Name: In the Name of Identity
Rating: 3.6 (16 reviews)
Author: Amin Maalouf

What’s in it for me? Learn more about your own and others’ identities.

If someone were to ask “Who are you?”, could you give an answer that wasn’t just your name?

Explaining your own identity to others can be difficult. What do you mention? Your political or religious affiliation? Your sexuality? Your educational background?

These blinks will show you the ways in which we can understand identity. They’ll take you on a tour around the world to various cultures and religions, and explain how and why so many aspects of our lives influence the way we feel about ourselves – sometimes wrongfully so.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

why no religion is inherently cruel;
why you are truly unique; and
how radicalism arises.

“Identity” is a deceptive and loaded word that requires close examination.

How do you define your identity? Do you define yourself by your gender, your nationality, your sexuality, or all three?

The truth is that it’s no easy question to answer. Identity is a complex concept formed from the various affiliations that make us each unique, such as our religion, job, race, nationality, the people we admire, our hobbies, sexual preferences, etc.

But such allegiances aren’t fixed, despite what we may think. Over time, we identify more with some and less with others. These changes can happen over years or from one moment to the next when one aspect of our identity comes to the forefront. For example, a wealthy person from a low socioeconomic class might feel a strong working class pride when mingling at a party of people who inherited their wealth.

While many people’s identities vary from moment to moment, others have much more fixed conceptions about who they are. They might exclusively identify with one affiliation, be it their nation, religion or class, and consider the rest secondary.

However, creating rigid hierarchies about who we are can be problematic. One danger is demanding that others identify themselves in hierarchies as well, even when things aren’t that simple.

The author has experienced this imposition first hand. He’s a Lebanese novelist who immigrated to France when he was 27. His first language is Arabic, but he writes in French, and France has now been his home country for 22 years. And, although his roots are Islamic, he is a Christian.

Often when he has explained his atypical background to someone he is asked, “So deep inside, what do you feel like: French or Lebanese?” The author finds such questions misguided, because a person’s identity isn’t divisible into halves or quarters, or any fractions at all. A person isn’t more one thing than the other, nor does she have many different identities. Rather, identity is the collection of all our characteristics combined together.

Our identity is affected by how others see us.

Did you know that identity is something learned? Far from being innate, it’s something that we all construct together by the way we look at others – and others look at us.

We all have the power to influence other people’s identities by putting them into narrow superficial categories. Let’s look at an example: it may seem obvious to you that Austrians are different from Germans, and that every Austrian is also different from every other Austrian. And yet we still lump people together as groups and treat them as one block with identical behaviors, opinions – or crimes. We say “The Americans have invaded,” “The Arabs have terrorized,” “The Mexicans have stolen,” etc. And while these generalizations may seem innocuous at times, they can have serious consequences on people’s identities.

The West’s hegemony has marginalized other cultures, created a clash of civilizations and fueled an identity crisis.

We often think that certain groups are angry at the West because of their religion and their deep-seated fear of Western values.

But the truth is that when the West began to dominate the world, its riches, technology and power marginalized other civilizations and cultures. Modern culture has thus become synonymous with the West’s culture. Indeed, everything historically significant in recent memory has come from the West: capitalism, fascism, communism, aviation, electricity, computers, human rights, the atomic bomb.

Key ideas in In the Name of Identity

What is In the Name of Identity about?

In the Name of Identity (1998) explores the fallacies surrounding the idea of identity. The author uncovers the link between oversimplified, one-dimensional understandings of identity to violent cultural and sociopolitical clashes in the past and present, while arguing that identity and a global community of humankind are both compatible and desirable.