The Myth of Arabia
We cannot be more different. Well, we can, but we sure as hell are not one nation with the same aspirations and future. In daylight, the Arab unity is nothing but a wild dream and the fact that Arabs are one nation is a blunt myth.
With eyes wide opened, and a functioning brain in a skull, it wouldn’t take much to realize that myth; you can group Arabs into categories but sealing them all, from Oman to Mauritania, in one bag and present them to the world, or even to themselves, as a unity couldn’t be further from the truth.
Once upon a time, I used to indulge myself into endless debates with non-Arabs; topics were all emerging from me defending an accusation or another, bashing someone for having some nasty prejudice about my people, and more or less laughing out at the utter stone-age perceptions many have on us, back then, my own perception of the Arab world was limited for I haven’t experienced life in Arabia outside of the Laventine. Now, my attitude has entirely changed; when someone starts the same old females-oppression topic, I no longer negotiate, my first reaction would be ‘I am Jordanian, if you like, we can both go get a Gulf boy and give him a headache’!
We might all speak the same language, but so do Singapore and Scotland, we might share the same religion, but so do Angola and Italy, we might be neighbors, but so are Germany and France, in fact, an Algerian would be more comfortable communicating with a French than he would with an Omani, a Wahabi Saudi would fight a Shiite Bahraini to death, and what is looked upon as the norm in Lebanon would sentence you to stoning in Saudi!
Contrary to what it might appear to the misfed eye, Arabs don’t even share the same concerns; when the genocide of Gaza took place, the streets of Amman and Damascus were boiling in rage, while the average Saudi and Emarati couldn’t be more indifferent. Even when the events were topping speech starters in Cairo, it couldn’t be more different than it was in Amman, in Cairo, the concern was jammed upon those who were attacking the Egyptian policies of shutting the borders to Gazans, you could sense that the fact that innocents were being annihilated in Gaza was barely mentioned.
Suffice to say, the Arab world is one hell of a world, it’s creepy, interesting, contradicted, gloomy and shiny, it might be many things, but it sure is not united.
cross posted on The Rhetorical Blabber
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It all started with pan-Arab nationalism spoon-fed by the British into the minds of the Arabs during World War I attempting to dissociate them from the Ottoman Turks, which they have, and while the Arabs had this firm belief that they were fighting for ‘freedom’ and being their own, all they successfully had managed to do is give more lands to the British and French, incite more division of land and territory and more, things that had led eventually to the occupation of Palestine by the Zionist Israelis, and nationalism exhibited by each Arab country.
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The misconception started as early as the spread of Islam; the new-born state united different cultures under one authority and gave the false impression of unity, nevertheless, different regions of the Islamic state had different cultures and values, once the Islamic state was abolished, there was no more room for the myth of unity to stay alive.