Identity and violence.. the illusion of fate

Mashallah, the book of Amartya Sen features his radical critical approach to the problem of "identity" which represents a deep source of global conflicts in recent decades in particular. And perhaps this problem was more apparent in the Arab and Islamic worlds than elsewhere. Because religious / sectarian identity has become as if it is the main identifier for the person in both. And the reasons for the spread of this resort to religious or sectarian identity are the erosion of the nation-state and the erosion of its unified ideology for its citizens to keep them away from being confined to their small "identities" they grew up with. And as the author shows, confining a person to a single identity is merely impoverishing him and cutting him off from communication with others, and this confinement arises from ignoring the fact that a person lives in a vast network of relationships with others in his small environment and the larger surroundings alike, and each of these relationships increases his connection to others, and also increases his life richness, and his relationship with others becomes more solid. Many of the problems that humans suffer from nowadays, especially in the Arab and Islamic worlds, stem from their entrapment in a small circle of relationships that seem to them to represent a fate they have no escape from, because they live in the only network of relationships to which they belong...