Unreason signifies superstition, blind faith, dogmatism, the unseen, myths, and living outside of time. The unreasoning mind refuses to bear responsibility for the miserable conditions it has created. Therefore, a scapegoat must be found: the conspiracy, supposedly born from the West and Western interests. As if it were shameful for a person to have interests to defend. Why, then, were there conquests? And what about the… Do the conquests have a real connection to spreading the faith or to war spoils?

The irrationality that produces mysticism has produced dogmatism and schizophrenia, and has become hostile to science and materialism. Hostility to science and materialism means hostility to those who possess science and materialism, which manifested itself in the massacre of the vast majority of scientists 14 centuries ago. These scientists came from the Persian colony, which possessed a highly advanced civilization, vastly different from the decadent Bedouin culture of the Arabian Peninsula. The massacre of Persian scientists, within the framework of rejecting science, had backgrounds and motives no different from the mechanisms and motives that thwarted the modernization project in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The pioneers of the renaissance at that time tried to break the cycle of flawed traditionalism inherited from a flawed past by promoting new Western methods of critically engaging with sacred texts, aiming to break free from the caves of the Stone Age and overcome stagnation. However, they failed for many reasons, including the inability of the religious desert to engage with their ideas and endeavors, and their subsequent accusations of heresy and deviation from the text, which was deemed to be infallible. Among them were Muhammad Abduh, Taha Hussein, and others. The attempt lost the battle of civilization, but rationality regained some of its strength, especially during the First World War and immediately after the elimination of the Ottoman Sultanate and the establishment of many Sykes-Picot states. These states had many elements of success, which began to decline immediately after their birth, especially after 1928. The result was what we see now in the Sykes-Picot states, which are floundering in the quagmire of despotism and moving from one backwardness to another, and from a criminal primitiveness to a criminal religious nomadism. All of this can only be explained by the obsession with staying in the miserable past, which has obscured the vision of the world’s developments and keeping up with these developments, despite the fact that these developments and changes have managed to penetrate the private lives of many people in the Levant, especially in Syria and Lebanon, without permission.

 Unthinkable things are happening in the 21st century. For example, the rule of the mullahs in Iran, the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Nusra Front in Syria, alongside kings and princes, have proven their superiority over so-called republicans. It’s a strange and astonishing phenomenon that we never expected. We never expected a president to be a hereditary monarch, so eager to revive the past, like the Ba’athists and the Muslim Brotherhood, for example. Why this insistence on reviving the past, this parasitism towards it? What benefit is there in that past, which prevailed for 1440 years and was primitive, degenerate, criminal, tribal, bloody (the Red River), thieving, enslaving, and lying about spreading religion? Why should religion be spread by the sword? Can conquest continue as a way of life? Do the ethics of conquest deserve to be preserved, revived, or revitalized? Is a renaissance possible after the invasion has completed the human destruction of the invaders, curbed their development, and shattered their morals and progress, due to their reliance on tribute, plunder, and war spoils to finance their lives and needs? And in light of the deception of the culture of death, cloaked in the culture of jihad and the culture of martyrdom, for the sake of spending a illusory life in paradise between the thighs and vaginas of hundreds of virgin houris? The superstitious religion that embraced all of that must answer all of those questions, and provide a single proof of the truth of what it promised and what it destroyed in reality, the lives of the mujahideen and the lives of the oppressed among their victims at the same time.

 The life of jihad and martyrdom, reliance on the mystical realm of paradise and its houris, the myth of God’s victory for the believers, and the concepts of predestination, fatalistic faith, and rigid dogmas that hinder progress, all led to the defeat of the modern project in this region. Paradise was a reality within modernity, not in the seventh heaven. Instead of intensifying efforts to revive and embrace modernity on earth, there was a kind of entrenchment of addiction to backwardness, manifested in a tendency towards increased worship and subservience, and a growing presence of superstition, myths, and the unseen. In short, the era of Ibn Abdullah returned, and the concepts of paradise, hell, martyrdom, and takbir prevailed. Hordes of madness marched towards the seats of power to occupy them and transform the concept of the state or nation into a province or caliphate, not in service to the nation but to religion. Misguidance became synonymous with enlightenment, and misguidance became a crime in a religious state that considers the citizen a servant of religion, not of the nation, which it harbors as much enmity as it harbors enmity towards idols. Therefore, national education was removed from the curriculum. The teaching, because what unites the people of a country in this region is religion, not the homeland. And what are non-Muslim Sunnis doing in these countries? Here we return to the phrase mentioned at the beginning of the article, “Convert to Islam and you will be safe,” or emigrate!!! And those who believe that the homeland unites, not religion, have emigrated.

  The defeats suffered by the Arab modernization project militarily, politically, and economically led to the birth of frustration and despair among broad segments of those peoples. Everywhere defeats are born, a turn towards Sufism, the dominance of the unseen, a return to the past, and the mythologizing of it for what it represented in terms of glory, pride, and false dignity is born. After every defeat, a kind of culture is born based on invoking wonders and miracles and the return of prophets and saints who will work to defeat the enemy, as an alternative to self-criticism and reading the reasons for the defeats of the Arabists. The escape into the world of the unseen and superstitions prevented the peoples from holding the existing authorities accountable for what befell society as a result of their policies.

These existing political systems encourage a return to the past and its culture by offering a mystical explanation for their defeats and preventing questioning of their policies. Defeats could not generate a new renaissance trend because the forces of such a project have atrophied, weakened, and large parts of them have been annihilated under the weight of authoritarian oppression. Added to this is the inability of these forces to review their programs, which reality has shown to be outdated and fit only for library shelves. There is no benefit in the continuous embalming of history and turning it into a set of idols. The peoples of this region need to critique their present, which is in reality their past. They need to abolish the inherited and make way for progress by dismantling the prevailing concepts, perceptions, and ossified customs that have persisted for centuries and stifle minds. The project of modernity is linked to a huge number of necessities, obstacles, and capabilities. We do not see these capabilities in this era, as if the peoples are afflicted with sterility and stagnation at the same time. We see the opposite: a kind of addiction to backwardness and a passion for dwelling in the past. Which represents a voluntary suicide!