What is the nation?

Section: Political Books

Number of pages: 373 pages

Who is the Arab reader who does not know the meaning of nation? After a century and more of being saturated with the writings and speeches of the fathers of Arab nationalism, most Arab readers have become fully convinced that the question “What is nation?” An absurd question in the first place, and it is necessarily a matter of defining the defined, otherwise who would dare to doubt that the Arabs have been a nation since they appeared on the stage of history 3000 years ago, and that they are “one nation” and “with an eternal message”? This reference book does not aim to cast doubt on anything, but rather promises the reader a complex journey that will change his opinion on many matters, and will present him with a different perspective, and he will discover, in the end, that the issue is more complicated than he imagined at first glance. With the exception of the first article, the article by Johann Fichte, which is a reference text for all subsequent nationalist writings, and argues that the nation is a natural phenomenon that exists in itself, and that it exists in isolation from any human effort and historical circumstances, all the other articles selected here defend a counter-thesis that says that the nation is a human creation, and the result of processes of creation, formation, and even invention and fabrication carried out by humans in specific historical contexts, and that people are not born a nation but rather they become a nation with time and in contexts specific history