Bedouin nostalgia syndrome

  After every Arab defeat, a kind of culture was born based on invoking wonders and miracles and the return of prophets who would work to defeat the enemy, Whoever supports God, God will support him, and the proof of that is his support for the believers in their conquests, It is as if the victory of the invading occupiers was limited to the believers, Hulaku won and the Bedouin won without faith, since when the Bedouin began to conquer, they had no religion, and reciting the two testimonies was nothing but an expression of a formal, deceitful, verbal, hypocritical faith, Most of those who recited the two testimonies apostatized from the religion after the death of Ibn Abdullah, and as a result, there were the Wars of Apostasy, which claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people, The fighting between religious groups continued later, and those wars were no less fierce than the Wars of Apostasy.

Continued conflict means continued failure, and continued failure has led to collective psychological distress, Now, psychiatry recognizes a condition called nostalgia syndrome, which is a longing for the past, justified by the assumption that this past was glorious, The idea is that simply returning to it, its methods, and practices is enough to revive that glory, However, that past was not glorious, and even assuming it was is not enough to simply transfer it to the present and achieve glory. Reaching glory requires means, and using the methods of the past in the present means implanting the past in the present, For example, relying on camels for transportation and using camel urine for medicinal purposes will not cure illness, Similarly, using the sword in wars and other such tactics will only conjure up backwardness and, consequently, the antithesis of past glories,It is with this objective that a party was named Ba’ath, meaning the revival of the past, Undoubtedly, some have limited the transfer of “glory” to the product itself, rather than to the use of past methods. However, the vast majority have not limited the transfer to achieving glory alone, but rather to using the methods of the past, which produce nothing more than a carbon copy of that originally miserable past. Reusing its methods in the present will produce a situation even more miserable than that of the past.

  Psychiatry has given the phenomenon of longing for the past and the attempt to reproduce it the name of nostalgia syndrome, which oppressive authoritarian systems have worked to expand its spread, that is, to expand the spread of the psychological illness generally characterized by the madness of longing for the primitive past, Oppressive authoritarian systems have an interest in the spread of all kinds of madness because popular madness helps these systems to continue their exploitative political and material existence, Then these systems save themselves the trouble of reviewing their programs, which reality has proven to be overtaken by time and are no longer valid except to be thrown into the garbage heaps of history, which refuses continuous “mummification” and transformation into an idol, The solution, according to the desire of those systems, is to afflict everyone with the pandemic of nostalgia, which represents a barrier to progress, a gallows for minds, a den of the vermin of decay, and a denial of modernity, which cannot exist in the folds of the past, especially that past, which in its time was also as barren as the desert in which it was found.

In practice, progress can be born from the womb of defeat, as has happened in many societies, However, progress cannot coexist with authoritarian rule, Therefore, authoritarian regimes strive to thwart any progress, thus ensuring that the governed remain in a state of nostalgia—a nostalgia that is preferable to backwardness and worse than progress, and one that is comfortable for despotic authoritarianism, This has occurred not only through civilian authoritarian oppression, such as the military, but also through the partnership and active support of religious institutions,These institutions sometimes allied themselves with the military to share the spoils, and at other times fought fiercely with the military for the same spoils, What united religious institutions and their leaders with military despotism was the distribution of the spoils, and what strained their relationship was the disagreement over these shares, This state of exploitation and domination by the military-religion duo has fostered a deep-seated addiction to backwardness in people’s minds, This backwardness manifests as stagnation, sterility, and a rejection of modernity, All of this is achieved through clinging to the past and yearning for it—what is called nostalgia.