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The Caliphate, Drop by Drop By @LePoint There is, in Islamism, a hatred of anteriority. Whatever dared to exist before the Muhammadan revelation has no right to a place, and this even has a name: jahiliyya, "the age of ignorance," a void that must be concealed at all costs. Ahmed al-Sharaa's Syria is now demonstrating this methodically. In the new school textbooks, the statues of Mari, a royal city-state on the Euphrates nearly five millennia old, have disappeared, and the tambourine player of Ugarit has been erased too. Ugarit is the port near Latakia where, in the 14th century BC, scribes invented one of humanity's very first alphabets. The neck and chin of Elissa, the Phoenician who founded Carthage, are now veiled. Zenobia, the queen of Palmyra who defied Rome in the 3rd century, nearly slipped into limbo, but the Syrians protested and she returned, drastically shortened but back. The Mona Lisa, by contrast, no longer exists at all for Syrian students. Islamism is not a religious nationalism but a destructive internationalism. It knows neither borders, nor languages, nor peoples, nor ethnicities, and recognizes only the umma and its horizon, the caliphate. The Syrian textbooks admit it without retouching: “the pride of Arab nationalism” has become “the pride of Islamic civilization,” just as “dying for the homeland” has turned into “dying for Allah.” Kurds, Turkmens, Shiites, Druze, Christians and Jews have evaporated from Syria’s long history, and the Ottoman occupation is no longer more than a “domination,” a tender memory of the last caliphate, which was nevertheless only a brutal colonization and a calvary for the dominated peoples, among them precisely the Syrians. Even the Great Arab Revolt of 1916, a Syrian source of pride, is no longer taught. It is no longer only Bashar al-Assad who is being erased, but Syria, in its beautiful singularity, that is systematically being rubbed out. Continue reading at: lepoint.fr/editos-du-point/l…