George Banna, Samir Sadek
There are ways to determine a person’s affiliation and identity, Affiliatio determined by place of birth and is not subject to will, Someone born in China is Chinese by affiliation, Identity, however, is something else entirely, Identity is a matter of choice; it is subject to the dictates of conviction, If someone is born in Egypt and wants their identity to be Indian, then their identity is Indian, but their birth affiliation is Egyptian. Similarly, someone who voluntarily lives in Syria and holds a Syrian identity card, in addition to accepting or choosing that Syrian identity, is Syrian, whether Arab nationalists and the Muslim Brotherhood like it or not.
Syria, as a state, is a Syrian state because its geography has been called Syria for thousands of years,Syria is not Arab, nor is it French or Indian, etc. Identity has nothing to do with the will of others, as if Arab nationalists and those who identify with Arabism can impose an Arab identity on others, Identity has nothing to do with lineage, ancestry, ethnicity, or historical roots. The choice of identity is entirely personal.
Julia Domna was a Syrian woman from the city of Homs, She is not known to have had any connection with the Arabs of the Arabian Peninsula; her relationship was with Rome, Several Roman emperors came from her family, meaning they were Roman citizens, None of this has anything to do with the Arabian Peninsula, She is like Zenobia, who was a queen in Palmyra, and Palmyra is located in Syria, Therefore, the Kingdom of Palmyra is Syrian, nothing more and nothing less.
America is American, France is French, Germany is German, Greece is Greek, Egypt is Egyptian, and so on, For example, there are 80 million Americans of German descent, These are Americans and they do not want Germany to occupy America, nor do they want America to be considered German, because they want to live as Americans and do not want to practice internal colonialism in America. In Syria, there is a group that wants Syria to be considered Arab, and this group does not do this for the sake of Shukri al-Quwatli or anyone else, but rather for the sake of Khalid ibn al-Walid, Umar ibn al-Khattab, and other such figures.
This Arabized group does this for well-known, self-serving political purposes,This group wants to colonize the country from within, as a continuation of the Arab Bedouin-Ottoman colonialism from without, This is, in reality, what the Arabists and Arabized groups did in conjunction with the Muslim Brotherhood in the last century.
There are those who want to impose an Arab identity on the Syrians, but many Syrians do not want this identity; in fact, they are ashamed of it. They do not want to be ruled by Arabs or Arabism, not because Arab rule is barbaric—which it is indeed!—but because their personal choice is to have a Syrian identity, There is no shame in the Syrian identity because it has contributed many positive things to humanity for long periods, Whoever looks at Syria will find the traces of a great civilization, Regardless of the prestigious status of Syrian material civilization, whose traces remain standing proudly to this day, there is human civilization, which is manifested in the creativity of the Syrians and their invention of the plow, the alphabet, and the wheel, Mentioning this has nothing to do with empty, morbid pride; it is history.
Some do not want the Arab identity, because this identity has brought nothing but humiliation: the humiliation of conquests, the humiliation of the culture of captives and spoils of war, the humiliation of the Bedouin concept of rights, the humiliation of subjugating many peoples by the sword, the humiliation of aggression against others, the humiliation of occupying Spain for seven or eight centuries, then the humiliation of turning east to India, occupying it, and killing its people, Killing is humiliation, and the slaughter of people in Iraq at the hands of Khalid ibn al-Walid is humiliation, What Ibn al-Aas did in Egypt is humiliation, similar to the humiliation of Uqba ibn Nafi and the humiliation of Saladin, Then the caliphs, from the first to the last, were humiliation, The colonization of Syria and then turning it into ruins for 1440 years, divided between the Arabs of the Peninsula and the Ottoman sultans, is humiliation, to the point that the League of Nations prohibited conquests with a resolution issued after the First World War.
We are amazed and say that it is not reasonable that the Caliphate and the Sultanate ruled these lands for 1440 years, without leaving a trace of a beautiful achievement such as the Bosra Theater in Syria or an irrigation canal in southern Syria with a length of 170 km and many others, There is no beautiful thing built in the last fourteen centuries, and we do not think that the Suleymaniye Tekke represents anything noteworthy, The Bedouin of the Jazira and the Bedouin of Anatolia did not build anything civilized even in the Jazira and in Anatolia because they were not civilized peoples like the Pharaohs of Egypt or the people of Mesopotamia or the Levant who invented writing, the plow and the wheel!