Asabiyyah: The Power of Social Solidarity
Before Adam Smith, there was Ibn Khaldun.
Before prints of The Wealth of Nations were plucked off shelves faster than a Harry Potter book in 1776, the Muqaddimah was written in 1377. Before the ruling elite, in cities like London, Paris or Boston, were introduced to ideas such as the free market, the division of labour and the science of political economy, a Tunisian born Islamic scholar wrote about production, consumption, utility and supply and demand.
And before Adam Smith was heralded as the father of modern economics, Ibn Khaldun laid the foundations for modern economic theory 400 years earlier.
Lauded as the father of sociology, it wouldn’t be a reach to also call Ibn Khaldun the father of economics. Or at the very least, put his name amongst the Mt. Rushmore of greatest social economic thinkers.
But this isn’t about laurels, titles or due credit. It isn’t about who’s invisible hand stretches longer. As the great fictional character, Chazz Michael Michaels once said — and I’m rephrasing here — this is about one word and one word only.
Asabiyyah.
Amongst the insightful concepts Ibn Khaldun wrote about, one in particular stands out. It is an idea that embodies social cohesion. Asabiyyah is the concept of “social solidarity with an emphasis on unity, group conciseness and sense of shared purpose.”
More than ever, we have demonstrated that there is a fellowship, a bond that ties us all together. We have evolved beyond our political nature and created a community that, at least for now, is borderless.
Our ethos in the 21st century is one of a strong asabiyyah. One of social indivisibility that is borderless even if we may be unaware of it.
There’s no question that we are going through challenging times. But it isn’t the first time we have collectively faced a pandemic. Our enemy, lurks in the dark, and comes with various names; the Flu, The Black Death, Ebola, HIV or Cholera. They come, they kill and leave us with a crippled environment and a fractured soul, only to plot and plan their next wave of attack.
But if history serves as a precursor, we not only prevail, but when faced with adversity, we exercise our strongest attribute of all — our ability to rally, band together and operate under one single republic. This is what asabiyyah is.
I first came across the phrase whilst reading Peter Turchin’s book, War and Peace and War. Peter Turchin, a scientist who specialises in cultural evolution and cliodynamics, uses mathematical modelling and statistical analysis to study historical societies.
The word, in his opening chapter, resonated with me. The timing? Impeccable. We’re demonstrating our asabiyyah at this very moment. Social solidarity through social distancing. Now there’s a paradox.
A scroll down Instagram lane and you will witness the remarkable things people all over the world are doing. Italians playing racketball out from their balconies, Brazilians singing in harmonised chords out from their terraces, the British standing up every Monday at 8 pm and giving a round of applause to the NHS personnel, and the Chinese in Wuhan, airing out notes of encouragement to one another out from their sky towers.
All of this involved the group. The collective. This is our asabiyyah.
In a time and era where certain factions are trying to widen the wedge between your tribe and mine, it is more crucial than ever to rally behind the idea of a global asabiyyah. My tribe is your tribe. My growth is your growth. My well being is your well being. That would surely make Ibn Khaldun proud.
But perhaps I am wrong. Maybe our asabiyyah has been resilient and on display all along. Maybe the business pioneers of our generation knew this and capitalised on it. Maybe Alibaba, Amazon, Airbnb, Google and Uber are a result of our asabiyyah. Either they were the engine that spurred our collective growth, or was it there all along?
Whichever way you look at it, it is fascinating how far we have collectively come. It is truly remarkable.
Take Uber for instance. Consumers traveled roughly 26 billion miles on their platform in 2018. Thats not a typo. That is the round trip distance between our little planet to every other planet orbiting the sun. And that’s not just one round trip, but two roundtrips. So if you were to hop on a SpaceX or Virgin shuttle, visit every planet in our solar system and came back, it would still be half of the mileage we covered in 2018.
Neptune is roughly 2.7 billion miles away. The sun? A measly 100 million miles. The expression ‘astronomical figures’ suddenly doesn’t sound very. Well. Astronomical.
Then there’s Airbnb. Since its 2008 inception, the company has had over 500 million guests, earning hosts over $65 billion throughout the 12 years since.
That’s the equivalent of half of the world’s population when Adam Smith was around. And a 150 million people more when Ibn Khaldun was working on his body of work in Tunisia.
500 million is no number to scuff at. And yet, every day, over 500 million people post selfies, memes and videos with filters on Instagram.
If that’s not impressive enough then recently, Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud said on Bloomberg that their platform sees 2 billion minutes of meetings take place on Google Meet every day. That’s thousands of years of meetings between people from Peru all the way to South Korea.
Still not impressed?
How about another Alphabet ecosystem? The addictive yet productive Youtube platform. The platform sees about 300 hours of video being uploaded every minute. That’s 18,000 years of non-stop video footage that gets put up each year.
As for the twitteratis; those who prefer the written word over visuals, they churn out over 6,000 tweets per second on average. A quick Siri command and she says that adds up to about 200 billion tweets a year.
The growth in books and literary sphere is quite fascinating as well. Back when Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1440, numbers for published books were naturally low. The following century, the world witnessed an unprecedented growth in books published and printed. By 1500, there were thousands of printing presses that resulted in more than 20 million books in Western Europe alone. By 1600, that number rose tenfold to somewhere between 150 million to 200 million.
Now in the US alone, 689 million print sales were recorded in 2019. The King of Horror himself, Stephen King, has singlehandedly sold more books in his lifetime than there were books printed in the 16th century. He’s at 350 million and counting.
Speaking of books, I remember how thrilled I was, as a child, when my father bought The Britannica series. Could it be? All of the world’s knowledge in a series of encyclopaedias right at my fingertips? I would get lost in those hardcovers for days.
Now? Wikipedia has entirely changed that. With over 6 million articles, the idea that the Britannica series had just about a 100,000 articles sounds like child’s play.
How about another pop culture reference? Let’s show Rod Tidwell the money.
Two of the largest e-commerces, Alibaba ($55 billion) and Amazon ($280 billion) recorded net sales higher than the combined gross national product of all countries back when Ibn Khaldun ($45 billion) and Adam Smith ($175 billion) were alive.
Adam Smith would be happy to know that there is good in capitalism. And Ibn Khaldun would be happy to hear that we, collectively, are bound by an asabiyyah that breaks barriers set by “biological, geographical, social or cultural groupings.” (Yusur Alsalihi, 2018)
I hope our future will follow through with its current trajectory. I hope our kids and youth will carry the torch with the foundations we have collectively built in the 21st century.
We have much more in common than we think.
Besides. How else can we take a round trip around the world? How else can we create content that can last thousands of years? How else can we evolve to the point where our tribe converges into one?
Ibn Khaldun believed that asabiyyah is strongest during the nomadic and tribal phases and diminishes in strength as civilisations, or rather empires advance. But we have evolved. We have created a universal asabiyyah — one with no borders, no creed and no ethnicity dividing us.
The digital revolution has instilled in us new customs and a new way of thinking. It has given us a tenacious asabiyyah that can overcome any adversity.
Pandemics? We have overcome. We will overcome. Let’s hope that we have the foresight to keep building on what we’ve started and we can find more of what we share in common rather than what separates us. That is asabiyyah.
