The Questions Of Identity And Cultural Alienation
18 March, 2018
Islamic countries (dark green)
KHARTOUM (Sudanow) - The issue of identities and their complications were among the causes of the breakdowns in the Arab and Muslim Worlds. These identity questions have sown the seeds of sedition in many of our countries and opened the doors wide for Westernization and faulty conceptions.
As a consequence, tribalism has taken roots and the concept of nationalism has faded away. Fighting, feuding and sedition have mushroomed and unilateralism has become the norm, whereby politicians took center-stage and the Arab and Muslim countries fell prey to foreign interventions of sorts, and the country and citizen became the victims. This is what Amin Ma’aloof calls: “The fatal identities.”
Now the question; What has caused these identities to be so? And how can our nation extricate herself from this historical quagmire? What is the role of the intellectual in the perpetuation of peaceful co-existence and the acceptance of the other (with his varied and different identities?).
Sudanow magazine has put these questions before a number of intellectuals and came out with these replies:
THE DEBATE:
Critic, Novelist, Dr. Salah Siralkhatim, said that the question of the debate about identities has bypassed early treatment when the image of Mustafa Saeed (in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North) and his quixotic struggle in Europe was doomed to a bloody end and forced him to return to his roots, a return he did not tolerate and slid into oblivion once again. There also springs to our minds the female protagonist in Layla Abulela’s novel, who lived in London, loved Europe and suffered another type of struggle with a changing identity in a changing World. And also comes to mind the image of the female protagonist in Iraqi writer Ena’am Kujja’s novel, who was an American army conscript of Iraqi origin and who came to Iraq with the invading army. This woman had come to her country after the fall of Baghdad, carrying her new identity, and to fight a war against her country of origin, in favor of her new country. She found herself in the face of a different sort of struggle for identity, where that Iraqi fought her rida’a brother (one who was breastfed by one’s mother) who was active in the ranks of the rebel Mahdi Army. That was a tragic representation of what was actually taking place on the ground, in which the national identity was destined to eclipse in favor of the identity that was prevalent in the world. The identity issue is no longer a sort of intellectual extravagance; but has, rather, become a painful status quo being perpetuated the world - over, now that the World has become unipolar after the collapse of the socialist bloc.
Academic Professor Mohamed al-Fatih Abua’agla maintains that “identity is the daughter of human civilization”, where the ID card, the nationality certificate and the passport are all exploited by man for segregating, isolating and besieging the other. The closed politics and ideologies are crucial factors in employing identity to assimilate others.
Prof. Abug’agla adds: Identity is a crucial factor in describing all creatures, because knowledge about those creatures is essential for understanding the essence of things. The diversity in humans and other beings is a positive element, which is rich and beautiful. That is because the forest which is made of one type of trees is not better nor more beautiful than the forest with a variety of trees’ species.
Abua’agla indicates that under the intersecting perceptions, the absence of social belonging, family breakdowns, decay of the social fabric, the disappearance of ideological blocs, and the emergence of sharp class divisions had prevented some social sectors from cherishing a feeling of belonging to the certain society. Politics had played a pivotal role in accelerating this social segregation and in bypassing the partisan programs and emptying them from the principles of concern to the respective party’s power base. The tribe is no longer feasible nor effective in bringing the society together and in fortifying a positive identity that is on good terms with the other, under the prevailing political polarizations that succeeded with their political tactics and machinations to filter through the tribal formations and disrupt their cohesion, thus producing struggles within the components of societies. Accordingly, the nonconformist detached has been redefined as the one with no identity, the one in isolation from interaction within the social fabric. By the result, isolation and detachment have become the driving force for extremism.
In the same context, writer Omar Karrar maintains that the norm is not unity, but disagreement, diversity and plurality. A rich vivid identity can qualify the human being to possess liberty in a manner that empowers him to build himself and exercise his specialty in a fruitful and constructive way both locally and internationally. The identity which is practiced through the logic of stillness and identification with others is the cause of wars, he further argues.
Critic Hassan Emami from Morocco reaffirms that identity is a composition of elements bound to the place and culture. ”What is unnatural is the imbalance in the personality during the processes of change. Cocooning oneself in life is the rejection of what is new and adhesion to what is old. We, as societies sharing certain characteristics, today exercise conflicting forms of interaction with modernism, one time to the right and another time to the left. Hence remains the role of general policies and philosophies to create comprehensive cultural, political and economic projects to tackle this status quo and this identity that swings between conservativeness and openness.”
DEFINITION:
Novelist Jamaleddin Ali is of the view that identity in the general sense can be divided into a number of identities or small particles that share common characteristics that look small but then mold and grow up and then merge to make a whole identity, at the same time keeping the characteristics of each particle. The spirit of belonging starts from the small family, then the extended family, then the tribe, then the group of neighboring tribes in the one geographical area, then the society at large and then the people or peoples who inhabit a certain region. Every particle of these has its defining characteristics which it shares with others according to the law of nature. Merging these components according to the amount of their particles in the one pot (which is the geographical area called country) serves the nations and leads them into progress and prosperity. This all-embracing pot has a number of aspects: The common history, the language, the religion, the economy and others. Each of these aspects supports the big pot and none of them should be taller than the other and none of them should try to remove another from beneath the pot, otherwise we cannot achieve the required balance for the merger inside, a matter that can cause the pot to fall face down and spill the merger.
For his part, Critic Sabir Juma’a notes that humanity is enmeshed in bloody struggles over the identity issue with its political, economic, social and cultural aspects. “We have noticed that the geographical South is caught, everywhere around the world, into such conflicts, a matter that obliges marginalized peoples to carry up arms in the face of the authority in order to attain their usurped rights and demonstrate their specialty. This was seen in the bloody conflicts in the Biafra war in Nigeria, the wars in Yemen and Southern Sudan, the American Civil War, the war between India and Pakistan and Ireland’s war against Great Britain.
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