Eight years ago in this column – on 26 April 2017, to be precise – I discussed the question of ethnic, religious, tribal, and gender diversity in the Arab world. Two days earlier, the American University in Cairo had hosted a symposium it jointly organised with the Ibn Khaldun Centre for Development Studies to discuss the issue.
The event was a response to the upheaval that followed the Arab Spring, ushering in various forms of civil war and strife, in which the ethnic dimension figured prominently in several Arab countries.
My role in the symposium was to set a framework to steer the dialogue towards resolving tensions, especially given the region’s extreme volatility. It was clear that I needed to address the tragic reality then unfolding in the Middle East in general, and the Arab world in particular, and one incident stood out. It seemed to encapsulate the raging destruction that was reducing cities to ashes and leaving countless dead, wounded, and displaced. In Syria, the warring factions had agreed on a population swap: Shias would relocate to predominantly Shia areas and Sunnis would move to Sunni areas. It was an exercise of pure, systemic ethnic cleansing. Terrorism chose that moment to strike, bombing a bus in the middle of one exchange, mingling innocent human blood and body parts in a grotesque, horrifying cataclysm that recognised neither Sunni nor Shia.
For the purposes of the symposium, it was important to balance that emotive moment and contextualise it intellectually. I therefore adopted an academic lens to review the failed approaches of the dominant ideological trends – Arab nationalism, socialism and liberalism – towards that intractable regional problem. That history led through decades of civil war, the appalling use of chemical weapons in Halabja, the desperation of refugees from Syria that ended with death by drowning in the Mediterranean, the abuses of the “blocking third” in Lebanon. Today, the question of diversity continues to hover over conflict zones in Sudan, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen, and to permeate the tense climate in Iraq and other Arab countries.
As we contemplate the Fifth Gaza War and its spread, it appears the embers beneath the ashes are forever ready to burst into flame and proliferate. This is not due to a lack of knowledge or awareness. In 1994, a significant event occurred: the publication of the book Sects, Doctrines, and Ethnicities and, in tandem, the call for a conference on “Minority Rights in the Arab Homeland” set for 12-14 May 1994, in Cairo. But the conference could not be held in Cairo and the organisers had to turn to another country at the last minute. The conference’s theme had triggered an uproar: some groups were enraged at being labelled minorities and various foreign ministries released statements alleging foreign conspiracies.
Zarqa Al-Yamama is a legendary figure from pre-Islamic Arabia renowned for her extraordinary eyesight and keen intuition. She could hear sounds imperceptible to others, spot danger from beyond the horizon. Saadeddin Ibrahim was a Zarqa Al-Yamama of our times. He was among the first scholars to address the problem of ethnic and religious minorities in the Arab world, and to provoke intense denial and condemnation as a result. He estimated that 15 per cent of the Arab population are minorities. He argued that all the civil wars and domestic strife in the Arab world stemmed from the refusal to acknowledge minority rights and the active suppression of minorities, which reached the scale of the use of chemical weapons in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Not much has changed. The deficiency in the Arab nation-state keeps stability and, hence, material and human development as far out of reach as the seventh heaven. The syndrome has manifested in the recent sectarian events in Sweida between Syrian Druze, Arab tribes, and Syrian government forces on the ground, while Israeli aircraft dominate the skies and bombard Damascus and the rest of southern Syria. It is also evidenced in the division of Sudan between the alliance of the “legitimate” government based in Khartoum and the Rapid Support Force government alliance based in Nyala, the capital of Darfur.
The Arab world, at present, is split between eleven countries that have embraced the concept of the nation-state and eleven other countries marked by sharp internal divisions, the diffusion of weapons outside the control of the central authority, and a surfeit of ethnic, sectarian or regional divisions threatening the integrity of the state. Both models – the nation-state and the divided state – call for a revitalisation of the intellectual drive to address diversity in the Arab world. Indeed, there is much to be learned from those experiences.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 7 August, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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