Oasis 15

The need for freedom and for authentic relationships is sometimes crushed by legal systems which seem to get further away from it and indeed even at times betray it or deny it

The prehistory of the current secular republican regime goes back to the early years of the nineteenth century, when the Empire began to set out the limits of state authority and the rights of citizens, Muslim and non-Muslim. The still ongoing tension between state and religion originated at the same period

Merely by surveying the events of the last hundred years, we can see just how much is happening today in Syria. What is going on there in fact is not simply a battle between the Baath Party and its opponents, nor a merely regional conflict, but a settling of accounts that could change the whole international equilibrium.