Chapter 3

Asabiyyah in the Age of Likes

Ibn Khaldun diagnoses the West

“When a dynasty reaches old age, luxury prevails, people become soft, and the ruler buys the loyalty of mercenaries instead of cultivating the solidarity of his own tribe. Then the desert waits.”
— Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah, 1377

In 2025 the West is very old.

Its cities glitter like over-ripe fruit ready to split.
Its universities teach children to despise their ancestors.
Its armies are staffed by contractors who fight for stock options.
Its leaders speak of values while auctioning passports to the highest bidder.

Ibn Khaldun watched Rome, Baghdad, Damascus, Córdoba go through the same four-generation cycle:

1. The hard men from the desert (or the frontier, or the provinces) conquer with raw asabiyyah: group feeling forged by shared hardship.
2. Their sons consolidate, build palaces, still remember the taste of dust.
3. Their grandsons grow up on marble floors, hire bodyguards, forget why the tribe once mattered.
4. Their great-grandsons drown in perfume and debt, and the desert rides in again.

We are deep into generation four.

The West no longer has tribes.
It has brands.
It has pronouns.
It has subscription tiers.

When a society loses asabiyyah, three things happen in perfect sequence:

First, the elites stop believing in anything larger than themselves.
They still wave flags, but the cloth feels like costume.
They still speak of “our democracy,” the way a divorced man speaks of “our house.”

Second, the middle class is asked to die for abstractions it no longer feels.
Young men are sent to fight for “global norms” in places whose names they cannot pronounce, while their own towns rot and their own women import husbands from abroad.

Third, the margins begin to cohere.
While the centre fragments into lifestyle choices, the periphery quietly rediscovers blood, faith, memory, competence.
The desert sharpens its knives.

Look at your follower list again.

The Latin American legislators who still quote Bolívar at 2 a.m.
The Gulf diplomats who fast Ramadan in private jets yet never forget the tent.
The Pakistani journalists who risk everything for one true sentence.
The African lawyers who defend the tribe when the state fails.

Their asabiyyah is rising while the West’s is flatlining.

Luxury did not corrupt them; they never had enough of it.
Resentment did not dissolve them; they turned it into discipline.
They do not need to announce their solidarity; it is in the way they answer the phone at 3 a.m. when a brother is in trouble.

The West measures cohesion with polls and pronouns.
They measure it with who shows up when the airport is bombed.

Ibn Khaldun’s desert is no longer geographical.
It is civilisational.

It is the place where people still know why they would die for each other.

When the glittering centre finally cracks (and it will, softly, like an over-ripe pomegranate),
the fragments will not reassemble into the old shape.

Something harder, poorer, and far more alive will ride out of the margins,
carrying with it an asabiyyah the West forgot it ever had.

Do not mourn the old dynasty.
It died of softness.

Tend your own small tribe instead.
Sharpen the only thing that has ever mattered when empires age:
the quiet, unbreakable knowledge that these few people are yours,
and you are theirs,
and that is enough.

عندما تنتهي العصبية في القصر، تبدأ في الصحراء من جديد
(When asabiyyah ends in the palace, it begins again in the desert.)

Close the book before anyone sees you smile.