What will hold Singapore together in a time of change?
"I decided to supplement my meagre knowledge of Islamic civilisation by studying its rise and fall a little more closely. I therefore sought the advice of Professor Hussein Alatas who promptly loaned me a massive three-volume work entitled Muqaddimah: An Introduction To History.
It was written by a man called Ibn Khaldoun whom I had never heard of and who is rarely mentioned by modern historians. Moreover, the work was completed in 1377. Of what relevance, I asked myself, could the outpourings of a man from over 600 years ago be to our times, let alone the year 2000.
I was never more wrong in my life. This 14th-century Berber, a descendant of one of the Prophet's supporters, is so contemporary that many modern historians in comparison appear traditional.
It is incredible that this 14th-century man should have anticipated ideas about man and society, about jurisprudence, geopolitics, power, religion, war and peace, and many of the great themes about the rise and fall of civilisations centuries before thinkers like Vico, Marx, Spengler and Toynbee elaborated them with greater wealth of detail.
The wrappings which conceal his basic ideas are admittedly mediaeval and unacceptable to modern minds.
He nevertheless looks on his environment with a detachment and objectivity that was not to be surpassed until centuries later by Western man. He states facts. He observes.
He knows the glorious past of his own civilisation. But he is aware too that it is gone and he does not want to restore it.
What then has Ibn Khaldoun to say about the rise and fall of civilisations that is relevant to us?
He allots to all civilisations a finite lifespan of about 120 years spread over three generations of 40 years each. In the fourth generation, the end is reached and by the fifth, the final death spasms.
He says that this is the invariable and predictable course of history, though sometimes he seems to offer an escape. For why, he asks, has civilisation proved to be so much stronger in the East than in the West, in Persia and Iraq,
Syria and Egypt than in the Maghreb which was the focus for his great work.
He had also seen the merchants of Europe who came to the Barbary ports, and had marvelled at their wealth and splendid way of life. He did not pursue this fertile path, for had he done so he might have guessed that Western Europe would soon light its torch of civilisation from the glowing embers of Islamic culture.
What sparks off a civilisation in the first place? He attributes it to a special human quality which he calls "asabiyya". It means group solidarity but it takes different forms and meanings at different stages of civilisation.
What Khaldoun means is that asabiyya has to be built up through hardship and great austerity. That is why, says Khaldoun, the Prophet Moses deliberately kept the Israelites whom he had led out of Egypt for 40 years in the desert. As slaves in Egypt, the Israelites had become subservient and fatalistic. They had been drained of asabiyya. It took a generation of exposure to the hardships of the desert to renew their asabiyya.
In more modern times, it was in Hitler's ghettos that the Israelites of today built up asabiyya. It was in the desert too that Prophet Muhammad conjured up the asabiyya which inspired the great Islamic conquests. Though Ibn Khaldoun wrote of the nomads with detestation as destroyers of culture... he admired their asabiyya - their courage, toughness, their self-reliance and above all their solidarity and fellowship.
The men with asabiyya, headed by a great leader or prophet... take over a dying civilisation and thus begins a sedentary culture - a city culture. Khaldoun makes clear that while the desert generates asabiyya, only the city can create civilisation.
As long as the spirit of asabiyya prevails, the first-generation ruler exercises power justly and wisely. The law is fairly applied. Taxation policies are designed to stimulate prosperity and personal initiative. The ruler, says Khaldoun, "does not claim anything exclusively for himself because (such an attitude) is what is required by group solidarity". Given this kind of ruler, order prevails and art and learning flourish. Out of the ashes of the old civilisation, a greater and more vibrant culture emerges.
The next four stages are of progressive decline. The easy democracy of the first stage vanishes as the new ruler claims total authority over his people. Authority is no longer shared. He becomes a tyrant demanding subjects who must manifest servility and unquestioned obedience. The asabiyya is being drained out of them. Discontent and resentment dissolve group solidarity. The tyrant is succeeded by vainglorious rulers also lacking in asabiyya. They build monuments and palaces...They hire mercenaries to protect themselves from a people they now fear and no longer trust. Nepotism and corruption become the rule of law. The burden of taxation grows and incentive for creation of wealth consequently dies. Then comes the ruler "who is content with what his predecessors have built". Since his civilisation has lost its capacity for growth, the ruler tries to arrest its decline by reviving and adhering strictly to old rituals and meaningless traditions.
And finally the death pangs of a great civilisation. Here I can do no better than quote Khaldoun himself: "The fifth stage is one of waste and squandering. In this stage the ruler wastes on pleasures and amusements (the treasures) accumulated by his ancestors through (excessive) generosity to his inner circle at their parties. Also he acquires bad, low-class followers to whom he entrusts the most important matters (of state) which they are not qualified to handle by themselves... Thus he ruins the foundations his ancestors had laid and tears down what they had built up. In this stage the dynasty is seized by senility and the chronic disease from which it can hardly ever rid itself, for which it can find no cure, and, eventually, it is destroyed."
He goes on to add that the end of the dynasty is clearly in sight when the hard-up ruler, unable to squeeze his subjects any further, takes part in trade and commerce and tries to monopolise it to the detriment of his trading subjects.
By then the asabiyya, bred in the desert, has been drained of its last drop.
What happens then? A new lot of desert nomads bursting with asabiyya take over the dying city to once again restore vigour and once again to suffer the same fate."
They don't make ministers like they used to - this is what happens when your politicians are really technocrats.
We are told that the "Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times" theory of history is allegedly wrong and fascist.
Rick Szostak notes that the Ottomans survived for 6 centuries, and they were rising to power when Khaldun was writing, and that he had ulterior motives for exaggerating "the role of royal complacency in imperial decline".
