Does not left except the Lebanese nationalism

November 25, 2021

Sejean Azzi

@AzziSejean

(See Translation in Arabic Section

Life is for he who seeks glory, and what glory is not crowned by humility. Humility of glory is the victory of nobility over vanity. We have vanity and vanity, and we lack glory and nobility. Glory is not, necessarily, a political or military victory, for how many victories have climbed over blood, corruption, hatred and fraud, and touched the disappointment of defeat. How many setbacks their owners’ thought were victories and sought to bequeath them.

There is the glory of the eternal intellectual, scientific, and artistic works, the glory of dignity, values and virtues, and the glory of a sense of grace, happiness, and peace with oneself. There is the glory of faith in the homeland and the nation, the glory of liberation and freedom, there is the glory of belonging to the state of law and a high brow, the glory of belonging to traditions and heritage, and the glory of a broad national feeling. This is how the individual rises, the peoples rise, and the nations rise.

The stigma of most of the people of the East, and the reason for it, is that they have bound their glory to singular nationalism, tied their nationalism to religion, and wounded their religion with the sword, and they do not know how to put it back in its sheath. And if swords were the adornment of men in the pre-Islamic era, it is assumed that peace became their adornment after Islam. But what happened is the opposite: Antara bin Shaddad “remembers that the spears are waving, and he likes to kiss the swords because they gleamed.”

In Europe, the swords of Christians continued to shine in religious wars, as if they did not come and did not call to Christ, nor did the Gospel come to us. After the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), historian Olivier Chalin said: "If there had been a war between Protestants and pagans, it would have been less violent than that between Protestants and Catholics."

It is strange for a person to seek glory by instinct. The true glory of the East, and indeed the glory of man in another place: it is your love of words that verses and surahs have descended upon us through the books of God and the prophets and messengers. Is that all his peoples are God's chosen peoples, and all of his lands are the promised lands between man and man, otherwise God will apologize for not being present. It is that its peoples were given the freedom to choose their religion between Christianity, Islam and Judaism, and the freedom to choose their legislation between religion and secularism, and even atheism. It is those riches that cross borders and depths waiting for a patriotic hand to extract them for the benefit of their societies and advance their societies. But the East gave its wealth to colonialism and employed religions in civil wars. Instead of this wealth being the source of his national security, he made them the price of his borrowed security. Instead of religions being the source of his peace and stability, he made them pretexts for mobile strife and prolonged violence.

Before the advent of the colonialists, most of the wars of Islam were civil and took place between its caliphs, sultans, states and sects. The Islam of the message was watching in pain the Islam of the caliphate in fighting, not as if a prophet had read or the Qur’an had spread. When nationalities emerged that, even if faithful, raised the banner of secularization, as the idea of Lebanese nationalism was, for example, it was scorned, repelled, and relegated. And here Lebanon, since the formation of its nation-state in 1920, is still paying the price for the East's rejection of it. The recognition of the Arab identity by those who met in Taif in 1989 was not accompanied by a Shiite case that wanted to affix Persian nationalism as an addition or an alternative.

When a people considers that its nationalism is superior to all other nationalities, the endless conflicts and wars of the peoples begin. Nationalism moves from a historical, geographical and civil framework that protects a particular people to a base for the launch of hegemony over other peoples. If the progress of mankind did not abolish nationalities because they are a historical fact, it should have abolished wars by regulating relations between nations to reach true glory. Strange is the inability of humanity to draw up a map to save the world from the evil of negative nationalities and to establish lasting peace between societies. It is strange to live on borrowed glories. Despite intellectual and scientific creativity, the brilliance of natural intelligence and the invention of artificial intelligence, despite regional and international forums, dialogues and conferences, and transcontinental alliances and continental unions, the world is still living between cold and hot wars. Neither religions nor creeds established peace, nor dictatorships nor democracy. Hegemonic tendencies outweigh pacifism.

In Lebanon, every historical stage has been the victim of a certain nationalism. And every nationalism thought Lebanon belonged to it and had it, and its all-encompassing nationalism denied it all the feelings of the East and the fragrance of its nationalities. The positive aspect of this reality is that the struggle of nationalities over Lebanon challenges the validity of its claim and proves the existence of a special Lebanese nationalism. The negative thing is that these nationalities have turned into fanaticism and distanced themselves from the ideas and philosophies of their historical liberators. And when nationalism turns into militias and terrorist arms into regimes or organizations, it loses its agency over the peoples of the nation. Perhaps this decadent transformation seemed to be a return, or even a regression to the roots. Nationalities are originally a group of small, scattered and contiguous fanatics that have accumulated and become, by virtue of mutual interests and the necessities of solidarity in the place, a general nationalism at the level of cities and states. In his book "Twenty-One Parables for the Twenty-first Century", Yuval Noah Ariri tells that Egyptian nationalism arose through the concerted efforts of tribes to build dams to stem the flooding of the Nile, and this solidarity developed into a great ... national feeling.

Since those ancient times, Egyptian nationalism has not disappeared, and since the time of the Torah and the holy books, the Lebanese situation has not disappeared. Rather, it has become a national feeling due to the Lebanese peculiarities in this East, and thanks to the Lebanese resistance for freedom and dignity. It is impossible, therefore, for any other nationalism, no matter how wide its geography, or for any country, no matter how coercive it may be, to eliminate Lebanese nationalism, even if it were temporarily relegated to a mountain that nominates martyrs. The ink of true nationalism is not erased like the ink of constitutions, and the more some try to erase it, the more it loosens and shines because it is mixed with the blood of generations. In fact, Lebanese nationalism is the only one in this East embodied in a state/homeland, while other nationalities are still roaming in the world of theories, especially Syrian and Arab nationalism, as the peoples spread in their lands are demanding independence, autonomy and secession, contradicting one nationalism. Provided that you do not share loyalty to Lebanon, so you go looking for glories that are less than the glory of Lebanon.