2+0+2+6=10 which simplifies to 1.

In numerology, the number 1 is the ultimate power number, symbolizing unity. In the Tarot, it is represented by the Magician, the merging of spirit into matter, or as Gen Z now calls it, “manifesting.”

I am no math whiz or card shark, but 2026 screams unity as a necessity.

But while manifesting unity, a few reflections on what division can evoke, and why building bridges matters more than erecting walls.

During a recent guided tour at Louvre Abu Dhabi, a long-overdue exhibition on the equally remarkable Mamluks, which I had already seen in Paris, presented a manuscript suggesting thatChampollion may not have deciphered the Rosetta Stone but instead built his work on earlier Egyptian research that went uncredited. Whether that claim ultimately holds or not, “discovery” stories often simplify complex chains of transmission, turning shared, cross-cultural knowledge into singular breakthroughs and leaving many contributors unnamed.

This immediately brought back a memory from my American University in Cairo days. A French year-abroad auditing student once challenged our science professor when she suggested that Jean de La Fontaine’s Fables were plagiarized from Aesop and Phaedrus. He argued that La Fontaine did not plagiarize but openly reworked a shared literary heritage, which, to him, made the work new. I didn’t react much at the time, far more focused on weekend plans, though I fully agreed with him.

Months later, in a core curriculum class called Philosophic Thinking, a lecture mentioned Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism, making a case for reading culture contrapuntally, from imperial and colonized perspectives, to reveal suppressed voices. I had studied Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in high school, which later became source material for Francis Ford Coppola’s epic Apocalypse Now. That masterfully written book stayed with me for years, forever casting the Congo as an earthly vision of hell in my mind. Said notes that while Conrad condemns the moral rot of imperialism, Africa remains a voiceless backdrop: Europeans think and reflect; Africans remain sound or shadow. He famously extends this critique to the monumentally successful and personal favorite 1942 L’Étranger by Albert Camus, underlining how the murdered Arab is nameless while Meursault’s inner crisis receives full narrative depth, rendering colonial Algeria a silent stage.

A 2013 response , Meursault, contre-enquête by Kamel Daoud, could be used to further Said’s point. The widely publicized fatwa against the author that followed, largely drowned out possibilities for debates around the book itself. Daoud was later celebrated again in 2024 for his novel Houris.

These readings can help explain why calls to rebalance cultural narratives, often labeled “woke”, have gained ground across literature, art, and design.

Myriads of comparable interpretations surge in our Woke/MAGA era. What connects these examples for me is the way dominant narratives, Western in our time, absorb ideas from elsewhere, largely Eastern today, or whatever keeps getting relabeled as such, while keeping those sources out of their own origin stories.

Tying these recollections to the present is a 2025 book I came across in Beirut’s brilliant Librairie Antoine by historian Sophie Bessis, La civilisation judéo-chrétienne: Anatomie d’une imposture. The book deconstructs the notion of a “Judeo-Christian civilization” as a postwar political invention that replaced earlier “Greco-Latin” origins, while erasing Europe’s Eastern links. As Bessis writes, “Jewishness is not recognized as one of the constituents of European and Western civilization while denying it its share of Orientality, and yet ‘the Jew has been Westernized’” (p. 20).

I see bridges crossing gaps in cultural dialogues in music such as that of Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, Nina Simone or Rosalia to only name a few. Also in hybrid paintings of Etel Adnan, where Arabic calligraphy blends with abstract Western forms, or in the work of Mona Hatoum, whose installations confront erasure through intimate, cross-cultural gestures. My own Egyptian alabaster works seek to address similar voids by reinterpreting local traditional Egyptian craft through a personal lens.

I remember the 1980s and 1990s clearly, a time when Western citizens of Arab Muslim descent, like myself incidentally, were largely culturally invisible. In Paris, the few “French Arabs” present in elite circles were mostly of Christian or Jewish background, which felt alienating although I couldn’t grasp it at the time. The only visibly Arab Muslim figures I recall were small neighborhood shopkeepers or gas station workers. No celebrities (except for movie star Isabelle Adjani whom I never knew was Muslim until much later), no political or cultural figures come to mind, despite France’s long and extensive history across predominantly Muslim lands.

Much has changed since then. Or at least it appears so. Visibility has increased, yet so have tensions. The gaps feel wider, the confusion deeper, and conversations increasingly confined to echo chambers. I believe the present is always preferable to the past, and France remains, contrary to certain opinions, a country of openness.

In 1999, my name became the first visibly Arabic name to appear on France’s national music charts singing French pop music. I was determined to lead by example and make a change. Stars didn’t fully align for it but that’s another story.

Then came 9/11, and everything hardened. It gave Islam a Western “voice” in the most catastrophic way, collapsing complex identities into rigid binaries, and narrowing the path for us all.

I continue to wonder why every barbaric act committed by someone identified as Muslim is almost immediately framed as religious, while similar acts committed by people of, say, Christian background are more readily attributed to mental illness, drugs, or psychological instability. Are these perpetrators not mentally disturbed as well? Is the difference merely that some shout “Allahu Akbar,” or claim allegiance to groups they may never have truly encountered?

Without drifting into conspiracy, I sometimes think of the Disney film Zootopia and its unsettling portrayal of manipulation and narrative engineering. Many of us sense that much of what is presented in the media does not quite add up. It cultivates fear, flattens complexity, and ultimately divides far more than it informs.

I find that these double standards grow too easily in the grey zones where labels blur meaning. Arabs, for example, are quite simply those whose mother tongue is Arabic. Encyclopedia Britannica defines language as a system by which humans express themselves as members of a social group. In other words, language inherently carries culture. By that logic, I am French. Not by choice but by fact. French is my mother tongue, I was raised in France, and I only learned basic Egyptian Arabic as an adult. This view unsettles some people, particularly non-Muslim Arab natives eager to distance themselves from certain associations, yet distinctions such as “Arabs versus Jews” make little sense, since many Sephardic Jews are Arab culturally, as are Arab Christians. The majority of Muslims, for that matter, are Asian, not Arab.

These kinds of divisive shortcuts have always bothered me, even as I reject woke rewrites that wrench colonial histories out of context for the sake of angry retaliation and further counterproductive division.

Raised by a father who was devoted to Le Figaro, a paper that was more balanced then and is now increasingly fear-mongering, I find myself struggling today with its darker brushstrokes at a moment when enlightened cross-cultural dialogue feels essential. The writing often remains masterful, and some articles are still worth reading for the windows they open onto existing, sometimes expertly informed perspectives.

A recent piece by Marie-Claude Mosimann-Barbier nonetheless flips Algerian demands by asking why France should not instead seek reparations for thousands of French enslaved in Algeria. It argues that Algeria would not exist as a country without its French colonial past, citing infrastructure such as railroads and ports, and goes on to attribute the beginning of the slave trade in Africa to a Muslim general. Though I find this line of reasoning deeply questionable, it is revealing in another way: it shows how quickly debates slide into selective accounting, where history is compressed, rearranged, and mobilized to respond to present anxieties.

This is where I begin to distance myself from certain contemporary reflexes, particularly within some strands of woke thinking. Can you rewound past event, or purify them retroactively? Doubtfully so. Don’t people understand the essential importance of  context?

Many of the emancipation ideas, independence movements, and frameworks of resistance rising today are themselves products of imperial systems. Not implying that this justifies domination, but it grounds history as layered, entangled, and rarely innocent.

The same complexity applies to how we speak about the United States. Reducing it solely to its imperial and colonial footprint feels as reductive as denying that footprint altogether. The US has obviously offered powerful ideas to the world: individual freedom, social mobility, cultural experimentation, and economic opportunity. That these ideals coexist with deep contradictions does not cancel them out.

Unity, for me, does not mean friendship, agreement, or shared sensibilities. We do not all have to like one another, or even fully understand one another, even if I sometimes wish we did.

A baseline of respect, some degree of curiosity, and enough self-education to allow for conscious, informed choices often feel like a reasonable starting point. I find this particularly challenging in my own life and work in Egypt, where I often coexist with people whose educational paths and reference points have been radically different from mine. This gap can be disorienting, and at times difficult to navigate.

And for all its ancient power, Egypt did not invade other continents, did not export ideology by force, and did not claim to save the world. At least not yet. Yet many people here, as elsewhere, are increasingly engaging with ideals often associated with the West: individual freedom, free market opportunity, and the possibility of movement and self-determination across cultural spaces. These aspirations, whatever their contradictions, feel increasingly present, and increasingly difficult to ignore.

Guernica by Pablo Picasso remains, for me, one of the clearest demonstrations that unity does not require harmony. By transforming the bombing of a Basque town in 1937 into a universal cry against war, Picasso turned imperial horror into shared recognition. Fragmented forms, primal pain, and formal rupture converged into a space where opposing camps could still see themselves reflected. Unity born not from consensus, but from acknowledgment.

With the number 2026 reducing to the number 1, I do wish, against many odds, to see unity placed at the center of our choices. Not as innocence, not as denial, but as a discipline. A way of softening the lingering tensions inherited from the post-colonial era without fueling new cycles of resentment.  A year when cross-cultural exchange stands not as an aspiration, but as a standard of excellence.

With these thoughts in mind, I wish us all a happy, inspired and united 2026.