Amsterdam and ‘Asabiyya’ — Tribal Solidarity and the Loss of Cohesion

by Brecht Jonkers

Brecht Jonkers explores how the violent clashes in Amsterdam between Maccabi Tel Aviv ultras and a coalition of local Muslim groups highlight the power of asabiyya, or group solidarity, as theorized by Ibn Khaldun, in contrast to the individualistic and atomized nature of Western society, which struggles to understand such cohesion.

The Dutch capital Amsterdam was the scene of a veritable street battle last week, as violent ultras of the Israeli football club Maccabi Tel Aviv faced off against a combined force of Dutch taxi drivers, activists of the Palestine solidarity movement, and a large contingent of Muslims — and Dutchmen of Moroccan descent in particular.

While mainstream media was quick to term the fights a “pogrom” initiated by nothing more than pure antisemitism, the facts soon became clear that hooligans of the Maccabi Tel Aviv supporter base had initiated the violence. Maccabi Tel Aviv is (in)famous for its radically Zionist and explicitly anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab political identity, which explains the chant “Death to Arabs” and “There are no children left alive in Gaza” with which they arrived in Amsterdam to begin with. Soon, this further devolved into attacks on Dutch houses that had Palestinian flags hanging from the windows, harassment of random Muslim and “Arab-looking” people in the city, and even physical attacks against local taxi drivers.

What the Maccabi rioters didn’t count on was the immediate and violent reaction they would be faced with on the streets of Amsterdam. The Netherlands is famous for several things, but hardcore street battles usually don’t come to mind alongside the typical windmills and tulips. And yet that is what happened: through group chats and social media, large numbers of counter-protesters of mostly Moroccan descent were rallied to the streets, and an immediate counterattack started that lasted throughout the night. Panic spread throughout the Zionist ranks, with Benjamin Netanyahu considering the deployment of Mossad officials to “investigate” the incident on Dutch soil.

Yet, despite what the government of the Netherlands and most of the mainstream media would have us believe, the ferocity of the reaction on the Amsterdam city streets should not have come as a surprise at all.

This fight is what happens when you attack a group of people who still have a lively group solidarity, whether that be the Dutchmen of Arab and Amazigh descent or Muslims in general, as in this case. This is a perfect example of what the famous 14th-century Tunisian historian Ibn Khaldun called “asabiyya”.

Asabiyya, often translated as tribal solidarity, is the deeply rooted internal cohesion and cooperation that ensures the stability and safety of a tribe, group, nation or ethnos. It can grow and expand, but also wither away and die — in a cycle of birth, expansion, growth, deterioration and death that would later be echoed by Oswald Spengler and in a way by Soviet historian and ethnologist Lev Gumilev with the term “passionarity”.

In his 1377 masterpiece known as the Muqaddimah, the introduction to his magnum opus of world history series in seven volumes, Abu Zayd Abdurrahman Ibn Khaldun presents asabiyya as the defining factor in the rise and fall of realms and empires. Tribes and clans with stronger social bonds and internal solidarity end up sweeping away the petrified and often corrupt institutions of older empires, and replace them with a revitalized and healthy state organism for centuries to come.

As long as this internal solidarity remains strong, the future of the dynasty, empire or clan is assured. But when egoism, arrogance, corruption and decadence come to the foreground, the realm will fare in much the same way as did its predecessors. A cyclical movement of history in which the unhealthy “organism” of rootless, unfocused statehood continually gets replaced by the vital essence of a new social and political culture.

In Ibn Khaldun’s own words:

Dynasties have a natural lifespan like individuals. As long as there exists sufficient asabiyya among the group, the dynasty remains strong. When the group’s asabiyya weakens, so too does the dynasty.

Much like the ancient Chinese doctrine of the Mandate of Heaven, asabiyya is a fickle and fleeting concept that can strengthen a claim to imperial power and authority when maintained and bolstered, but may just as well lead to the downfall of entire empires when it is weakened and corrupted.

Ibn Khaldun was a great admirer of the rough and “primitive” nobility of the nomadic dwellers of the North African deserts and the Central Asian steppes alike, and saw in their proximity to nature and their humble lifestyle a higher honour than what could generally be found in the centres of the great urbanized civilizations. Sedentary life, while bringing great advantages of its own, holds a permanent and very real danger of leading to degeneration, decadence and corruption. As detailed in the following quotations:

When a group acquires power, its solidarity and unity are preserved for a time. But as they enjoy their power and wealth, they become preoccupied with selfish concerns, and the group solidarity that held them together dissipates.

Asabiyya declines with the increase in luxury and civilization. Once people become sedentary and experience the pleasures of wealth and power, they no longer feel the need to bond or depend on each other.

The latter is extraordinarily applicable to modern Western society, at least the liberal-capitalist society that has dominated Europe and North America for well over a century now. Individualism and liberalism have led to a society of atomized, insular individuals, who often hold little to no solidarity with one another, nor consider themselves part of a greater entity. This has made it possible for people like arch-neoliberal Margaret Thatcher to try to cement rootlessness as a virtue with the quote that “there is no such thing as society”.

And now we come to the crux of the matter. The reason why Western media is so flabbergasted with the ferocity of the Amsterdam streets’ response to Tel Aviv hooligans is because the liberal mindset cannot comprehend a basic concept such as “solidarity”. Let alone the fact that people are willing to fight back as a group if one of them has been attacked.

What Ibn Khaldun and Spengler couldn’t predict is that asabiyya proved to be especially powerful and poignant in migrant communities of post-war Europe. Just a few examples are the Central African communities in the Parisian suburbs, the South Asian population of England, the Turkish diaspora in Germany and the Moroccans of the Netherlands. Personal moral judgment of how this plays out in reality, which includes violent flare-ups and riots in some cases, is not relevant here right now. The fact is that it exists. Group solidarity is here to stay, and even in the most multicultural societies, the modern equivalent of tribal cohesion remains a force to be reckoned with.

Let us be honest with ourselves: if the Maccabi Tel Aviv ultras had beaten up a run-of-the-mill Dutch man or woman, nothing would have happened. There would have been no riots, no protests, perhaps not even media coverage. At the very most, there would have been a police investigation — provided the officers weren’t too scared of being labelled antisemites for pursuing the case — which would have dragged on long enough for the culprits to be back safe and sound in Tel Aviv anyway.

It’s one of the key weaknesses of the Western world, and has been for decades: lack of solidarity, lack of self-awareness, rampant individualism, and fundamental egoism. Contemporary European society has no asabiyya anymore. Tribal solidarity and social cohesion are vague echoes to a far-off past when ethnos, religion and economic class still meant something in the popular spirit. When “touch one and you touch all” was the normal reaction to aggression.

The Moroccan community in the Netherlands has shown that their asabiyya is still intact, even after half a century of life in the West. All it needed was a single spark for the powder keg of internal solidarity to explode into an immediate response against those who slighted the community.

Again, this is meant as a purely analytical angle, devoid as much as possible of overtly partisan language. One can rejoice or lament about it, but one cannot escape that asabiyya will need to be taken into account. Understanding asabiyya is crucial when trying to grasp the mindset of other cultures in an increasingly multipolar world. As well as to understand the fact why outward showcases of splendor, power and wealth do not necessarily translate in mental, social, psychological or spiritual health of a society.

And perhaps the West can find its own spiritual reawakening if it understands asabiyya. For the internal threat of rootless cosmopolitanism and liberalism may very well be a bigger danger than any external adversaries. Perhaps something can be learned from how people in Amsterdam — not the government, not the police force or the state apparatus, but an ad-hoc force of mostly angry Arabs and Muslims — de facto defended the honour of the Netherlands from being defiled by a group of Zionist supremacists who believe they are above Gentiledom everywhere.

To conclude in the words of Ibn Khaldun:

Throughout history many nations have suffered a physical defeat, but that has never marked the end of a nation. But when a nation has become the victim of a psychological defeat, then that marks the end of a nation.