Since the Second Arab Revival, the Levant has been undergoing a chronic reconfiguration, governed by the day-to-day anxieties of geographic dislocation, demographic shifts, economic decay and theft, and, of course, political instability in its inherited pre-modern regimes.
The obstacles to the Enlightenment renaissance rush before and after World War I are many, but the most important ones are that the social structure emerging from the darkness of four centuries of Ottoman rule was not the bearer of a renaissance project, and that the new world that formed was not pleased with the Enlightenment, but rather colonized the Levant for decades, killing the phenomenon of trying to cross over to modernity, and the regimes that emerged after it completed the Enlightenment obsession in order to perpetuate their hold on power.
Continuous wars in the Levant with the implanted Israeli entity, inter-state wars between the countries of the Levant itself, in politics, economics and on the ground, up to the war of fragmentation of societies in Lebanon, Iraq and Syria, in what is falsely called the "Arab Spring". In what is falsely called the "Arab Spring" and finally the war of total destruction on Gaza.
In light of this gloomy and shaky color, elites retreated, thought froze, most intellectuals joined the authorities, and became paid or hidden employees of influential people or rich Gulf states, and associations and change parties were absent, and their slogans became a reason for smiling smiles, and the forces of political Islam advanced to occupy the forefront, while the Christian forces in Lebanon, for example, are still parroting their sayings in a parrot-like manner, while Christians are leaving the East to plunder an unclear future.
All this is to say: But our conviction that there is no salvation except through thought, culture and enlightenment made us go the hard way, starting from history, demography, religion, economics, anthropology and sociology, in order to establish, together with intellectuals who work individually, a contemporary knowledge platform that, if it does not produce a movement consciousness, will at least be a catalyst for a consciousness movement resulting from real knowledge products based on academic research.
This is the aspiration and the difficult path to a future that will take the world to horizons that we are gasping for as we huddle around the extinguished hearth of the past.