When a song gets stuck in your head — truly lodged, playing on loop without your consent — something philosophically strange is happening. The 14th-century North African historian Ibn Khaldun noticed that music works on the soul through what he called 'asabiyya' — a binding force, the felt pull of collective belonging — and he thought musical repetition was one of its most reliable mechanisms. Modern cognitive scientists call the phenomenon an 'earworm,' but that label explains nothing. What Ibn Khaldun's frame suggests is more interesting: the melody isn't haunting you randomly. It's rehearsing solidarity. The tune that won't leave is often one tied, however thinly, to a group you belong to or long for — a generation, a city, a version of yourself. This is why certain songs feel less like personal taste and more like identity anchors. They are, in Ibn Khaldun's terms, the sonic infrastructure of 'we.' So the next time a song colonizes your morning, it's worth asking not 'why this song?' but 'which belonging is this rehearsing?'

Name a song you return to compulsively — who were you with, or who did you want to be with, the first time it mattered?

Drawing from Islamic Social Philosophy synthesized with Cognitive Science of Music — Ibn Khaldun