Parallel case studies in the conceptual history project: Chinese case (horizontal political vocabulary), finished paper · this paper (Arabic case) · Roman case (Latin), research in progress.

The Conceptual Boundaries of Horizontal Political Solidarity: Eight Words in Arabic-Islamic Political Thought

Formal version v3 · begun 2026-06-19 · conclusion and §5 made more precise 2026-06-22 · data corrections 2026-08-02 and 2026-08-05 · rewritten in plain prose 2026-08-05 · Pianruo · Leimma. Originally by Pianruo with Leimma, now maintained by Vox.
[to be supplied] = page references still awaiting verification against library holdings

Record of data corrections, 2026-08-02 [User ruling · 2026-08-02 · in-person session · “If it needs correcting, correct it”]. When this paper was being turned into HTML, every figure was checked back against the data files, and four places were found where the text did not match the data. All have been corrected, and the original wording is recorded here for checking:

1. In Section 6, the entry for ikhtilāf originally gave the number of instances in the early period as “821 instances”. The value of pre_fiqh_to820.target_instances in the data file ikhtilaf_ppmi_fields.json is 1214. The figure 821 presumably arose from copying the period name to820.

2. The methodological note in Section 6 originally stated that the whole paper uniformly used “5 words on either side (a ±5-word window)”, but both columns of arabic_ppmi_fields.json (the ʿaṣabiyya own-works group and the predecessor-pool group) explicitly state "window": 4. The text now states the two window values separately.

3. Sections 5 and 6 originally stated that the own-works group and the predecessor-pool group had “zero intersection among their top 30 neighbours”. In fact the own-works group yielded 30 neighbours and the predecessor-pool group only 21 (a sample of 51 instances could not fill 30 under the set thresholds). The conclusion that the intersection is zero is unchanged; the wording has been made accurate.

4. The byline has been changed from “Pianruo” to “Pianruo · Leimma” [User ruling · 2026-08-02 · in-person session · “The byline is the two of you jointly”]. Pianruo was merged into Leimma on 2026-07-02; the text was written by Pianruo, and this correction and subsequent maintenance are the responsibility of Leimma.

Record of data corrections, 2026-08-05 (second batch, under the same authorisation, “If it needs correcting, correct it”). The product pipeline, comparing every figure under SC-22 while building the HTML, found one discrepancy, and Leimma, rechecking the same sentence, found a second. Leimma herself confirmed both by recalculating from arabic_occurrences.json:

5. In Section 5, the usage density for Maqrizi was originally given as “about 0.09 to 0.11 occurrences”, a range that has no source in the data file. In fact each of the two works has its own value: Sulūk, 9 occurrences / 830,007 tokens ≈ 0.11; Mawāʿiẓ, 5 occurrences / 874,554 tokens ≈ 0.06 (combined 0.082). The text now lists the two works separately.

6. In the same sentence the multiple was originally given as “17 to 50 times”, which does not match the corrected densities for each author (Ibn Ḥajar at 0.41 against 2.71 is only about 6.7 times). Recalculated from the data: Ibn Ḥajar about 6.7 times, Sakhawi about 9.8 times, the two works of Maqrizi about 25 and 47 times, Ibn Taghrī about 32 times. The text now reads “about 7 to 47 times” (Suyūṭī, at almost zero, is not counted in the range).

Record of the plain-prose rewrite, 2026-08-05 [User ruling · 2026-08-05 · in-person session · “It reads far too much like AI; it is completely incomprehensible. It needs to go through the non-fiction writing pipeline and be rewritten in full”]. This revision changes only the wording. Self-coined terms (register layer, layer switching, reversal of layer switching), metaphors used as analytical terms (clearing the field, deployment, slots, slot-by-slot handling, invoking the positive pole, three structural locks, semantic ecology, conceptual home) and several short closing sentences have been replaced with plain expressions. All claims, figures, quotations in the original and in translation, notes and references are unchanged; the 18 missing links have been kept as they were, at the requester’s instruction, neither strengthened nor softened. The rewritten version is v3; the rewriter was the non-fiction writing pipeline (drafter: Claude; rewriter for removing the AI flavour: Codex). v3 passed the curator’s final review and has replaced the previous text as the authoritative version [User ruling · 2026-08-05 · in-person session · “Fine”]. Leimma’s three-level acceptance record is kept in the rewrite work order; the original text of v2.3 is preserved in the git history and the delivery directory.

Abstract

This paper analyses eight Arabic political concepts and argues that Arabic-Islamic political thought did not simply prohibit horizontal political solidarity. Instead, it handled different types of horizontal solidarity separately, specifying which forms could be permitted, tolerated or incorporated into the legitimate order and which should be condemned. The fourteenth-century North African historian Ibn Khaldūn attempted to use ʿaṣabiyya (عصبية, group solidarity) to describe horizontal force itself in neutral terms, so that this capacity would be neither condemned nor required to be converted into some other form. The attempt did not succeed. The reason is not that Ibn Khaldūn failed to complete his argument, but that the existing conceptual system had no place for such a neutral description. Combining textual analysis with a method from computational semantics (PPMI semantic field analysis), this paper tests, one by one, the semantic stability of the eight concepts in a corpus spanning several centuries, and so provides quantitative support for the claims above.

1. The Problem

Political communities have to deal with a persistent problem: people form ties with one another outside the recognised structure of authority, based on kinship, locality, shared belief, occupation or simply shared interest. These ties are sometimes closer than formal relations of authority and better able to mobilise action. Political thought has to decide what the status of these ties is. May they exist legitimately? Under what conditions?

Different political traditions have given very different answers to this question. Modern European political thought gradually developed the concept of “party” and accepted that horizontal association within political organisation could be legitimate. The Confucian tradition condemned horizontal alliances among officials under the name of pengdang (factions), while Ouyang Xiu tried to distinguish the association of gentlemen, which gave rise to a debate on the subject. This paper studies the answer that Arabic-Islamic political thought gave to the question.

This tradition is usually described as suppressing horizontal political solidarity. The description points in the right direction, but it does not explain how different forms of horizontal solidarity were each treated. Understanding these specific differences requires analysing eight words together: jamāʿa (community), bayʿa (oath of allegiance), ikhtilāf (disagreement), fitnah (civil strife), ḥizb (party), shīʿa (Shiʿa / followers), ahl al-baghy (the group of rebels) and ʿaṣabiyya (group solidarity).

Each of these eight words specifies how a different form of horizontal political solidarity is to be handled. Some forms are incorporated into the legitimate order, some can exist only in domains that do not affect political authority, some are condemned, and some are placed in a dedicated legal category. ʿaṣabiyya is the only concept that attempted to describe horizontal force neutrally, outside these ways of handling it, and it was not lastingly accepted by the Arabic tradition. Its failure shows that this system covered the whole range of forms that horizontal political solidarity could take.

A note on method. This paper uses two kinds of evidence. The first is textual-historical analysis, including reading of primary Arabic political, legal and theological sources and of the relevant secondary scholarship. The second is computational PPMI semantic field analysis of the OpenITI (Open Islamicate Texts Initiative) corpus. PPMI (positive pointwise mutual information) is a statistical measure of how closely two words co-occur in texts: if word A and word B appear near each other much more often than chance would predict, they have a high PPMI value. By calculating the top 30 highest-PPMI neighbours of a word in different historical periods, one can map its semantic neighbourhood and compare whether that neighbourhood changed over time. This method turns the interpretive judgement “did the meaning of this word really change?” into a question that can be quantified and checked. Section 6 gives a fuller account of the method.

2. The Whole Community and the Single Oath: jamāʿa and bayʿa

The basic structure through which Arabic-Islamic political thought handles horizontal solidarity consists of two concepts: jamāʿa (جماعة) and bayʿa (بيعة). The former defines the only legitimate form of horizontal solidarity; the latter specifies how horizontal solidarity is converted into recognised political authority.

jamāʿa: the only legitimate horizontal whole

The literal meaning of jamāʿa is “gathering” or “assembly”; in political-theological usage it gradually became fixed as the designation of “the Muslim community as a whole”. The self-designation most commonly used by Sunni Islam to this day is ahl al-sunna wa-l-jamāʿa (أهل السنة والجماعة), meaning “the people of the Prophetic tradition and the community”. The jamāʿa here is not merely a descriptive term. It is a political claim: that the Muslim community as a whole is the only horizontal collective with legitimacy.

This claim means that any horizontal association narrower than the whole community, that is, any sub-group organisation, has no independent political legitimacy. If such associations are organisations under recognised authority, their legitimacy comes from vertical authority and not from the horizontal ties themselves. If they do not accept this authority, they are regarded as a dangerous fitnah that splits the whole, which is discussed in detail below. This classification recognises no form lying between the two.

The classification took shape in concrete political struggles and did not have a purely abstract theological source. Barzegar’s study traces the history of the political formula “adhering to the community” (luzūm al-jamāʿa, لزوم الجماعة) and finds that it was deliberately shaped in the scholarly circles of Basra and Kufa in the late Umayyad period (late seventh to early eighth century), closely tied to the legitimation of caliphal authority and aimed directly at early Shiʿi political activity.^¹ The proposition that “the whole community is the only legitimate horizontal whole” was first institutionalised in power struggles, then acquired religious authority through the hadith literature (records of the Prophet’s words and deeds), and finally became an unshakeable foundation of Sunni political thought. (Note: the political formula luzūm al-jamāʿa does not appear among the top neighbours of jamāʿa in this paper’s quantitative analysis of OpenITI. The reason is that the OpenITI corpus consists mainly of hadith collections, while the political formula is found mainly in political-theological works. This absence does not affect Barzegar’s textual-historical argument; see Section 6 for details.)

bayʿa: the oath of allegiance and political authority

The jamāʿa framework does not deny the social existence of horizontal solidarity: tribes, families and local groups continue to exist in reality. What it denies is the spontaneous political legitimacy of these horizontal ties. bayʿa (بيعة, oath of allegiance or contract of investiture) is the only recognised way in which horizontal force is converted into legitimate political authority.

bayʿa is the founding act that establishes the authority of the caliph (the Islamic political leader). In classical theory it is completed when a group known as ahl al-ḥall wa-l-ʿaqd (أهل الحل والعقد, “those who loose and bind”, that is, the scholars and notables of the community qualified to represent it) swears allegiance to a candidate on behalf of the whole community. Once this contract is concluded, the candidate acquires the authority to rule, and not before. The eleventh-century jurist al-Māwardī gave the most systematic account of this procedure in al-Aḥkām al-Sulṭāniyya (The Ordinances of Government).^²

The bayʿa mechanism is exclusive. Horizontal solidarity can produce leaders, but only through the ritual of bayʿa is such a leader recognised as a legitimate political authority. Tribal solidarity by itself does not produce political authority; it is bayʿa that allows such horizontal force to acquire legitimate political standing. Horizontal solidarity that has not passed through bayʿa still has no political legitimacy, and once it forms an armed force it is placed in the legal category of rebellion (see Section 4).

The landmark historical event for this mechanism is what happened at the Saqīfa after the death of the Prophet Muhammad (632): a group of community leaders assembled hastily and swore allegiance to Abū Bakr, thereby establishing the first caliph. Madelung’s reconstruction shows that in the Sunni tradition this oath of allegiance was understood as the act that constituted authority itself. It was not a confirmation of Abū Bakr’s pre-existing authority but the act that established that authority.^³ ʿAlī, the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, delayed his allegiance for about six months. This interval was discussed again and again in political thought over the following thousand years or more, and the Sunni tradition regards it as the root of all later divisions.

bayʿa and jamāʿa together form the basic structure of this system: the only legitimate form of horizontal solidarity is the whole community (jamāʿa), and horizontal solidarity can be converted into legitimate political authority only through the oath of allegiance (bayʿa). Within this dual framework, any sub-group horizontal association that claims independent political legitimacy is left without any clear legitimate status, because it has not been recognised through bayʿa.

3. Juristic Disagreement and Political Rupture: ikhtilāf and fitnah

The jamāʿa-bayʿa framework does not require all Muslims to agree on every question. What it sets is a requirement of political unity, not of intellectual unity. Within this framework, ikhtilāf (اختلاف, disagreement) and fitnah (فتنة, civil strife or rupture) together draw a precise boundary: which kinds of disagreement are permitted, and which must be eliminated.

ikhtilāf: permitted disagreement and its boundaries

The literal meaning of ikhtilāf is “being different” or “difference”. In legal usage it refers specifically to legitimate disagreement among qualified jurists on questions of probabilistic legal inference. That is, when the texts of the Qurʾān or of the Prophetic tradition do not themselves give a definite answer, different scholars may reach different legal conclusions through analogical reasoning or consideration of the public interest, and this difference is permitted.

The four legal schools of Sunni Islam (Mālikī, Ḥanafī, Shāfiʿī and Ḥanbalī) coexist on this basis. They hold different positions on many specific questions, such as details of ritual, conditions of transactions and criminal evidence, but the tradition understands these differences as richness rather than division. A saying in circulation holds that disagreement among jurists (ikhtilāf al-fuqahāʾ) is a “mercy” (raḥma) granted to the community.

The key point here is the domain in which ikhtilāf operates. Hallaq’s study shows that the deeper reason why the Sunni tradition allows juristic disagreement to exist is precisely that such disagreement is confined to the scholarly-legal domain, where it cannot generate independent political claims.^⁴ The four schools each retain different legal opinions, but no school thereby acquires a right to make independent political claims. ikhtilāf is a pluralism in the horizontal direction, but this pluralism is strictly confined within the limit of “not endangering vertical authority”.

This limit is not an external constraint; it is part of the internal logic of the concept of ikhtilāf. Once juristic disagreement crosses out of the scholarly-legal domain into the domain of political organisation (for example, if a school claims that its opinions give it a right to make independent political claims), ikhtilāf is no longer merely ikhtilāf. It begins to become fitnah.

fitnah: why political rupture is unacceptable

The root of fitnah (فتنة), f-t-n, refers in a metallurgical context to testing the purity of metal with fire. The tenth-century lexicographer Ibn Fāris identified the core meaning of the word as “trial and testing”. In the Qurʾān, fitnah occurs about sixty times, with a very wide semantic range: divine trial, temptation, persecution, and rupture and strife within the community. The lexicographer al-Rāghib al-Iṣfahānī (d. c. 1108), in his Mufradāt alfāẓ al-Qurʾān (Vocabulary of the Qurʾān), distinguished two kinds of fitnah: that sent down by God is a purifying trial; that caused by human beings is a rupture that should be condemned and avoided.^⁵ In theory this distinction allows another interpretation to be imagined: if political rupture caused by human beings could be described as a social process and not merely as a moral failure, theory might also be able to analyse competition between horizontal political organisations.

Al-Rāghib’s distinction did not give political rupture a neutral interpretation. There are three reasons for this outcome.

The first reason lies in the difference between what the two words refer to. ʿaṣabiyya (discussed in detail in the next section) refers to a capacity, namely group solidarity. Condemnation can be directed only at the abuse of this capacity, and the capacity itself can in principle still be described neutrally. fitnah refers not to a capacity but to the rupture of relations itself. Political fitnah is by definition caused by human beings, and therefore always belongs to the kind that al-Rāghib says should be condemned. Al-Rāghib’s distinction cannot provide a neutral interpretation of political fitnah.

The second reason is that the first major civil war in Islamic history shaped the later use of the word. The parties to this civil war (656–661) included several famous Companions of the Prophet. In the Sunni tradition these people are regarded as a group morally beyond criticism. The tradition does not permit moral criticism of their conduct, and therefore cannot describe the war as “a structural conflict that could have been avoided”, since that would amount to holding that some Companions had erred. Historical narratives of this civil war could therefore only record events; they could not analyse the structures that led to the conflict. Madelung’s study reveals how deeply this constraint affected later historical writing.^⁶ When a tradition cannot analyse a historical event neutrally, the word used to describe that event also cannot acquire a neutral analytical meaning.

The third reason is that jurists established it as an unshakeable legal principle. Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal (780–855), one of the most influential Sunni jurists, made “preventing fitnah”, that is, preventing political rupture, the core principle of political jurisprudence: enduring an unjust ruler is better than provoking civil strife in the name of overthrowing his rule. This principle was later invoked again and again in the tradition of political jurisprudence and systematised, becoming one of the foundational axioms of Sunni political ethics. Abou El Fadl’s study points out that classical jurists, in organising this tradition, systematically gave priority to the hadiths that advocate quiet endurance over those that permit active resistance. This was a textual selection with an institutional motive, not one determined by the texts themselves.^⁷ Once this principle had been institutionalised, “preventing fitnah” became an axiom that no longer needed to be argued, rather than a conclusion open to discussion. Any attempt to neutralise fitnah analytically would first have to overturn this axiom, and that was almost impossible.

ikhtilāf and fitnah together define the range within which this system allows disagreement to exist. In the intellectual-legal domain, disagreement is permitted and is valued positively as the richness of the tradition. Once disagreement enters the domain of political organisation and generates independent political claims, it is classed as fitnah, which must be eliminated. This distinction allows horizontal pluralism that does not challenge vertical authority to exist, while excluding political organisation that would challenge vertical authority.

4. Three Ways of Handling ḥizb, shīʿa and ahl al-baghy

Beyond the basic structure established by jamāʿa-bayʿa and the range of disagreement defined by ikhtilāf-fitnah, three further forms of horizontal solidarity appeared in history. They were handled, respectively, by claiming to represent the whole, by establishing an alternative system of authority, and by coming under the jurisdiction of the law of rebels. Each of these ways carried a different cost.

ḥizb: seeking legitimacy under the title “party of God”

ḥizb (حزب) is the standard word for “political party” in Arabic today, but the history of the word is far more complex than this modern meaning.

In the Qurʾān, ḥizb has sharply opposed positive and negative uses. Sūra 5, verse 56 and Sūra 58, verse 22 mention ḥizb Allāh (حزب الله, “the party of God”), referring to those who are of one heart and one path with God and the Prophet, and declare that they will surely prevail. Sūra 58, verse 19 mentions ḥizb al-Shayṭān (حزب الشيطان, “the party of Satan”), referring to those who forget God and follow Satan, and declares that they are the losers. To belong to the party of God is the highest affirmation; to belong to the party of Satan is the most complete negation.

Because these two uses are opposed to each other, any group claiming to fight for God’s cause could describe itself as ḥizb Allāh (the party of God) and thereby claim legitimacy for its horizontal association. This claim does not contradict the logical framework of jamāʿa, because to claim to be “the party of God” is to claim to represent the whole community of faith against those who have betrayed it, not to claim the particular interests of a sub-group.

This stands in fundamental contrast to the situation of ʿaṣabiyya. ʿaṣabiyya names the solidarity within a particular group; it is inherently particular and cannot be universalised. To claim “we have strong ʿaṣabiyya” is to claim cohesion within our own group, and it cannot at the same time be understood as “we represent the whole”. To claim “we are ḥizb Allāh” is different: however contested, this claim says “we represent the interests of the true community of faith”, which meets the logical requirement of jamāʿa.

ḥizb can therefore seek legitimacy within this system, but on one condition: the horizontal association must claim to “represent the whole” and may not put forward claims on the basis of a sub-group’s particular interests. This condition allows horizontal organisations to exist while requiring them to give up making independent claims as a sub-group. The present-day political-military organisation named “Party of God” (Hezbollah, حزب الله) uses exactly the Qurʾānic title “the party of God”. This naming shows that the religious meaning of ḥizb has not been replaced by the modern meaning of “political party”; the two meanings coexist to this day.

ḥizb later developed the neutral modern meaning of “political party” in the nineteenth century (the earliest documented use is the Egyptian al-Ḥizb al-Waṭanī, the “National Party”, of 1879^⁸). This semantic extension required no theological argument, because the original uses of the word included both the negative “party of Satan” and the positive “party of God”. The new usage therefore needed only to extend the existing semantic range, without first having to remove a purely pejorative meaning. (Note: the detection of the political-party sense of ḥizb in this paper’s quantitative OpenITI layer is limited by the genres of the corpus. The OpenITI corpus contains no nineteenth-century press texts, so the semantic extension of the Nahḍa period is not visible; see the explanation in Section 6. This does not affect the historical account above, since the two examine different layers of evidence.)

shīʿa: establishing an alternative system of authority

(Note: this paper’s quantitative analysis of shīʿa for the early period (seventh to eighth centuries) yielded only 45 instances, below the minimum threshold for reliable PPMI calculation, and conclusions about this period do not rest on computational evidence; see the detailed explanation in Section 6. The following description of the semantic development of shīʿa rests on textual-historical analysis.)

The literal meaning of shīʿa (شيعة) is “followers” or “supporters”. In early Islamic political history the word meant the group that supported the claim of ʿAlī (ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib) to political leadership. ʿAlī was the cousin of the Prophet Muhammad and also his son-in-law, and this group regarded him as the Prophet’s rightful successor after his death.

When the Prophet died in 632 and the bayʿa at the Saqīfa gave the succession to Abū Bakr, ʿAlī’s supporters (shīʿat ʿAlī, the followers of ʿAlī, that is, the “Shiʿa”) faced a structural choice. They could accept the outcome and abandon their claim; they could contest it by force and be placed in the category of rebels; or, as actually happened in history, they could construct an alternative theory of authority that did not acquire legitimacy through the bayʿa mechanism but established another source of vertical authority.

Shiʿi theology developed a theory of authority centred on the “theory of the imamate” (ʿilm al-imāma): God had granted legitimate leadership to the Prophet’s family line through explicit designation (naṣṣ, نص, an explicit statement in the text), not through a communal contract. This means that the imam’s authority comes from divine appointment and needs neither the recognition of “those who loose and bind” nor bayʿa.

The events at Karbala in 680 became the formative moment of Shiʿi identity: the Prophet’s grandson Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī rose up with a small band of followers and was surrounded and destroyed by the Umayyad army at Karbala, with almost all his male relatives killed. The Shiʿa afterwards shaped this tragedy into a central narrative of suffering and witness, and the theory of the imamate gave this tradition a structure of authority that could be sustained even without political control.

The Shiʿa and ḥizb took different paths. ḥizb, by calling itself “the party of God”, sought legitimacy for horizontal association within the existing system. The Shiʿa left the Sunni framework, established a parallel system of vertical authority, and developed into a complete religious-political tradition. This tradition endured, but it left the original system entirely. The original “followers of ʿAlī” could not obtain legitimacy for their horizontal association within the Sunni framework; they later obtained legitimate standing within another framework of authority.

ahl al-baghy: the legal classification of rebels and their reintegration

The third case is that of horizontal solidarity that has become an armed force but has neither established another system of authority, as shīʿa did, nor claimed to represent the whole, as ḥizb Allāh did. Such a group is placed in the legal category of ahl al-baghy (أهل البغي, the group of rebels).

The root of baghy (بغي) points in two directions, “seeking” and “transgressing”, and in legal contexts it became fixed as “rebellion against recognised authority”. The Islamic legal doctrine of ahl al-baghy established three conditions; only when all are met together is an armed group placed in this legal category (rather than the more serious categories of ordinary crime or apostasy):

First, shawka (شوكة, “thorn / sharpness”, by extension organised armed force): the group has enough military strength to pose a real threat and is not a mere rabble.

Second, taʾwīl (تأويل, “interpretive justification”): the group has an argument, even if a mistaken one, and this argument uses the Islamic conceptual framework. Its members believe they are fighting for a just cause in the Islamic sense, not simply for plunder or personal gain.

Third, khurūj (خروج, “going out”, that is, withdrawing from obedience): the group has actually broken away from recognised authority.

When all three conditions are met, the group legally qualifies as ahl al-baghy and receives a special legal treatment: after it has been subdued, its members may not be executed, its property may not be confiscated, and its families may not be enslaved.^⁹ Tabassum’s study points out that this is the content in the Islamic legal tradition closest to the principle of “distinction in armed conflict” in modern international humanitarian law.

This legal protection does not recognise the rebels’ claims as legitimate, nor does it recognise horizontal political solidarity as having independent legitimacy. The law still regards the rebels as members of the community, but holds that they have wrongly broken away from recognised authority. The relevant procedures are aimed at disarming them, bringing them back into obedience to a single authority and restoring the unity of the community (jamāʿa). The provisions protecting rebels therefore serve reintegration, not recognition that several authorities may coexist.

These three ways of handling cover almost all the major forms that horizontal solidarity actually took in history: ḥizb relies on a positive title to seek legitimacy within the system, shīʿa leaves the existing system and establishes an alternative framework, and ahl al-baghy is placed in a dedicated legal category and then reincorporated into the unified community. This system does not simply prohibit horizontal organisation; it handles different forms of horizontal organisation separately. What is distinctive about ʿaṣabiyya is that it attempted to describe horizontal solidarity itself neutrally, outside these ways of handling it.

5. The Transmission of ʿaṣabiyya as a Neutral Analytical Concept

Prehistory: two uses in poetry and in hadith

Before Ibn Khaldūn, the word ʿaṣabiyya had already circulated for several centuries in two traditions that did not directly argue with each other.

The first was the pre-Islamic Arabic poetic tradition. ʿaṣabiyya comes from the Arabic root ʿ-ṣ-b (عصب, “to bind”), and its original meaning is related to the agnatic kin group (ʿaṣaba, عصبة): the circle of male relatives who are obliged to take revenge when a person is harmed or killed and to share risks with him. ʿaṣabiyya is the cohesion and sense of mutual obligation within this group. In pre-Islamic Arab society (which the Islamic tradition calls jāhiliyya, جاهلية, “the age of ignorance”), tribal solidarity was the basis of survival: in the desert environment an individual without tribal protection could not obtain basic security. The pre-Islamic Arab tradition praised this solidarity as the highest virtue, and the most widely circulated tribal maxim was “Help your brother, whether he is the oppressor or the oppressed” (انصر أخاك ظالماً أو مظلوماً), treating group loyalty that does not ask who is right as the summit of virtue. (This maxim is preserved in the Islamic hadith literature, where the Prophet reinterpreted it, changing “help” into restraining the oppressor from doing wrong rather than unconditional support; see Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī no. 2444 and Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim no. 2584.)

The second was the Islamic hadith tradition of condemnation. Qurʾān 49:13 declares: “We made you into peoples and tribes so that you may know one another; the noblest of you in the sight of God is the most God-fearing.” This moved the basis of communal belonging from lineage to faith: the Islamic umma (community of faith) replaced the tribe as the legitimate unit of political loyalty. Following on from this, the hadith (records of the Prophet’s words and deeds) systematically condemned conduct associated with the old tribal ethic. Sunan Abī Dāwūd no. 5121 records a saying of the Prophet aimed explicitly at ʿaṣabiyya:

لَيْسَ مِنَّا مَنْ دَعَا إِلَى عَصَبِيَّةٍ وَلَيْسَ مِنَّا مَنْ قَاتَلَ عَلَى عَصَبِيَّةٍ وَلَيْسَ مِنَّا مَنْ مَاتَ عَلَى عَصَبِيَّةٍ

“He who calls to ʿaṣabiyya is not one of us; he who fights for ʿaṣabiyya is not one of us; he who dies for ʿaṣabiyya is not one of us.”^¹⁰

What this hadith condemns is ʿaṣabiyya as a motive for action, that is, placing tribal loyalty above judgement of right and wrong and defending one’s kinsmen whether they are right or wrong. It does not directly condemn the capacity for group cohesion itself. It was precisely on the basis of the difference between the two that Ibn Khaldūn later reinterpreted ʿaṣabiyya.

In the classical Islamic period, the poetic tradition that praised ʿaṣabiyya and the hadith tradition that condemned it did not enter into direct debate. The hadith tradition labelled the whole pre-Islamic era as jāhiliyya (ignorance), thereby cancelling the poetic tradition’s value as a point of reference rather than debating with it. So when ʿaṣabiyya entered the Islamic tradition, no positive conceptual tradition was ever established for it from within: there was only praise from outside (in a poetic tradition that had already been devalued) and condemnation from within (in the hadith). This was the situation that Ibn Khaldūn tried to change.

Ibn Khaldūn’s two-step argument

Ibn Khaldūn (ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Muḥammad ibn Khaldūn, 1332–1406) was a North African jurist, statesman and historian who held office in Tunis, Fez, Granada and Cairo, finally serving in Cairo as chief Mālikī judge. His scholarly career spanned the rise and fall of several North African dynasties: he witnessed at first hand the overthrow of the Ḥafṣid and Marīnid dynasties, and this experience formed the direct material background to his theory of history. His Muqaddima (المقدمة, Introduction), completed around 1377, is the methodological introduction to his great universal history, the Kitāb al-ʿIbar (Book of Lessons), and attempts to establish a “science of human civilisation”, explaining the rise and fall of dynasties through observable historical regularities. In the premodern Islamic intellectual tradition this was an extremely rare undertaking.

Ibn Khaldūn’s interpretation of ʿaṣabiyya is at the core of this undertaking. He wanted the word no longer to denote only morally condemned tribal loyalty, but to serve as a neutral sociological variable explaining the rise and fall of dynasties. He completed the argument in two steps: first he showed that what the religious tradition condemns is the use of this capacity for wrong ends, not the capacity itself; then he applied the word to historical and social analysis.

The first step: distinguishing the capacity itself from its abuse. In the Muqaddima Ibn Khaldūn addresses directly the fact that “the Prophet condemned ʿaṣabiyya”. He argues that the things the Prophet condemned include anger, desire, royal authority and group feeling, but that these condemnations do not require the complete eradication of these things themselves; they are directed at cases in which they are used for wrong ends. On ʿaṣabiyya, Ibn Khaldūn’s text (in Rosenthal’s English translation) reads:

“When the religious law censures group feeling and says: ‘Neither your blood relatives nor your children will be of use to you (on the Day of Resurrection),’ (such a statement) is directed against a group feeling that is used for worthless purposes, as was the case in pre-Islamic times. ... On the other hand, a group feeling that is working for the truth and for fulfillment of the divine commands is something desirable. If it were gone, religious laws would no longer be, because they materialize only through group feeling.” (Muqaddima, Chapter 3, Section 26; Rosenthal’s English translation, p. 414)^¹¹

This step still belongs to moral evaluation: it answers the question of under what conditions this capacity should be condemned, and does not yet analyse how it operates in history and society. It is a form of argument commonly used in exegesis (the discipline of reinterpreting canonical texts in a way that accords with a particular position). Ibn Khaldūn limits the object of condemnation to the use of this capacity in pursuit of wrong ends; ʿaṣabiyya that serves the right path is not only free from condemnation but is a necessary condition for realising the religious law. In this way he separates the capacity itself from its abuse, which makes it possible to describe the capacity neutrally.

The second step: applying the word to historical and social analysis. Having completed the first step, Ibn Khaldūn, in the historical-sociological analysis of the Muqaddima, treats ʿaṣabiyya as a mechanism variable explaining historical change. His basic argument is as follows. Nomadic groups form strong group solidarity (ʿaṣabiyya) because of harsh natural conditions. Strong ʿaṣabiyya enables a group to conquer a sedentary civilisation whose defensive strength has weakened and to found a new dynasty. After the dynasty’s power is stable and living conditions improve, group solidarity is gradually used up. By the third or fourth generation, ʿaṣabiyya has weakened to the point where it can no longer defend against new challengers, and the dynasty falls and is replaced by another group with stronger ʿaṣabiyya. This model explains the rise and fall of dynasties by the strength or weakness of group solidarity. In the model, strength does not mean “good” and weakening does not mean “bad”; they are observable social facts that have predictable consequences.

Logically, the two steps together are complete. The first step makes the second possible: once the hadith condemnation has been relocated to the abuse of the capacity rather than the capacity itself, using ʿaṣabiyya as a neutral analytical concept no longer conflicts with the religious tradition. In the following seven hundred years this argument was never effectively refuted.

Why this concept did not spread in the Arabic tradition

Ibn Khaldūn completed the two-step argument above, but his analytical use of ʿaṣabiyya did not spread in the later Arabic tradition. This section examines the reasons for this outcome.

The first reason lies in the system’s existing classification of horizontal solidarity. Sections 2 to 4 have shown that horizontal solidarity could be the whole community (jamāʿa, the only legitimate form of the whole), could be converted into recognised authority through bayʿa (the only legitimate channel), could be confined to the intellectual-legal domain (ikhtilāf, permitted disagreement), or could be condemned as a rupture of the community (fitnah). Horizontal organisations could also claim to represent the whole (ḥizb Allāh), leave the existing system and establish another authority (shīʿa), or be placed in a legal category and then reincorporated into the system (ahl al-baghy). The ʿaṣabiyya of which Ibn Khaldūn speaks belongs to none of these. It is not the whole community, it has not been converted through bayʿa, it is not confined to the intellectual-legal domain, and it has not been condemned as fitnah, because Ibn Khaldūn states explicitly that it should not be condemned. It does not claim to represent the whole, nor is it the result of leaving the system or of being dealt with under the law of rebellion. This concept sets out to describe horizontal force neutrally, outside the existing classification, and the system did not recognise such a conceptual category.

The second reason lies in the scholarly institutions of the time. However complete its argument, a concept needs an institutionally grounded readership that keeps using it if it is to spread. The main genres of the Arabic scholarly tradition were jurisprudence (fiqh), belles-lettres (adab) and historical chronicles. None of these three genres uses concepts of the kind “sociological analytical variable”. Alatas, in his study of the reception history of Ibn Khaldūn, states directly that Arabic scholarly institutions did not accept this practice of using words as analytical tools.^¹² So although ʿaṣabiyya had a complete argument behind it, it lacked an institutional readership able to keep using and spreading it.

Frequency of use and semantic neighbours in the OpenITI corpus

The computational results from the OpenITI corpus directly support the judgement above.

In Ibn Khaldūn’s own text (the Kitāb al-ʿIbar), ʿaṣabiyya occurs 374 times, a usage density of about 2.71 occurrences per 10,000 words. This density is about 7 to 47 times that of later Arabic historians: the two works of Maqrizi have about 0.11 occurrences (Sulūk) and 0.06 occurrences (Mawāʿiẓ) respectively, Ibn Ḥajar about 0.41, Sakhawi about 0.28, Ibn Taghrī about 0.08, and Suyūṭī almost zero.^¹³

Semantic field analysis provides a further piece of evidence. When PPMI analysis was carried out separately on Ibn Khaldūn’s own writings and on historical texts before Ibn Khaldūn (a combined pool of Ibn al-Athīr and al-Dhahabī), the semantic neighbours obtained for the two groups did not overlap at all: the intersection was zero. (Correction of 2026-08-02: this passage originally read “the top 30 semantic neighbours of the two groups of texts”. In fact the own-works group yielded 30 neighbours, while the predecessor-pool group yielded only 21 under the set thresholds, since its sample has only 51 instances. The zero-intersection result was confirmed by recalculation: the two groups share not a single word.)

The high-frequency semantic neighbours in Ibn Khaldūn’s own writings are: bi-ṭabʿihā (by its nature, PPMI 10.1), al-qawiyya wa-l-shawka (strength and power), wa-l-tanāṣur (mutual aid) and wa-fanāʾ (and extinction). This is a vocabulary of dynamic analysis, built around force, nature and change.

The high-frequency semantic neighbours in Arabic texts before Ibn Khaldūn are: al-yamaniyya, al-muḍariyya (the Yamanīs and the Muḍarīs, names of two great tribal confederations), hājat, hiyāj (commotion, outbreak) and qatl (killing). This is a vocabulary of concrete historical conflict, built around tribal factions and bloodshed.

The semantic neighbours shown by Arabic texts after Ibn Khaldūn (260 instances) are: al-jāhiliyya (the pre-Islamic age of ignorance), al-ḥamiyya (tribal zealotry), qawmuh (his people), al-kibr (arrogance) and al-jawr (injustice). This set of neighbours is almost unchanged from the distribution before Ibn Khaldūn. Over the following six hundred years, the semantic neighbourhood of ʿaṣabiyya remained dominated by vocabulary condemning tribal loyalty and did not continue Ibn Khaldūn’s analytical usage.

Transmission in Ottoman Turkish

The reception history in Ottoman Turkish can be used to test whether Ibn Khaldūn’s analytical use of ʿaṣabiyya would have had a different outcome of transmission in another linguistic environment.

In the mid-seventeenth century, Ottoman Turkish scholarship began to engage seriously with Ibn Khaldūn’s Muqaddima. The engagement took place in a specific context: reformist officials and historians facing problems of military and political decline needed an explanatory framework, and Ibn Khaldūn’s theory of the rise and fall of dynasties happened to provide one. This was something the Arabic tradition had never had: a readership with an institutional need.

The encyclopaedic scholar Kātib Çelebi (1609–1657), in his historical chronology Takvimü't-tevarih (1648), used Ibn Khaldūn’s three-stage framework of decline, but rendered ʿaṣabiyya with the Ottoman Turkish expression taassub ve taavün-ı rical (“zeal and mutual aid”), without using the Arabic word form ʿaṣabiyya itself.^¹⁴ He accepted Ibn Khaldūn’s analytical framework, but did not adopt the original word, which carried the condemnatory meaning of the Arabic hadith.

The historian Naima (Mustafa Naima, 1655–1716) not only adopted Ibn Khaldūn’s dynastic theory but also used the word directly. In his Tārīkh-i Naima (History of Naima, whose preface was completed around 1698), he translated Ibn Khaldūn’s five-stage theory of dynasties almost word for word, and directly used the Ottoman Turkish forms asabiyyet and aşiret ü asabiyyet (“tribal solidarity”) as analytical tools. His usage is analytical, not moral: “the dominant feature of the first stage (zafer vakti, the period of victory) is asabiyyet, that is, the cohesion of solidarity and zeal”; “in the third stage, the state is strong enough to have no further need at all of aşiret ü asabiyyet”; he even used this framework to analyse the historical trajectory of the Ottoman Empire itself. Sariyannis’s systematic study of this history confirms that Naima read Ibn Khaldūn directly from the Arabic original and quoted him extensively, and that he named Ibn Khaldūn in the text as his source.^¹⁵

In Ottoman Turkish, asabiyyet was used to analyse the rise and fall of dynasties, whereas this usage did not spread in the Arabic tradition. When Ottoman Turkish readers encountered the word, they did not at the same time inherit the six hundred years of condemnatory meaning it had accumulated in the Arabic hadith tradition. These readers also genuinely needed analytical concepts to explain dynastic decline. They could therefore use asabiyyet as an analytical tool.

The avoidance of ʿaṣabiyya by Nahḍa writers

The Ottoman case shows that when the linguistic environment and the needs of readers change, the analytical meaning of ʿaṣabiyya can spread. The case of the nineteenth-century Arabic Nahḍa (نهضة, the cultural revival movement) is the opposite: even when the political motive was at its strongest, Arabic writers still did not adopt the analytical meaning of the word.

The central task of the Nahḍa was to cross sectarian boundaries and mobilise the Arabic-speaking population to build a common political identity. This task was very close to the horizontal solidarity described by the technical meaning of ʿaṣabiyya, so these writers should have had a strong motive to invoke Ibn Khaldūn’s framework. But they did not. Leading Nahḍa writers such as Buṭrus al-Bustānī (1819–1883) and Jurjī Zaydān (1861–1914) avoided ʿaṣabiyya entirely, preferring the new vocabulary of waṭaniyya (وطنية, patriotism, from waṭan, homeland / fatherland), which was influenced by the French concept of patrie and entered Arabic through al-Ṭahṭāwī’s accounts of Paris. Ardıç’s systematic study of this history provides the most direct explanation.^¹⁶

This avoidance had two causes operating at the same time. First, the movement needed to build a union between Muslims and Christians, and the word ʿaṣabiyya had always been used within the context of Islamic political philosophy, making it hard to use for naming cross-sectarian political solidarity. Second, by the nineteenth century ʿaṣabiyya, in the semantic development of Arabic, had additionally acquired the negative meaning of “sectarianism” or “narrow factionalism”, which was exactly what the Nahḍa presented itself as overcoming. Invoking this word as a positive concept of mobilisation would have conflicted directly with the movement’s account of itself.

The closest example of using Ibn Khaldūn’s framework is Sāṭiʿ al-Ḥuṣrī (1880–1968). His pen name was itself “Abū Khaldūn”^¹⁷, and his theory of Arab nationalism has clear structural parallels with Ibn Khaldūn’s framework. But al-Ḥuṣrī did not inherit the word ʿaṣabiyya. He took language rather than kinship as the basis of solidarity, and used qawmiyya (قومية, nationhood) rather than ʿaṣabiyya as his organising concept. He continued to discuss the problem of horizontal solidarity that Ibn Khaldūn had raised, but did not continue to use the original word. This shows that by the twentieth century ʿaṣabiyya already carried negative meanings in Arabic contexts, such as sectarianism and the age of ignorance. Even though al-Ḥuṣrī had a strong motive to invoke Ibn Khaldūn’s framework, he had to use qawmiyya instead. Ibn Khaldūn’s analysis of horizontal solidarity was thus still inherited by al-Ḥuṣrī in another form, but the word ʿaṣabiyya did not continue to spread.

6. Quantitative Evidence: The Semantic Fields of the Eight Concepts

Methodological note

The computational evidence used in this paper comes from PPMI analysis of the OpenITI corpus. OpenITI is a large library of Arabic texts indexed by the author’s death date (in the Islamic calendar). The analytical settings are as follows: for each target word, taking each position where it occurs in the text as the centre, a number of words to the left and right are extracted to form co-occurrence pairs; after the frequencies of all co-occurrence pairs have been counted, PPMI values are calculated, and the top 30 highest-PPMI neighbours for each period are taken as a quantitative description of the word’s semantic field. The minimum co-occurrence threshold is 2, and the minimum corpus frequency for a neighbour is 3. The analysis involves no random elements, and rerunning it on the same corpus gives exactly the same results.

Two window sizes were used (corrected 2026-08-02, on the basis of the fields in the data files). Seven of the eight concepts, and the later group for ʿaṣabiyya, use 5 words on either side (a ±5-word window). Only the comparison used in Section 5, “Frequency of use and semantic neighbours in the OpenITI corpus”, between the own-works group (374 instances) and the predecessor-pool group (51 instances) uses 4 words on either side (a ±4-word window); see the window field of both columns in arabic_ppmi_fields.json. Because the window here is narrower, absolute PPMI values should not be compared directly with the neighbour lists of the other groups; comparison between the two columns within this group is unaffected, because the two columns use the same window.

Known biases of the corpus. The 15 longest texts in the OpenITI corpus are almost all large traditional compilations (hadith collections, legal compendia, historical chronicles), with no press or political journalism. This genre bias affects interpretation in several places: (1) the political formula of jamāʿa, luzūm al-jamāʿa, does not appear among the top neighbours, because the corpus consists mainly of hadith collections, where the main use of jamāʿa is the congregation at prayer, not political cohesion; (2) the political-party sense of ḥizb in the nineteenth century may already have appeared in actual language, but is not visible because the corpus contains no press; (3) analysis of Ottoman Turkish is not feasible (see below). Wherever this bias has an effect, it is stated explicitly in the analysis.

Results for each concept

ʿaṣabiyya. Ibn Khaldūn’s own writings: 374 instances, 2.71 occurrences per 10,000 words; the high-frequency neighbours are a vocabulary of dynamic analysis (by its nature, strength and power, mutual aid, and extinction). Histories before Ibn Khaldūn: 51 instances; the high-frequency neighbours are a vocabulary of concrete tribal conflict (Yamanīs, Muḍarīs, commotion, killing). The neighbours obtained for the two semantic fields (30 for the own-works group, 21 for the predecessor pool) have zero intersection. Arabic texts after Ibn Khaldūn: 260 instances; the neighbours (the pre-Islamic age of ignorance, tribal zealotry, his people, arrogance, injustice) are almost the same as for the pre-Islamic period. No measurable semantic drift over six hundred years.

fitnah. All three periods (early, 212 instances; classical, 3,181 instances; late, 8,840 instances) show the same semantic field: al-Dajjāl (the deceiver of the end times), ʿadhāb al-qabr (the torment of the grave), ashrāṭ al-sāʿa (the signs of the Hour) and waqaʿat (it broke out). In none of the three periods does any analytical or neutral vocabulary enter the top neighbours. fitnah remains stable throughout within the semantic field of civil strife and eschatological judgement.

ikhtilāf. In both periods (1,214 instances; 15,393 instances) the high-frequency neighbours come from the scholarly-legal domain: al-Shāfiʿī, “two opinions” (qawlayn), “legal question” (al-masʾala) and “our school” (aṣḥābunā). KWIC sampling check: non-legal uses (such as “the alternation of night and day”) account for 0.7–1.6%, the lowest semantic contamination among the eight concepts, which shows that the word was very stably confined to scholarly-legal contexts.

ahl al-baghy. 2,093 instances. The high-frequency neighbours centre on a legal structure of opposition: al-fiʾa al-bāghiya (the rebellious faction) against al-fiʾa al-ʿādila (the just faction), qitāl (fighting), ḥukm (ruling) and yajūzu (it is permitted). It is clearly distinguished from the vocabulary of ordinary crime (ḥirāba) and apostasy (ridda). The three qualifying conditions (shawka, taʾwīl, khurūj) appear in the structure of argument in the relevant texts, not as high-frequency neighbours.

bayʿa. The three periods (95 instances; 615 instances; 1,529 instances) show one visible shift in distribution: the early period is dominated by abstract contractual vocabulary (ʿaqd, contract; al-imāma; the names of Abū Bakr and ʿUmar); the later period leans towards specific historical events of allegiance (the pledge of al-Ḥudaybiyya, oaths of allegiance to Muʿāwiya, Yazīd and al-Walīd). This drift from the vocabulary of abstract mechanism to the vocabulary of historical narrative reflects a pragmatic shift of the “oath of allegiance” from institutional discourse to historical chronicle.

ḥizb. All three periods (2,279 instances; 3,264 instances; 1,452 instances) stably keep the Qurʾānic polar associations (party of God / party of Satan). Party-organisational vocabulary (tanẓīm, siyāsa, ḥukūma) does not enter the top neighbours in any period. As noted above, this is very probably due to the genre bias of the corpus (no press), and should not be read as the absence of the party sense from actual language in the late nineteenth century.

jamāʿa. All three periods (458 instances; 2,076 instances; 10,402 instances) are dominated by religious-communal vocabulary (prayer, Muslims, people). Political vocabulary (sultan, imam, caliph) is weaker among the neighbours. This is a genre effect of a corpus consisting mainly of hadith collections: in hadith texts the main use of jamāʿa is the collective on the occasion of prayer, not political cohesion. The invisibility of the political formula luzūm al-jamāʿa does not contradict Barzegar’s analysis, which starts from political-theological texts: the two examine corpora of different genres.

shīʿa. Three periods (45 instances; 316 instances; 1,029 instances). The early period has only 45 instances, below the threshold for reliable statistics, and is excluded from the PPMI report. The period of theological transition (316 instances) shows vocabulary of political following (Kufa, the revolt of al-Mukhtār, al-Ḥasan); the classical period (1,029 instances) shows a movement towards networks of hadith transmission (Ṣadūq, that is, Ibn Bābawayh, a canonical transmitter of Twelver Shiʿism; al-sunna). The direction of change is consistent with the historical trajectory “political faction → institutionalised religious community”, but the early sample is too small for a statistical claim.

Limits of the analysis of Ottoman Turkish. Computational analysis of Ottoman Turkish texts is not feasible. The key texts of Kātib Çelebi have no open machine-readable full text; the transcriptions circulating online are available only through paid institutional access and are mostly in Latin transcription, so they cannot be matched directly to word forms in Arabic script. Of the six volumes of Naima’s Tārīkh-i Naima, only one has an OCR text layer at the Internet Archive, and in that volume the number of identifiable genuine instances of the root of ʿaṣabiyya is about 2 to 4, far below the minimum reliable threshold for PPMI analysis (usually 30 or more instances are required). The argument of the Ottoman case therefore relies entirely on the textual-historical study of Sariyannis (2019) and does not rest on computational analysis, as has been indicated in Section 5.

7. Conclusion

The conceptual system described in this paper does not handle all horizontal solidarity uniformly through a single prohibition; it handles the various forms separately. jamāʿa defines the whole community as the only legitimate horizontal whole. bayʿa is the only channel through which horizontal force is converted into legitimate authority. ikhtilāf allows horizontal pluralism to exist, but only within the intellectual-legal domain. fitnah defines political rupture as intolerable conduct. ḥizb can draw on its positive meaning in the Qurʾān and seek legitimacy by claiming to represent the whole. The history of shīʿa shows that horizontal organisations can also leave the existing system and establish another authority. The legal doctrine of ahl al-baghy places horizontal solidarity that has formed an armed force in a dedicated legal category, with reintegration as the aim of its treatment.

ʿaṣabiyya was not covered by the existing ways of handling. Ibn Khaldūn tried to use it to describe horizontal force neutrally, so that this force would be neither condemned nor required to be converted into another form, but would simply become an object of analysis. The system did not recognise such a conceptual category. Ibn Khaldūn’s two-step argument is logically complete: the first step limits the object of condemnation to the abuse of this capacity, and the second applies the word to historical analysis. In the Arabic textual tradition from the medieval period to the nineteenth century, no one effectively refuted it, but almost no one took it up either. The PPMI data show that the semantic neighbours of the Ibn Khaldūn own-works group and the predecessor-pool group have zero intersection, and Arabic texts after Ibn Khaldūn did not continue his analytical usage. This word therefore did not spread beyond Ibn Khaldūn’s own texts. (In the twentieth century al-Ḥuṣrī continued to discuss the problem Ibn Khaldūn had raised, but replaced the word ʿaṣabiyya itself with qawmiyya; see the discussion of the Nahḍa in Section 5.)

The reception history in Ottoman Turkish shows that what failed to spread was not Ibn Khaldūn’s argument itself; rather, the Arabic tradition of the time lacked the conditions for accepting this concept. In a linguistic environment that had not inherited the Arabic condemnatory meaning, and where readers genuinely needed to analyse the rise and fall of dynasties, the technical meaning of the word could be put to use, as Naima’s asabiyyet shows. Arabic-Islamic political thought did not form a concept for describing horizontal political solidarity neutrally. This was not because Ibn Khaldūn failed to see the problem or failed to put forward a complete argument, but because the existing conceptual system had already specified the political and legal status of each form of horizontal solidarity, and did not recognise a conceptual category that only analyses horizontal force neutrally, neither condemning it nor converting it.

Notes

¹ Abbas Barzegar, “‘Adhering to the Community’ (Luzūm al-Jamāʿa): Continuities between Late Umayyad Political Discourse and ‘Proto-Sunni’ Identity”, Review of Middle East Studies 49.2 (2015): 140–158, at pp. 140–148. DOI: 10.1017/rms.2016.35. ↩

² al-Māwardī (ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad al-Māwardī), al-Aḥkām al-Sulṭāniyya wa-l-Wilāyāt al-Dīniyya (The Ordinances of Government), on the procedure of bayʿa and the qualifications of “those who loose and bind”. ↩

³ Wilferd Madelung, The Succession to Muhammad: A Study of the Early Caliphate (Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 28–56. ↩

⁴ Wael B. Hallaq, “On the Authoritativeness of Sunni Consensus”, International Journal of Middle East Studies 18.4 (1986): 427–454, at pp. 429–433. DOI: 10.1017/S0020743800030872. ↩

⁵ al-Rāghib al-Iṣfahānī (Abū al-Qāsim al-Rāghib al-Iṣfahānī), Mufradāt alfāẓ al-Qurʾān (Vocabulary of the Qurʾān), entry f-t-n. ↩

⁶ Madelung, The Succession to Muhammad, p. [to be supplied]; see also Aaron M. Hagler, The Echoes of Fitna (Brill, 2022), pp. 1–22. ↩

⁷ Khaled Abou El Fadl, Rebellion and Violence in Islamic Law (Cambridge University Press, 2001), chapters 2–3, pp. 32–99 (doctrinal foundations and historical background; specific pages to be verified against library holdings). ISBN 9780521793117. ↩

⁸ See Ami Ayalon, Language and Change in the Arab Middle East (Oxford University Press, 1987), section on ḥizb, p. [to be supplied]. ↩

⁹ For the framework of legal treatment, see Sadia Tabassum, “Combatants, not Bandits: The Status of Rebels in Islamic Law”, International Review of the Red Cross 93.881 (2011): 121–139, especially pp. 126–127 (two conditions: ta'wil + mana'ah; determination of combatant status) and pp. 131–132 (the rules on dividing spoils do not apply to rebels; prohibition of attacks on women and children). Note: Tabassum explicitly states two conditions (ta'wil and mana'ah); the “three conditions” formulation is found in the primary juristic literature: Sarakhsi, al-Mabsūṭ, vol. 10, p. 136; Ibn Qudāma, al-Mughnī, book on war against rebels (third condition: mana'ah + ta'wil + an organised leader); the corresponding chapter of Māwardī’s al-Aḥkām al-Sulṭāniyya. DOI: 10.1017/S1816383111000117. ↩

¹⁰ Abū Dāwūd, Sunan Abī Dāwūd, no. 5121. Online at sunnah.com/abudawud:5121. Note: the Islamic scholar al-Albānī graded the chain of transmission of this hadith as weak (ḍaʿīf); but the traditional direction of opposition to ʿaṣabiyya is reflected in several hadiths, and the direction of the hadith condemnation is itself undisputed within the tradition. ↩

¹¹ Ibn Khaldūn, Muqaddima, Chapter 3, Section 26; English translation in Franz Rosenthal, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History (London: Routledge, 1967), vol. 2, p. 414. For an analysis of the exegetical strategy of Ibn Khaldūn, see Abou-Tabickh (2019), pp. 184–186. ↩

¹² Syed Farid Alatas, Ibn Khaldun (Oxford University Press, 2013), p. [to be supplied]. Note: the publisher was originally recorded in error as Routledge; Alatas’s Routledge publication is a different book of 2014, Applying Ibn Khaldūn. The page numbers for the specific argument and the exact bibliographic details await further verification. ↩

¹³ Frequency data come from analysis of the OpenITI corpus; see Section 6 for details. ↩

¹⁴ Marinos Sariyannis, “Ottoman Ibn Khaldunism Revisited”, in Political Thought and Practice in the Ottoman Empire (Rethymno, 2019), p. 261. ↩

¹⁵ Ibid., pp. 265–270; primary source: Naima, History of Naima (Tārīh-i Naima), 1:33–40; p. 273 (transmission was mediated through Naima, not through direct reading of the Muqaddima). ↩

¹⁶ Nurullah Ardıç, “Genealogy or ʿaṣabiyya? Ibn Khaldun between Arab Nationalism and the Ottoman Caliphate”, Journal of Near Eastern Studies 71.2 (2012): 315–324. DOI: 10.1086/666697. (The existence and core argument of the article cited here have been checked; specific page numbers and direct quotations will be added after access to library holdings.) ↩

¹⁷ For the source of al-Ḥuṣrī’s pen name, see Bassam Tibi, Arab Nationalism, 3rd edn (Palgrave Macmillan, 1997), p. [to be supplied]. ↩

Bibliography

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• Ibn Khaldūn. Kitāb al-ʿIbar (Tārīkh Ibn Khaldūn). OpenITI text ID: 0808IbnKhaldun.Tarikh.Shamela0012320-ara1. ↩Notes
• Ibn Khaldūn. Muqaddima. English translation: Franz Rosenthal, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, 3 vols (London: Routledge, 1967).
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• Abū Dāwūd. Sunan Abī Dāwūd, no. 5121. sunnah.com. ↩Notes
• al-Māwardī. al-Aḥkām al-Sulṭāniyya (The Ordinances of Government). ↩Notes
• al-Rāghib al-Iṣfahānī (Abū al-Qāsim al-Ḥusayn ibn Muḥammad al-Rāghib al-Iṣfahānī, d. c. 1108). Mufradāt alfāẓ al-Qurʾān (Vocabulary of the Qurʾān). Edited by Ṣafwān ʿAdnān al-Dāwūdī. Damascus: Dār al-Qalam; Beirut: Dār al-Shāmiyya, 1412/1992.
• Ibn Fāris. Maqāyīs al-Lugha (The Standards of Language).
• Naima. Tārīh-i Naima (History of Naima). Edited by M. İpşirli (Ankara: Turkish Historical Society, 2007). ↩Notes

Secondary sources

• Abou El Fadl, Khaled. Rebellion and Violence in Islamic Law. Cambridge University Press, 2001. ↩Notes
• Alatas, Syed Farid. Ibn Khaldūn. Oxford University Press, 2013. [Publisher corrected: originally given in error as Routledge; the Routledge book is a different work of 2014, Applying Ibn Khaldūn; page numbers to be verified] ↩Notes
• Ardıç, Nurullah. "Genealogy or ʿAṣabiyya?" Journal of Near Eastern Studies 71.2 (2012): 315–324. DOI: 10.1086/666697. ↩Notes
• Ayalon, Ami. Language and Change in the Arab Middle East. Oxford University Press, 1987. [Page numbers to be verified against library holdings] ↩Notes
• Barzegar, Abbas. "'Adhering to the Community.'" Review of Middle East Studies 49.2 (2015): 140–158. DOI: 10.1017/rms.2016.35. ↩Notes
• Hallaq, Wael B. "On the Authoritativeness of Sunni Consensus." IJMES 18.4 (1986): 427–454. ↩Notes
• Hourani, Albert. Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age. Cambridge University Press, 1983.
• Madelung, Wilferd. The Succession to Muhammad. Cambridge University Press, 1997. ↩Notes
• Sariyannis, Marinos. "Ottoman Ibn Khaldunism Revisited." In Political Thought and Practice in the Ottoman Empire, pp. 251–286, 2019. ↩Notes
• Tabassum, Sadia. "Combatants, not Bandits." IRRC 93.881 (2011): 121–139. ↩Notes
• Tibi, Bassam. Arab Nationalism. 3rd edn. Palgrave Macmillan, 1997. [Page numbers to be verified against library holdings] ↩Notes

Pianruo · Leimma · first draft 2026-06-19; data corrections 2026-08-02 and 2026-08-05; rewritten in plain prose 2026-08-05 (v3) · formal Chinese version. Originally by Pianruo with Leimma, now maintained by Vox.