6
Ibn Khaldūn Applied
Medjugorje and the Islamic State
How might a Khaldūnian sociology work in practice? There’s no better test of theory than using it to unravel a complex case, and there’s no place where religion and ethnic identity have been more intertwined than in the former Yugoslavia. Almost everyone knows about the wars that tore through that region in the 1990s, as Croats, Serbs, Bosniacs, and Kosovars fought over territory. Some people also remember a set of religious events that took place a decade earlier: the visitations of the Virgin Mary to a group of teenagers on a hill outside Medjugorje, a small village in southwestern Bosnia-Herzegovina. Are these related? Or are they separate? We shall see what a Khaldūnian sociologist might say about these events and then evaluate that interpretation’s strengths and weaknesses. Then we’ll consider a more recent case: the current civil war in Syria and the growth of the Islamic State.
Case 1: The ‘Miracles’ at Medjugorje
On June 24, 1981, six young people claimed to have seen and conversed with the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus, on a hill behind Medjugorje, whose name means “between the mountains.” Members of the local Franciscan priest’s catechism class, they encountered “the Gospa” (Our Lady) while returning home after evening Mass.
After a few heartening remarks and the promise to return the following evening, the figure vanished. . . . By that evening, the whole village knew about it. Accompanied by a rapidly growing crowd of villagers, the seers went back to the hill the following evening. The Madonna, who was said to be seen and heard only by the young visionaries, gave messages to pass on to everyone. Peace and forbearance among God’s people, the priests, and all the people of the world.1
The apparitions continued daily, first on the hillside, then later in the church rectory, during which the Virgin transmitted teachings to her believers. Calling herself the “Queen of Peace,” she typically urged people to pray, fast, confess, and take communion. Within a short time, the evening meetings on ‘Apparition Hill’ had grown to a few thousand people, mostly locals. Villagers reported miraculously swift healings, similar to those experienced in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, which was at that time growing in influence in both America and Italy. Indeed, the parish priest, Father Branko, had attended a Renewal meeting in Italy just two years before. While there, he supposedly received visions of the special relationship between the Holy Mother and his parish.2
Yugoslavia in 1981 was still a Communist state, under a good deal of central control, so official repression started almost immediately. The six visionaries were investigated, access to the hill was closed, parish religious services were disrupted, and the church collection was sometimes confiscated. This had the unwanted effect of publicizing the apparitions, so that ever larger numbers of people heard about them and made pilgrimages to the village. Franciscans from abroad began organizing visits, which brought a tremendous amount of money into the previously backward region. Recognizing this, the authorities relented; they ultimately built their own tourist complex at the edge of town. By the early 1990s, an estimated ten million pilgrims had visited the site, sometimes over one hundred thousand in a day. Travel agents set up package tours, which included Masses in English and visits with the visionaries.3
From the first, scholars generally treated the reports of these apparitions as religious phenomena. The visionaries were all staunch Catholics, their visions corresponded to Catholic beliefs, the content of the teachings was orthodox, and the local church was in an area of a long-standing Franciscan mission work. The millions of pilgrims who visited the site in the 1980s, along with journalists, Vatican religious inspectors, and others framed the apparitions in a language of “miracle,” “charism,” “prophecy,” and “renewal.” Sociologists, at least those writing up to the early 1990s, used the language of “pilgrimage,” “religious organization,” “religious competition,” and “religious revitalization.”4
Not all of this reportage was positive. It turned out that there was a good deal of behind-the-scenes conflict between the visionaries, the local priests, and diocesan officials. This was perhaps inevitable, given the sheer numbers of visitors. Much was made (by the sociologists) of the split between the local Franciscans and the ecclesial hierarchy, especially after the latter declared the apparitions “unsubstantiated.” Michael Sells reported:
The increasingly wealthy Franciscans refused to cede control of several disputed local parishes to diocesan authorities. The Bishop of Mostar denounced the Medjugorje visions as a fraud. At one point militias attached to the Medjugorje Franciscans seized the bishop, held him overnight, beat him, and ceremonially stripped him of his ecclesiastical insignia. The Medjugorje Franciscans were accused by critics of engaging in cult practices and sexual exploitation. The Franciscans accused the Bishop of similar depravities, threatened to blow up the cathedral of Mostar, and barricaded a disputed church in nearby Capljina against any effort of the Bishop to assert diocesan control.5
This was heady stuff, seemingly suitable for B movies, the tabloid press, or American daytime television, were it not for the context: beginning in 1992, an ethnic war tore apart this region of the former Yugoslavia. Serbs, Croats, and (so-called) “Bosnian Muslims” struggled for control of Bosnia-Herzegovina from March of that year until late 1995. NATO intervention and the Dayton Accords finally brought an end to the fighting.
Ethnic War
The wars that dismantled Yugoslavia during the 1990s are complicated and have multiple sources, about which scholars have argued at length.6 For many sociologists, and also in the popular press, the 1992–1995 war in Bosnia was cast as an ethnic conflict—albeit one that split on inherited religious lines. Serbs, Croats, and Bosniacs were recognized as being divided by religious background, but their rather slack religiosity was seen as a marker of ethnic primordialism, not of religious practice and belief. As the joke went at the time, the only difference between the three groups was which religion they did not practice. Still, people would kill for these differences. As Michael Sells noted, “some survivors . . . had not viewed themselves as religious or even thought about their religious identity until they were singled out for persecution because of it.”7
Though not primordial, inter-ethnic conflict in the region extends at least to the founding of the Yugoslav state after World War I. The conflict was mainly between Serbs and Croats. Serbs had had their own state before the war, while Croats had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Their division was actually a matter of state identity, not biology or deep history. However, as Benedict Anderson famously wrote, late-19th- and early-20th-century nationalist ideologues imagined that language, biology, and history were coterminous. One ‘people’ were supposed to have one language, one body-type, one history, and one culture, and deserved their own state.8
Croat dissatisfaction with Serbian dominance in the Yugoslav kingdom, and especially with the king’s attempts to strengthen central control, led to various ethnically charged political assassinations. After invading in 1941, the Germans divided the country, setting up a puppet state in Croatia controlled by the nationalist Ustaše militia. In the next several years, and in the context of a bitter war against both Serbian royalist ‘Chetniks’ and Tito’s Partisans, the Ustaše killed several hundred thousand Serbs plus tens of thousands of Jews and Roma. The victorious Tito government set up a memorial to these dead on the site of the Jasenovac concentration camp. Despite Tito’s rhetoric of “Fascists” and “Partisans” to describe the wartime conflicts, this memorial was read by many as a Serbian commemoration of Croatian atrocities—and also a disregard of the atrocities that had been committed by other sides.9
The fact that Tito was himself a Croat dampened ethnic tensions for a while, as did the disproportionate economic development of Yugoslavia’s north, where the bulk of the Croats and Slovenes lived. This balanced Serbian political control, exercised through a Communist Party formally open to all. By the 1960s, however, the government succumbed to pressures to recognize the Yugoslavia’s various ethnic components, both demographically (through identification on the national census) and institutionally, by devolving some power to Yugoslavia’s regions. The categorization of Bosniacs as “Muslims”—a 1968 constitutional change—was the first formal identification of religion with ethnicity. The category “Bosniac” was not made available, but the category “Yugoslav” was; it was mainly chosen by urbanized elites and by those who had married across ethnic lines.10 These categories shifted with Yugoslavia’s disintegration during the 1990s. After the civil war, for example, Montenegrin ‘Muslims’ were reportedly evenly split about whether to identify themselves as “Bosniac” or “Muslim.” The first term connected them to a country in which they did not live, and the second connected them to a religion that most of them did not practice. Such are the choices that people were forced to make in this region.11
Medjugorje was no stranger to these pressures and to this conflict. Though located quite close to a Bosniac-dominated part of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Medjugorje is also only a few kilometers from the Croatian border. The village served as an Ustaše stronghold during World War II and, Sells wrote, “was the site of some of the most gruesome atrocities.” Beginning in 1992, Croatian Army and civilian militias launched a concerted attack on Bosnian Muslims and Serbs living in the region. Their destruction of the town of Stolac, for example,
was systematic, methodical, and precise. Catholic homes, businesses, and shrines remained untouched, but the non-Catholic heritage and property were thoroughly destroyed. Foremost among the mosques destroyed . . . was the Emperor’s mosque . . . one of the three most ancient in B[osnia-]H[erzegovina]. . . . Eight other mosques were destroyed, including other historic works from the Ottoman period. Also . . . the Orthodox church of Holy Assumption . . . as well as ten residential areas, four urban neighborhoods, the bazaar area, . . . three main libraries, two public galleries of paintings . . . [and so on]. As in other campaigns by Catholic and Orthodox militias, the precision with which the target heritage was sought out and destroyed indicated the participation of an educated elite as advisors, including, according to reports, local Catholic art historians and professors.12
Bosnian Serbs launched similar attacks on Catholics and Muslims in other areas, including killing several thousand Muslim men at Srebrenica and scattering their bodies in the surrounding fields. Such ethnic cleansing goes beyond mass murder; it amounts to the systematic erasure of a people’s cultural heritage and being.13
Religion and Ethnicity
As we saw in the previous chapter, the contemporary world typically sees ‘religion’ and ‘ethnicity’ as being fundamentally different sorts of things. Religion is imagined to be a matter of beliefs and of personal participation in religious life, and, in the views of many writers, is increasingly a matter of personal choice.14 Ethnicity, on the other hand, is typically treated as a given: as a matter of biological breeding and tribal allegiance. Objectively, it was hard to distinguish between the three warring Yugoslav groups. All spoke the same language, possessed the same blood, hair, and skin types, and had interbred for hundreds of years. The few linguistic differences that existed were invented in the 1920s; biological difference was an illusion. Nor were the various groups divided by residence, though different villages had differently balanced populations. Even their pasts were not as separate as later nationalist ideologies led outsiders to believe. That’s what surprised the world: that generations-long neighbors would turn on one another, murderously. This was not supposed to happen in modern times.15
Historically, sociology has admitted a tie between religion and ethnicity, but one that is intrinsic to neither of them. Put succinctly, it saw them both as artifacts of a ‘traditional’ past. As we saw earlier in this volume, 19th- and early-20th-century sociology was born out of an effort to understand Europe’s industrialization and did so by distinguishing ‘modernity’ from ‘tradition’. This took various forms in the sociological classics: Marx’s “feudalism” versus “capitalism,” Maine’s “status” versus “contract,” Tönnies’s “Gemeinschaft” versus “Gesellschaft,” Durkheim’s “mechanical” versus “organic” solidarity, and Weber’s efforts to describe the uniqueness of the West. By the mid-20th century, American sociologist Talcott Parsons had systematized this difference with his famous ‘pattern variables’: social characteristics on which traditional and modern societies were supposed to diverge. Among them, religion and ethnic particularism were firmly on the traditional side.16
On the religious side, institutional differentiation and state expansion were supposed to have moved religion to the private sphere, while increasing interreligious contact was supposed to make supernatural belief less plausible. On the ethnic side, group-based identity and intergroup discrimination were believed to interfere with needed economic development. Several sociological theories argue that a modern economy needs people to be individualistic, cosmopolitan, universal in outlook, tolerant, oriented toward rationality, self-reflective, and willing to break traditional ties for the sake of personal advancement. Add in the sense that industrial and post-industrial economies create ties between formerly unlike peoples, and it is easy to understand why many sociologists—along with other scholars—thought that religious and ethnic groups would vanish as the traditional world waned.17
The eruption of religio-ethnic conflict in Yugoslavia and elsewhere produced a crisis for the proponents of a smooth transition to an individualized, secular, post-ethnic world. Eastern Europe was supposed to be ‘on the road to modernity’, where ethnic and religious ties were thought to be no longer important. Some observers tried to salvage their basic theories by treating religious and ethnic resurgence as anti-modernist responses to the social disruption that modernity brings. Others took refuge in talk of ethnic primordialism, though why this would have religious overtones was left unexplained. Yet, even on this score, ethnic violence should not have erupted in Medjugorje, which had played host to so many outside visitors. The religious tourism that had so connected that village to the outside world should have inoculated the villagers against conflict. Clearly, the reigning sociological view failed to predict events on the ground.18
What Would Khaldūn Say
Unlike Western sociologists, Ibn Khaldūn applied the same conceptual categories to religion and to ethnicity, seeing them both as potential sources of “group-feeling.” He focused not on tribal peoples’ supposed traditionalism, but on their willingness to sacrifice for one another. He saw religion not as a matter of belief, organization, and rite but as a force that similarly encouraged people to cooperate. Both ethnicity and religion could accentuate group-feeling. Both could sustain group identities in the face of conflict and change. Most notably, they could do so at any point in history—for his was a cyclical theory, not one imagining ‘progress’ from the ‘traditional’ to the ‘modern’.
A Khaldūnian sociologist would argue that it makes sense to see the Marian apparitions at Medjugorje and the ethnic violence of the 1990s as part of the same social process. Despite their overt message of peace, the apparitions heightened Catholic identity and solidarity at a time of disintegrating state power. Coming in a border region, economically backward and ethnically mixed, the apparitions amounted to a supernatural affirmation of Catholicism’s special status. Precisely because the region was backward before the influx of tourist money, clan groups were stronger. Farming was hard and resources were scarce, which forced families and clans toward self-reliance. Prior events had presented inhabitants with a conceptual world in which “Croat” and “Catholic” were seen as synonymous, even if this was not historically accurate. Is it any wonder that group-feeling was heightened as Catholicism became more important?19
As Michael Sells pointed out, “the original messages attributed to [the Virgin] contained an anticommunist subtext”—an appropriate dividing line, given the nature of the existing Yugoslav regime. Later messages dropped this theme in favor of calls for prayer, fasting, and the conversion of unbelievers. It is not hard to see how the latter might justify the forced expulsion of Serbs and Bosniacs, who were increasingly defined by their non-Catholic status. Heightened Croat/Catholic group-feeling mobilized this opposition to “outsiders” in the context of a declining Yugoslav state. As that state evaporated, religio-ethnic conflict burst into the open.20
The issue here is group-feeling, not ‘tribes’ conquering ‘cities’, though that was where Ibn Khaldūn focused his history of the Muslim world. For Khaldūnian sociology, the question is about the extent to which various groups are tied together, and about the sources and results of that centripetal solidarity. The rigors of life in southwestern Bosnia united families and clans but did not bind them into larger groups. Indeed, we know there was considerable hostility between the various Croat-Catholic clans; a Khaldūnian sociologist would look for similar conflict among Serbs and Bosniacs. Among the Croats, at least, clan group-feeling was high but of limited scope. This is where religion enters the picture.21
The “miracles at Medjugorje” made Catholicism more important in this region, and Khaldūnian sociology would expect this to create greater intra-clan cooperation. This was apparently the case. The events themselves were framed in a Catholic idiom, under the supervision of the local Franciscan order. Various local clans and families worked with outside Catholic groups to develop the tourist trade. They presented themselves as Catholics to the pilgrims, such that this became their public master identity. The net result was to highlight the equation of Catholicism with Croatian ethnicity—exactly the submerging of particular loyalties into religion that Ibn Khaldūn found so important for Islam’s triumph.
A Khaldūnian sociologist would also highlight a further development: the effect that the apparitions and the subsequent deluge of pilgrims had on local Catholicism. Prior to the 1980s, Medjugorje was mostly a village of women. As was the case in several of Yugoslavia’s economically less-developed regions, many of its men lived in Italy and Germany as migrant workers, sending home remittances to support their families. Village religious life revolved around women’s prayer groups, not around the church. Women held religious status, and, according to anthropologist Mart Bax, “It was widely felt that without their efforts . . . the Virgin Mary would not have appeared.” As is true in many places, popular Catholicism was not uniquely church-centered, which means that it was a much more eclectic than during the later pilgrimage period. It was, in fact, less oriented both to orthodoxy and to boundaries, though no village woman would have said this to church officials directly.22
The massive influx of pilgrims did more than bring wealth to the region; it also re-centered popular Catholicism on the church. Women’s status declined, both because economic opportunities brought men back from abroad and because outsiders focused their attention on the visionaries, the priests, and other local officials. They portrayed the region as more uniformly (and orthodoxly) Catholic than it had been, heightening local Catholic identity. Non-Catholics could not participate in the economic boom, so were displaced. All this heightened Catholic ‘așabiyyah, in Khaldūnian terms.
This is not to say that the Marian apparitions are responsible for, much less caused, the ethnic cleansing. That is not how a Khaldūnian sociologist would put the matter. Instead, religious solidarity and ethnic solidarity are of a piece. This is particularly so where ethnicity is defined along religious lines, whether or not the people involved are “religious” in terms of their personal beliefs, prayer life, and so on. It is the feeling that matters, and the sense of group identity. Unlike the standard Western approach, a Khaldūnian sociology would not be surprised by the eruption of communal violence. Intense group-feeling can stimulate conflict with outsiders. It does not matter whether the feeling comes from religion or from ethnic ties.
In short, a Khaldūnian approach is not surprised by the eruption of ethnic conflict at a religious pilgrimage site. The 1980s religious fervor heightened group-feeling, which then set locals against their ethno-religious ‘enemy’. Ibn Khaldūn’s ideas reveal central elements of the events at Medjugorje, both ethnic and religious, that standard Western sociologies hide.
Is It True?
This is a plausible picture, but we have to ask ourselves: Is it true? First, is it actually the case that both religion and ethnicity were sources of group-feeling in this region? Second, did this group-feeling contribute to the massacres, ethnic cleansing, and other events about which I have spoken? Despite the appeal of the Khaldūnian interpretation I have laid out, I am afraid that the answer is split.
Based on what I have described in the previous section, the first question deserves a qualified “yes.” The ‘miracles’ at Medjugorje did heighten Catholic identity in the region and religion did serve as a source of group-feeling for those involved. Overall, previously divided clans cooperated with one another. “Catholic” and “Croat” became more closely identified than before, even interchangeable. This fits the Khaldūnian model. The qualification stems from some residual inter-clan competition over business opportunities and from divisions between the local Franciscans and the diocesan authorities.23 Catholic group-feeling did not seem to stifle such rivalries in full.
However, the second question deserves a decisive “no.” Let me explain why.
As we saw in the previous chapter, there are two ways to describe group formation. Groups can form by attraction: the center-focused force to which I referred earlier in this chapter. Alternatively, they can form by division: as a result of group conflict, which leads each party to consolidate out of fear and for self-preservation. Was the Bosnian conflict in and around Medjugorje primarily a result of centripetal solidarity—i.e., forces that bind people together? Or was ethnic division there fed by violence in a self-perpetuating spiral? An analysis of the role played by elite actors in creating the conflagration indicates the latter. We can address this issue in four related points.
Point One: As the Yugoslav state imploded in the late 1980s, various leaders played up ethnic divisions as a way to hold onto power. Slobodan Milošević notoriously parlayed an ultra-nationalist 1987 speech in Kosovo into election as president of Serbia, leading that country throughout the 1990s wars. Franjo Tudjman was similarly elected Croatian president on an extreme nationalist platform. Each financed and armed ethnic militias in Bosnia that carried out much of the 1992–1995 killing. Milošević was indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia for war crimes and genocide, and was still standing trial at the time of his death. Tudjman reportedly would have been similarly indicted, had he not died before the Tribunal was convened. Both were political instrumentalists, “who used their cultural groups as sites of mass mobilization and as constituencies in their competition for power and resources.” ‘Playing the ethnic card’ has long been a route to political success in countries with histories of ethnic division and where electoral systems and/or electorates do not reward cross-ethnic connections. It was especially tempting in Yugoslavia, where access to the political power was suddenly up for grabs.24
Point Two: Both Serbs and Croats used religion as a means to create divisions. The 1989 anniversary of the 1389 Battle of Kosovo was heavily ritualized by the Serbian Orthodox church and state, being treated as the “Serbian Golgotha”—complete with a Mary Magdalene figure ministering to the fallen Serb warriors. This highlighted Serb-Muslim divisions, which fed both the atrocities in Bosnia and the later conflict in Kosovo. Croatian Catholic nationalism had long centered on the campaign to canonize Cardinal Stepinac, a church leader tied to the Ustaše and opposed to the Communists and Serbs. It is worth noting that Croatia declared its independence from Yugoslavia on the tenth anniversary of the first Medjugorje visions. This was clearly a ploy to give Croatian separatism a supernatural imprimatur. Serb and Croat militias were both said to identify their victims by religiously identified surnames and by asking about the prayers they had learned in childhood. In doing so, they made what Michael Sells called “religion identity” a dividing line, imposing it on people whose actual religious identity was sometimes quite different. Sells reported that Croats in the Stolac-area HVO (Croatian Defense Union) militia even murdered their fellow Muslim militia members, creating a divide where none had existed before. This is certainly group formation from without, not the kind of solidarity that Khaldūnian ‘așabiyyah would generate.25
Bosniac ‘Muslim’ leadership, on the other hand, did not use religion as a rallying point, though the regime did attract some outside jihadi fighters who came to support their imagined ‘Muslim brothers’. These outsiders were reportedly often appalled at the religious slackness of the population they sought to defend. Today’s Bosnian Islamism appears to be a post-war phenomenon, driven at least in part by the West’s failure to protect Bosniacs and by the disproportionate death toll that Muslims suffered during the war. Resurgent Bosnian Islam—and it is not very resurgent—is a result of the dividing lines drawn by others, not their cause.26
Point Three: Conflicts in and around Medjugorje did not always divide on religious lines. Mart Bax’s 1995 report of a 1992 murderous intra-Catholic clan feud appears to have been at least overblown and at worst invented,27 but the conflicts between Medjugorje’s Franciscans and the Mostar bishop were not. Sells reported that this was mainly a struggle over property and influence—one that led the bishop to denounce the visions as false and led the Franciscans to refuse to cede authority over their villages. At the height of this struggle, the bishop was kidnapped by Croatian militias, beaten, and held captive overnight in a Franciscan chapel.28 Reality on the ground does not allow us to embrace any neat Khaldūnian picture of religion enhancing group-feeling.
Point Four: The Communist state had long used “Serb” and “Croat” as categories by which to administer the Medjugorje region. It originally called them “Partisan” and “Fascist,” rewarding and punishing locals for their parents’ actions during the Great War. Croats paid taxes to Serb officials, saw new development channeled to Serb villages, and suffered official depredations at the hands of Serbian police. They were unofficially barred from public employment, which meant that many were forced to emigrate for work, either to Western Europe or to the United States. Is it any wonder that they resented this treatment, based solely on their ethnic status? Or that they welcomed the Marian apparition as a source of both pride and cash? Or that they used their newfound independence to retaliate across the ethnic lines that governing elites had drawn around them?29
We are not dealing here with an ethnic primordialism. ‘Serbs’ and ‘Croats’ have not been fighting for centuries, as was claimed in the media at the time. ‘Catholic’, ‘Orthodox’, and ‘Muslim’ have not always been firm lines drawn around various groups in the region, nor have they always been the most salient social barriers. Yes, there have always been lines of separation here, but the various divisions usually cut across one another, and they were of differing strength in different eras.
Still, at this place, at this time, ‘ethnic’ and ‘religious’ divisions were available as tools that regional and national elites could use to expand their political power. The Yugoslav wars of the 1990s are a classic case of how such elites can set groups against one another. Medjugorje’s divisions were not simply the grassroots result of Khaldūnian group-feeling; they stemmed from deliberate elite policies. Group identification was actively created, which led to war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and even genocide. Religiously and ethnically based ‘group-feeling’ is not the whole story.
Where does this leave our attempt to expand the sociology of religion’s intellectual toolkit by adding Ibn Khaldūn’s concept of al ‘așabiyyah or ‘group-feeling’? The answer is mixed. Clearly, the Khaldūnian approach—with its roots in the history of Islam, not Christianity—has the merit of placing the Medjugorjian miracles and the inter-ethnic fighting in the same field of view. It is one of the few approaches that does so, forcing scholars to gauge their empirical relationship. Religion and ethnicity are related intimately in this case; seeing exactly how this works itself out represents considerable scholarly progress. That is one point in its favor.
Here is another: Khaldūn’s approach also recommends against sociology’s historic representation of ‘tradition’ as static and ‘modernity’ as dynamic. Both are dynamic, because both involve shifting degrees of group-feeling. Simple traditionalism-versus-modernity is an inappropriate way of understanding Bosnian events.
On the other hand, Ibn Khaldūn’s concept of al ‘așabiyyah fails to account for many of the events at Medjugorje, particularly during the fighting. Though the ‘miracles’ likely heightened Catholic solidarity during the 1980s, later social solidarity seems to have been more a matter of heightened group boundaries than of attractive group centers. During the war, Serbs, Croats, and Bosniacs were defined more by their divisions than by their central ties. Indeed, religion appears to have heightened these divisions while shifting the balance of power within groups as well as between them. This would not have surprised either Max Weber or Vilfredo Pareto, each of whom focused on the actions of elites. It should not surprise us, either.
We would not, however, expect Weberian sociology to explain all aspects of social life, and neither should we expect this of a Khaldūnian approach. It is, I believe, useful to look for the presence or absence of centripetal group-feeling in social conflicts; we should just not expect to find that it always important. In this case, groups were shaped from the outside, through conflict, rather than from an inwardly generated sense of solidarity. I suspect that Ibn Khaldūn himself, the hopeful (and not totally successful) politician, would draw useful conclusions from seeing exactly how these elites accomplished their task.
For sociologists of religion, however, there is an additional reward. We saw in Chapter Two how 19th-century sociology formed itself in intellectual opposition to Ultramontane Catholicism. Early sociology portrayed itself as scientific and progressive; thus it portrayed religion—its opponent—as part of an intellectually irrelevant past. Following Manuel Vásquez, I argued that this created a tendency among sociologists to disvalue the study of religion: Why spend time investigating something that is about to disappear?
Events of the last forty years have made it clear that religion is not disappearing. Yet institutional sociology has not really noticed. The sociology of religion is often seen in the profession as an intellectual backwater. Few graduate schools offer significant training programs. Few academic job openings list it as a first or second acceptable sociological field. More than a few of the major current scholars in the sub-discipline teach other subjects, because that is what their universities say they need.
Race and ethnicity, class structures, globalization, conflict, and the transformation of communities are, on the other hand, seen as core sociological concerns. Yes, they should be. Religion, however, figures into each and every one of these topics in the contemporary world. A Khaldūnian sociology would not closet the study of religion, as does much of today’s institutional sociology. It would trace the various roles that religion plays in the creation and maintenance of social solidarity, intertwined with these other factors. Khaldūn would certainly not treat religion as something relevant only to the past.
Case 2: The Islamic State
Events, of course, often force scholars out of their shells. We live in a new political era, in which religion refuses to play the part in which sociology once cast it. As I am writing this (in 2015), the news is filled with worries about Islamic militants overrunning the Middle East as well as attacking Western targets in the rest of the world. Islamists set off a truck bomb at New York’s World Trade Center a bit over twenty years ago.30 Eight years later, a group used airplanes as flying bombs to bring down its towers. This sparked a U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, neither of which has turned out well. Islamist attacks in Sudan, Kenya, Yemen, Spain, Britain, Indonesia, Nigeria, and elsewhere have left hundreds dead. A few years ago, Islamic militants captured (and were later driven from) Mali’s capital. Libya descended into civil war.
As I write, vast swaths of Syria and Iraq have been conquered by an armed organization that goes by various acronyms: IS, ISIL, ISIS, Daesh, and who knows what by the time you read this. The “I,” of course, stands for “Islamic” and “S” stands for “State.” ISIL stands for “Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant,” ISIS stands for either “Islamic State in Iraq and Syria” or “Islamic State of Iraq and ash-Sham”—the latter term denoting the northern reach of the 7th- and 8th- century Muslim conquests. In Arabic, that’s ad-Dawlah al-Islāmiyah fī ‘l-ʿIrāq wa-sh-Shām—the name that the Islamic State itself prefers.31
In any case the Islamic State claims to be establishing a new Caliphate and has won recognition from Islamist groups in several countries, including Libya and Nigeria. It is certainly imposing Islamic law on the people it has conquered. Can Ibn Khaldūn’s analysis of al ‘așabiyyah teach us anything about these events?
I have already said a lot about the interactions between ethnicity and religion. These are certainly active in the current struggle. The Islamic State’s fighters (mostly Arab proponents of Sunni Islam) attack Yazidis as ‘devil-worshippers’, while the latter are defended by Kurds (also Sunnis but non-Arabs), who see the Yazidis as ethnic kin. Turks (Sunnis by religion and Turkic by ethnicity) attack Kurds while claiming to attack the Islamic State and frequently attacking the Shiite-supported Syrian government as well. Alawites (an ethno-religious group from northern Syria) side with the government, as do some Syrian Christians (also from the north), fearing that an Islamic State victory will destroy whatever tolerance once existed in that country. Lebanese Shiites under Hezbollah defend the Syrian government, a task supported by Iran (Shiite but Persian). Druze (another ethno-religious group, but largely Arab) oppose both the Islamic State and the government, mainly wanting to be left alone. Druze living in Israel side with Israel’s Jews. All but the Jews, Kurds, and Turks are ethnically Arab, though that does not prevent divisions along religious lines. Clearly, religions and ethnicities both divide people and unite them. Ibn Khaldūn’s idea that the two factors work similarly certainly seems to be true here. Beyond that general principle, however, the details are still unfolding. The situation is an even better example than was Bosnia of how religion and ethnicity can complicate conflicts.
Khaldūn would also be interested in some other factors underlying the conflict. One in particular is the mega-drought that drove somewhere between a quarter and a half of Syrian farmers from their land, crowding them into cities that quickly became ungovernable.32 Add in the U.S. invasion of neighboring Iraq and the mass of refugees it generated, and social chaos is no surprise.
For our purposes, however, the most interesting Khaldūnian contribution would be an analysis of who joins the Islamic State and why. We are not dealing with desert folk, nor tribal folk, nor people who are trained from birth to fight for their kin. As of this writing, we do not have a full demographic picture of contemporary jihadiya.33 We do know that the forces that have declared a new Caliphate in Syria and Iraq include volunteers from many different countries—including the United States and Germany—who have rallied to aid what many call ‘Islamic fundamentalism’.34 In Syria, they have joined long-time opponents of the Assad regime. In Iraq, they have been joined by disaffected Baathists (a former political grouping) and purged members of the former Iraqi military.
This is an unstable coalition, but it is not a horde riding out of the desert to overwhelm softer city-folk. That part of Ibn Khaldūn’s theory does not hold. None of these are barbarians. They demonstrate a technological and strategic savvy on a par with any city dwellers. They recruit widely and intelligently, raise cash by selling oil, extracting ransom, and taking over banks, plant sleeper cells throughout the region, and maintain an active Internet presence.35
On the other hand, for some of these, at least, there is a possible role for group-feeling. We can leave aside the Baathists, the former Iraqi officers, and the lower-class Iraqi Sunnis who, as Lydia Wilson discovered, are fighting to settle scores with their Iraqi Shiites oppressors.36 Their solidarity is born of division, like that in the Balkans. We can also leave aside the recruits from the Muslim Caucasus: Chechnya, Ingushetia, Dagestan, and similar regions. Dangle a few thousand dollars in front of unemployed young men from impoverished families and you’ll find a lot of takers.
The jihadi recruits from Europe, the U.S., Australia, and other developed states are another matter. They come from rich countries with strong welfare systems. They travel long distances to be trained and to join the fighting. Just like prior Western recruits to Al-Qaeda, they join for ideological, not practical reasons.37 If the new Islamists’ willingness to die for their cause does not stem from the conditions of desert life, is it rooted in a religious vision that—to use Ibn Khaldūn’s words—lets “them concentrate all their strength in order to make the truth prevail, [so that] they become fully united and obtain superiority and . . . authority”?38
The French scholar Olivier Roy has explored the social origin for those proclaiming an Islamist identity, particularly those engaged in contemporary jihad. Though the Islamic State is too new to fall under his lens, his analysis of earlier jihadiya gives us some clues to the role that Islamism plays in their lives.39
Roy pointed out that the 2001 Trade Center bombers were all highly educated professionals, many of them from scientific and technical fields. They mostly lived in Western countries as part of a transnational Muslim elite. They were not in the top elite, and so had little political influence, either in the West or in the countries from which they or their families came. Yet they were privileged when compared to the bulk of their countrymen. They were the kind of city people whom Ibn Khaldūn would scarcely imagine giving their lives for a cause.
Their problem, Roy wrote, was that these men’s mode of existence gave them no secure identity. First, they lived as Muslims in the secularized West. That made them not just a minority, but an unaccepted minority, particularly in Europe, where the fear of ‘Muslim invasion’ is rife even in the mainstream press. Second, their conditions of work took them from one country to another as job opportunities opened and their professions called. They had nowhere stable to set down roots, even had those roots been welcomed, which they were not. Could they look to a homeland? Not likely, given Middle East’s moribund economies. To use Roy’s term, they were “deterritorialised.”40 Having no other way of defining themselves, they turned to Islam as a core identity.
Far from representing a traditional religious community or culture, on the margins of which they lived, and even rejecting traditional Islam, most of these militants broke with their own past and experienced an individual re-Islamisation in a small cell of uprooted fellows. Here they forged their own Islam, as shown by Muhammad Atta’s will.41
Jihadi Islam looks backward to its imagination of the first Muslim conquests, forgetting the centuries of tolerance and diversity that came afterward to mark Islam as a high civilization. Identifying with the early fighters, it creates a global jihad to defend Dar al Islam (‘the house of Islam’) against what it sees as a decadent secularism. Until recently, this took place on Islam’s borders (the U.S., Spain, Britain, Kenya, Bali, etc.) or against perceived ‘crusaders’ (Afghanistan, Iraq). Only in Syria and perhaps Libya has the main fight been against fellow Arabs. There, ISIS battles regimes that it sees as either secularist or heretical.
Those are the leaders. The followers, wrote Roy, are often also from the West, but from the unemployed immigrant and post-immigrant working classes.
The radicals are often a mix of educated middle-class leaders and working-class dropouts, a pattern reminiscent of most West European radicals of the 1970s and 1980s (Red Army Faction in Germany, Red Brigades in Italy, Action Directe in France.) Many became born-again or converted Muslims in gaol, sharing a common marginal culture. . . . Twenty years ago these men would have joined a radical leftist movement, but such movements have disappeared from the spaces of social exclusion. . . . For a rebel, to convert is to find a cause.42
This explains how disaffected Chechens, Saudis, Kosovars, Pashtuns, Turkish Germans, Black Americans, Balochis, and the like can take up arms for Islam. Late-modern globalized society could not give them a reason for being, so they found their own. These fighters are clearly driven by a form of group solidarity: one of ideology, not origin. It is not the al ‘așabiyyah that Ibn Khaldūn attributed to backward desert peoples. Is it an analogue of the religious ‘așabiyyah that he said could substitute? I think so.
Remember that Ibn Khaldūn traced the presence or absence of al ‘așabiyyah to the concrete situations in which people live their lives. Desert life was hard, so groups needed to stick together. City life was comparatively easy, so individualism could flourish and groups could weaken. What Roy has done is surprisingly similar. He has noticed that jihadiya come from social strata that do not have a secure place in the late-modern world. They are rootless. They are alienated. Their societies give them no positive sense of self. Islamic radicalism is one way to get a sense of purpose. As he put it, “They are fighting at the frontiers of their imaginary ummah [‘Muslim community’].”43 Their allegiance to Islam gives them a sense of mission—something that otherwise they would not have had.
To my knowledge, Roy has never mentioned Ibn Khaldūn in his writings, and why should he? He has, however, made a similar theoretical move. He has looked to people’s concrete social situations to see what kind of social solidarity they can develop. He has seen that Islamism is a way to find personal identity and overcome weak social connections. Ibn Khaldūn said the same. Islamism creates a religious group-feeling, even as that version of the religion is rejected by the vast majority of Muslims.
This is not, however, a religion of sweetness and light. In 2000, Mark Juergensmeyer published a prescient book about religious violence: Terror in the Mind of God. In it, he examined recent cases of violence in five religious traditions, from Christian bombers of abortion clinics in the U.S. to Jewish and Muslim suicide attacks in Israel and the West Bank, to the Aum Shinrikyo attack in Tokyo’s subways. He also interviewed some of the perpetrators: the Reverend Michael Bray, who firebombed seven American clinics; Mahmud Abouhalima, the ‘mastermind’ of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; the Sikh militant Simranjit Singh Mann; and others. He found, unsurprisingly, that these men saw themselves at the center of a cosmic war. They saw themselves involved in a spiritual battle against the forces of darkness, one fraught with moral significance. Above all, their struggle was embedded in the social tensions of the present era. Radical religious ideas, in Juergensmeyer’s view,
have given a profound and ideological clarity to what in many cases have been real experiences of economic destitution, social oppression, political corruption, and a desperate need for the hope of rising above the limitations of modern life. The image of cosmic struggle has given these bitter experiences meaning, and the involvement in a grand conflict has been for some participants exhilarating. . . . [It helps assuage] the sense of personal humiliation experienced by men who long to restore an integrity they perceive as lost in the wake of virtually global social and political shifts.44
Here, militant religion provides a path forward to those seeking to escape social chaos and moral decay by turning back the clock to a purer era. It is not the only path available, but it is by no means rare in the contemporary age. Ibn Khaldūn would likely agree.
