FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Englishness & Ibn Khaldun

Rant Number 432 16 March 2011

On Sunday evenings Midsomer Murders is on German TV, I learn. The whole nation stops to watch it. ‘It’s so popular!’ says a Teutonic mate of mine. ‘A celebration of Englishness’. But now Midsomer’s co-author is in a pickle. Our star detective show is a hit because it is ethnic minorities-free, the co-author asserts. Its actors are implacably pale-faced. Whiteys. Aargh!The rash statement got him suspended - c’est la vie.

Actually, if Midsomer Murders celebrates anything, it is hecatombs. The fictional village’s phenomenal murder rate worried even the Queen. ‘Too dangerous’, she is reported having said. Nor does John Nettles’ Inspector Barnaby quite convince. His sensitive face, boringly reflecting the conventionally ‘proper’ emotional responses to his investigations, is hardly a mirror of Englishness – indeed, the exact opposite of the stiff upper lip that used to be a true Englishman’s hallmark. As to the race issue, it is a red herring. Anyone who does not inhabit bucolic TV havens like Midsomerbut real English cities like London, Birmingham, Leicester, Bradford & so on knows that multi-racialism and miscegenation are now facts, like tides and dandelions are facts. Still, the trivial hoo-hah raises an interesting issue: Englishness – what is it? What does it mean to be English? Or British, for that matter?

Groan... This sort of ‘what’ question is a waste of time. Because either Englishness, unlike salt or smallpox, has no essence or because any string of putative qualities – like queuing up, milk bottle deliveries, tolerance, fairness & what not – are not unique to the English. Yet, being English is not quite like being a Kryptonian. Prima facie, it makes sense. To dodge it is chicken.

The poor Italian priest dares to advance a suggestion. A fourteenth century Arab polymath - historian & sociologist & philosopher & diplomat & judge & so on - perhaps, just perhaps, has the answer. Asabiyya. A peculiar Arabic word. Could that be it?

Enters Abd al-Rahman ibn Muhammad ibn Khaldun of Tunis. (1332-1406 AD.) Historian A.J. Toynbee termed him a genius. His life was adventurous. Ranged from Moorish Al-Andalus – courtier to the Emir of Granada - to a prison spell in North Africa, to honour and celebrity as a magistrate in Cairo. His whole family and treasure perished in a shipwreck. In Damascus he was ambassador to Tamburlaine and witnessed the appalling sack of the city & the extermination of its inhabitants by the Tartars. In between, he wrote massively. Next time you get stranded on a desert island with a copy of Ibn Khaldun’s encyclopaedic Universal History its perusal might be worth your while. Then you can leisurely delve into that felicitous, if elusive Khaldunian concept, asabiyya.

Social solidarity. Group cohesion. Team spirit. Esprit de corps.Communal bond. Unity. All expressions tentatively conveying some of asabiyya’s meaning. Ibn Khaldun claims this desirable, useful cohesion or social spirit is chiefly based on a) blood ties or kinship ; b) common ancestry; c) common way of life; d) relations of dependence. (Hope this is roughly right but if you are a Khaldun scholar please don’t rip me up.) Solidarity works best in tribes – Bedouins he meant, apparently – villages, cities and states. Solidarity is the cement that holds nations and states together. However, once a powerful polity is set up, solidarity weakens & becomes redundant. Gradually, as the state or empire expands, it begins to split, fragment, grows luxurious, soft and eventually decays. The Arab thinker conceives of civilisations developing into cycles, akin to biological growth, birth, youth, maturity, senility and death. A trifle pessimistic? Well, at least Ibn Khaldun is a good deal less cumbrous, more intelligible than the morphological farrago of history concocted by Oswald Spengler. Maghribi cous-cous is more digestible than Teutonic Schweinebraten, perhaps?

Ibn Khaldun distinguishes states whose laws are based on reason from those whose legislation comes from revelation. The latter type is especially useful, because it includes both life in this world and life beyond the grave. His discussion of jihadin Islamic polities I found really cognitive. An eye opener.

Back to Englishness. Take the Elizabethans. You behold there real asabiyya powerfully, effectively at work. A nation largely united behind a national religion, despite lingering Catholic resistance. Sharing blood ties, common bonds, sense of purpose, spirit, a sense of vision and vocation. The Elizabethan seamen, explorers, adventurers and pirates spread out from the little island and founded and conquered new worlds.

Or consider the Victorians. Today much maligned but a race of tremendous energy and dynamism. An empire-building people. Excelling in science, technology, literature, poetry, social reform, the fine arts and the art of war. Could they ever have done it without possessing strong asabiyya?

This drive carried on victorious through WWI and WWII, most people will argue. I disagree. Both wars were at bottom ruinous European civil wars. Expressions of European malaise, fragmentation and decline. Including British decline. Although the two world wars ended up in apparent victory for Britain, they actually tolled its empire’s death knell. A Welsh adventurer and mountebank at the helm, Lloyd George, symbolised the ominous twilight behind the WWI triumph, whilst Churchill, the brilliant scion of a Peer, ‘the saviour of his country’, actually destroyed very British empire he had gone to war to preserve. England ended up broke. The cunning of reason, Hegel might have called it. Or the inevitable rise and fall of civilisations, as Ibn Khaldun would have observed.

Question: can you detect this health-giving social cohesion, unity, team spirit in today’s Britain? PM David Cameron believes so. His ‘big society’ presupposes it. (What the hell is a ‘small society’, I wonder?) A government department is named after it. Traces of asabiyya perhaps endure. The English still manage to rally together in emergencies. But the proud people have grown despondent, lax and querulous. The economy contracts. The young are offered no vision, no great ideals, no sense of purpose, apart from what Arabs call zina. The national church is on its death bed, and Christianity in retreat or absent from public & private life. The Olympic Games, the Cup, the crop-headed yobs, the celebs, are they today’s expression of English asabiyya? How sad.

Anyway, don’t despair. Inspector Barnaby Number Two now has a dog. And what can be more English, pray, than a man and his dog?

Revd Frank Julian Gelli