Abstract
At a time when the global empire seems to show its naked aggression especially in North Africa and West Asia, as we have seen in Libya, and now in Syria, an aggression that has further dismembered these societies, manifested also in global debt, racism against immigrants, and attacks on workers’ rights, we have also been witnessing a type of ‘nativist’ violence wearing the garb of religion as reflected in the different militant groups in the region who claim to offer an alternative to corrupt and violent regimes, on the one hand, and to a violent racist global empire led by the United States, on the other. The claims of these nativist groups are that political Islam or the return to the true Islam is the only solution available, and that they want to duplicate an ideal Islamic State from the distant past. While doing so, they have further helped the global empire in further destroying local societies, and many of them have collaborated with the US and other western countries, and their proxies in the region. Worsening this situation is the neoliberal life/subject-hood that has become the spirit and norm in many societies and states in the Global South, whereby individualism and self-interest have displaced the collective/common good. In this article, and through a reading of the concept of Asabiyya as articulated by Ibn Khaldun, the author suggests an alternative response to the violent global empire, to violent religious militancy, and to neoliberalism, by discussing how the concept of Asabiyya can help in building internal solidarity within societies in the region, and possibly beyond.
Introduction
In this article, I will discuss briefly the responses in the region of North Africa and West Asia to the imperialist aggression on states and societies, and suggest an alternative to that through a reading of Ibn Khaldun’s concept of Asabiyya – solidarity. 1 I will first briefly discuss the current situation in the region, how it developed, and the impact of colonial, neocolonial, and imperialist interventions in the region. Second, I will discuss two prevailing trends in the region in response to western hegemony and interventions. The first trend is that of neoliberalism according to western dictates, affecting negatively the poorest and weakest in the society, and entrenching self-interest and individualism rather the interest of the collective. A second response that I will also discuss is that of militant Islamism, which has further dismembered the societies in the region, and thus helped the global empire and hegemony in the region. After discussing these prevailing issues, I will outline the main ideas of Ibn Khaldun’s concept of Asabiyya (group/social solidarity) as a way to suggest a new approach towards the collective, common good. Forging social solidarity is crucial to fend off imperial aggression and hegemony, as well as serve as a corrective to the two current dominant trends in the region. Then, and in way of concluding the article, I will attempt to propose rethinking the concept of Asabiyya as a concept that could be of use for the people of the Global South rather than a concept confined to a single society/state as it was articulated by Ibn Khaldun in the late 14th early 15th century. The goal of attempting to rethink the concept of Asabiyya as a framework for a possible future for the Global South is because in today’s global hegemony of the West/North local Asabiyya is not a suitable answer for fighting the hegemony of the Global North only through a localized work and group solidarity, but requires the multitude of the Global South united around common interests and aspirations, and around resistance to exploitation, interventions, and hegemony leveled against them by the West, and racism and exploitation within the Global North itself.
Before starting with the first part of the article, I would like to clarify a few points regarding the title of the article, and also my approach in reading and applying such a concept from Ibn Khaldun.
Normally Ibn Khaldun is studied and defined as an Arab or an Islamic scholar. As I have argued in earlier work (Shihade, 2013, 2017), while scholarship on Ibn Khaldun often appears to include him as a major scholar of sociology, among other fields, this inclusion works as an exclusion at the same time for two reasons. He is mainly presented as an Arabic/Islamic scholar, and as someone who studied and wrote about past and particular societies. Thus, such scholarship has frozen him in a time and place and culture that cannot be of any use beyond them, and let alone be universalized as scholars do when they study Greek and other European scholars. Thus, my reading of Ibn Khaldun aims at challenging such particularization of his work. I hope to offer a form of a neo-Khaldunian scholarship that aims at re-reading and re-thinking his ideas further, and in this article I will explore this approach through his concept of Asabiyya – social solidarity. Furthermore, his background is influenced by the scholarship and politics of West Asia and North Africa, and his work was written in Arabic. Hence, it is more than adequate to categorize him as an Afro/Arab/Asian, and thus challenge further the particularization that predominates in studying scholars from outside the West, especially now that there is a push and interest among many academics and students for decolonizing knowledge and for exploring ideas from outside the West; and to think about his work in a new way in order to translate it to fit our times.
A final note about my interest in Ibn Khaldun’s work. Compared to much canonical western scholarship, which I find to be linear and deterministic in one respect, and even when it calls or argues for better societies/life, to be very mechanical, Ibn Khaldun’s work/thought is different in many ways. As Timothy Mitchell (1988) argues, westerners, impacted by western linear thought, need to always see the end at the beginning. There is room for ambiguity, little tolerance for contradictions. Things have to happen as they were previously thought of. In a sense also, everything has to be mechanical. In contrast, Mitchell uses the thought of Ibn Khaldun as an example of alternative thinking. It is circular, it gets you somewhere, it might take you to different contradictory sites, yet it can offer you ideas. Furthermore, in my view, compared to the work of Hegel and others, Ibn Khaldun is a practical scholar. His ideas are not based on ethics, including the concept of Asabiyya, but on necessity and because it is natural to human beings. Furthermore, he always leaves room for doubt. Compared to modern western scholarship, which I view as a religious scholarship, Ibn Khaldun’s work is very skeptical or at least not deterministic. As I have discussed before (Shihade, 2012), when secularism replaced religion in the West, it became a religion itself for not allowing room for doubt, for uncertainty, and thus humans/scholars became Gods of modernity, so certain of their ideas that their texts and theories became like religious texts, and the human/scholar in them replaced God. Like Ibn Khaldun and the spirit of his writing and thought, I aim to engage in this article with one of his ideas, re-reading it anew, hoping to get to a place that might help in engaging with important issues of our time that affect us locally, regionally, and globally.
Imperialism, colonialism, and its current state of affairs in the region
When thinking about the Arab world as it exists in the present day, in the form of states in West Asia and North Africa, it is not an exaggeration to argue, as many have done before, that the region is the creation of the era of western colonial and imperial powers. Since the 19th century, states were charted on maps, regimes were created, and when colonial powers left the region, they left only symbolically. The economic system remained the same as during the colonial area; local resources remained the privilege of western companies with part of the wealth enjoyed by a few local leaders and their benefactors; local markets remained hostage to western products and run according to the conditions of the global market.
Industrialization, self-sufficiency in agriculture, and an independent economic system in general, or as an alternative to predatory capitalism, remained an illusion. Not only economically, but also militarily, states in the region have since their creation been dependent on imperial states, which have kept these states dependent on their western patrons. The dream of Arab unity advocated by Gamal Abdel Nasser since the 1950s has been shattered by the interventions and attacks from western countries (including Israel). What came to replace that period of hope for unity that was connected to Third World solidarity, was the rise of the petrodollar states in the Gulf (with the support of western countries, especially the United States); and with their increased power and role in the region came also the spread of their patronage system to accommodating regimes in the region, and the spread of a reactionary Islamization that has come to dominate the politics and societies in the region today. Any attempt to break free from western hegemony/global empire by any state in the region (Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Algeria, despite the critique that one can level against the regimes in these countries) has been faced with indirect and direct attacks by western countries. Parallel to the prevention of access to cash or technologies for industrialization, western countries have maintained support for internal oppositions, and support for reactionary and militant Islamist groups against these regimes that many hoped could bring about an end to dependency was crushed or is in the process of being so. Some of these regimes, unable to withstand the assault of imperial interventions and imperial hold over the global economy, have at times succumbed to the dictates of the global economic center (the North) (see e.g. Hamouchine, 2016). But partial submission is not acceptable, and so in the end, a brutal attack was the only way to get rid of these regimes. In the midst of the historical trajectory of state creation in the region, Israel was created in 1948 through western military, technological, economic, and diplomatic support, and in the process since 1948 Israel has been dismembering the Palestinian society and wreaking havoc on neighboring states and societies who are flooded with Palestinian refugees, and who have had to deal with constant Israeli attacks, lengthier invasions, and wars. Israeli settler colonialism is not a local issue, its implications are in and beyond Palestine, both regionally, and globally, and Israel is part of the western imperial hegemony in the region and in the way it has been impacting Palestinians and others (Shihade, 2015, 2016a).
The result of all of this is that, today, there is not one state in the region that could be described with any certainty as being a stable one. Far from it, what we witness is further internal instability, and possible further breakup of states. Western intervention and hegemony with the help of client regimes has, sometimes through direct wars (as is seen in Libya, Iraq, Syria) or proxy wars (as in Yemen), further disrupted life in the region, displaced millions of people, dismembered these societies further, and destroyed much of the infrastructure in these states. The responses to this state of affairs in the region have been twofold: neoliberal politics, and/or a reactionary Islamic militancy, to which I will now turn to discuss briefly.
Neoliberalism in Palestine and the region
With the situation described in the previous section, and in light of the defeat and the unmaking of the Soviet Union and the retreat of socialism and the left in general since the 1980s, and with the defeat of revolutionary movements, regimes in the region have collaborated with or succumbed to the World Bank’s monetary policies and dictates as conditions for receiving loans, among which are the breakdown of protective measures for the local economy, the further opening of markets to global products, the cutting of subsidies for necessities that support the poorest in these countries, and the cuts in spending on social, health, and educational programs for the public. In the process, these states have become more dependent on western states, and the weakest section in these societies further burdened by higher living costs, debt, and uncertainty; while the richer sections in these societies enjoy privileges and have accumulated more wealth through their links to the global economy and/or through direct links to specific states in the West.
Neoliberalism came to dominate life in the region not only economically. Unions were crushed or marginalized, and so also any political opposition to the policies of regimes in the region. Socially also, these societies went through an alteration. Solidarity and revolutionary politics were replaced with accommodation to regional and global powers, and a retreat of the sense of the collective. Self-interest overshadowed the collective interest, and activism was replaced by western NGOs or NGOs that are funded by the West and run according to western agendas. The hope that many in the region had after the waves of mass mobilization that started in 2010/2011, the so-called Arab Spring, was sooner or later crushed through the intervention of western countries with the collaboration of reactionary forces in the region. The latter included the militant Islamic forces that hijacked these revolutions and were supported by western states and their local client states in the region (Shihade, 2012). In short, the picture today is that of a retreat of the state, except in its disciplinary and repressive internal power, and a retreat of the collective. Meanwhile local elites (including in the still directly colonized Palestine) continue to accumulate more wealth, and collaborate with local regimes and external hegemonic powers. Repression and dictatorship have become the norm on the state level, as well as on the level of the smallest local institution. Any dissenting voice on a group or individual level is met with the harshest response. 2
The neoliberal ideology that dominates states and societies in the region has led to furthering self-interest over the collective. A sense of alienation from one another and materialism have become dominant in the region, with the result of diminished social solidarity, a lack of interest in and engagement with the common good, and diminished political organizing both in the form of old style political parties as well as in the form of non-allied political organizing: something that might be called a modern form of ‘each for his, and each for his own,’ a new form of a ‘state of nature.’ Even revolutionary regimes and revolutionary movements are busy selling out to the global neoliberal agenda. While a few accumulate personal wealth in the process, many are left out, with an increase in poverty and insecurity, and a growing sense of despair and disillusionment with formal politics, political movements, and even with the state (Hamouchine, 2016).
What Frantz Fanon (1966) warned about the postcolonial has become a reality, and in Palestine, it had already become a reality before being in the postcolonial. Fanon’s call for the Third World to create a new humanity for the globe, to create an independent economy, a new form of politics based on the active participation of the public, a new identity born out of people’s public and active participation in politics, economics, and ideas, has fallen on deaf ears in the Arab world, and elsewhere in the Global South. Instead, we have more dependency, more poverty, more alienation from politics, and a stagnation of ideas, and mimicry: mimicry of the powerful as articulated by Ibn Khaldun, or a bad copy of the sick West as articulated by Fanon. Instead of Asabiyya – social solidarity – we have social divisions, infighting, and dictatorial regimes on the state level, as well as on the smallest level of public institutions.
Political Islam in the region
The rise and dominance of political and militant Islam is best understood in the context of the atmosphere described in the previous two sections. Yet, long before the shift to neoliberal economics and politics, Islamist groups were supported by different western countries (including Israel) (see Amin, 2012; Dreyfuss, 2006; Mamdani, 2003). That support was aimed at helping to crush revolutionary movements and to crush regimes in the region who called for an end to dependency, for unity, and non-alliance with the global power competition between the US and the Soviet Union at the time (Amin, 2012; Dreyfuss, 2006). With the defeat of the so-called republican regimes in the region after the war of 1967, the balance of power in the region shifted to the Gulf states (Amin, 2012; Kerr, 1971). With this shift, and with the aid of the petrodollar economies, political Islam and Islamic militancy spread further in the region. While these Gulf states aimed through their support for Islamist groups to gain further hegemony, Islamist groups themselves aimed at taking over governments in the region (Amin, 2012).
According to this ideology, in Islam there is no separation between politics and religion, a true state for Muslims is an Islamic state, and so the true path for Muslims. It is presented as a return to the ‘original’ Islam of the past, a pure Islam not contaminated by the plague of western secularism that separates religion and the state, and which will bring back the glory of the past, and make Muslim countries/states more powerful and even a player on a global scale. Yet, these assumptions are based on a misreading of history. Religion was not the main reason for powerful states(s), and there never was an Islamic state in the past as these advocates argue (Hallaq, 2012; Shihade, 2016b). Furthermore, secularism (the running of states according to non-religious principles or doctrines) was not created by the West, but has had a long history in the region, as elsewhere in the Global South. Furthermore, running states and societies according to religion, a specific dogma or interpretation of it for that matter, can only divide societies further for it automatically excludes those who do not follow that specific interpretation of Islam, including those who are Muslims themselves (Shihade, 2016a).
Furthermore, ‘states’ in the past did not have hard borders, nor passports, and those who moved from one place to another had an easier way to do so. In fact, as articulated by Ibn Khaldun, mobility/nomadology/migration (for all kinds of reasons) is the norm among humans, it is natural to human beings. Thus, in many ways, the modern nation state is anti-human, unnatural (Shihade, 2015, 2016a, 2016b). This is also important in the context of the xenophobia and anti-immigrant trends seen in Europe and elsewhere. For Europe/US and the West in general, who have wreaked havoc for centuries on the Global South, and continue to do so, to malign immigrants, especially at the hands of right-wing populist groups and individuals, is to fail to understand that these states have all along mistreated the poorest and the weakest among their own societies, have heavily contributed to the ‘problem’ of immigration from the Global South, and that these states are the biggest enemies in their own societies. Notwithstanding, hardly anyone in these states can themselves claim to be Native/Indigenous to their own place of residence: mobility for humans/animals in general is very natural, as long as its purpose is not to conquer, as long as it is not part of a quest for lands, resources, and peoples.
Thus, and in a way of summing up the previous two sections, especially the questions regarding states and societies in the Global South, one cannot but think about the concern that Fanon voiced, and his fear of entrapment of postcolonial societies in the identities that were the making of the colonial world: reactionary identities, identities that are frozen in time. What Fanon called for was for the identity of the postcolonial states to be remade to reflect the new spirit of freedom after decolonization. Instead, what we see in the Arab region is a reactionary identity. Two trends have come to dominate culture in the last few decades: one is a mimicry, a superficial copying, of western culture; the other is a reactionary Islamist culture that has been advocated for by religious political groups for some time and who have managed to have a hold on a large part of the Arab world.
There is a similarity between Fanon’s warnings of mimicry and of adopting a frozen and rigid identity in the postcolonial world, and Ibn Khaldun’s idea on mimicry: the weak/ruled mimicking the strong/ruler. His concept of Asabiyya, by which he meant a sense of a collective, must always be reformulated according to the changing conditions of the group.
This is an important point to which I will turn next by discussing Ibn Khaldun’s concept of Asabiyya, and by which I aim to detail the conditions that build and sustain a society. By bringing Ibn Khaldun into the discussion, the aim is to discuss one, among many other examples, of how ‘Muslim’ or Arabic scholarship (because it is written in Arabic, and not all scholars were Muslims) from the distant past is different in the way it views and analyzes socio-political structures compared to the current Islamist view, as well as the neoliberal current in the region. The absence or marginalization of the Khaldunian canon, among many other great thinkers of the past, is in part due to non-knowledge, because such studies are marginalized and our academic institutions are a poor copy/mimicry of a western-centric curriculum that was developed in the West in the context of the modern politicization of knowledge that aimed at the colonization of the Arab and Islamic world and the Global South in general (Shihade, 2017).
Ibn Khaldun’s Asabiyya – social/group solidarity
One of the main reasons, in my view, for the lack of group solidarity in the region is the lack of reading: the alienation and/or self-alienation of people in the region from local/regional knowledge (both written and oral). This is true in this part of the world, but also similar to conditions in other parts of the Third World/Global South. It is due in large part to the working of western modernity and the geopolitics of knowledge that led to the predominance of the knowledge from the center, and the marginalization of the knowledge from the periphery, and to the devaluation of knowledge from the Global South through the hegemony of the Global North (Mignolo, 2009). And this is in the context wherein the global empire was aided by an intellectual imperialism that created a conformity of thought in the North as well is the South (SH Alatas, 2000).
In the Global South, and here I will restrict my discussion to North Africa and West Asia, scholars and intellectuals have mostly followed established western knowledge, or its claims, without any modification, and without offering alternative knowledge or ways of knowing and being – and even though it is well established that knowledge production and imperial conquest are the twins of western hegemony and its devastating impact on people of the Global South (SH Alatas, 2000; Mignolo, 2009; Said, 1978; Shihade, 2017). Furthermore, for the most part, scholars/intellectuals in the Arab world have either participated in a blindly idealized knowledge from the past, or actively engaged in the devaluation of their own heritage and knowledge production through what has been called ‘self-Orientalism’ (Khalidi, 2006), in which local knowledge from the past has been studied and written about through the very same Orientalist lens. These texts are seen of less value, of something particular to a specific time and space, unlike western texts that are considered of universal value (Shihade, 2013, 2017). Furthermore, scholars in the region for the most part, like western scholars, have taken Arabic knowledge as a text to be studied, as an object of knowledge about the past, rather than a source of epistemology, rather than an epistemology that can offer an alternative to the history of western knowledge production that has been entangled with western global dominance and violence (Mignolo, 2009; Raju, 2009). The result is an alienation of generations of students and scholars from their own ‘secular’ knowledge, an alienation accompanied by a sense of defeat and weakness in the face of the Global North, which helped create a void that has been filled by fundamentalist and reactionary Islamist groups with their own particular religious narrative as the only response to the state of despair and weakness that many feel in the region. It is an alienation that has contributed to the dismemberment of group solidarity, because any group that does not produce its own knowledge and engages with knowledge produced in the past, and mainly engages and relies on knowledge produced somewhere else, by other people with their own specific experience, is a form of copying, or mimicking (to use Ibn Khaldun’s term) of knowledge of the dominant group: conforming to its parameters, methods, and even questions, without even asking or questioning the relevance of such knowledge to local histories and needs (SF Alatas, 2001; SH Alatas, 2000; Shihade, 2017).
Thus, this article is a modest attempt to push for a de-alienation from one’s own heritage that, on the one hand, can offer a challenge to the ‘religious’ reading of culture/heritage/past, but can also offer an alternative to the neoliberal and devastating subject-hood/investment in individualism and self-interest offered and created by the Global North. In this context, the next part of the article will briefly engage with the concept of Asabiyya – group/ social solidarity – as articulated by Ibn Khaldun in the 14th–15th century in his Al-Muqaddimah (An Introduction to the History of Social Organizations), a multi-volume text that explores the reasons why people live together, and what conditions are needed for sustaining their dignified collective existence. This article is also a way to creatively read such work to make it relevant to local needs (SF Alatas, 2001), both to counter the state of alienation we are in, but also to engage with questions that are relevant to local contexts, needs, and aspirations for a better life, for a dignified life, for an alternative to the process of dismemberment that we currently witness of the societies in the region.
Before discussing the concept of Asabiyya, let me first situate my approach to the study of Ibn Khaldun. As I have argued in earlier work, the studies of Ibn Khaldun have been approached from two perspectives. The first is from a nativist nature, claiming originality for Ibn Khaldun’s thought from which many western thinkers have appropriated ideas, or as a form of inclusion by western scholars that results in exclusion. He is seen/presented as the first scholar of historiography, sociology, etc., yet he remains outside the main thinkers of the field in all of these disciplines, whose genealogy starts with a western thinker and ends with another western thinker (Shihade, 2013). Thus, this apparent form of including Ibn Khaldun, like many other non-western thinkers, is in practice a form of exclusion. This is not only in writing, but also in teaching; and it is a global reality (Shihade, 2017). There are several reasons for this, and among them is what Khalidi calls ‘self-orientalism’: that is, not only the way Orientalist scholars have treated scholars and texts from the Orient, but also how even Orientals have adopted the same approach in their own studies (Khalidi, 2006).
The closest to the approach I use in the study and application of Ibn Khaldun’s thought and methods is that of Mahmood Mamdani, a non-specialist in Arabic or Islamic philosophy (Mamdani, 2013). As narrated by Mahmood Mamdani in his article, he was confronted by students in the graduate program in Kampala about not including in a graduate course on Medieval Political Philosophy a text or a scholar from Africa, and when he asked them what texts or scholars they were suggesting, they proposed Ibn Khaldun, since he had lived in North Africa. That led to Mamdani’s publication of the article after reading Ibn Khaldun’s work and comparing it, around the question of race, with Kant and Hegel, and the commonly argued idea that Africa had only oral knowledge (if at all).
What I have been trying to do with Ibn Khaldun’s ideas is close also to the work of Syed Farid Alatas, in which he states: ‘What we need . . . however, are serious efforts to apply his theoretical framework to empirical situations, historical or contemporary’ (2006: 788). But more importantly for me is the contemporary part, and applying it beyond the region, which I now turn to explore in the next section.
Ibn Khaldun and the concept of Asabiyya: An elaboration of the Aristotelian concept that humans by nature are political
Ibn Khaldun argued that we often repeat established knowledge without investigating its validity, or its accurate meaning. In his view, one of the crucial concepts that is often repeated without understanding its meaning is the concept that ‘humans are by nature political.’ In his view, this concept is crucial for understanding why social organizations or living in the collective are natural to humans. His goal in Al-Muqaddimah, as he argued, is to understand the meaning of that: the meaning of why humans are by nature political/live together in plurality, and what are the conditions for sustaining a living-together in multitudes in a dignified way that guarantees both the individual’s dignified life and the sustainability of the group with a direct cause/link between the two.
Ibn Khaldun argued that the meaning of ‘humans are by nature political’ is that the human can only live in a poli, polis meaning directly a city, but more so the plural, which means a space where larger number of humans live together. Due to self-interests and needs, one needs the group to sustain a dignified life, and at the same time this social organization needs to offer the individual a dignified life for the individual to remain within it and thus for the group to sustain itself.
Thus, what we see here is an early reading, if not an original idea, of how and why one’s freedom and dignity is guaranteed once one moves from the state of nature to human civilization (Rousseau’s social contract). In Ibn Khaldun’s view, the concept of the state of nature is a hypothetical one as humans never lived is such a state of being. Rather, according to him, the difference is in the numbers, in the size of the group and the economic system they live in. The state of nature is the group with a small number of individuals, and the political and social organization is the larger one. In his view, the move from being/living in a small group into a larger one is natural to all human beings regardless of their religion or racial background (Mamdani, 2017; Shihade, 2013). That is because living in small social organizations, life is difficult and insecure both economically but also physically (Shihade, 2015).
According to him, living in a larger social organization offers a move from an economic system to a different one. It is a move from a simple economic system based on agriculture and farming, exchange and sharecropping, to a much more developed economic system that by the effect of the larger number of people in it, leads to a surplus of labor, due to the fact that the labor of many together becomes larger than the sum of each on his/her own. This surplus of labor leads consequently to a surplus of capital that gets invested in creating new products that not only make life easier, but also create the need for more labor, which gets filled by the coming of more individuals into that social organization, and so on and so forth. The constant surplus of labor and further surplus of capital, and newer products that make life easier, also helps in building a much more developed and sophisticated urban life. 3 In some sense, this is the earliest materialist historiography centuries before Marx, as Marx himself and so many others acknowledged, yet it remained on the margins of modern/contemporary analyses, including Marxist analysis (Shihade, 2013).
The main point is that this natural tendency of humans to live in larger groups needs something different from what bound together the individuals living in smaller social organizations, whose main link was blood relationship. In larger social organizations, something else is needed for binding the individuals together, and preventing the disintegration of the group, and here comes a new way of reading the concept of Asabiyya. 4 According to Ibn Khaldun, while in smaller social organizations blood ties connected the members of the group together, and whose relationship was managed and regulated by an elder or elders of the group, in a larger social organization a new spirit is needed to create a sense of unity/solidarity among the people and a new form of governance is needed to manage the relationship between the individuals in the group, but also to manage the larger more developed/sophisticated economy. So, what is that ‘spirit’ that is needed to keep people together in a larger social organization, and what is the form/type of governance that is needed to regulate their life together and manage that type of economy?
While some might argue for religion to bind people together, according to Ibn Khaldun, a religious spirit/feeling is unnatural to humans – and even if one is religious, such cases are exceptional in the history of human social organizations, and only took place with the existence/presence of a prophet and lasted only during his lifetime (here he is speaking about ‘monolithic’ religions). The more natural and more common in different historical periods and in different geographical locations (time/space) has been a history of human social organizations being bound together through a different spirit, a non-religious spirit, a ‘secular’ spirit, a binding together through an Asabiyya that guarantees/secures the individual’s dignified life, and consequently the survival/sustainability of the group (Shihade, 2016b). So, what guarantees the individual’s dignified life?
According to Ibn Khaldun, one is human only through thought and labor, and one can live and sustain a life only through labor (both physical and mental). For the individual to remain in a social organization, his/her labor must be fairly compensated, fairly in relation to the living costs of the place/city one lives in. Otherwise, the individual unfairly paid for his/her labor, which does not allow her/him to sustain a dignified life, is forced into choosing between two options.
One option is that the individual cheats the system that treats him/her unfairly by expending less labor into the skill/profession he/she is working in. The other option is to move/migrate to another place where her/his labor is treated more fairly and allows her/him to live a dignified life. Either option that the individual is compelled to take will lead to a poorer quality as he/she contributes to the deterioration of that profession/sector of the economy and sooner or later that sector of the economy disappears, and with it also disappears the surplus of capital that could have been accumulated if one was paid fairly.
Thus unfair pay for labor for the individual indirectly dis-affects the wellbeing of the whole larger social organization, and its economic development. This process, according to Ibn Khaldun, if it continues without a government that intervenes on behalf of the individual, will lead sooner or later to the destruction of that social organization. But that government must do more than guaranteeing a fair pay for labor to individuals under its rule (SF Alatas, 2001; SH Alatas, 2000; Shihade, 2013, 2017).
Governments/regimes must constantly work to infuse a sense of Asabiyya, a sense of group solidarity among the individuals under their rule. This sense of group solidarity is not based on religious feelings, but on the material needs of the individuals in the group. These material needs are needed both to secure internal cohesion, and to fend off external aggression. While Ibn Khaldun did not talk about that explicitly, individuals/groups must also infuse in the larger group some sense of group solidarity – Asabiyya – because it is in their individual interest to do so. As stated earlier, the larger the group, the more surplus of labor, the more surplus of capital, the easier and safer life is.
Furthermore, for the internal cohesion of the group to be maintained, the government or regime, in addition to securing fair pay for the labor of each individual (regulating a fair pay for labor), must also avoid the presence of monopolies in the economy, for monopoly kills/destroys fair opportunity for all. The government/regime must avoid engaging exclusively in any sector of the economy, but should constantly, through taxes collected, keep working at creating more economic opportunities for the individuals in that social organization. It can and must offer them through these revenues, education: education that encourages critical thought, not an education based on memorization and harsh punishment, and an education that offers space for learning skills needed in the economy. It can and must also offer health facilities, public health, management of and planning for a healthy life in the city that avoids overcrowding, which allows the flow of fresh air, makes the health of the individuals more secure, for only health and education, together, can help in sustaining the continuity of the group and its development/sustenance (Shihade, 2013, 2016b).
It is only through these policies that a government/regime can guarantee a sustainable collective, and cohesion of the social organization, the sense of Asabiyya – group solidarity – without which members in the group won’t come together to fight at times of external aggression, invasions, and/or interventions from outside powers. Otherwise, each will attend to her/his own (a state of nature), and the collective will collapse.
In some ways, what we see here in reading Ibn Khaldun is a ‘practical’ approach to sustainability, which does not negate the ethical, which in modern times and modernity have been presented as an anomaly, and especially so since the hegemony of the neoliberal age.
By way of conclusion: Asabiyya for the Global South
The times of Ibn Khaldun were times of less connected global economy, a less connected world, a world that did not have a global empire based on a hegemonic aggressive global/globalized capitalist system: a system built on aggressive global interventions and domination and exploitation of humans and resources all around the world. It is also a global system that has less space for local autonomy. Even if local governments/regimes follow the advice offered by Ibn Khaldun, the global empire will not leave them alone. Thus, the concept of Asabiyya as articulated by Ibn Khaldun must be creatively rethought to fit this current globalized condition – a condition where the Global North has been accumulating wealth through the exploitation of resources, of labor, and of people in the Global South (both at home and abroad) and through the repression of any possibility for the Global South to carve for itself a dignified life (Amin, 2012; Wallerstein, 2004).
As the empire has become global, a certain counter-global Asabiyya among the peoples of the Global South must be the response in order to build/create a dignified life that guarantees and secures the wellbeing of each individual, and that guarantees the sustainability of the Global South as a whole. A form of new alliance and solidarity based on the common interests and needs of the people in the Global South to live without external aggression, intervention, and exploitation is needed: a sense of Asabiyya that learns from past mistakes, learns from the pitfalls of nationalism, learns from the mistakes of the experiences in the so-called postcolonial/post-apartheid states, or the currently colonized such as Palestine.
While it is easy to enumerate the reasons why the Global South can only sustain itself, live in a dignified life where the wellbeing of each individual is secured, and why this approach/goal is the only way to fend off the naked violence of the global empire, and while it is easy to argue that the violence of the different fundamentalist religious groups in North Africa and West Asia only helps in destroying the Global South and thus guarantees longevity for the hegemony of the global empire, it is not easy, at least for me and for now, to suggest how to organize/build a regime/leadership/movement that can lead, organize the life and economy of the people in the Global South. For sure, neither neoliberalism nor militant religious reactionary spirit can bring the kind of collective spirit, a kind of global Asabiyya, that can bind people of the Global South together. Both have had devastating effects, as witnessed in so many countries/societies of the Global South. More people are getting poorer and devastated by policies of intervention abroad and the policies of naked capitalism at home.
Thus, what is it required is a critical analysis of past and present experiences of different attempts in different parts of the Global South to organize and coordinate the efforts of people in the face of global empire that by its very nature does its best to prevent such an alternative. What is needed is a framework of a globalized Asabiyya that intersects gender, race, and class, and that is not run by a specific center, nor flattens any category. One could be a female, but not a feminist. One could be a Palestinian but participate in the chocking of his/her on society and undermining its liberty and freedom and dignity. The same can be said about the Global South in general. For sure, academics have an important role to play in this. Not because I think they are more important than other sections of the society, but because of how academia has become so invasive globally in modern times with its globalized knowledge, and with how universities have become central in the global empire. This is due to the increase (one might say inflation) of the number of colleges around the globe and so also the number of students in these colleges. Also, we can no longer rely on traditional political parties, or on charismatic leaders. It was tried in the past, and it failed.
Furthermore, the alternative cannot be to mimic western norms, or through a reactionary and exclusionary identity. Following the main ideas suggested by Ibn Khaldun, we must put the dignity of the individual first, for without the individual the multitude cannot sustain itself, and the dignity of the individual must include a fair pay for one’s labor so that one is able to sustain a decent living. The multitude must find a new spirit, a new spirit that fits the current globalized world that is dominated by western countries and led by the United States. It must include elements that unite people in the Global South, their aspirations, and their needs. It must reflect people’s economic needs, provide a secure and critical education, a healthy life, and a just life without oppression either from the global empire or local rulers. It must be secular (not to confuse that with animosity to religion and spirituality). It must be concerned with people’s physical health and necessary material needs. It must be attuned to nature and the fragility of the environment. It also must guarantee the freedom of mobility/migration, which are natural to human beings, as Ibn Khaldun argued. If the Bandung spirit of the 1960s failed to achieve its goals, we might need to think of a reworking of that concept in a way that can unite people around the world around the common good, common needs, and aspirations – a new form of Asabiyya that fits our current times.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes
Author biography
