Ali Ahmed Said Quotes
The Arab individual does not elect from among people of different opinions who represent different currents. The Arab is accustomed to voting according to pre-determined concepts. Whoever represents this pre-determined concept... The nationalist will vote for a nationalist, and the communist will vote for a communist. These are all types of religious sects. The tribal and sectarian structure has not disintegrated, and has not melted down into the new structure of democracy and the democratic option.
Ali Ahmed Said, 1930-*, [Adonis], Syrian Arab Poet, Television Interview, ANB TV, November 26, 2006
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The Syrians hate the Lebanese and vica versa, After the Lebanese Civil War, Syria took advantage of the weakened nation to send troops to occupy and control Lebanon politically which it did for over a decade.
He was the one who wrote the popularization of the Lost City of Atlantis
Many Republicans in the early 21st century signed a “no new tax” pledge to Grover Norquist, a Republican Party Boss, which he kept in his personal safe. However, many criticized the practice in that the private party pledge could easily conflict with the Oath the legislators took to the Constitution.
He was using “triblism” in the general sense of tribes, religions, political parties, nations or any group loyalty that domnates.
From the latter part of the 20th century onward, religious nationalism was no longer a force for most religions and nations except Muslim countries. It was the only religion left where a large proportion of the adherents saw no distinction between the religion and the government. Nations that had separation of church and state were not conducive to the extreme fundamentalist form of Islam where the Secular Leader and the Religious leader was to be embodied as a single person. As a result Islamic religious nationalists argued for a Theocracy and at times fought for it with violent means. The secular government typically, to curtail the violence and prevent a religious takeover, often outlawed the extreme religious Islamic parties. While Aslan cites the Muslim Brotherhood failure in Egypt as a desirable outcome, the only way the other forces of Egyptian society could prevent the Islamists from taking over turning the country into a theocracy was to forcefully repress the extremists. The Turkish outcome was much better, but there was the threat of repression of the Justice and Development Party when it won a majority control of the government. There were explicit threats that if it tried to weaken the secular nature of the government as Ataturk had formulated it, the military would come “out of the barracks” and oust the government as they had done before. There were nations like China which persecuted religions such as certain forms of Christianity, but those religions were not fighting for religious nationalism. They only wished the freedom to practice their religion and had no program or theology that argued for Christianizing the government. The Tamil Hindus of Sri Lanka did not want a Hindu government and were perfectly free to practice their religion. The problem was that they felt that there was systemic social and economic discrimination against the Tamils and they fought for independence—not of a Hindu state, but of a secular, nondiscriminatory state of equal opportunity.
He meant gender, not the frequency of sexual activity.
Ali Ahmad Said Esber (born 1 January 1930), also known by the pen name Adonis or Adunis, is a Syrian poet, essayist and translator. Maya Jaggi, writing for The Guardian stated "He led a modernist revolution in the second half of the 20th century, "exerting a seismic influence" on Arabic poetry comparable to T.S. Eliot's in the anglophone world."
