Ibn Khaldun's theory of history, described in his Muqaddimah, explains how the monotheistic nomadic tribesmen overturned a weak and luxurious sedentary culture.
There is no mystery about why the U.S. experience in Afghanistan ended in failure, embarrassment, and scandal. Nor is it a mystery why the Taliban took over Kabul so quickly. They were fighting for primacy. Their victory was foreordained.
The medieval Arab historian Ibn Khaldun explains the dynamic in his 14th-century masterwork,
Al Muqaddima. History, he shows, is a repetition of the same pattern seen throughout the ages—a group of nomadic tribesmen overturn an existing sedentary culture, a civilization that has become weak and luxurious. What drives the success of the rising tribe is its group solidarity, or
assabiya. Its awareness of itself as a coherent people with a drive for primacy is frequently augmented by religious ideology. The stronger the tribe’s
assabiya, the stronger the group. Assimilating the conquered by imposing its will and worldview on them, the victor lays the foundations of a new civilization. But since, as Ibn Khaldun writes, “the goal of civilization is sedentary culture and luxury,” all groups carry the seeds of their own demise.
And so the struggle begins anew.
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It’s frightening to see American leadership pulling America apart at the seams. And it’s shocking to see our constitutional order ripped to shreds as the establishment undercuts property rights, imposes capricious public health regulations, mandates experimental medical treatments, and holds political prisoners. But the lesson of Ibn Khaldun is that these destructive policies are simply indications that a cycle that has been repeated through the ages is once again in motion. To watch history erupt in our own timeline is indeed terrifying, but it is part of the natural order of human societies.
“Their prowess disappears as Time feasts on them,” Ibn Khaldun wrote of dying regimes. “They reach their limit, the limit that is set by the nature of human urbanization and political superiority.” Evidence of the establishment’s decay is everywhere you look—the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, the public health bureaucracy’s failed COVID response, even Obama’s 60th birthday. Who would publicly celebrate leadership of an effort to split a nation on behalf of a sectarian gang that is only kept from each other’s throats by driving them at a much larger force, one made more cohesive and angry by the elite’s incessant attacks? Only a deracinated and delirious regime would parade an assortment of celebrities from the worlds of entertainment and politics to demonstrate its self-arrogated superiority in front of a nation it locked down, bankrupted, and mocked—only an intoxicated elite with no one left to take away the car keys.
By definition, the numbers are always against elites—they consist of small coteries of leadership and their needy retinues. The success, indeed survival, of any elite depends on its ability to cultivate and maintain group solidarity. To make public demonstrations of breaking
assabiya means they are forfeiting the privilege of leadership, which therefore, as Ibn Khaldun wrote, will pass to another branch of the same nation. While the ruling regime falls apart, he wrote, “the group feeling of other people (within the same nation) is strong. Their force cannot be broken. Their emblem is recognized to be victorious. As a result, their hopes of achieving royal authority, from which they had been kept until now by a superior power within their own group, are high. Their superiority is recognized, and, therefore, no one disputes their claim to royal authority. They seize power.”
We are part of history unfolding before us, as it has throughout time. But to be clear, what we are witnessing is not the end of America. It’s just the end of this particular branch of American leadership.