How Islam Repackaged Tribalism as Religion By Raymond Ibrahim

How Islam Deified Tribalism

PJ Media : 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.

Its natural enemies remained everyone outside of it. Again, this is basic tribalism 1.0, though, as mentioned, with religious dressing.

Read it all here.....