The modern state, in its early establishment, imposed a model of identity and made it one of the legal conditions for national belonging. We witness a hierarchical framework for identity construction, beginning with community, religious, educational, and media institutions, extending to the existing political authority, where the individual remained the recipient. Today, political modernity is characterized by the integration of individualism into the new formation of societies and states, as the opening of markets and communications coincided with the expansion of establishing diverse community organizations. This necessitated the guarantee of rights, freedoms, identities, and opportunities for all groups comprising society, without the need for coercive assimilation, through the participation of everyone in decision-making. This administrative model relies on a broad base that incorporates all community components, where each component has a share in management, based on competence and ability rather than on disabling quotas. In this partnership, the fears of components from the threat of annexation and enslavement are alleviated, especially when applying majority rule literally. This is based on the notion that the modern state is the political framework through which individuals can organize their lives and affairs.

Thus, discussing the prevention of "killing identities" is impossible in the absence of democracy, as it is one of the essential pillars of the modern state due to its capacity to accommodate differences and organize coexistence among all societal components, which differ in belief, opinion, ethnicity, and religion. Here, the importance of consensual/coalitional democracy emerges, which emphasizes equal citizenship in rights and duties within the framework of a decentralized state.

It seems that decentralized containment, as a method entirely opposed to central hegemony, creates the possibility of a new balance between the state and society, based on the principle of dialogue and combining national identity unity with expanded administrative autonomy, providing a broad space for sharing management, resources, and opportunities. This helps to reduce separatist tendencies and fills the void of rights demands by protecting language, culture, and religion within the context of a national integration process.

A decentralized state, administratively but not politically, geographically and not nationally, entails numerous benefits: prioritizing the public national interest over the interests of sub-identities and facilitating the establishment of a civil state that safeguards the rights of all its components, thus ending the prevailing political culture in favor of the concepts of political modernity, and solidifying contractual relationships expressed in the "social contract."

In all cases, it is essential that the principles and values of political modernity (democracy, secularism, rationality) lead to a unifying national identity, creating measures of trust among different social components, in addition to relinquishing the "obsession with sub-identities."

## 3 - The Dangers of Purist Identities
Our Arab societies are experiencing an identity crisis, reflected in their inability to balance authenticity and modernity. Religion is adopted as a formal cultural content that does not go beyond being a slogan, while insisting on returning to the conditions of its emergence, placing the present in the dock without considering the magnitude of temporal change. The explosion of the situation in this manner led to a deep disconnection from the self, attracting followers who raised spiteful swords, while the chants of "Allahu Akbar" were merely rituals to legitimize these swords.

In an attempt to explore the reasons for the closure of identity in contemporary Arab culture, two main reasons can be highlighted: First, this culture prioritizes the issue of identity over freedom, while modernity and its contemporary transformations have long settled the matter by prioritizing the freedom issue over identity. The popular culture and some Arab intellectual trends, especially nationalism and religious movements, seem to make the issue of identity the core of all issues. One evidence of this trend is the transformation of most Arab Spring revolutions from revolutions for freedom into revolutions preoccupied with identity. This has confused these revolutions, fueled a closed traditional identity that does not facilitate the emergence of a human identity capable of accommodating all local affiliations and positively interacting with them amid global transformations.

Secondly, contemporary Arab culture still suffers from the dominance of the group over the individual. While contemporary culture has shifted from prioritizing collective entities to giving precedence to the individual, their rights and cultural affiliations, Arab culture has not yet been able to make this transition.

Thus, the identity, which claims its absolute purity and superiority, as a superior discourse against other cultures and identities, has ended up inflaming feelings of hatred and exclusion among peoples. The phenomenon of ISIS, which believes in the supremacy of Islamic identity over all other human identities without exception, exemplifies this. The illusion of a sacred superior identity seems to be a ready-made premise that leaves no room for review, establishing the concept of "absolute truth."

Anyone following the writings of Islamic movements can feel this "absolute truth," distinct from national identity, when it defines itself as a "divine identity" that transcends political borders, which has made the Islamic discourse contradict the embrace and protection of the national state. Moreover, all entities that have emerged.

Levant: Dr. Abdullah Turkmani