The Ottoman caliphate disappeared in 1924, more with a whimper than a bang. But despite this humiliating end, the abolition of the caliphate was greeted with dismay in Muslim lands far beyond the borders of the Ottoman world. The 1920s saw the high-water mark of European imperialism in the Middle East, with the division of the Ottoman territories into Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine and the establishment of British and French mandates. Egypt was under British control, Libya under Italian rule, while Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco were firmly governed by the French. Many Muslims felt humiliated by these arrangements and some thought that the revival of the caliphate might provide a ray of hope in this otherwise dismal and depressing political landscape.

There was much less agreement about what sort of caliphate this should be and who should be the new caliph. A swift response came from the sheikhs of the Azhar in Cairo, long the established intellectual leaders of the Sunni world. After a meeting on 25 March 1924, they issued a notice reaffirming the traditional view that the caliphs were the representative of the Prophet in the protection of the faith and the implementation of its laws. They rejected the separation of the political and religious powers of the office implied by the 1922 abolition of the sultanate and asserted that Abd al-Majīd was not a true caliph since he had accepted this. Now the umma should set about finding a new holder for the office.

Others argued that the caliphate was a perversion of Islam, a calamity which had no basis in the Qur’ān, and that, far from being essential to the faith, it was in fact an impediment which confused politics with religion in an unhelpful way. Thus, in his book Islam and the Fundamentals of Ruling, Alī Abd al-Raziq (1887–1966), an Oxford-educated Egyptian intellectual, argued for a separation of religion and government along the models found in the west. While his views were supported by other secularist intellectuals, like Taha Husayn in Egypt, they were roundly denounced and passionately condemned by more orthodox figures.

Events and personalities combined to prevent any agreement on the revival of the caliphate. The divisions between those who saw the office as providing spiritual leadership for all Muslims and those who looked to a caliph who would renew the political power of the umma and unify the Muslims in opposition to their oppressors meant that there was no consensus on how to proceed. Any of the suggested candidates for the office – Sharif Husayn of Mecca, Fu’ad I, the king of Egypt, or Ibn Sa’ud, king of what was becoming known as Saudi Arabia, were all mentioned – immediately aroused fierce opposition or simple ridicule, which ruled them out. There was no widespread popular dismay about the abolition of the caliphate, nor any mass movements among Muslims to work for its restoration. By the 1930s Muslims in the Middle East were more concerned about events in Palestine and were looking to Arab nationalism rather than the caliphate as an ideology which would respond to their hopes and anxieties.

Even in what we might call Islamist circles, the reinstatement of the caliphate was not a priority. The most prominent and influential Islamist revival movement was the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt by Hasan al-Banna (1906–49). For Banna and his followers the real issues were the revival of religious enthusiasm and commitment to the sharī‘a. In order for this to happen, the destructive influence of foreigners, the British in the Egyptian context, had to be challenged and removed. To do this, Banna was prepared to work with nationalists and with the Egyptian kings Fu’ad and, from 1936, Farouk, trying to stiffen their resolve against foreign rule. The ultimate objective was a Muslim caliphate, to be sure, but the revival of the caliphate would be the end result of independence and moral reform, a distant aim rather than a first step.

The period after 1945, marked as it was in the Middle East by the end of the French mandates in Syria and Lebanon, the end of the British mandate in Palestine in 1948 and the establishment of the state of Israel, led to much uncertainty and division in the Muslim Middle East and discussions about the future and the revival and development of the area. However, few if any of those leaders involved looked to the caliphate as a way forward. The ideology of nationalism was now increasingly joined by that of socialism. Egyptian President Abdel Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956, and the subsequent humiliation of British and French attempts to take it back, led to the forging of close links between Egypt and the Soviet Union. For most politically active people in the Arab Middle East, communism rather than the revival of the ancient caliphate pointed the way to the future. When I first started travelling in the area in 1964 it was generally assumed this was where the future lay. Most people would have accepted that they were Muslims as well as socialists and nationalists, but the mosques were for old men, relics of a vanished world, and the caliphate as distant and irrelevant as the Holy Roman Empire in post-war western Europe.

One Islamist group stood out in opposition to this view. This was Hizb al-Tahrīr (the Party of Liberation), founded by a leading Palestinian religious scholar, Taqi al-Dīn Nabhani (1909–77), from 1952 onwards. Like the Muslim Brotherhood and related movements, Hizb al-Tahrir argued for spiritual revival and the unity of Muslims. Where they differed was in asserting that the revival of the caliphate was to be the instrument of these changes rather than the result. As Reza Pankhurst, an authority on the recent history of the idea of the caliphate, explains:

The founders of Hizb ut-Tahrir, who were Islamic jurists as well as activists, viewed the caliphate both as a shari‘a obligation and as the necessary political structure required to reform and unite the community. Emerging in an era when the physical restrictions of colonial control were being removed, their ijtihad [legal reasoning] led them to conclude that the necessary revival was one of an intellectual nature, requiring fundamental changes in the concepts carried and worldview held by the Muslim community, and that the caliphate was not the final goal but rather the vehicle for change in the world.¹

The party has put forward some more specific proposals about caliphal government, in addition to more typical views on such matters as women’s dress and the enforcement of sharī‘a. The caliph can be chosen from all male Muslims, that is he, and it must be he, does not need to be of Qurashi descent. The caliph must operate within the limits of sharī‘a. The party rejects the idea of democracy and argues that the concept of the sovereignty of the people amounts to kufr (unbelief) since sovereignty belongs to God alone. It equally argues against nationalism and groups who seek to establish Islamic government according to sharī‘a in one country. It does, however, assert that Muslims, male and female, should be able to choose the caliph by voting and that this choice should be confirmed by the taking of the bay‘a in the time-honoured fashion. Non-Muslims living within the caliphate must be protected but are effectively prevented from voting or assuming any positions of responsibility in the government. Another distinctive policy is the return to the gold standard, with dinars and dirhams modelled on those first issued around the year 700 in the caliphate of Abd al-Malik. This, it is argued, will prevent inflation and other economic abuses.

Hizb al-Tahrir, with its call for a universal caliphate, has attracted considerable popular support in countries such as Palestine, the ‘stans’ of Central Asia, and Indonesia, but despite participating in a number of failed coups it has been unable to put its ideas of caliphate into practice anywhere.

It is always important to recognize that a call to establish an Islamic state, or to launch jihād, is not the same thing as calling for a caliphate with all its universal claims. Some militant Islamist groups have attached less importance to the concept of the caliphate than Hizb al-Tahrīr. For Usāma b. Lādin and Al-Qaeda, the restoration, or creation, of a universal caliphate was a distant, even utopian aspiration which would follow after immediate objectives like expelling westerners and western influence from the Muslim world had been accomplished. Al-Qaeda’s Afghan allies, the Taliban, were and still are primarily focused on creating a Muslim state, ruled according to sharī‘a within Afghanistan rather than a caliphate which could attract the loyalty of all Muslims. Ironically, the idea that Al-Qaeda is working to establish a universal caliphate finds its clearest expression in the polemics of American politicians like George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, who tried to develop the image of the caliphate as a Muslim totalitarian enterprise which threatens the whole world.

Since the proclamation of their caliphate, the so-called Islamic State (Dawlat al-Islamiya) has become the most prominent and influential group advocating the revival of the caliphate and, unlike Hizb al-Tahrīr for example, they have moved to put their ideas into practice. Islamic State is distinguished from other jihadi and salafi groups at the present time by its emphasis on the title and role of the caliph. It is the first of these movements in the twenty-first century to have designated an individual who can be identified as the caliph. While other groups may have called for the restoration or revival of the caliphate, only Islamic State has gone so far as to inaugurate one. It is important to recognize what a radical claim this is and what risks and problems it brings with it.

The establishment of the caliphate was announced in Islamic State’s online periodical Dābiq on the First of Ramadan 1435 H (29 June 2014; Dābiq uses the Muslim calendar and Common Era dates are never mentioned). The new Commander of the Faithful and caliph, Abū Bakr al-Baghdādi, addresses Muslims thus:

O Muslims everywhere, glad tidings for you and expect good. Raise your head high for today – by God’s grace – you have a state and a khilāfa which will return your dignity, might, rights and leadership. It is a state where the Arab and non-Arab, the white man and black man, the easterner and the westerner, are all brothers … Soon, by Allah’s permission, a day will come when the Muslim will walk everywhere as a master, having honour, being revered, with his head held high and his dignity preserved … The Muslims today have a loud thundering statement and possess heavy boots. They have a statement to make that will cause the world to hear and understand the meaning of terrorism and boots that will trample the idol of nationalism, destroy the idol of democracy and uncover its deviant nature.

Apart from these general exhortatory proclamations, the writers of Dābiq are concerned to prove that the ideas of imamate or caliphate are not simply religious ideals but must also lead to the establishment of an active, working and powerful state, that is to say that they completely reject those strands in Muslim thought, medieval and modern, which suggest that the caliphate can offer Muslims only spiritual and religious leadership:

These callers to God couldn’t grasp the idea that Islam could have a state and an imam nor could they begin to understand what it would cost to achieve this. It was as if they had never studied the history of Islam and learned what this endeavour would require from us in terms of blood.

The discussion then moves on to the Quranic verse describing the imamate which God gave to Abraham² and what this imamate might entail. This imāmah and the milla (religious community) of Abraham which was established become the blueprint for the caliphate as a political organization:

Moreover the imāmah mentioned in the above verse isn’t simply referring to imāmah in religious affairs, as many would wish to interpret it. Rather it’s inclusive of imāmah in political affairs which many religious people have shunned or avoided on account of the hardship it entails itself and on account of the hardship entailed in working to establish it. Furthermore, the people of today have failed to understand that imāmah in religious affairs cannot be properly established unless the people of truth first achieve comprehensive political imāmah over the lands and the people.

The claim of Abū Bakr al-Baghdādi to the caliphate seems to be based on two criteria. The first is descent from Quraysh. While we cannot be certain, there is no reason to doubt his lineage and there must be many tens of thousands of people who could claim Qurashi descent, after all; but, as we have seen, there are, and have been since the eleventh century, many Muslims who have rejected the idea that the caliph has to be from the holy tribe. The second criterion seems to be a more simple assertion that many Muslims have taken the bay‘a and that he is defending Muslims, by whom he means, of course, only the Muslims who believe the same things as he and his followers do. As we have seen throughout this book, there have been many different discourses for claiming the caliphal title and there is no generally agreed legal position on what constitutes a legitimate caliphate. Baghdādi’s claim does not seem to be, in the light of these different traditions, ipso facto illegitimate: there is a whole variety of precedents.

IS is emphatic that the caliph must come from Quraysh. At the same time it asserts that all Muslims are equal and that distinctions of race and nationality must be swept away along with the international borders which keep Muslims apart. It is difficult to see how these two ideas can be reconciled.

The ideologues of Islamic State use the history of the caliphate in a ruthless but not entirely unintelligent way. Their propaganda and image are redolent with nostalgia for ancient glory. The adoption of black, and of black banners, is a clear attempt to relate their movement to the Abbasid revolution and appropriate its symbols for their own attempt to remake the Islamic world.

But the world they look back to is above all the time of the Prophet and the first caliphs. Their model rulers are what they imagine the early caliphs to have been. Abū Bakr, the first caliph, plays a large part in this and it cannot be a coincidence that the IS caliph has adopted this same name. IS looks back to his military triumph in the ridda wars against the rejectionists which followed the Prophet’s death and identifies its Muslim opponents in Syria and Iraq with the murtadds, the apostates who opposed the early Muslim state. In the accounts of these campaigns they find justification for treating such opponents as worthy of death: if Abū Bakr put the murtadds to death without mercy, then his successors in the new caliphate can, and indeed should, do the same. In the abundant, and historically very unreliable, accounts of the wars of the early caliphs, they can discover almost anything. To take one especially terrible example, the burning alive in an iron cage of the unfortunate Jordanian pilot, in the whole of early Islamic history (in contrast, incidentally, to early modern European history) there is virtually no tradition of burning prisoners alive. However, Islamic State ‘researchers’ have managed to find one example in which Abū Bakr is alleged to have ordered such a dreadful punishment, and that is enough to justify this barbaric behaviour and, more than that, to publicize and glorify it.

IS continuously looks back to caliphal examples and a romantic view of early Islamic warfare. Its magazine Dabiq is full of pictures of iconic figures of black-clad warriors on horses brandishing long curved scimitar-like swords. The texts refer to them as fursān (knights), a word redolent with memories of courage and commitment lifted straight from the world of medieval chronicles. The desire to associate themselves with an ancient and purer form of warfare, like the revival of the caliphate itself, is eloquent testimony to the seductive power of this vision.

Its enemies are identified with the enemies of the Prophet, his Companions and the first caliphs in the Islamic tradition. The Murji’in were a group which flourished in the Umayyad period. Essentially non-violent, they believed that it was not up to Muslims to decide that other Muslims who did not share their beliefs were kuffār, unbelievers. Allah alone should make that decision. The Murji’in, as such, have not been a force in the Islamic umma for centuries and their very existence must have been unknown to most Muslims. For Islamic State the term Murji’in can be applied to all those Sunni Muslims in Syria and elsewhere who are not as hardline as they are. And of course it is possible to find Traditions allegedly passed on from the Companions of the Prophet and precedents from the early caliphate to demonstrate that such people were worthy of death.

There are other examples of how Islamic State uses the political and religious disputes of the early caliphate to establish its righteousness and destroy its rivals in the Muslim world. The history of the caliphate is a fundamental legitimizing tool, alive and, in its hands, deeply dangerous.

Its rise and its use of the idea and ideology of caliphate demonstrate that this ancient idea still has power and authority in the Muslim world, which has taken many by surprise. I hope this book has shown that caliphate is a concept with a wide variety of meanings and interpretations. Its strength lies partly in its flexibility. Its intellectual justification draws on the direct connection with the earliest days of Islam and the glorious era of the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates. At the same time it can be used, even twisted, to promote ideologies which are sinister and brutal. But the idea of caliphate is not in itself dangerous or threatening. We need not be afraid of it, even if we are fearful of how some have chosen to interpret it.