Ethnic, regional, and tribal senses of identity are inevitable, but in Islam, they must be secondary to our identification as Muslims belonging to a single Ummah.
The phenomenon of nation-states, in which the people come to define themselves primarily as being Egyptian, Syrian, Canadian, or what have you, has, to a great degree, transformed the porous compartmentalization within the Ummah into tribes and ethnicities (which is itself relatively harmless), into way of dividing the Ummah and erecting barriers between Muslims.
It is arguable, and I would argue, that this phenomenon represents the crisis Rasulullah ï·º referred to when he was asked about the possibility of a situation in which the Muslims have no imaam, and he advised us to distance ourselves from “all those sects”. For indeed, nationality has become a type of sect