5
To North Africa
An Arab Judge Looks at History
Now for something completely different. The previous two chapters have explored Chinese civilization, to see what new perspectives it can give us on religious life. This chapter does not attempt to summarize a tradition, much less a civilization. Instead, it explores the writings of a single man.
Walī al-Dīn Abū Zayd ‘Abd ar-Raḥmān Ibn Muḥammad Ibn Khaldūn al-Tūnisī al-Haḑramī1 was born in Tunis, in North Africa, in 1332 CE (734 AH). Known by his clan name, Ibn Khaldūn, his work is more popular today than it was when I was a student. Yet it is still under-appreciated. A politician and court advisor as a young man and the chief judge (qadi) of the Maliki school of Islamic law in his middle and old age, Khaldūn wrote an encyclopedic history of the Arab conquests and of the rise and fall of its dynasties and kingdoms. He covered nine centuries of events ranging across the Middle East from Iran to Moorish Spain. That work, the Kitāb al-’Ibar (‘Book of History’), was the first analysis of the socio-political dynamics of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious society. Together with its introduction, the Muqaddimah, it contains ideas that can help us understand certain religious dynamics today.2
We moderns think we live in a chaotic world. The 20th and early 21st centuries have been filled with wars, genocides, and abject brutalities. They have also been filled with great efforts for human rights, social progress, and world peace. Yet we cannot forget the millions of soldiers and civilians killed in World War II, the millions more who died during Stalin’s and Mao’s famines, the Holocaust, the genocides in Armenia, Rwanda, and Cambodia, and the civil wars over land and resources in Central America, West Africa, Angola, and elsewhere. Nor can we forget the current collapsed states in much of the Islamic world. We who have lived through these times often imagine that earlier eras moved more slowly than ours, and were thus more stable. They were not.
Ibn Khaldūn’s century—the 14th of the Common Era—was even more chaotic than ours. His was the century of the plague: the ‘Black Death’ that carried off as much as 60% of Europe’s population. North Africa suffered similar death rates and also much political instability. Armies invaded, common people rebelled, and kingdoms collapsed in both Christian and Muslim lands. This constant disorder shaped Ibn Khaldūn’s views just as much as Europe’s stability during the ‘High Middle Ages’ had shaped Thomas Aquinas’s hopeful views.3
Image yourself a fifteen-year-old boy in 1347, living in Tunis under the Hafsid dynasty, which ruled what was then the most powerful state in North Africa. You are the son and grandson of scholars and the great-grandson and great-great-grandson of court diplomats. You study politics, literature, Qur’an, and jurisprudence with some of the best teachers of your day. Some were refugees from Moorish Spain, or the descendants of refugees, for by the time of your birth, the centuries-long Christian Reconquista had left only Granada in Muslim hands. Your forebears, too, had left Spain more than a century ago; they had been prominent in Seville. You are bright and well connected. Life is promising for such an intelligent son of a distinguished family.4
All of a sudden, things fall apart. The armies of Abul-Hasan, the Merinid ruler of Fez, conquer Tunis and send the Hafsids into exile. The new court brings you new teachers, but an Arab tribal revolt drives out Abul-Hasan’s troops the following year. Then the plague hits. Your parents, other of your relatives, and several of your most esteemed teachers die. The city is in chaos. What future does an ambitious boy have in a place like this?
Ibn Khaldūn did not stay. Though offered a minor post by the returning Hafsids, he soon followed one of his remaining teachers westward: first to Bougie, on the North African coast, then to Fez. There, he became part of a scholarly circle set up by Abul-Hasan’s son and successor, Abu ‘Inan. He stayed eight years. For a time he was Abu ‘Inan’s secretary, but that ended when the ruler decided to retake Tunis. He put Khaldūn in jail, perhaps not wanting a resourceful Tunisian at large while he was gone.5 Khaldūn remained in prison for twenty-one months, until Abu ‘Inan’s death. The new ruler made him minister of state, but after that man’s death in a revolt, Khaldūn moved to Granada. There he was made an ambassador to the court of Pedro the Cruel, the Christian king of Castile. Intrigues at both the Moorish and Spanish courts drove him again to North Africa, where he became prime minister to Abu ‘Abdallah, the Hafsid ruler of Bougie. That post lasted a couple of years. Then, the Hafsids fell into dynastic bickering and Ibn Khaldūn thought it best to find work elsewhere.
I could go on, but you see the pattern. Franz Rosenthal, who translated Ibn Khaldūn’s masterwork into English, recounts the story in great detail. For our purposes, it is the pattern that matters. North African and Spanish/Moorish politics were chaotic and deadly. Theirs was a civilization in decline, in which few thought that all Muslims ought to work together. Factionalism, intrigue, and personal aggrandizement were the rule, not the exception. Ibn Khaldūn saw this. He could not manage this as a politician, so his task as a scholar was to explain why it happened.6
He soon got his chance to do so. In 1375 he was asked to lead a political mission to some Arab tribes in what is now central Algeria. He persuaded one of their leaders to give his family protection at Qal’at Ibn Salamah, a rural castle in the province of Oran. He spent three years there in quiet and comfort. He later wrote in his autobiography,
I completed the Introduction (Muqaddimah) [to the Kitāb al-’Ibar] in that remarkable manner to which I was inspired by that retreat, with words and ideas pouring into my head like cream into a churn, until the finished product was ready.7
It is this Muqaddimah for which Ibn Khaldūn is now remembered. Despite its title, it is more than a mere ‘introduction’. It lays out a set of principles for a new approach to history. In some passages, he called this ‘ilm al-’umrān al-basharī (‘the science of human organization’) and in others ‘ilm al-ijtimā al-insanī (‘the science of human society’). He meant these terms to distinguish his project from ordinary history, which he saw as a record of events that float on history’s surface (ȥāhir). In the Muqaddimah, he sought to lay out history’s inner meaning (bāțin). To him, an historian ought to provide a “subtle explanation of the causes and origins of existing things, and deep knowledge of the how and why of events.”8
This is why Ibn Khaldūn is frequently called the world’s first sociologist. To use a phrase often applied to 19th-century European thinkers, he tried to uncover the ‘motor of history’. Hegel famously found this motor in the dialectical movement of ideas; Marx found it in the internal contradictions of the economic order. Ibn Khaldūn found it in the dynamics of al ‘așabiyyah, a term usually translated as “group-feeling,” “esprit de corps,” or “spirit of kinship.” The term comes from the Arabic root ‘așab, “to bind.” It is a force for social solidarity. Societies with well-developed ‘așabiyyah are strong and capable; those whose ‘așabiyyah is weak divide easily and are quickly conquered. The Muqaddimah outlines the aspects of social life that strengthen and weaken ‘așabiyyah. The rest of the Kitāb al-’Ibar applies this analysis to the pre-Islamic Mediterranean world, to early Arab and eastern Muslim history, and to the history of the Muslim west.9
Three Key Ideas
Ibn Khaldūn built his work around three key ideas. The first was a basic distinction between nomadic and sedentary peoples, rooted in the differing requirements of their ways of life. The second was the importance of al ‘așabiyyah to a group’s ability to organize itself and to stay united. The third was the role of Islam in augmenting or transforming this group-feeling. Together, these ideas let Khaldūn trace the interactions between kin ties, economics, and religions as they influenced the rise and fall of the various groups that shaped the history of North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean. We’ll take up each idea in turn.
Tribes and Cities
Ibn Khaldūn saw history as a cyclic struggle between barbarism and civilization—or ‘tribes and cities’, to use a popular shorthand. He saw nomads as typified by “badāwah”—“bedouinity” or “desert attitude.” Their sparse surroundings force them to move their herds to find grass and water. Wet years bring good grazing and their animals increase, though they still must move to find fresh feed. Dry years bring privation: lands dry up, water disappears, and sand covers what little vegetation remains. In these times, no one can afford to be generous. Groups battle over resources. In short, dwelling in an unstable natural environment gives tribes a rude and savage life. They endure with little and work hard for what they get.10
This life has consequences for tribal social relations. To put it bluntly, tribes can survive only if they stick together. Tribal peoples, wrote Khaldūn,
are alone in the country and remote from [protection by civil] militias. They have no walls and gates. Therefore, they provide their own defense and do not entrust it to, or rely upon others for it. They always carry weapons. They watch carefully all sides of the road. They take hurried naps only when they are together in company or when they are in the saddle. They pay attention to every faint barking and noise. . . . Fortitude has become a character quality of theirs, and courage their nature. They use it whenever they are called upon or an alarm stirs them.11
In such a situation, the tribe is everything. Individuals cannot survive alone, and if a tribe starts bickering, it risks being overrun by others. The tribe has to work as a unit, both to master its environment and in response to outside threats. Compelled to courage and fortitude, its members support each other against all comers
“Hatharah”—“sedentarization”—on the other hand, typifies settled peoples. Relatively speaking, these people are stable and rich. Agriculture, trading, and similar livelihoods let them accumulate wealth. They spend this on better living, which, Khaldūn argued, softens their characters. They think more of themselves and less of their neighbors, because they can afford to do so. They ask magistrates and rulers to defend them both against their fellow citizens and against hostile outsiders. They depend on institutions for support—on laws, not on persons. In short, their living makes them less able to take care of themselves. As Khaldūn put it:
sedentary people have become used to laziness and ease. They are sunk in well-being and luxury. They have entrusted defense of their property and their lives to the governor and ruler who rules them, and to the militia which has the task of guarding them. They find full assurance of safety in the walls that surround them, and the fortifications that protect them. No noise disturbs them, and no hunting occupies them. They are carefree and trusting, and have ceased to carry weapons. Successive generations have grown up in this way of life. They have become like women and children, who depend upon the master of the house. Eventually, this has come to be a quality of character.12
Clearly, Ibn Khaldūn exaggerated this picture to make a point. In doing so, he was merely creating what Max Weber would later call ideal types. These are logically distinct cases by which an analyst seeks to capture the range of social possibilities. No particular society corresponds completely to either badāwah or hatharah. The distinction between them, however, illustrates something important.13
Specifically, Khaldūn proposed two principles. First, he claimed that everyday life shapes people’s character; second, he claimed that different patterns of character are typical in different societies. Some groups live in rigorous circumstances, which call forth personal fortitude and a devotion to the group. Other groups find easier living, because their circumstances let them accumulate wealth. The former suppress individuality, the latter encourage it. Both kinds of society need order, but the former calls on everyone to help each other while the latter lets people delegate key tasks to others. Ibn Khaldūn was interested in the consequences of these situations for various societies’ development.
Since . . . desert life no doubt is the reason for bravery, savage groups are braver than others. They are, therefore, better able to achieve superiority and to take away the things that are in the hands of other nations. The situation of one and the same group changes, in this respect, with the change of time. Whenever people settle in the fertile plains and amass luxuries and become accustomed to a life of abundance and luxury, their bravery decreases to the degree that their wildness and desert habits decrease. . . . [T]he more firmly rooted in desert habits and the wilder a group is, the closer does it come to achieving [military] superiority over others.14
This is Ibn Khaldūn’s central point about these two social types: they produce a cycle of conquest and dissolution. Harsh life makes tribes strong and fierce, which enables them to conquer softer city dwellers. On doing so, they become rulers, who settle down and take on the civilized habits of their subjects. After a couple of generations of sedentary life, they lose their unity and fortitude and so fall to the next wave of barbarians. Khaldūn saw the history of his native Maghreb, of Islam, and indeed of the Mediterranean world since Roman times as a cyclical history of conquest. Tribes overwhelmed cities, became civilized, and were overwhelmed by other tribes in their turn.15
Some contemporary scholars have taken up this contrast. Daniel Pipes, for example, calculated that Muslim armies were disproportionately made up of soldiers from the steppes, deserts, and mountains from the time of Islam’s 8th-century expansion until 1823, when Egypt’s Muḥammad ‘Alī conscripted Nile valley peasants to make a national army. He thus supported Khaldūn’s point. On the other hand, Pipes argued against Khaldūn, saying that pre-Muslim armies were not so dependent on soldiers from marginal areas. Yet under Islam, he agreed, troops that came from a hard life were far more successful than were those raised in gentler circumstances. Benjamin Barber similarly opposed tribes and cities in his popular analysis of current political events, Jihad vs. McWorld. His contrast, however, was not closely attuned to Khaldūn’s work, in that he treated “jihad” as a reaction to globalization, not as the natural result of harsh tribal life.16
Al ‘Așabiyyah
For Ibn Khaldūn, there is a deeper motor to this process. He did not think that military success is the result of just individual fortitude; more importantly, it depends on group unity. Other things being equal, unified peoples will conquer those who are less able to cooperate. Tribes and city people, in his view, differ in the amount of feeling they have for one another. He used the term ‘așabiyyah to describe the emotion that leads group members toward mutual support. Tribal people have a strong group-feeling, which to leads them to support each other, even at the cost of their own lives. City folk have less group-feeling, so they are less apt to sacrifice themselves for the common good.
Ibn Khaldūn wrote that group-feeling has several sources, of which kinship is the strongest. In his words:
[Respect for] blood ties is something natural among men, with the rarest exceptions. It leads to affection for one’s relations and blood relatives, [the feeling that] no harm ought to befall them nor any destruction come upon them. One feels shame when one’s relatives are treated unjustly or attacked, and one wishes to intervene between them and whatever peril or destruction threatens them. This is a natural urge in man, for as long as there have been human beings. The direct relationship between persons who help each other is very close, so that it leads to close contact and unity.17
Different social settings, however, can emphasize or deemphasize these ties. Tribal peoples live with and depend on their kin, while settled folk live with kin and non-kin alike. It makes sense that kin group-feeling is stronger among tribes than elsewhere. Tribes, wrote Ibn Khaldūn, will fight to the death for their group. They thus readily prevail over those for whom the group is not so important.
In Ibn Khaldūn’s telling, group-feeling is, at first, external or defensive. It is the functional equivalent for nomads of the fortresses and armies of city folk. Lacking economic resources and even a secure livelihood, nomads must depend on their group or die. Some scholars thus see in al ‘așabiyyah a substitute for the strength and security that richer societies provide.18
Yet Ibn Khaldūn did not see complex societies as having something that nomads lack. On the contrary, he saw just the opposite. City dwellers not only lack the personal fortitude found among nomads, they also lack their strong group-feeling and common will. They are not used to looking out for one another, which makes it harder for them to respond to emergencies. This leads to their eventual defeat. Law and armies compensate somewhat for sedentary people’s weak așabiyyah, but they cannot replace it. Nomads’ superior group-feeling and lack of regard for outsiders allows them a single-minded brutality that ultimately prevails.
There is, however, a catch: it does not prevail for long. The nomads’ victory brings booty, wealth, and rich living. This weakens their așabiyyah, for which they substitute laws, mercenary armies, and so on. Ultimately, they become weak enough to fall to others.
When a tribe has achieved a certain measure of superiority with the help of its group feeling, it gains control over a corresponding amount of wealth and comes to share prosperity and abundance with those who have been in possession of these things [for a long time]. . . . As a result, the toughness of desert life is lost. Group feeling and courage weaken. Members of the tribe revel in the well-being that God has given them. Their children and offspring grow up too proud to look after themselves or to attend to their own needs. They have disdain also for all the other things that are necessary in connection with group feeling. This finally becomes a character trait and natural characteristic of theirs. Their group feeling and courage decrease in the next generations. Eventually, group feeling is altogether destroyed. They thus invite [their] own destruction.19
Ibn Khaldūn thought this process took at most four generations.20
Let’s step back for a moment. Clearly, Ibn Khaldūn focused on kin ties, though he wrote that these need not be actual blood connections. Master-client relations, close friendships, longstanding relationships with neighbors, and so on can also produce strong group-feelings. The issue is not whether people have common ancestors; the issue is the degree to which a group holds together based on a sense of mutual commitment. As Khaldūn put it, “A pedigree is something imaginary and devoid of reality. Its usefulness consists only in the resulting connection and close contact.”21 Other social ties can be equally strong.
Read even more generally, however, Ibn Khaldūn is giving us a theory of ethnic solidarity—a theory of how and when ethnic groups hold together. Modern social science knows that ethnicity is not rooted in biology or descent but in social identification and attribution. Your ‘ethnicity’ depends on what others think you are and what you claim to be. Ibn Khaldūn said much the same. Biology and descent are mere metaphors. Ethnic groups form because others treat them as groups and also because people see themselves as connected with one another. Ibn Khaldūn emphasized the second of these. His work contains a centripetal (or center-focused) theory of group solidarity. For him, groups unite by mutual attraction, which can be either strong or weak. He traces both the causes of this strength or weakness and also its consequences.
We can illustrate this with some contemporary examples. First, people can, and do, take on non-relatives as family. The Irish American adopted ‘son’ of the Corleone family in the Godfather films is a fine example. He acts out of family loyalty as much as do the ‘real’ Italian sons. His group-feeling is strong. Second, ethnic ties are variable. One of my graduate professors often challenged us to identify his ethnic background. We could not, in that pre-Internet age, and his looks did not give us a clear reckoning. Nor did his behavior: he hung out with and was accepted by Whites, African Americans, Asian Americans, and even a few Latinos (though that was not the name-of-choice in that era). What was he? He seemed to be able to move across ‘ethnic’ borders with ease.
Similarly, Paul Spickard and Rowena Fong showed how Pacific Islanders are able to shift ethnic identities across their lifetimes. Most are of mixed ethnicities and the Islander kin system lets them actualize whichever of their varied identities they need. Depending on how they can trace their relatives, they can become Tongan while in Tongan communities, Samoan in Samoan communities, generic ‘Islander’ among Islander Whites, and so on. Spickard and Fong speculate that perhaps such flexible ethnicities will become more common in an increasingly mixed-race world—a city-world, in which Ibn Khaldūn would expect group-based așabiyyah to be weak.22
Here is one more example. I have a colleague who grew up ‘White’, in the United States, but became ‘Black’ when he moved to London. He has spent much of his professional life trying to become ‘Asian’. How does this work? His parents were from Pakistan. The U.S. counts Pakistanis as ‘Caucasian’, but in Britain they have been popularly lumped with West Indians, Africans, and other immigrants from the former empire. All are termed ‘Black’. The last thirty years have seen a vigorous identity movement among British South Asians, who have sought their own category. They have demanded the right to choose their own ethnicity. Their social and political struggle has largely worked, in part because several decades of British leaders have realized that the United Kingdom is no longer made up just of pale English speakers. The U.K. is now a multicultural society. The question is how to make sure that this society does not fragment. Leaders of all political stripes recognize that forcing White British identity on everyone is out of the question.23
This is a useful example, because it shows how ethnicity can be a matter of both attribution and choice. My colleague used to have an attributed identity: one to which he was assigned. Now he has chosen—and agitated for—a different one. Not everyone gets to do this, especially in societies riven with ethnic conflict. My colleague’s educational and class privilege gave him leverage that other people do not have.24
As Ellis Cose showed in his interviews with successful African American professionals, however, even knowledge and accomplishment do not erase some ethnic barriers. The White police officer who accosted African American Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates in 2009 for ‘breaking and entering’ into his own house, and then arrested him on his own porch for ‘disorderly conduct’, clearly thought that this Black man was out of place. The case made headline news, while proving that some ethnic attributions are harder than others to erase.25
Ibn Khaldūn has two things to add. First, his theory of group-feeling highlights the fact that the strength of group identification is variable, not constant, and that it depends on the circumstances of daily life. He wrote that tribal peoples have strong ‘așabiyyah because their situation demands that they stay unified. If they do not, they are overrun by others. He wrote that city peoples have weaker ‘așabiyyah because they do not depend on their group for day-to-day protection and sustenance. If this is right, the opponents of British multiculturalism should stop worrying. Britain’s ethnic diversity is a city phenomenon, which Khaldūn thought meant easy living. He wrote that easy living always undercuts in-group loyalties.
Here’s where Khaldūn may need some correction. At least part of Britain’s ethnic landscape puts some ethnic groups in poverty. The U.S. is not the only place where minorities have less access to jobs, education, and prospects. City police forces in both countries often target them for special treatment, from formal ‘stop-and-frisk’ policies to informal patterns of arrest that result in fines that pay the cities’ bills. Ethnic youth gangs are one response to this kind of oppression. They protect their members and give them a sense of unity that looks an awful lot like the așabiyyah that Khaldūn attributed to desert dwellers. In this sense, cities can generate group-feeling too.
Khaldūn’s point is about the rigors of life, however, not whether one lives in a rural or a built-up environment. Group-feeling varies according to that rigor: high where life is hard, low where it is not. That makes it a variable. Measuring group-feeling is something that social analysts need to do, as they seek to understand particular situations.
Ibn Khaldūn’s second point is about how ethnic ties form. He proposed a centripetal (center-focused) theory. For him, groups are strong or weak based on the ties that members have with each other. Strong ‘așabiyyah comes from strong internal ties, and it lets groups prosper. Weak ‘așabiyyah keeps them from uniting. Khaldūn’s approach is all about internal attraction: members either feel connected to one another or they do not. The feeling they have for each other makes their groups rise or fall.
This is not the only way to conceive of group cohesiveness. It is one of two basic models, the other of which argues that groups are formed by conflict with outsiders. Such conflict leads each party to consolidate out of fear and for self-protection. These are edge-focused theories, not center-focused ones. Many contemporary scholars focus on edges, emphasizing either the role that actual attacks play in creating group support networks or, more abstractly, examining groups’ reactions to such things as the ‘pressures of modernity’. In both cases, the idea is that outside stresses lead groups to unite.26
The distinction is relatively simple. On the one hand, groups can unite by mutual attraction—in Ibn Khaldūn’s case because of the feeling they have for one another. On the other hand, they can be forced together by outside circumstances: oppression, war, or maltreatment. Both clearly occur, but Ibn Khaldūn argued that only inwardly generated group-feeling could create the kind of solidarity that keeps groups strong. Were outside pressure the only factor, then groups would fall apart as soon as the pressure lifted. He emphasized, however, that group solidarity is active, not just reactive. Yes, Bedouins had to band together for safety, but they also banded together because they depended on each other for survival in a harsh environment. Raised to be mutually supporting, they developed the habit of watching out for the group’s well-being. It took, he said, up to four generations of easy living for them to forget this habit of mutual care. Only then does group-feeling decline. For him, al ‘așabiyyah’s centripetal attraction is crucial for group unity.
Religion
Ibn Khaldūn made one further turn that contemporary theorists of ethnic solidarity do not. He saw a role for religion in generating and regulating al ‘așabiyyah.
As noted above, Ibn Khaldūn thought that city dwellers had a problem. Settled life lowered their sense of group-feeling and encouraged them to put themselves above others. It turns out that he thought that tribes had a problem, too. They were sometimes so group-oriented that it was hard for them to work with outsiders, at least for very long.
He best described this in his discussion of the nomadic pre-Muslim Arabs.27 They were, he wrote, extremely warlike and also extremely successful at conquering others. He called them the most barbarous of peoples, because their life as camel herders kept them in the most nomadic condition. They thus had strong ‘așabiyyah, courage, and fortitude, but were the most remote from civilization. Their loyalty was limited to blood relations, and their warfare produced only pillage and ruin. He described them as
a savage nation, fully accustomed to savagery and the things that cause it. Savagery has become their character and nature. They enjoy it, because it means freedom from authority and no subservience to leadership. . . . On account of their savage nature, [they] are people who plunder and cause damage. They plunder whatever they are able to lay their hands on without having to fight or to expose themselves to danger. They then retreat to their pastures in the desert.28
Though he admired their strong group-feeling, he did not think it provided any basis for continued lasting success:
[The Arabs] care only for the property that they might take away from people through looting and imposts. When they have obtained that, they have no interest in anything further, such as taking care of [people], looking after their interests, or forcing them not to commit misdeeds. . . . Under the rule of [the Arabs], the subjects live as in a state of anarchy, without law. Anarchy destroys mankind and ruins civilization. . . . It is noteworthy how civilization always collapsed in places the Arabs took over and conquered, and how such settlements were depopulated and the [very] earth there turned into something that was no [longer] earth. The Yemen where [the Arabs] live is in ruins, except for a few cities. . . . [B]ecause of their savagery, the Arabs are the least willing of nations to subordinate themselves to each other, as they are rude, proud, ambitious, and eager to be the leader.29
There is, however, a way out of this situation: religion. Ibn Khaldūn argued that religion—specifically Islam—could counteract such a group’s particularism, lending it the strength and unity that it needs to triumph.
When there is religion [among them] . . . , then they have some restraining influence in themselves. The qualities of haughtiness and jealousy leave them. It is, then, easy for them to subordinate themselves and to unite. This is achieved by the common religion they now have [Islam]. It causes rudeness and pride to disappear and exercises a restraining influence on their mutual envy and jealousy. When there is a prophet or saint among them, who calls upon them to fulfill the commands of God and rids them of blameworthy qualities and causes them to adopt praiseworthy ones, and who has them concentrate all their strength in order to make the truth prevail, they become fully united and obtain superiority and royal authority.30
In Khaldūn’s view, Islam expanded Arab ‘așabiyyah to encompass more than kin. This allowed the growth of royal authority and proper kingship, which he saw as a healthy result of well-developed group-feeling. A society needs ‘așabiyyah to stay together, but it also needs to be able to extend that group-feeling widely across the society; narrow group-feeling tears societies apart. Uniting behind kings, who organize their followers to look out for the common good, makes healthy social life possible.31
The problem is, the establishment of royal governments normally lowers ‘așabiyyah, as governments soon come to depend on laws, not on the group. How to prevent this? Religion provides the answer. Ibn Khaldūn showed how Islam kept Arab ‘așabiyyah high, enabling the growth of Muslim civilization. The group-feelings of various tribes and clans did not vanish, but they were submerged into a wider unity that made the Arab empire possible. Prophetic religion thus proved a better unifier than kinship. It ensured that the nomadic Arabs would become a stronger force than city dwellers’ armies and laws.32 Here’s how he described the process:
Religious coloring does away with mutual jealousy and envy among people who share in a group-feeling, and causes concentration upon the truth. When people [who have a religious coloring] come to have the [right] insight into their affairs, nothing can withstand them, because their outlook is one and their object one of common accord. They are willing to die for [their objectives]. [On the other hand,] the members of the dynasty they attack may be many times as numerous as they. But their purposes differ, in as much as they are false purposes, and [the people of the worldly dynasty] come to abandon each other, since they are afraid of death. Therefore, they do not offer resistance to [the people with a religious coloring], even if they themselves are more numerous. They are overpowered by them and quickly wiped out, as a result of the luxury and humbleness existing among them.
This happened to the Arabs at the beginning of Islam during the Muslim conquests. The armies of the Muslims at al-Qadisiyah and at the Yarmuk numbered some 30,000 in each case, while the Persian troops at al-Qadisiyah numbered 120,000, and the troops of Heraclius, according to al Waqidi, 400,000. Neither of the two parties was able to withstand the Arabs. [The Arabs] routed them and seized what they possessed.33
In essence, Ibn Khaldūn saw religion as another source of ‘așabiyyah. Historically, it made the Arab conquests possible. Yes, the nomads’ fortitude contributed, but Islam kept kin-feeling under control. It gave the Arabs a wider sense of purpose. The point, for us, is that religion and kinship can both increase ‘așabiyyah.
However, the cycle did not end there. Despite Islam, the natural decline of group-feeling soon set in. Having conquered, the Arabs took on civilized habits and lost their ‘așabiyyah. City life lowered their common will below the point that Islam made any difference. Their empire split into kingdoms, whose dynasties rose and fell with the rise and fall of various tribal solidarities. Seljuqs, Almoravids, Turks, Berbers, and others came to power and then were absorbed or swept away in the pattern of invasion and conquest that Khaldūn traced back one thousand years. Religious group-feeling came to be but one among scores of group-feelings that typified the ethnically and territorially diverse Muslim world. Regimes rose or fell, peoples conquered or faded away in a complex dance of these many ‘așabiyyaht. This is the pattern that Ibn Khaldūn saw lying beneath history’s surface.34
Comparing Khaldūn and Durkheim
How does Ibn Khaldūn compare to standard Western sociologists, especially in his analysis of the role of religion in social life? Among the classical theorists, Émile Durkheim provides the most interesting point of contrast. Like Khaldūn, Durkheim was concerned with what holds societies together; both also thought that religion plays a role in creating social solidarity. Their two theories are, however, quite different. Their contrast sheds light on some ways that Ibn Khaldūn’s approach might show us something new.35
Durkheim famously divided societies into two types, according to the complexity of their divisions of labor. In simple societies, everyone does pretty much the same kind of thing. They all herd, or farm, or hunt, or fish, or gather, or whatever it takes to keep life going. He recognized that such societies often have clear gender lines, but one man’s work is a lot like another man’s and the same is true for women. Roles are limited and stable. Young people grow up knowing what they will do as adults. There are, of course, small variations, but one peasant farming family is pretty much like another. Everyone has to develop the same skills and abilities.
A complex society, on the other hand offers lots of different professions, and people have to specialize. This is more than the just “butcher, baker, and candlestick maker” of the children’s rhyme. Try accountant, ballerina, coach, development officer, engineer, firefighter, geneticist, on through politician, quality inspector, real-estate agent, stevedore, etc., all the way to zookeeper. They all have different skills. Their jobs require different levels of education, different mental and physical abilities, sometimes even different personality types. People end up being not at all like one another, though many can (and do) form friendships across their various divides.
Durkheim wondered what held each of these societies together. He argued that the simple societies are particularly prone to splitting. Left to themselves, the people in them do not much need each other. They all hunt, grow, or gather the same things. Except for repelling enemies or finding non-consanguineous mates, they could easily split into several groups without it making much difference for people’s lives. Complex societies, on the other hand, are much less apt to splinter. Their extensive division of labor keeps them together, because no one can produce all the goods she or he needs to live.
As a result, Durkheim said, each kind of society has a different form of solidarity. Simple societies have to be held together ‘mechanically’: by means of externally enforced common ideas and customs. Like his British precursor Henry Sumner Maine,36 Durkheim tracked shifts in law to show how simpler societies mainly use laws to enforce conformity and keep people in their place. Complex societies, however, hold themselves together ‘organically’. Like an organism, all the parts contribute to the whole. They thus do not need so many laws to regulate specific norms of behavior. Their laws focus on enforcing contracts and keeping their division of labor running smoothly. Not that modern societies lack criminal law, but there is proportionally less of it than there is in the traditional world.37
In Durkheim’s view, this did not end the matter. Read together, his 1893 Division of Labor in Society and his 1897 study of Suicide show how each form of social solidarity creates its own social problems. Simpler societies require external pressure to tie people together; when this pressure is too high, their suicide rates increase as people sacrifice their lives for the group (’altruistic suicide’). Or they kill themselves when they see so little difference between themselves and others that there is no point in living (’fatalistic suicide’). Complex societies, however, suffer from excessive individualism. Their suicides result from a lack of social ties (’individualistic suicide’) or a dearth of moral support in times of confusion (’anomic suicide’). Durkheim advertised Suicide as a study of how society shapes even the most personal of acts. It is also, however, a study of the consequences of the shift in social structure that he had tracked in his earlier work. The very nature of suicide changes as societies move along the path from simple to complex.38
In both cases, Durkheim found a role for religion. In simple societies, he argued, it can enforce common beliefs and customs, producing a solidarity of sameness. Everyone stays together because they all believe and do the same things. Religious deviance is heavily punished. In complex societies, on the other hand, religion can give individuals a sense of meaning that they too often cannot find in the other parts of life. It can also give them a way to connect with others. Churches, synagogues, and the like are all places where people go both to find the meaning of life and to develop the social ties that an overly individualistic society fails to nurture.
In short, for Durkheim, everything changes according to the social structure. Religion changes too.
It is easy to see the similarities and differences between this and Ibn Khaldūn’s work. Both scholars concerned themselves with social solidarity, and both posited two polar types of society based on people’s means of livelihood. Ibn Khaldūn agreed with Durkheim that tribes were much more uniform than cities and that city life encouraged individualism. Yet where Durkheim saw simpler societies tied together by external laws and compulsion, Khaldūn saw tribes as knit from within—by their group-feeling. Where Durkheim saw complex societies as strengthened by their internal interdependence, Khaldūn saw them as weakened by their lack of common will. Most notably, where Durkheim found social solidarity problematic for simpler peoples, tracing what solidarity they have to common ideas, Khaldūn saw tribes as stable and tied together by feelings, not philosophies. Durkheim did not wrestle with solidarity’s emotional side until his later work, where he wrote that it supports the sacred ideas that he says prop up the social order.39 Even then, its precise outlines are not clear. For Khaldūn, the emotional bond to the group always came first; shared ideas may support it, or they may undercut it. Ideas are secondary in any case.
The contrast between the way that Durkheim and Ibn Khaldūn approached religion is particularly strong. Durkheim identified religion most particularly with simpler societies, where it establishes unity among groups that might not otherwise cohere. Khaldūn found tribal solidarity unproblematic, but saw a role for religion in energizing settled life. Islam, he said, could accentuate even a settled group’s ‘așabiyyah, lending it the strength and unity that it otherwise lacks. Further, Durkheim saw religion acting on a group from without while Ibn Khaldūn saw it enhancing mutual attraction from within. In essence, the two disagreed about just how to approach the issue of solidarity. Though Durkheim did not espouse a completely boundary-oriented approach, he was much less centripetally focused than was Khaldūn. The latter insisted that group solidarity requires strongly felt emotional attachments between members.40
The final contrast centers on each theorist’s treatment of ethnicity. This is relatively simple: Durkheim ignored ethnicity; Ibn Khaldūn found it central. Throughout his work, Durkheim focused on social structure as well as on the moral sentiments that he thought made social life possible. Like most Euro-American social theorists of his time, he did not consider race and ethnicity to be central to the social transformations of the industrial age. W.E.B. Du Bois was the only theorist of sociology’s founding generation to do that, and he was long marginalized by the profession.41
Ibn Khaldūn, however, not only placed ethnicity and ethnic solidarity at the center of his theorizing. He also used the same set of concepts to capture both its role in society and the role of religion. Both ethnicity and religion are important as carriers of al ‘așabiyyah. In his view, each of them generates feelings of social solidarity. They do so in much the same way. The two forces interact to produce the particular patterns of solidarity found in a given place and time. Put bluntly, for Ibn Khaldūn, religion and ethnicity are the same sort of thing. Yes, they have different attributes; anyone can see that. Yet in his schema both work by means of the same mechanism. They work by generating group-feeling, which builds group strength. They are both centripetal emotional forces that tie groups together. His core concept connects two things that standard Western sociology (and the sociology of religion) typically keeps apart.
Let me pause briefly over that last sentence, for it is an important one. When I was growing up in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, the general consensus was that race and ethnicity were biological and fixed—i.e., something that you were given and could not change. Religion, on the other hand, was a matter of identity and ideas: something you could change. These two things operated very differently in the public consciousness.
For example, the Civil Rights Movement of my youth did not try to make people race-less. It merely tried to have people of different races and ethnicities treated equally. My African American friends did not want to become White; they just wanted the same respect that White folks took for granted. After all, Irish Americans did not lose their ethnicity as they joined ‘native’ Anglo-Saxons to constitute the racially dominant White race. The same was true for Italian Americans a bit later on. Their biology did not change; the boundaries of what was considered White just shifted to include them. There was no way that racial boundaries were going to erase the difference between White and Black—that difference was too embedded in American history to disappear.42 In any case, race and ethnicity were seen as biological, not as matters of personal choice; the Civil Rights Movement’s goal was to make human biological variation stop influencing social and political structures.
In the same years, Will Herberg wrote an influential book on the sociology of American religion. Titled Protestant, Catholic, Jew, it argued that 19th-century America’s multiple religious divisions had reduced themselves to three. There was, he argued, no longer much difference between Methodists and Episcopalians, between Presbyterians and Congregationalists, nor between these and the other groups that were part of what scholars called the American Protestant Mainline. People switched from one to another rather easily. Catholics were becoming more and more like Protestants, though they had not (at that time) begun to give up their own religious brand. Jews, too, were giving up their particularity—especially the Conservatives, who were becoming more and more open to liberal ideas. In addition, intermarriage was beginning to grow between these three religious streams. All were regarded—at least by educated people—as being of equal moral worth.43
The 1970s, of course, saw the decline of the Protestant Mainline, Catholic dissatisfaction with Humanae Vitae, and the first expansion of Jewish-gentile intermarriage. They also saw the rise of American Evangelicalism—a religious movement for which conversion is both conceptually and institutionally central. Each of these events enhanced these sense that religion is a matter of personal choice. My students today cannot imagine anything else. Being young and Californian, many of them choose to have no religion at all.44
The point here is not that race and ethnicity are or are not really fixed, nor that religion is or is not really a matter of personal decision. The point is that standard thinking treats the two as being fundamentally different. Sociology textbooks put them in different chapters. That is how they were looked at when I was being trained.
This is beginning to change. As I write this passage, the Middle East is in the midst of a multi-sided war, whose fault lines no one can quite understand. Some of the conflict is portrayed as religious: Iraqi Sunnis attack Iraqi Shiites and are attacked in turn. Yazidis are massacred by Sunni fundamentalists for their supposed religious apostasy. These Yazidis are, however, also treated as an ethnic group and are defended by the Kurdish peshmerga (Sunnis), who see them as ethnic kin. Syrian Druze and Alawites are often called religious minorities but act like ethnic groups—and are occasionally persecuted like them. Are religion and ethnicity so separable here?
As we shall see in the next chapter, there is a lot to gain by seeing religion and ethnicity through the same set of conceptual lenses. That is this book’s purpose: to show us things that standard ways of doing the sociology of religion miss. This is one of Ibn Khaldūn’s strengths: he saw that religion and ethnicity have a lot in common, especially in the ways they tie people to one another.
In any event, Ibn Khaldūn’s work is more than just a history of nomadic conquest. It is the first sociology of a multi-ethnic society, one in which religion played a key but varied role. Khaldūn saw religion as a parallel means of solidarity, alongside kinship, ethnicity, and so on. All were active in both tribes and cities, but in different strengths and combinations. As we shall see in the next chapter, putting religion and ethnicity in the same picture lets us see relationships that would otherwise be invisible.
Ibn Khaldūn’s Islam
So far, I have presented Ibn Khaldūn as if he were a secular sociologist. That is not the case. This is not just because sociology was only invented five centuries after his death. It is because his social analysis is inseparable from his religion. Unlike the 19th-century sociologists we encountered in Chapter Two, Ibn Khaldūn was a convinced believer. Indeed, he spent the last twenty-four years of his life as a Muslim judge in Egypt, much of it as the head (qadi) of the Maliki school of Islamic law. He was, in fact, rather devout. What are we to make of Ibn Khaldūn’s Muslim side? How did it shape his writing about the core patterns he saw underlying social life?
Though contemporary scholars separate (or claim to separate) their personal religious views from their research and writing, the same was not true in earlier eras. Thomas Aquinas, for example, was both a Catholic and a scholar; one cannot read his work without seeing how both shaped his intellectual vision. Baruch Spinoza was similarly enmeshed in science, in philosophy, and in mystical Judaism. Both Immanuel Kant and Karl Marx outgrew their religious upbringings (and in Marx’s case, his teen Christian fervor), but one can see those upbringings in their mature work. Why should Ibn Khaldūn be any different?
In fact, he was not. It is something of a commonplace to remark that the Muqaddimah and the Kitāb al-’Ibar were simultaneously masterpieces of scholarship and a way for a jobless politician to advertise his skills to prospective employers. It is less often noticed that the Muqaddimah, in particular, contains an argument for the importance of Islam in political life. I described this above as his expressing an appreciation for the role of religion in creating al ‘așabiyyah, but that is not precisely what he did. He did not write about just any religion; he wrote about Islam. Nor was the Islam he praised just any Islam. It was a particular variety of Islam, focused on bringing people together for common purposes. It was decidedly unmystical. In fact, it bears some resemblance to present-day Salafist Islamism, though not with the same exclusive fervor and not with the same disregard of actual history. He portrayed an Islam grounded in the early years of unity and expansion. It was this Islam that could generate al ‘așabiyyah. No other.
I am not the only scholar to have seen this. James Morris noted that many passages in the Muqaddimah criticize certain movements in Mahdist Sufism that Khaldūn thought were un-Islamic as well as politically disastrous. Morris wrote:
One of the most common targets of Ibn Khaldūn’s criticism is the common popular belief in a redeeming “Mahdi”-figure (or other related forms of messianism), which is typified in his long section [of the Muqaddimah] (Q 2: 142–201) debunking both the hadith foundations of such beliefs and their further development in Shi’ite and Sufi contexts. The main aim of his criticisms there is not so much the intellectual pretensions underlying that belief as it is the recurrent political delusions following from the popular spread of such ideas among those he calls “common people, the stupid mass,” which have led many Mahdist pretenders—both sincere and fraudulent—into fruitless uprisings and revolts without any hope of successful and lasting political consequences.45
In Morris’s telling, Ibn Khaldūn thought that such Sufism was responsible, in part, for the political and material decline of Islamic states in Andalusia and the Maghreb. Where he wrote of early Islam as bringing people together across their differences, thus creating tremendous group-feeling and a sense of holy mission, he described Mahdists and folk-messianists as dividing Muslims, one from another.46
This may explain why Ibn Khaldūn portrayed contemporary Sufi leaders in such a negative light. Morris notes that his accounts of them clearly do not match those of other contemporaneous writers. He wrote so as to mobilize his readers against them. Morris reminds us that,
We should never imagine that Ibn Khaldūn—at least in his Muqaddimah—is speaking simply as a disinterested, objective historian and mere describer (or “encylopedist”) of the Islamic intellectual, artistic, cultural, and religious traditions that he discusses. Machiavelli did not write his Discourses on Livy for scholars of Latin philology.47
Ibn Khaldūn was thus, in a deep sense, an apologist for a particular kind of political Islam. He thought that Islam, rightly conceived and maintained, could reverse Muslim civilization’s declining fortunes. He saw group unity as the best way of reinvigorating Muslim civilization. He also saw it as better Islam than the Sufi variety: Sufism’s honoring of individual holy men and their revelations undercut Islam’s core message of submission to Allah alone.
We will revisit this matter in the next chapter. It will help us see what Ibn Khaldūn might be able to tell us about the contemporary rise of ISIS—the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria—a phenomenon that has been hard for Western scholars and politicians to understand.
