Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements

Sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, publishing We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite the week of this conversation, defends his structural theory of why ‘Great Awokenings’ rise and fall — then turns to his own biography as a Black, convert Muslim to probe what elite wokeness would look like outside a Western, Protestant-descended culture.

Key ideas

1. Great Awokenings recur on a structural cycle, not a unique historical accident. Al-Gharbi identifies four episodes of elite progressive upheaval among American Symbolic Capitalists — the 1920s–30s, the mid-1960s–70s, the late 1980s–early 1990s, and the post-2010 wave that peaked around 2021 — each driven by two recurring factors: acute elite overproduction (a term from Jack Goldstone and Peter Turchin) and a countercyclical moment when hardship spreads from ordinary workers to elites and elite aspirants simultaneously.
2. Awokenings fizzle because their coalitions are structurally unstable, not because grievances are resolved. The alliance between frustrated elite aspirants and ordinary people is temporary: once enough aspirants are absorbed into elite institutions, they disengage, and persistent differences in how symbolic capitalists and ‘normies’ talk and think about politics generate internal friction that erodes movements from within — one reason, in al-Gharbi’s account, that awokenings rarely culminate in revolutions.
3. Symbolic capitalists are a psychologically distinctive class, selected as much as socialised. Gatekept by credentials and formed by particular socioeconomic backgrounds, knowledge-economy professionals are more ideological, more extreme, more dogmatic yet more conscientious and cognitively sophisticated than the general population — a profile al-Gharbi treats as a partial, unresolved explanation for the well-documented gap in neuroticism and reported wellbeing between the political Left and Right.
4. Wokeness has a traceable, contested lineage in Anglo-Saxon Protestantism and WEIRD culture, which is why Islam resists it differently. Al-Gharbi links elite progressive politics to the social gospel tradition and to Joseph Henrich’s account of the Catholic Church’s marriage-and-family programme reshaping Western psychology, then argues Muslim-majority societies host structurally similar status politics among their own symbolic capitalists — visible in Istanbul, less visible in more traditionally religious settings such as Konya — without importing the full Western package.
5. Al-Gharbi identifies as a Muslim who happens to be Black, not a ‘Black Muslim’ in the 1960s–70s political sense. His own path ran from Catholicism, through a period of unpersuaded atheism, to conversion to Sunni Islam roughly fifteen years before this conversation; he distinguishes his universalist Islam from the politically mobilised, now largely discredited Nation of Islam tradition associated with Louis Farrakhan.

Content

The Great Awokening: elite overproduction and countercyclical fortunes

Al-Gharbi’s central claim, developed at length in We Have Never Been Woke, is that the post-2010 surge in elite attention to race, gender, and social justice — peaking around 2021 and now receding by his own measures — is the fourth instance of a recurring pattern, not a one-off product of social media, Trump, or zero interest rates. He dates three earlier ‘Great Awokenings’: the 1920s through the early 1930s, the mid-1960s to late 1970s, and the late 1980s through early 1990s (the era of ‘political correctness’). Two factors predict when a new episode begins. The first is acute elite overproduction — Jack Goldstone and Peter Turchin’s term for a society producing more credentialed people who expect elite outcomes (six-figure jobs, home ownership, a standard of living matching their parents’) than it can deliver, leaving them chronically dissatisfied. The second is a countercyclical convergence: elites and ordinary workers ordinarily experience good and bad times in an inverse relationship (elite prosperity often comes at workers’ expense, and vice versa), so an awokening needs a rare moment when both groups are simultaneously frustrated, giving disaffected elites a mass base willing to lend them attention. Cowen presses al-Gharbi on why the Great Awokening weakened even though the academic job market remains glutted and housing remains expensive; al-Gharbi answers that some measures of the 2010s crunch have genuinely eased, and that elite overproduction is only one of two necessary conditions, not a sufficient explanation on its own.

Why awokenings fizzle: unstable coalitions, not resolved grievances

Al-Gharbi’s account of decline is structural rather than ideological: awokenings do not end because their claims are refuted or satisfied, but because the coalition that sustains them cannot hold. Frustrated elite aspirants join a movement primarily to secure entry into elite institutions; once a critical mass succeeds, they disengage. Meanwhile, symbolic capitalists — al-Gharbi’s term for knowledge-economy professionals in law, academia, journalism, and consulting — engage with politics in ways that differ systematically from the broader public (‘normies’), producing internal tension that alienates the mass constituency a movement needs to sustain itself. This is also, in his view, why awokenings rarely tip into revolution: the alliance required to reach that scale cannot hold together long enough. Asked whether the pattern ratchets upward over successive episodes, like escalating wars, or follows a random walk, al-Gharbi favours the random-walk model, noting the late-1980s political-correctness episode was both shorter and less dramatic than the one that followed 2010 — while stressing he remains open to persuasion.

Testing rival explanations: media, feminisation, and the case for structural recurrence

Cowen offers a competing account — that the Great Awokening was produced by decades of left-leaning university faculties supplying journalists, amplified after 2011 by social media’s incentive structures inside outlets like The New York Times, riding on a substrate of Protestant moral inheritance and the feminisation of elite professions, and then ended by the fragmentation of mainstream media and Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. Al-Gharbi accepts that feminisation of the symbolic professions and social media both matter for explaining this episode’s specific texture, but argues they cannot explain awokenings as a category, since three earlier episodes occurred without social media, with different media structures, and before the professions were as feminised as they are today. The four episodes share, in his account, ‘an insane amount’ in common despite occurring in very different media and demographic environments — evidence, to him, of a structural rather than a contingent cause.

Neuroticism, ideology, and the symbolic professions

Asked why neuroticism appears more pronounced on the political Left — a well-replicated finding across societies — al-Gharbi is candid that the causal direction is unresolved: progressive ideology could exacerbate neurotic tendencies (he cites research on ‘competence downshifting’, where white progressives, unlike white conservatives, systematically simplify their speech when talking to Black interlocutors, alongside heightened rumination about whether one is being a ‘good ally’), or pre-existing neuroticism could make progressive frameworks more attractive to those already prone to social anxiety. He layers on a further, largely independent explanation: entry into the symbolic professions is itself selective, gatekept by credentials and shaped by the socioeconomic backgrounds from which entrants are drawn, producing a population that is more ideological, more extreme, more dogmatic, more conformist, more conscientious, and more cognitively sophisticated than the public at large — a psychological profile present even outside periods of active awokening.

Wokeness and Islam: WEIRD culture, Protestantism, and the Muslim exception

Pressed on whether elite wokeness would look different in a Muslim society, al-Gharbi first notes that parallel status-politics movements — Black Lives Matter protests in Seoul, echoes of Occupy Wall Street and #MeToo — have appeared across very different symbolic-capitalist hubs worldwide, including in Istanbul, where feminism and gay rights surface in protest movements at far higher personal risk than in London. He links wokeness historically to the social gospel of Anglo-Saxon Protestantism, and separately cites Joseph Henrich‘s argument in The WEIRDest People in the World that it was the Catholic Church’s medieval marriage-and-family programme — banning cousin marriage and polygamy — that produced WEIRD psychology, a claim al-Gharbi finds sits in tension with, but not necessarily contradiction of, the Protestantism account. He resists Cowen’s suggestion (prompted by a visit to Rumi’s grave in Konya) that Islam is simply insulated from wokeness, arguing instead that Muslim societies host their own status politics among symbolic capitalists, distinct from Western wokeness rather than immune to an equivalent dynamic — and that much of what Westerners take as ancient, essential difference between Islam and the West is, per his Socius paper on the Islamic Commonwealth period, of comparatively recent historical vintage.

Black Muslim identity, Malcolm X, and al-Gharbi’s own conversion

Al-Gharbi distinguishes ‘Black Muslim’ — the politically mobilised identity tied to the Nation of Islam — from ‘Muslim who happens to be Black’, which he now applies to himself, favouring the universalist orientation reflected in his own name (Musa, ‘Moses’; al-Gharbi, ‘of the West’; his son is named Ezra). He traces the decline of Black Muslim political mobilisation to the discrediting of figures like Louis Farrakhan and, above all, to the 1965 assassination of Malcolm X, who broke with Farrakhan’s antisemitic, anti-white framing after his hajj revealed a more universalist Islam — even as ordinary Black Muslim religious practice, disconnected from that earlier political structure, has continued. Al-Gharbi’s own path ran from a non-Muslim upbringing in a military community, through Catholicism (abandoned after concluding from close reading of scripture that Jesus did not claim divinity, a rejection that — per Quine’s web-of-belief metaphor — could not be isolated from the rest of Catholic doctrine), through a period of ‘militant atheism’ he could rationally justify but not emotionally inhabit, to conversion to Sunni Islam roughly fifteen years before this conversation. He rejects the idea that his Muslim or Black identity gives him special epistemic insight into wokeness, endorsing instead — citing his affiliation with Heterodox Academy — a ‘partially situated knowledge’ view in which different backgrounds contribute complementary, not superior, perspectives.

Sociologists of Islam and the modernity of political Islam

Asked to name the great sociologist of Islam beyond Ibn Khaldun, al-Gharbi points to al-Farabi, credited with an early social-construction theory of religion — that religions are divinely inspired but socially constructed, shaped by particular times and places in ways that can distort as well as transmit universal truths, a claim al-Gharbi notes al-Farabi applied even to his own tradition — and to al-Biruni, a pioneer of ethnographic method and of integrating mathematics into social science. Al-Gharbi endorses Olivier Roy’s thesis that contemporary radical political Islam is not a fundamentalist throwback but a distinctly modern phenomenon, tracing its emergence to the late 19th and early 20th centuries alongside global capitalism, colonial expansion, and — concretely — the discovery of oil, which transformed Wahhabism from a marginal sect in an impoverished corner of Arabia into the state ideology of a wealthy petrostate. On European Muslim immigration, he expects second- and third-generation assimilation broadly comparable to other migrant groups, driven by ordinary incentives (friendship networks, professional advancement), but argues France’s aggressively secularist policies — banning head coverings across religious groups to target Muslims specifically, or removing non-pork school meal options — generate frictions that America’s more pluralist approach to religious minorities largely avoids.

See also

• Musa al-Gharbi — speaker
• Tyler Cowen — host
• We Have Never Been Woke — al-Gharbi’s book, published the week of this conversation
• Symbolic Capitalists — al-Gharbi’s term for the knowledge-economy class at the centre of his theory
• Jonathan Haidt on Morality, Politics, Disgust, and Intellectual Diversity on Campus — another CWT conversation on campus political culture and ideological homogeneity
• Joseph Henrich — cited on WEIRD psychology and the Catholic Church’s marriage-and-family programme