Past Arab tradition speaks of immigrants or exiles to Europe who, having benefited from its sciences as well as from its cultural and political renaissance, stood to face the tyranny of the Ottomans and sought to establish Western-style nation-states. Modern tradition dating back to the early and mid-20th century speaks of immigrants who were influenced by European theories of nationalism and returned to their countries to found political parties and spread a nationalist ideology opposed to sectarianism, tribalism and regionalism, seeking after a secular model that would take citizenship as its basis. This tradition also speaks of some who returned to found Communist parties with the main slogan “workers of the world unite”, meaning that they had reached the extent of ruling out national identity, not to mention ethnic, tribal, sectarian and religious ones. Those who returned from Europe at the time, influenced by its ideas and philosophical movements, led the resistance to occupation and the opposition to the regimes that had arisen under its wing and by its will. And they were the active elite in society for the eradication of all forms of division. This was in the past, during the phase when national states were founded. Today, on the other hand, we find the “elite” immigrating to Europe and the US trying to spread its religious ideology there, forming isolated enclaves on the margin of the society they live in, clinging to their customs and traditions, interacting between themselves and opposed to any kind of interaction between cultures and civilizations. As for those of them who return to their homeland, we find them more strongly attached to ancient values than the local inhabitants. They color their discourse or their writings with slogans of human rights and the rights of groups, borrow from history what fits their tendencies, and use a few foreign phrases to appear more advanced, although some of these phrases have a much more accurate and expressive equivalent in Arabic. And above all of this, they raise the slogan that “the world is a small village”, taking technology and the media as an example of this, paying no heed to the content of the hatred and calls to division they spread through such media. In short, the immigrant intellectuals of the past were benefiting from advanced European thought and trying to bring it to their countries. Today, on the other hand, we find them returning to take human groups back to a pre-state age – patriarchal groups established on bases of race, religion and tribe. Is that not what one notes in the tendencies of the Syrian opposition abroad? The Antalya Conference was a live example of such tendencies: its leadership was chosen on the basis of sectarian and ethnic shares, and it started its activities by calling for protests on the “Friday of Tribes”. Needless to say that the current regimes in the Arab World are also responsible for such a state of fragmentation, for the spread of division and the exercise of tyranny over the past fifty years. Yet we had expected the “elite” living in Europe, or returning to the homeland, to be more advanced and more open than these regimes, not for them to return to reviving pre-state communal entities and to lead a campaign of sectarian and religious incitement. We had expected them to return to preach modernity, not to say post-modernism, and the democracy they have experienced and exercised in the West, not to return to lead the consecration of the local backwardness which regimes have preserved and nurtured. We are living in the Age of Tribes, not the “Friday of Tribes”.
