Admirable though it is that people write passionately in defence of their beliefs, especially in the face of deceptive politicians who can use the might of state machinery to force their propoganda down the throats of many unsuspecting people, I have to take objection to part of this (two-month old) article by Osama Saeed, a member of the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB) (Saeed also has his own blog).
Saeed writes
It came as news to many Muslims, and probably non-Muslims too, that one of the things "fundamental to our civilisation" is opposition to any recreation of the Islamic caliphate. That is according to the home secretary, Charles Clarke, speaking last month as an honoured guest of the neocon Heritage Foundation in the US.
It follows hard on the heels of similar comments made by both Tony Blair and George Bush. With such luminaries pushing the policy, there must be significance to the words. The caliphate was wiped from the map, the message seems to be, and they want to keep it wiped.
It is true that deceptive politicians, like Dick Cheney, and just plain stupid ones, like Charles Clarke, will use half-truths, misinformation and other weapons in the arsenal of political rhetoric to push home their message and dupe an unsuspecting electorate (afterall, since when was the definition of the caliphate common knowledge?). And for challenging this Saeed deserves credit and my support. But what is false, and perhaps deceptive itself if not borne of ignorance, is the next parapgraph from Saeed's article:
The institution [i.e. the caliphate] they attack is the idea of a united political leadership of the Muslim world, which was destroyed in 1924 after about 1,350 years.
This is a common belief among various Muslim political groups, which include Hizb al-Tahrir (though we should be careful to distinguish each group), whose sole aim is the restoration of the caliphate (Ar. khilafah). But it is an historical fiction. The whole history is a lot more complex. As the historian Khalid Blankinship writes:
The ‘Abbâsids never ruled in Algeria (except briefly in the extreme east of that country), Morroco, and Spain, so that the unity of the state had decisively ended. This actually first happened when the rebelling Berbers of Morocco set up their own khalîfah in 122/740, and it never happened after that year that all the Muslims ever were under one single khalîfah again.
So, the "united political leadership", whose loss Saeed bemoans so much, was lost centuries before 1924! Well over a thousand years before 1924, in fact! And, as Khalid Blankinship points out, there were numerous claimants to the title of khalifah (caliph). From the Ummayads in Spain to the Fatimids in Egypt, and the many petty principalities in between, all declared themselves as the legitimate rulers of Islam. As far west as Nigeria, where Ottoman power was never even smelt, Usman dan Fodio and his sons declared the Sokoto Caliphate. The last Abbasid caliph, himself, was nothing more than a figure head to give the Mamlukes prestige they needed; indeed, this had been the fate of the Abbasid caliphate for many years, first under the Buyids then under the Seljuks. Eventually the Abbasid caliphate was crushed by the invading Mongols. More importantly, there are questions surrounding the legitimacy of the Ottoman claims to being the caliphs and their equally murky -- and, from a Turkish nationalist's point of view, traitorous -- dealings with the British. [1] Further, the official title of caliphate itself had only been discovered by the Ottomans as late as 1774, after their defeat to the Russians at Kuchuk Kainariji.
So my question would be: just which caliphate does Saeed lament the loss of?
The sad fact is that, in my experiences, many Muslims accept this "1924" and One Continuous Caliphate fiction unthinkingly. This shows how ill-thought ideologies, which rely solely on emotionally-charged rhetoric, have penetrated even the critical minds, the bright and the articulate amongst Muslims today. More often that not, the array of political groups who constantly cry over the loss of the Ottoman caliphate, merely wish to recreate Ottoman statism. For why else has the year 1924 reached such a level that it is seen as the point when the last Muslim polity, perhaps Islam itself in the eyes of some, was "destroyed"?
One could also note that rather than restoring the caliphate, there is a more viable option: the monarch of Morocco. Khalid Blankinship again:
The continuity of the use of such titles in the Muslim West also extends down to the present in Morocco, where Muhammad VI is still to this day amîr al-mu’minîn, just like ‘Umar ibn al-Khattâb [the second of the Rightly-Guided Caliphs], and that is taken with deadly seriousness in Morocco. Thus, the Moroccans, having their own continuous succession of the title, do not at all now and never before did recognize the Ottoman Turkish sultâns’s claim to the title of khalîfah. Indeed, since the sultâns of Morocco claimed descent from the Prophet (SAAS) and were thus Qurashîs, while the Ottomans were not, it might be held against the Ottomans rather that they did not recognize the Moroccan ruler as khalîfah and submit to him.
But I don't suppose we will see Saeed, and other fans of the Never Ending Caliphate, booking one way tickets to Marrakesh anytime soon.
Notes
[1] Khalid Blankinship mentions questions surrouding the legitimacy of the Ottomans in his article. So does this article by Hamza Alavi entitled "The Ironies of History: Contradictions of The Khilafat Movement". Alavi is interested in the Indian Khilafat movement of the 1920s, but I would recommend the references he cites especially Minault, G. The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilisation in India, 1982. Alavi's article also discusses in some detail the intrigues involving the latter Ottoman sultans and the British and the response of Turkish republicans.
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