Islamic Tribalism

Raymond Ibrahim is a scholar of Islam and has authored several excellent books on the history of Islam, two of which I especially recommend to anyone interested in this history Defenders of the West: The Christian Heroes Who Stood Against Islam (2022) and Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West (2018). In a recent column at PJ Media he writes:

Despite its religious veneer, Islam can easily be defined and understood by one non-religious word: tribalism.

This is key. The entire appeal of Muhammad’s call to the Arabs of his time lay in its perfect compatibility with their tribal mores, three in particular: loyalty to one’s tribe; enmity for other tribes; and raids on the latter to enrich and empower the former.

For seventh-century Arabs — and later tribal and pastoral peoples, such as the Turks and Tatars, or Mongols, who also found natural 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 humanely; to be outside the tribe was to be treated inhumanely.

This certainly explains the Arab aphorism: "Me against my brother. My brother and I against our cousin. My brother, my cousin, and I against the world." Islam, Ibrahim writes, repackages this ancient tribalism by making religion, rather than blood relationship, the basis for tribal identity. Ibrahim goes on:

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.” Moreover, all Muslims were to become “friends one to the other to the exclusion of outsiders.”

Hence the umma, which is often translated as “Muslim nation,” 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.

Its natural enemies remained everyone outside of it.

This enmity toward those outside Islam found its way into the Koran:

Or consider the Islamic doctrine of al-wala’ wa’l-bara’ (translated as “loyalty and enmity,” or “love and hate”). Muhammad preached it, and the Koran commands it. Taken together, for example, Koran 58:22 and 60:4 call on all Muslims to “renounce” and “disown” their non-Muslim relatives — “even if they be their fathers, their sons, their brothers, or their nearest kindred” — and to feel only “enmity and hatred” 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.

This certainly helps us to understand much of recent history as Ibrahim explains:

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 in one tent, and their natural enemies, the non-believers, or infidels, in another. And, as we’ve seen, the essence of tribalism is warring and preying on other tribes in order to empower 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.

In, for example, the Encyclopaedia of Islam, we read under the entry for “jihad” that the “spread of Islam by arms is a religious duty upon Muslims in general … Jihad must continue to be done until the whole world is under the rule of Islam … Islam must completely be made over before the doctrine of jihad can be eliminated.”

In other words, the doctrine of jihad — warfare on the other — is so pivotal to Islam that without it, Islam ceases to be.

You can read more from Ibrahim at the link.

It's stunning that Muslims have made their hatred of unbelievers so clear and yet American and European political leaders seem to think that it's somehow irrelevant in the contemporary world. Blinded, perhaps, by a secular worldview, they seem unable to comprehend that millions of Muslims, hundreds of whom they've blithely permitted to immigrate into their countries, are deeply committed to killing anyone outside Dar al-Islam.

Fervent Muslims are committed to eliminating the infidel, either by converting him to Islam or killing him. They abhor the idea of assimilating into the cultures of the countries into which they migrate. Assimilation is seen as a profound betrayal.

They don't hate non-Muslims because of anything they've done. They don't hate the infidel because of the crusades, or because of colonialism, or because Muslims are often poor and resentful of the rich. Those things may exacerbate their enmity but their not the primary cause of it. The primary cause of the Muslim hatred of non-believers is that they're not Muslims.

There can only be war between Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Kufr. There is only temporary peace if and when Muslims are in a position of weakness. As soon as they are strong enough there will be war. This is a cycle we've seen play out in the Middle East for the past eighty years and it's why there can be no lasting "Two-State Solution" with Israelis and Muslims living peaceably side-by-side.

It's why Christians throughout Africa are being murdered by Islamic terrorists almost daily. It's why as soon as Hamas felt itself strong enough it launched a sickeningly cruel raid on Israelis on October 7th. It's why Muslims drive cars and trucks into crowds of people in European cities.

And it's why Iran must never be permitted to possess a nuclear bomb.