Outside the group

The book addresses the issue of the individual and belonging and its tornness between the requirements of the state and the demands of groups, which is considered one of the fundamental problems in multiculturalism, and it is one of the urgent issues in this region of the world. The researcher Nader Kazem discusses these issues from a problematic perspective. The task of this book, in addition to expanding the open discussion around these issues from all their aspects, is to resist a stubborn form of reductionism as the book advocates, which is reducing the human to their group belonging and cultural identity, portraying it as the inevitable fate and destiny of a person that they cannot escape from. Nader Kazem has previously addressed the issue of multiculturalism in several of his recent books, as a political and social recipe that ensures peaceful coexistence within multicultural societies, but in this book, he discusses the negative side effects that multiculturalism may cause. The book focuses on the role of multiculturalism in deepening individuals' attachment to their group, which enables groups to dominate their members and treat them as private possessions. This leads to what the book calls "oppressive collectivism," where an individual's belonging to a group is no longer just a freely available choice, but a duty that everyone must adhere to, and the group must not be lenient towards it. In this sense, the book recognizes the value of belonging and the right of individuals to belong to a group, which is contrary to the view of many modernist and nationalist factions (who see belonging to a subgroup as tearing apart the unity of the nation, dividing society, encouraging fanaticism and sectarianism, and breaking away from national consensus) as well as progressives and avant-garde.