In a confident civilization, belonging is civic. One enters through participation: to build, to translate, to govern, to invent. The door stands open to competence; the price of entry is contribution.

In an insecure civilization, belonging is privatized. Lineage supplants labor. Origins replace deeds. The primary question is no longer “What can you do?” but “Who are you?”

We know this mechanism well. For centuries, “Arab” referred less to a race than to a civilizational sphere: a language, a literary world, a shared intellectual horizon. To become Arab was to inhabit this world; to write, think, and build institutions within it. The house mattered more than the tribe.

This is why the Golden Age defies modern purity tests. Al-Khwarizmi arrived from Central Asia; Ibn Sina from the Persian world; Ibn Khaldun from North Africa. Hunayn ibn Ishaq was Christian. Maimonides, who guided the perplexed, was Jewish. Divergent origins, different beliefs, yet a singular intellectual milieu. They belonged because they produced.

Decline follows a familiar pattern. It reduces a living civilization to a biological category, then claims copyright over the dead. The definition narrows until it excludes the living, all while claiming the prestige of ancestors who, by these new rules, would no longer “pass.” The door is locked; the new owners merely manage the graves.

Once you identify the process, you see it everywhere. Ethno-nationalists celebrate empires founded on synthesis. Racialists quote thinkers who would have mocked their categories. Tribalists invoke men who spent their lives transcending the tribe.

The West is now reenacting this script. Confidence allows admiration to flow freely; insecurity guards it jealously. “How dare you admire him? He is not one of your own.” History becomes property. The past becomes a gated community. The guardians have arrived.

Civilizations do not collapse because strangers arrive. They collapse when builders turn into managers, and managers into wardens: when the drive to create the future is replaced by the urge to police the past.