Tribalism: The Key to Understanding Islam

February 10, 2025 by Raymond Ibrahim

Despite its religious veneer, Islam can easily be defined and understood by one non-religious word: tribalism.

This is key. The entire appeal of Muhammad’s call to the Arabs of his time lay in its perfect compatibility with their tribal mores, three in particular: loyalty to one’s tribe; enmity for other tribes; and raids on the latter to enrich and empower the former.

For seventh-century Arabs—and later tribal and pastoral peoples, such as the Turks and Tatars, or Mongols, who also found natural appeal in, and converted to, Islam—the tribe was what humanity is to modern people: to be part of the tribe was to be treated humanely; to be outside the tribe was to be treated inhumanely.

Muhammad reinforced this ancient dichotomy of tribalism, but by prioritizing religion over relatives. Thus, in his “Constitution of Medina,” which he promulgated with various non-Muslim tribes in 622, he asserted that “a believer shall not slay a believer for the sake of an unbeliever, nor shall he aid an unbeliever against a believer.” Moreover, all Muslims were to become “friends one to the other to the exclusion of outsiders.”

Hence the umma, which is often translated as “Muslim nation,” was born. Etymologically connected to the word “mother,” (umm) the umma came to signify the Islamic “Super-Tribe,” a universal tribe that transcends racial, national, and linguistic barriers, encompassing any and all who identify as Muslims.

And, its natural enemies remained everyone outside of it.

Again, this is basic tribalism 1.0, though, as mentioned, with religious dressing.

Or consider the Islamic doctrine of al-wala’ wa’l-bara’ (translated as “loyalty and enmity,” or “love and hate”). Muhammad preached it, and the Koran commands. Taken together, for example, Koran 58:22 and 60:4 call on all Muslims to “renounce” and “disown” their non-Muslim relatives—“even if they be their fathers, their sons, their brothers, or their nearest kindred”—and to feel only “enmity and hatred” for them, until they “believe in Allah alone,” that is, until they become Muslim.

Those two verses (58:22 and 60:4) are referring to a number of Muhammad’s close companions, who, according to Islamic history, renounced and in some cases slaughtered their own non-Muslim relatives as a show of their loyalty to Allah and the believers: one slew his father, another his brother, a third—Abu Bakr, the first righteous caliph—tried to slay his own son, and Omar, the second righteous caliph, slaughtered his relatives.

(For more, see my 60-page English translation of Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri’s Arabic treatise on the doctrine of al-wala’ w’al bara’, in my 2007 book, The Al Qaeda Reader.)

At any rate, from here we come to the natural origin of jihad: tribalistic blood ties were exchanged for religious ones, thereby dividing the world into two mega tribes: the believers in one tent, and their natural enemies, the non-believers, or infidels, in another. And, as we’ve seen, the essence of tribalism is warring and preying on other tribes in order to empower your own.

This dichotomized worldview is actually enshrined in Islamic law’s, or sharia’s, mandate that Dar al-Islam (the “Abode of Islam,” or the world of Islam) must battle Dar al-Kufr (the “Abode or world of non-Islam”) in perpetuity until the former subjugates the latter.

In, for example, the Encyclopaedia of Islam, we read under the entry for “jihad” that the “spread of Islam by arms is a religious duty upon Muslims in general … Jihad must continue to be done until the whole world is under the rule of Islam … Islam must completely be made over before the doctrine of jihad can be eliminated.”

In other words, the doctrine of jihad—warfare on the other—is so pivotal to Islam that without it Islam ceases to be.

Islam’s apotheosis, or deification, of tribalism also explains why tribal societies other than the Arabs also gravitated to and found Islam appealing.

Consider the Turkic peoples’ oldest epic, The Book of Dede Korkut. Although newly converted to Islam, the Turks of the epic regularly engage in pagan practices banned by Islam: they eat horse meat and drink wine and other fermented drinks; and their women are, in comparison to Muslim women, relatively free. It is only in the context of raids on the “infidel”—a smooth and easy transition from raids on the “tribal outsider”—that Islam finally becomes evident in their lives.

Here, for example, is a typical pre-battle boast from the Turks of the epic: “I shall raid the bloody infidels’ land, I shall cut off heads and spill blood, I shall make the infidel vomit blood, I shall bring back slaves and slave-girls.”

Here is another typical account these new Turkish converts’ pious exploits:

They destroyed the infidels’ church, they killed its priests and made a mosque in its place. They had the call to prayer proclaimed, they had the invocation [or shahada] recited in the name of Allah Almighty. The best of the hunting-birds, the purest of stuffs, the loveliest of girls … they selected.

Aside from preying on the infidel-other, which already came natural to the pre-Islamic Turks, any and all non-violent aspects of Islam—fasting, zakat, pilgrimage—are totally absent from the lives of these earliest Turkic converts as portrayed in the Book of Dede Korkut.

Even so, the older Muslim peoples, the Arabs and Persians, praised the new converts simply because they “fight in the way of Allah, waging jihad against the infidels,” to quote one source.

(Being committed to the jihad has always gone a long way to exonerate otherwise un-Islamic behavior among Muslims, as if to say, “Well, at least they’re doing the hard part—war on infidels—so give them a break).

It was the same for those Mongols who embraced Islam. As the Dominican friar Ricoldo (d. 1320), who spent a decade in the Muslim world, once observed, “the Tartars had adopted Islam because it was the easy religion, as Christianity was the hard one.”

In other words, whereas Islam complemented their preexisting tribal way of living, including by giving them license to prey on all outsiders, Christianity only challenged it.

So it is that Muhammad’s most enduring contribution to world history is that, in repackaging the tribal mores of seventh-century Arabia through a theological paradigm, he also deified tribalism into a sort of hyper-tribalism, causing it to outlive its historic setting and dramatically spill into the modern era.

Hence the notorious resistance to assimilation in the West; the creation of enclaves and clannish no-go zones; and the constant flare outs of terrorism and hate crimes.

Whereas many world civilizations have been able to break away from, or at least temper their historic tribalism, this has not been, and cannot be, so easy for Islam. For Muslims to break away from tribalism, is for them to break away from Allah’s laws—laws which, as seen, are logical and gratifying, at least from a primordial, or, if you like, primitive, point of view.

Raymond Ibrahim, author of Defenders of the West and Sword and Scimitar, is the Distinguished Senior Shillman Fellow at the Gatestone Institute and the Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum.