Amin Maalouf's Deadly Idenitites

Starting from a question he is frequently asked, Amin Maalouf examines the notion of

identity, the passions it sets off, its deadly derivates … The general tone that the author

employs is that of the simple and familiar conversation, which does not prevent the resort

to definitions, e.g.:” This is why I am myself and not another., at the edge of two

countries, two or three languages and several cultural traditions. This is precisely what

determines my identity.”

It is because he refuses this fatality (belonging against identity), that the author chose

to write Deadly Identities, a book of wisdom and lucidity, worry but also hope. Maalouf

is profoundly a humanist. He puts freedom higher than everything else(“As the the rest,

all of the rest the path of a free man, the beliefs he acquires, his preferences, his own

sensitivity, his affinities, his life all these things do not count.”), and delivers a

reflection in favor of tolerance, using for this cause the arguments of provoked passions

(“Not only by fanatics and xenophobes of all sides, but by you and me, each one of us.”),

and bloody repercussions (“This is how you ‘manufacture’ slaughterers!”, “[…] single

belonging declared with rage”). He establishes all of this on tangible reality, his own

experience, actuality, history… There is an implicit invitation to a serene contemplation

of our need of a belonging(”It means there is, deep inside each one of us, one ‘belonging’

that matters, our profound truth, in a way, our ‘essence’…”), democracy (“Common

sense dictates that he could claim to belong to both cultures. But nothing in the law or in

the mentality of either allows him to assume in harmony his combined identity”),

globalization(“[…] emerging continental identity”)…

This contemplation is essential and intelligent, and it calls for an open humanism, in

which the planetary vision of Man and his diversity in identities are not necessarily...