The nation is a reference selection about the nation and nationalism

Who is the Arab reader who does not understand the meaning of the nation? After more than a century of being saturated with the writings of the founders of Arab nationalism and their speeches, most Arab readers have become fully convinced that the question "What is the nation?" is an absurd question in the first place, and that it is a matter of defining the definable by necessity, otherwise who would dare to doubt that Arabs have been a nation since they appeared on the stage of history 3000 years ago, and that they are "one nation" and "a timeless message"? This reference book does not aim to doubt anything, but it promises the reader an intricate journey that will change his opinion on many matters, and will present him with a different perspective, and he will ultimately discover that the issue is more complex than initially imagined. Except for the first article, Johan Gottlieb Fichte's article, which is considered a reference text for all subsequent nationalist writings, and which argues that the nation is a natural phenomenon existing independently, and that it exists apart from any human effort and historical circumstances, all other selected articles here defend an opposing thesis: that the nation is a human-made construct, a product of processes of creation, shaping, even invention and fabrication carried out by humans in specific historical contexts. People are not born as a nation but become one over time and within specific historical contexts. This thesis will echo and resonate in various forms among thinkers of different orientations and backgrounds, from Ernst Renan's famous lecture "What is a Nation?" to Benedict Anderson's "Imagined Communities," passing through the writings of Joseph Stalin, Rabindranath Tagore, H.G. Wells, Ernst Gellner, Eli Kidor, Eric Hobsbawm, Clifford Geertz, Homi Bhabha, and Samuel Huntington. Number of pages: 376 Year of publication: 2023 Publisher: Dar Al-Rafidain for Publishing and Distribution