ABSTRACT
In most Islamic countries, tribalism was supposed to be a thing of the past once the modern nation-states, which provide the unifying frame for peoples, tribes, clans, and ethnic groups, came about. But there remain many states where the ethnic/religious/national/linguistic composition is so varied that it has challenged all attempts to assimilate all nationals into one unified identity and create a homogeneous nationality. This difficulty persists in many Islamic countries, whose boundaries were drawn by colonial powers that were not sensitive to the differences and contentions between various groups of people. Most of the countries hit by the Spring found themselves in such a situation in one way or another, even though they were not included in this category because other characteristics were found more prominent to include them in other groupings. Take for example Egypt, where the hostility and hatred is unbridgeable between the Muslim majority, which grew out of the Arab occupiers in the seventh century, and the shrinking Coptic minority, the original people of the land, who feel occupied, displaced, disaffected, disinherited, and made strangers in their own country by the Arab invaders, who imposed their alien culture through Arabization and Islamization. In Morocco and Algeria, the Berbers/Kabyls, who are the original people of the land, underwent the same process, and they still constitute a sizeable share of the population. Many of them still entertain dreams of independence, or at least of some sort of autonomy. The leaders of these secessionist movements, who are not tolerated in their own countries because they are considered subversive to the central rule, often live in exile in France, whence they lead their hopeless struggle.
