Quote by Amin Maalouf: “Every one of my identities links me to a large number of people. Together they form my tribe.”

We each contain multiple identities — our religion, nationality, language, gender, profession — and each one connects us to a different group of people. Taken together, these overlapping affiliations form who we are more completely than any single label can.

Maalouf published On Identity in 1998 in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, the Bosnian War, and ongoing Middle Eastern conflicts — all fueled in part by the politics of exclusive ethnic or religious identity. His essay argued urgently for a more complex understanding of human belonging.

Lebanese-French novelist and member of the Académie française whose work explores cultural identity, displacement, and the collisions of civilization. His 1998 essay On Identity (Les identités meurtrières) argued that rigid single-identity thinking is the root of modern violence.