Hampstead and Kilburn – it would be a disgrace if the Lib Dems don’t back Maajid Nawaz to the hilt

In the past 30 years British English has received a number of loan words from Arabic, words which would have meant very little to our young grandparents but are now familiar enough to be used metaphorically: jihad, fatwa, taliban, dhimmi. Almost all refer to religion and religious conflict, and have a slightly unwelcome ear to most people. (It wasn’t always like this, of course; Arabic has in the past given us a number of terms, from zero to orange to racket and nadir, not to mention countless scientific phrases).

One word I would like to see imported, however, is asabiyyah, a term which is best translated as ‘cohesion’, but more specifically refers to a historical cycle; as societies grow richer and more cultured their sense of cohesion diminishes until they are overrun by less advanced but more cohesive groups from abroad, who in turn lose their asabiyyah.

One could say that Islam invented the concept of ‘social cohesion’.