Afterword: Ritual, Emotion and Power

Abstract

Social scientists have long argued that collective rituals produce social cohesion and this has something to do with their emotionality. The fourteenth-century scholar Ibn Khaldun argued that emotionally intense rituals constituted a fundamental driving force in political history. In the medieval Muslim world, powerful dynasties commonly traced their ancestry from peripheral tribal groups, and urban elites were periodically overthrown and replaced by such groups. This pattern could easily be generalised to many other civilisations—from the dynastic cycles of China and Persia to the barbarian invasions of the Graeco-Roman and Christian worlds. Khaldun’s explanation for this pattern hinged on the notion of aṣabı̄yah (roughly ‘social cohesion’). Rural tribes derived their aṣabı̄yah from collective rituals that served to bond them into tight-knit military units, capable of standing together on the battlefield and carrying out daring raids. It was this quality of aṣabı̄yah that enabled rural tribes to invade and displace urban dynasties periodically. But having successfully deposed a ruling elite, the invading tribe’s emotional rituals would become sanitised and rendered ineffectual as part of the process of becoming educated into more literate forms and expressions of religiosity. Thus, the urban dynasty would become vulnerable over time to invasion and overthrow by another rural tribe, whose aṣabı̄yah remained intact. This cyclical theory of history has been taken up and developed in novel ways in recent decades.¹ If emotional collective rituals do indeed unite groups, then they may be capable not only of motivating coups and rebellions but also of legitimating established authority structures. Voluminous literatures in the social sciences, commonly inspired by the functionalist logic of Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life,² have provided ample examples of this legitimating role of ritual.³