Hazem Saghieh

With every major development in the Middle East- in the Arab Levant and its surroundings above all- questions are raised about communal groups and the extent of their integration into their nation-states, or the extent to which those nation-states can accommodate them through fair political systems…

After the crime at the church in the village of Hammoud, in Jordan's Karak Governorate, sincere and serious condemnations were made. Far more numerous, however, were condemnations that could be described as having nationalist and militant conditionality. Some voices deplored that this act was…

Almost no major event anywhere in the world, the French protests being the latest example, fails to split the Lebanese along the lines of their original divisions. There are those who stand against the French establishment - and with it racism, classism, and violent police repression - and…

For all their vast differences, the most extreme or "pure" ideological movements are all defined by their intellectual rigidity and dogmatism. Nonetheless, their history reveals instances in which they move beyond pragmatism into an opportunism that carries them far from the "purity" of doctrine…

Every major political or ideological movement has a component that it treats, or regards, as its Achilles' heel. Its more serious allies are uneasy with, if not outright embarrassed by, this component and about their alliance with it. The component may apply the doctrine ineptly, graft heresies of…

We may never have drawn adequate conclusions about our region from the key phrases we have been repeating for decades. "The rise of identities, the Cleavage of the nation state, in the age of globalization, between what precedes it and what surpasses it," and "the surge of tribal loyalties in…

Those calling for Hezbollah's disarmament, and for peace that ends the wars with Israel, rest their position on premises that are difficult to ignore. At the most basic level, the wars have exhausted Lebanon, taken a toll on its already frail national fabric, and played a crucial role in the…

A few days ago, Asharq Al-Awsat published a dispatch from Baghdad titled National Day Stirs Debate Over Independence in Iraq. "The independence debate" seems, at first glance, a strange phrase. The norm, especially in our societies, is for independence and its anniversary to be collective…

Like the famous Syrian "player," Libya's master of the "Jamahiriya" sowed the seeds of collapse during his phase of claimed greatness. Today Libya is geographically and institutionally divided. Its promised elections were never held, the UN-sponsored agreement among its parties has to be put to…

Going over the key milestones of modern Sudanese history, one finds an abundance of insights into its present tragedy. Unique layers of fragmentation combine with an exceptionally limited capacity to narrow this fragmentation through a state that would turn Sudanese society, however gradually, into…