From Beirut to Khartoum, the Arab world is changing beyond our recognition | Nesrine Malik

Wellor in the last few months there was a new dark ritual when he met people from some Arab countries. It is a kind of mutual sympathy and verification. How are things with you? where is your family I hope you are safe, I hope they are safe. I hope you are well. We are with you.

There is comfort in it, but also discomfort. Comfort because the words are sincere, the solidarity almost unbearably meaningful. Embarrassing because the scale of what many are enduring is too great to be captured in these words. Everything feels laced with survivor’s guilt, but also a bit of determination in the knowledge that the disasters tearing our nations apart have shortened the distances between us.

At the heart of it all is Palestine – an open trauma that haunts interactions. There was silence where there had been anger and shock. Added to that is Lebanon. Before the ceasefire, a friend from Lebanon told me it was a strange feeling that you might not have a country to return to anytime soon. “Shit,” said another when I asked her what the situation was for her family in Beirut. We continued on.

At the same time, Sudan is a year and a half in an astonishingly savage war. Even in occupied the West Bankalmost every Palestinian I met asked me about Sudan, their sense of the war there sharpened by their own experience. “This is such a shame,” one man told me, “[and] so unnecessary. It is always our leaders who want to fight, never the people. Wherever it is, it feels like a war whose causes are complex but the consequences for those who live through it are simple. We are all in familiar trouble.

Zoom out even further and the scene in the Arab world looks historically bleak. Big and small fires are burning everywhere. Many countries – Libya, Iraq, Yemen, Syria – are too separated of low class rumbling conflicts (It’s Syria again escalating), or fight humanitarian crises.

The charges of the last few years are staggering. Not only in terms of death, but also of exodus. The scenes of hundreds of thousands of Lebanese running away from the battle in previous months have been replicated throughout the region. Inheritance is a painful odyssey of movement, fracture and uneasy resettlement. Almost every Sudanese I know, in and out of Sudan, has huddled with other family members in temporary circumstances, living in a suitcase, waiting for the next time they have to move again. And they are the lucky ones spared from ethnic cleansing and starvation in other parts of the country.

Another sacrifice, less urgent when it comes to life and death, looms in the background. The great historical cities are devastated and a process of civilizational obliteration is underway. All of Syria’s UNESCO World Heritage sites have been damaged or destroyed. The Great Mosque of Omari in Gaza, whose origins date back to fifth century and which has been described as the “historic heart of Gaza”, was destroyed by IS. The old city of Sana’a in Yemen, inhabited for more than 2,500 years, is classified as “in danger” from 2015. Tens of thousands of artifacts have been discovered in Sudan this year, some dating back to the era of the pharaohs looted. Cities can be rebuilt, but heritage is irreplaceable.

Even stable countries like Egypt have not escaped this cultural sabotage. Heritage sites are destroyed to make way for urban development by a government racing to rebuild Egypt to conform to its monoculture of military rule. There is a metaphor in this that applies throughout the region. In the name of asserting power, the political elite is happy to vandalize identity.

Even in my own mind I can feel the cultural contours blurring as the physical architecture disappears. And along with that, so many other things are obliterated – the sense of rootedness, of continuity, of a future. I look at my children and it gives me chills to realize that the very topography of Sudanand the Arab world as I experienced it through literature, art and travel is something they will never know. For them, the ties that bind them to their parents, as they bound me to mine, are severed.

Now I sound like a nostalgic old woman, I know. Singing the blues of exile, idealizing a past that was always far from ideal, ready to tease the new generation and tell them it wasn’t always like that. Because I was once that new generation, listening to elders smoking Marlboro Reds and drinking tea and being told it’s a shame you never lived through the heyday, when we studied medicine in Baghdad for free, went to the theater in Damascus, hosted by Malcolm X in Omdurman. When we had huge publishing houses and pan-Arab solidarity. I used to think, well, isn’t this failure yours too? Because your class has failed to translate this into a political project that is not constantly hijacked by militaries and dictators.

As the center of political and economic power in the region shifts to the oil-rich Gulf states, which become concentrated expressions of hyper-consumerism and modernity, I can hear myself saying, “It wasn’t always like this.” It wasn’t always were fashion shows like this one by Lebanese designer Elie Saab held in Riyadh last month, which dominated social media with videos of J-Lo and Céline Dion recounting their hits to local and global influencers. Or high-octane sporting events and extravaganzas of glamor while orgies of violence unfold elsewhere. It hasn’t always been this desire to define our status by how closely we are connected to superpowers, or this thirst to showcase our global tastes.

I now forgive these elders more and I also want to tell them: you didn’t know how good you had it. I see now that what I thought was their failure was something much bigger, much more connected to global alliances and internal ones that prevented the emergence of a popular uprising or crushed it when it arose. Each protest was directed against impersonators.

An Iraqi friend recently offered me some comfort about Sudan. She told me that Baghdad was starting to feel normal for the first time in 20 years. Things were far from ideal, but there was an opportunity in a few decades for a chance for a fresh start. And perhaps the best you can hope for is a fresh start, not a rehabilitation of the past. Meanwhile, all that can be said to friends and strangers, all now countrymen, I hope you are safe. I hope you are well. We are with you.