The instinct of conquest between the ancient tribe and the modern state

A tribe is a group of clans that belong to, or have invented for themselves, one ancestor for the purpose of preserving their unity and cohesion, and gathered around water and pasture, to live on herding, hunting and raiding, inventing for themselves a custom that they have come to know and agree upon, or a “tribal law” that regulates aspects of their internal life, and their relationships with other tribes, from neighboring, alliance, enmity and hostility, and other relationships.

Over time, the “tribal society” transformed into a “state society” and custom developed into law. However, according to the axioms of natural and human evolution, according to which matter and thought undergo various transformations, where old ideas dissolve into new ones, and matter takes different forms, according to those axioms of evolution, when the tribe transforms into a state, it does not lose - finally - its basic characteristics, which are closer to human instincts in their savage phase.

We must not forget here that most of the ancient and medieval states and civilizations were founded by tribes that were searching for sources of power in water, land, trade routes, authority and wealth in general. This applies to the states founded by Arab, Turkish, Mongolian, Germanic, Scandinavian, Mayan and other tribes, which are states that turned into extended civilizations that do not end until they plant their seeds in the soil of a new civilization.

Thus, the state is the great tribe, or it is the form that the tribe that prevailed in the period before the discovery of agriculture and the migration to the banks of rivers took, instead of following the rainwater for grazing and hunting. However, any state, no matter how advanced its stages of civilization, must still have within it the “tribal root” that lies behind the various manifestations of civilization and urbanization.

Since the tribe and the state are two human systems created by man, there remains within this civilized man a “little Bedouin” who is closer to the instinctive stage than to being governed by customs and laws. This is what makes some countries sometimes adopt tribal behavior, as soon as the opportunity arises, in violation of the natural course of human history, which is the course in which the tribe turns into a state, and the state into a civilization, and civilization extends in time.

It happens, then, that there is a regression in the state’s policies, returning to tribal behavior, when political life becomes desertified, rural behavior creeps into the cities, and the idea of ethnic fanaticism, which is a purely tribal idea, dominates the state, where extreme right-wing ideas advance, cloaked in “ethnicized” religion, “institutionalized” history, and “sacred” race, just as the idea of tribal fanaticism depends on pumping the totemic histories of the ancestors, on the beliefs that the tribal priests guard, and on lineage, which is the pillar of tribal unity and cohesion.

Today, we see many countries adopting tribal methods in their international relations, methods that rely on invasion, looting, plunder, and evacuation. These are terms whose nature of concepts does not change because they have taken on other names, and under different justifications or justifications.

Wasn't the European colonization of the Arab East a kind of invasion of Scandinavian and Germanic tribes into some areas of Central and Southern Europe? Doesn't the Israeli occupation of the lands of the Palestinian people resemble those invasions carried out by the ancient Bedouin Israelite tribes, against the Canaanites or against each other?

Isn't the genocide of the people of Gaza by the Israeli war machine provided to it by Western countries, in reality, a type of ancient tribal invasion of the lands and homes of other tribes, an invasion in which acts of burning, demolition, looting, plundering, killing, extermination, and other acts are recorded for us in the books of ancient epics?

Doesn’t the planning to evacuate the people of Gaza from it to a new diaspora match what the books of epics and folk tales tell us about the rulings issued by some tribes on other tribes to leave their pastures and search for other pastures, in an indication of the “savage roots” of man, the roots that made cannons replace the sword, in a formal change in the means and tools, that does not touch the essence of the contemporary man who was returned by the advanced machine to the ages of invasion and plunder.

What is the difference between a tribe that has its eye on another tribe’s pasture and launches a raid to plunder its land and livestock, and a state that invades another people’s land and resources for the purpose of controlling their homeland and plundering their resources?!

Man is man in essence, whether he is a member of an Eskimo tribe, or a lecturer at Harvard, this man is body and soul, instinct and conscience, where the soul disciplines the body, and conscience balances the instincts. The soul works through religion and conscience works with the help of civilization, and the balance of soul and body, conscience and instincts appears in behavior, where behavior is the true manifestation of the relationship between soul and body or conscience and instinct.

If religion - in its spiritual goal - refines human instincts and strengthens his spirit, then civilization - in its civil goal - refines human behavior and attempts to elevate him from the stage of forests and deserts to the stage of cities. However, just as there is "religious hypocrisy", there is also "civilizational hypocrisy" when the swords of ancient raids are hidden under the elegant suit, and the "lion's tusks" are hidden behind diplomatic smiles, and when waves of colonial invasion come under the slogans of "spreading democracy" or occupation comes under the name of "liberation", while the goal is the same instinctive goal that man lived by in the deserts of the Arab countries, before Islam, and that man lives by in the skyscrapers of New York, in the twenty-first century.

It is the story of the human being who embraced religions, who invented laws, values, customs and morals, in order to move him from the stage of instinctive savagery that accompanied him during his journey from forests, caves, deserts and steppes, to rivers and resorts, until he reached cities and skyscrapers. He is the human being who transformed the spiritual messages and moral values he received into means, not to refine his instincts, but to cover them up, and to practice those instincts in the name of religions, values and laws.

*Quoted from Al-Quds Al-Arabi