Since the establishment of many countries in the Middle East, especially those formed as a result of the Sykes-Picot Agreement and its imposed maps through British, French, and Turkish scalpel, the systems that emerged from it have suffered and continue to suffer from a compounded complex between state identity and the crisis of its political and cultural elite, as well as the concept of citizenship and belonging. Among the most prominent manifestations of this complex are the bloody changes in the political systems that have ruled them since the mid-20th century to this day, due to attempts to monopolize power and impose authoritarian regimes, whether national, religious, or sectarian. This has put cultural and intellectual elites in a state of astonishment, confusion, frustration, and embarrassment bordering on absurdity, leading to severe fragmentation and division among these elites up to the present day, especially after they were overwhelmed by the storm of what was termed the "Arab Spring" or those that fell as a result of foreign occupation, exposing their realities and unveiling the vast amount of humiliation inflicted upon their peoples, which were sedated by false slogans propagated through media apparatuses that reduced nations to individuals and parties. This resulted in the collapse of those states and regimes in just a few days, accompanied by chaos and looting of public wealth wherever it was found.  

Cultural, artistic, and scientific elites suffered from significant challenges during the rule of these authoritarian regimes. For many reasons related to the tyranny and despotism of the ruling systems, as well as the nature of nomadic, agricultural, and tribal societies, they found themselves, like the other segments of society, intertwined with the regime and its symbols against a backdrop of inherited accumulations tied to the intellectual memory associated with social systems and their rural and tribal structures and symbols. This led some intellectuals to believe that the ruling regime was the only savior of the nation or the people from the fractures and defeats they experienced. Consequently, their pens, voices, brushes, or quills wrote, painted, sang, and played in praise of the regime, believing that they were glorifying their art, freedom, and the people they summarized in the figure of a leader or a chieftain, mistakenly thinking he would fulfill all their wishes. Meanwhile, there were also groups of intellectuals and scholars who were imprisoned in horrific prisons, others were eliminated or forced into exile, enduring the tragedies of this forced departure because they rejected and opposed that regime, while others isolated themselves in distant corners away from the spotlight to the extent that they replaced their professions and creativity with jobs and tasks unrelated to culture and its worlds, far from the light and circles of influence.  

Amidst this climate of loyalty motivated by fear and rejection, and its resulting consequences, we painfully remember the throngs of Arab intellectuals and others from various specialties and directions in literature, art, thought, law, sports, and science, who used to flock to the leader's palaces and other narcissistic leaders at festivals and events, offering their services in exchange for the generous rewards they received, whether monetary or material, akin to any court poet or the preachers of the sultans.  

Without generalization, these regimes and their symbols were supported by other groups, fearful of persecution and the loss of livelihoods. Many of them performed functional work and were largely apolitical, working as any employee in a company or institution without exploitation or harm to anyone. They were countered by another group who refused to yield even an inch of their principles and accepted marginalization, persecution, arrest, or exile. Whether these groups were few or many, they genuinely deserve to be called fighters and heroes of integrity in pride, sacrifice, and the elevation of principles. Among those employees and fighters, there are still groups that truly believe in the leadership and legitimacy of the regime and its symbols on an ideological or doctrinal basis, seeing those who rule them as saviors and liberators of the nation, rooted in their belief in these opinions. They too paid a heavy price because of this after the fall of those regimes.  

The painful question today in most of our countries is that both the rejecting and compliant sections of those who truly believed have suffered and continue to suffer persecution and deprivation, as is happening today to hundreds of intellectuals, writers, artists, university professors, and scholars, simply because they believed in the slogans of that era and collaborated with its regimes in one way or another, without having harmed a single hair on a citizen's head!  

After more than two decades since the bloody changes of the regimes, the troubling question remains whether the alternative democratic systems today will provide a space for those with opinions who are not responsible for any crimes or abuses of power, especially since many of them have realized the truth after the veil was lifted from the evils of the regimes they supported and believed in their proposals. Will the era of black revenge and the pretext of "You were with the regime, and there is no place for you today" end

Kifah Mahmoud