The Parisian

by Isabella Hammad

The French say the Christians want to be separate from the Muslims—again this is not true—and they keep calling the Syrian army Sharifi when not one soldier is from the Hejaz—they are all Syrians! We are all Syrians. The French want to provoke religious warfare and now they have stopped the convoys of food from going to Aleppo.

It has been encouraged by western influence to be a religious battle. It was not.

I hesitate these days over whether to call myself Syrian or Palestinian—and what about “Arab”—when the Europeans use the word I am sure that in fact they only mean a Muslim—they often also seem to mean a man who lives in a tent. What does that mean for the Christians and the Jews and the people of the Levant in general? And while we’re on that topic we should be clear about what exactly we ourselves mean by the term when we use it—is it simply a question of language or something larger—because in the end “Arab” might be no finer

Arabs are and were not just muslim.