How Islam Repackaged Tribalism as Religion

Despite its spiritual facade, Islam can easily be defined and understood by one non-religious word: politics.

This is crucial. The overall appeal of Muhammad’s call to the Arabs of his time lay in its excellent compatibility with their cultural mores, three in certain: loyalty to one’s tribe, enmity for different tribes, and raids on the latter to strengthen and empower the past.

For seventh-century Arabs— and afterward cultural and agricultural peoples, such as the Turks and Tatars, or Mongols, who likewise found normal appeal in, and converted to, Islam — the tribe was what humanity is to modern people: to be part of the tribe was to be treated fairly, to be outside the tribe was to be treated immorally.

Muhammad reinforced this old paradox of politics, but by prioritizing church over family. Thus, in his” Constitution of Medina”, which he promulgated with various non-Muslim tribes in 622, he asserted that” a believer shall not slay a believer for the sake of an unbeliever, nor shall he aid an unbeliever against a believer”. Also, all Muslims were to become “friends one to the other to the rejection of newcomers”.

Thus the agha, which is often translated as” Muslim society”, was born. Etymologically connected to the word “mother” (umm ), the umma came to signify the Islamic” Super-Tribe”, a universal tribe that transcends racial, national, and linguistic barriers, encompassing any and all who identify as Muslims.

Everyone outside of it remained its natural rivals.

Once, this is basic politics 1.0, although, as mentioned, with spiritual dressing.

Or regard the Islamist doctrine of al-wala’ wa’l-bara’ ( translated as “loyalty and enmity”, or “love and love” ). The Koran directs it, and Muhammad predestineds it. Taken together, for instance, Koran 58: 22 and 60: 4 visit on all Muslims to “renounce” and “disown” their non-Muslim family — “even if they get their fathers, their sons, their brothers, or their nearest kindred” — and to feel just “enmity and anger” for them, until they “believe in Allah alone”, that is, until they become Muslim.

Those two verses refer to a number of Muhammad’s close companions, who, according to Islamic history, renounced and in some cases slaughtered their own non-Muslim relatives as a show of their loyalty to Allah and the believers. One slew his father, another his brother, a third — Abu Bakr, the first righteous caliph — tried to slay his own son, and Omar, the second righteous caliph, slaughtered his relatives.

( For more, see my 60-page English translation of Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri’s Arabic treatise on the doctrine of al-wala ‘w’al bara’, in my 2007 book, The Al Qaeda Reader. )

At any rate, from here we come to the natural origin of jihad: tribalistic blood ties were exchanged for religious ones, thereby dividing the world into two mega tribes: the believers&nbsp, in one tent, and their natural enemies, the non-believers, or infidels, in another. And as we’ve seen, the essence of tribalism is waging wars and scheming against other tribes to advance your own.

This dichotomized worldview is actually enshrined in Islamic law’s, or sharia’s, mandate that Dar al-Islam ( the” Abode of Islam”, or the world of Islam ) must battle Dar al-Kufr ( the” Abode or world of non-Islam” ) in perpetuity until the former subjugates the latter.

For instance, we read in the Encyclopaedia of Islam that” jihad” means that” the spread of Islam by arms is a religious duty upon Muslims in general. Jihad must continue until the entire world is under Islam’s rule.

In other words, Islam is so dependent on the doctrine of jihad that it ceases to exist without it.

Related: Is European Colonialism the Root Cause of’ Muslim Grievances’?

Islam’s apotheosis, or deification, of tribalism also explains why tribal societies other than the Arabs also gravitated to and found Islam appealing.

Consider the Turkic peoples ‘ oldest epic, The Book of Dede Korkut. The Turks of the epic regularly engage in pagan practices that are against Islamic law, including drinking horse meat and drinking wine and other fermented drinks, and their women are generally free in comparison to Muslim women. Islam finally appears in their lives in the context of raids on the “infidel,” which are a smooth and simple transition from those on the” tribal outsider.”

Here, for example, is a typical pre-battle boast from the Turks of the epic:” I shall raid the bloody infidels ‘ land, I shall cut off heads and spill blood, I shall make the infidel vomit blood, I shall bring back slaves and slave-girls”.

Another instance of these new Turkish converts ‘ pious exploits can be found here:

They erected a mosque in its place, destroyed the church of the infidels, and murdered its priests. They had the call to prayer proclaimed, they had the invocation]or shahada ] recited in the name of Allah Almighty. The best of the hunting-birds, the purest of stuffs, the loveliest of girls … they selected.

Aside from preying on the infidel-other, which already came naturally to the pre-Islamic Turks, any and all non-violent aspects of Islam — fasting, zakat, pilgrimage — are totally absent from the lives of these earliest Turkic converts as portrayed in the Book of Dede Korkut.

Even so, the older Muslim peoples, the Arabs and Persians, praised the new converts simply because they “fight in the way of Allah, waging jihad against the infidels”, to quote one source.

Being committed to jihad has always been a long way to expels otherwise un-Islamic behavior among Muslims, as if saying,” Well, at least they’re doing the hard part — war on infidels — so give them a break.

The situation held true for those who converted to Islam as Mongols did. As the Dominican friar Ricoldo ( d. 1320 ), who spent a decade in the Muslim world, once observed”, the Tartars had adopted Islam because it was the easy religion, as Christianity was the hard one.”

In other words, Christianity only challenged their preexisting tribal way of life, whereas Islam complemented their existing tribal way of life, including by granting them permission to prey on all outsiders.

In other words, Muhammad’s most enduring contribution to world history is that he deified tribalism into a kind of hyper-tribalism by repackaging the tribal mores of seventh-century Arabia through a theological paradigm, leading to dramatic resurgence of the practice into the modern era.

Hence the infamous assimilation resistance in the West, the establishment of clannish no-go zones, and the ongoing rise of terrorism and hate crimes.

Whereas many world civilizations have been able to break away from, or at least temper, their historic tribalism, this has not been, and cannot be, so easy for Islam. For Muslims to break away from tribalism is for them to break away from Allah’s laws— laws which, as seen, are logical and gratifying, at least from a primordial, or, if you like, primitive, point of view.

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