This essay considers Ibn Khaldun's concept of assabiyya with respect to the generation of the collective political action, particularly, directed to state formation. Special attention is paid to the nature and genesis of assabiyya as a technical term developed cumulatively throughout the Muqaddimah. It asks whether assabiyya, as Ibn Khaldun defined it, can be reformulated and applied in understanding and explaining current political developments. It concludes with the assertion that, considering its holistic and interdisciplinary nature, its moral implications, and, most importantly, its spatio-temporal dimension, assabiyya can emerge as an alternative conceptual tool in overcoming the impasse currently facing political theory in general and the liberal democratic paradigm in particular.
The practical perceptions and theoretical models regarding the founding elements of political order can be broadly classified into three groups: Actor-centered political order, institutionscentered political order and asabiyya-centered political order. This last one, which we think is not represented properly in the mainstream literature, will be tried to be formulated in detail in our article, and it will be proposed as an alternative to existing perceptions. It should be noted here that the importance and even indispensability of all three elements cannot be denied when it comes to political order. As a matter of fact, in the relevant literature, despite the relative neglect of the element of asabiyya, actors and institutions have found a sufficient place for themselves. Therefore, as the word "centre" indicates, the point that differentiates the above approaches from each other is not to prefer one of these factors and ignore the others completely, but to perceive one of these factors as the "first cause" and/or the "independent variable," and to consider the others as a secondary factor or dependent variables. Hence, without denying the importance of actors and institutions in the formation of political order, we will defend the centrality and therefore the decisiveness of the element of asabiyya, and argue that the first two elements, despite their important roles in politics, will only gain meaning depending on the variable of asabiyya, which is a primary cause and independent variable.
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