The defeats suffered by the project to establish Arab states militarily, politically, economically, culturally, and in terms of freedom, etc., led to the birth of a flawed reaction represented by frustration and despair among broad popular circles, Frustration was a flawed alternative to criticism and objectivity, With frustration and the continuation of defeats, some people developed transformations, hypotheses, and developments aimed at circumventing personal responsibility, placing this responsibility on the conspiring other, and refusing to read the real reasons for the defeat, Among these transformations was the birth of ascetic trends such as Sufism, with its various forms of understanding and characteristics, then nihilism, and others.
The other was held presumedly responsible for the failure, then an attempt was made to punish the other by accusing him of heresy, then resorting to the supernatural to explain the disturbances of life, In addition to all of that, there was a tendency to return to the past or to yearn for the past and to bestow positive mythology of glory, pride, and false dignity upon it, without being able to theoretically prove the reality of those glories or even deny them, but the results favor the denial!
After every Arab defeat, a kind of culture was born based on invoking wonders and miracles and hope in the prophets who would work to defeat the enemies, Whoever supports God, God will support him, and the proof of that was his support for the believers in their conquests, It was as if the victory of the invading occupiers was limited to the believers, Hulaku was victorious and the Bedouin were victorious without faith, since when the Bedouin began to conquer, they had no religion, and reciting the two testimonies was 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, 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 caused collective psychological disturbances, including nostalgia for the past, This nostalgia is justified by the assumption that the past was glorious, and that 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 to achieve glory, Reaching glory requires means, and using the means of the past in the present means planting the past in the present, Relying on camels for transportation, using camel urine for medicine, and fighting with swords, etc., confirms the pathological nature of this condition, Invoking backwardness is the antithesis of glory, and naming a party “Rebirth” is a clear invocation of backwardness, represented by reviving a camel-ridden past. Undoubtedly, some have limited the transfer to “glory” as a product, not to using the means of the past, However, the vast majority have not limited the transfer to achieving glory alone, but rather to using the means of the past, which produce nothing but a carbon copy of that past, which was originally miserable, Reusing the means of producing it in the present will only lead to… A situation that is more absolutely and relatively miserable than that 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 that 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 spare themselves the trouble of reviewing their programs, which reality has proven to be overtaken by time and are no longer suitable 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 was in its time as barren as the desert in which it was found.
In practice, progress can be born from the womb of defeat, as happened in many societies such as Germany, Japan, and even America after the Civil War, However, progress cannot coexist with authoritarian rule, Therefore, authoritarian regimes sought to thwart any progress, thus ensuring that the governed remained in a state of nostalgia—a nostalgia that preferred backwardness to progress, and comfortable for the despotic authoritarian regime, This 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 with the authoritarian 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, rooted in a particular addiction to backwardness in people’s souls, manifested as stagnation, sterility, and a rejection of modernity, All of this was achieved. By clinging to the past and longing for it, that is, nostalgia!!!
The defeats suffered by the project to establish Arab states militarily, politically, economically, culturally, and in terms of freedom, etc., led to the birth of a flawed reaction represented by frustration and despair among broad popular circles, Frustration was a flawed alternative to criticism and objectivity, With frustration and the continuation of defeats, some people developed transformations, hypotheses, and developments aimed at circumventing personal responsibility, placing this responsibility on the conspiring other, and refusing to read the real reasons for the defeat, Among these transformations was the birth of ascetic trends such as Sufism, with its various forms of understanding and characteristics, then nihilism, and others.