The familiar and common use of the term “religious thought” and the term “Arab nationalist thought” is a metaphorical use, The first is based on the supernatural myths that Gabriel conveyed, and the second on static myths that do not change or develop, such as the fixed and static demographic characteristic, which is based on past heritage features such as the unity of language and history and the similarity of customs and traditions, to the other features of Arab nationalism, Neither the supernatural needs human thought, because God thought and sent his thoughts with Gabriel to the messenger, nor does the static and unmoving need thought, so why do they think about the common language, the common history, and other ready-made fixed characteristics? In all these cases, they have bypassed the changing reality with the word “thought” of a fundamentalist sect or “Arab nationalist,” and have used the word to indicate what it does not indicate.
It is not surprising that the religious fundamentalist movement rose on the ruins of the nationalist movement, which itself only succeeded by rising on the ruins of the religious movement, The religious movement failed to market the liberation from colonialism; in fact, it promoted the principle of “acquiescence” to Ottoman colonialism in the early 20th century, while the Arab nationalist movement succeeded in this, albeit temporarily and relatively! It is expected that a new movement will rise again, perhaps nationalism once more, on the ruins of the religious movement that has been rising for some decades (the Awakening), after the certain failure of this religious movement to deal with the problems and issues of the people. A temporary and relative success for one movement on the ruins of the failure of another! And so the rotation continues in the flawed cycle. They all failed to offer a critical review of the conditions of the region between the Gulf and the Ocean. They all failed to create a new, productive ideology, and they succeeded in only one thing: thwarting social, economic, and political development for the better, each in their turn, and these roles usually last for decades!
Saddam Hussein and Hafez al-Assad collaborated in purging the Syrian and Iraqi atmosphere of all political culture, They seized control of the homelands and everything on them – people, trees, stones, and livestock – and proceeded to bequeath them to their children and grandchildren after them, as a pure and permissible inheritance! They crushed democratic forces and annihilated them completely, Now, their supporters from the Salafist political nationalist movement lament the lack of a wise and experienced political successor, Others lament the absence of an opposition capable of saving the country, But where can such an opposition sprout and grow in entities that have been politically desertified? That is, dried up to become barren and emasculated, unable to produce or give birth,And where will an opposition with sufficient experience to lead the country come from, after every opponent has been eliminated in prison, some dying, others physically and psychologically scarred?
They all killed and dragged those who disagreed with them, and erected statues of themselves on hills and mountains, except for Nasser, They all plundered the country’s material resources and amassed billions in foreign banks, also except for Nasser… perhaps because his death was premature, They all drummed and trumpeted for unity, but what they did was nothing but entrench fragmentation and separation, The Syrian military achieved the merger with Egypt, and the Unity, Freedom and Socialism Party broke the union with Egypt, then in 1970 it turned against the separatists to practice a more separatist policy, Then came the turn of the Iraqi-Syrian contradiction, Here wars broke out between the pioneers of unity, freedom and socialism, and each side sent terrorism and explosives to the other, They talked about their achievements in freedom, socialism and unity!! Even the blind could confirm that there was no freedom, no socialism and no unity in the lands of the unionist socialists.
They all practiced the clamor of nationalist slogans and clownish speeches that lasted for hours. They fought religious currents outwardly, not because of their distance from the religious approach, but because of their fear of the religious current licking the gains of power, In the year that Abdel Nasser executed Sayyid Qutb, Nasser included in the Egyptian constitution all the demands of the Muslim Brotherhood group, and Assad did nothing else, In practice, the attack on the fundamentalist current coincided with fulfilling the desires of the fundamentalist component of the Brotherhood, such as establishing Quran memorization schools and issuing a personal status law cut and tailored in the style of Sharia, All of this was done despite the existence of a law that punishes membership in the Muslim Brotherhood group by hanging until death according to Article 49 of the Penal Code.
The citizen never felt, at any point, any difference between the authority that calls itself secular and civil and the fundamentalist religious current in internal and external affairs. Externally, there was no example uglier than the Syrian example, where the authority had no friends left except the Iranian-Iraqi mullah, the Lebanese imam, and the Yemeni Houthi, all of them friends and allies of the “secular” Syrian!, who is no different from them except for his necktie and European suit! As for the former friend, Hamas, it had to leave and it left, then it returned like a flood of Al-Aqsa, embraced by Shiites, In general, it is not common and not in accordance with the logic of sectarianism for a Sunni to be in the Shiite lair or embrace, and vice versa!
One of the worst examples of the nationalist-religious alliance that has taken turns destroying the country was the image with which the “secular” authorities justified their collusion with the fundamentalist religious component, The authorities supported religious television and radio programs and provided other propaganda facilities for some clerics, saying that they wanted to explain the true religion in order to avoid the spread of incorrect religiosity, But is there a true religion and an incorrect religion? What is true and incorrect is relative. For 14 centuries, the Sunni group has considered its Shiite rival to be misguided, and the Shiite group has considered the Sunni to be misguided, i.e., incorrect!
The oppressive nationalist authority aligned itself with the religious currents, which believe in absolutes. Since the religious current had its god, the nationalist current had to create a god for itself. Inventing gods was an easy matter, and we found it most clearly in the slogan “God, Syria, Bashar, and that’s it.” In the slogan, there is a parallel between Bashar’s position in Syria and God’s position in heaven. Bashar inherited divinity from another, and the gods did not become extinct after Bashar fled!
The apparent antagonism between the nationalist and religious currents could not disguise the divine religious structure of the nationalist approach, The hostility towards Ar’our or his ilk, who wanted to steal power, was met with agreement with Al-Bouti, Al-Hassoun, and Abdul Sattar Al-Sayed, who accepted sharing power, hand in hand, in order to sabotage the country in rotation. Today it is the nationalist, tomorrow the fundamentalist, and so the circle turns and the noose tightens around the homeland, which lost consciousness before it died completely and gave you its life.
Most segments of the population, especially the silent, gray masses, were fed up with these cycles and bouts of sabotage, However, they were powerless, as they lacked the money and weapons of the Wahhabis, and the money and weapons of the mullahs, Only the One sitting in the heavens knew how the affairs of the land would develop, a land where battles were being fought and massacres were being committed, It might be beneficial for the silent, gray majority if the fighting roosters were to become exhausted before the entire nation bled out, Unfortunately, each rooster thought that it could devour the whole cake alone, which distanced the nation from any solution to the problems and brought it closer to disintegration!
