The past: History and normative tradition

The word “caliphate” is the anglicized version of the Arabic khilāfa. Its triliteral root (khaʾ-lām-fāʾ)
connotes the idea of “being or coming after or behind someone in terms of order, time, or space.”
A khalīfa (caliph), then, is a successor, someone literally left behind by a predecessor to fulfill a certain
responsibility. The Qur’an speaks of Adam and by implication his progeny as “khalīfa” (2:30)—which
the earliest exegetes naturally took to mean “successor of an earlier creation that once dominated the
earth.” But God is also, according to a famous supplication of the Prophet Muhammad ‫ ﷺ‬in Sahih
Muslim, the khalīfa of a traveler who leaves his home and family in God’s care.27 This usage suggests
that the modern translation of the “caliph” as “deputy” or “vicegerent” is imprecise, as is the idea
popularized in the twentieth century that the humans are metaphysical “vicegerents of God.” Another
reference in the Qur’an to the Prophet David, upon him be peace, as “khalīfa in the land,” simply
meant “inheritor of the land,” but has been similarly used to impute to the word a sense of political
authority and metaphysical stewardship of the earth. The metaphysical meaning is conceptually
justifiable through the Qur’anic notions of taskhīr and takrīm (that God has honored humans and
subdued all other creation for them, 17:70, 14:32-3, etc.), but linguistically, it has no necessary relation
to the term at hand, khalīfa. This is not merely a linguistic quibble; entire genres of literature both by
Muslim authors and Orientalists have emerged based on this misunderstanding.28 In certain cases,
this misunderstanding has been used to impute to the Qur’an the modern idea of popular sovereignty
in the nation-state.29

What we are interested in, however, is the historical use of the term to signify the supreme political
ruler of the Muslims. In this sense, khalīfa (caliphate) came to mean the deputyship (niyāba) of the
Prophet Muhammad ‫ ﷺ‬in the leadership and stewardship of his community after his death. This
supreme political leader of Muslims was also called imam (leader) by theologians both Sunni and
Shiʿa—although the Shiʿa reserved the term imam for their theologically rightful, and not necessarily
political, leader. Earlier on, precisely because the term khalīfa did not have a clear political meaning
and was only a description of Abu Bakr’s role as the successor to the Prophet ‫ﷺ‬, the more explicit
label of amīr al-muʾminīn (the commander of the believers) became the common way to address the
ruler since the reign of the Second Caliph, ʿUmar. Over time, when the political field became crowded
with different kinds of leaders such as amīr (military commander), sulṭān (authority, king)
and malik (king), historical and political usage settled on the term khalīfa to refer to the single,
supreme leader of all Muslims.

The five historical models of the caliphate

The first and only normative model of the caliphate for the Sunni majority comprises the first four
successors of the Prophet ‫ﷺ‬, who later came to be called the Rashidun (Rightly Guided). At first,
religious and political authorities were not systematically distinguished and the caliph or successor of
the Prophet embodied both. Less than a century later, another model emerged in which the caliphate
became a primarily political office, and religious authority gradually came to be shared between the
caliph and the scholars (ʿulamāʾ). The ʿulamāʾ, the emerging class of dedicated scholars, now
increasingly served as the real socio-religious leaders of urban Muslim communities and intellectual
schools. The caliph’s powers had never been absolute in practice, but the ʿulamāʾ began to theorize
such limits and functions starting in the fourth/tenth century.
The early caliphs ruled the world’s largest empire from the small town of Medina as first among equals
(primus inter pares). This egalitarian, direct-access, and piety-based model proved unscalable to the
needs of administering a vast, far-flung empire. It thus gave way to the imperial caliphate of the late
Umayyad and High Abbasid eras. At its height, during the second/eighth and third/ninth centuries, the
Baghdad-based Abbasid caliphate was the richest and largest empire the world had ever seen in
terms of per capita wealth.30 It also adopted the symbolism of the pre-Islamic Sassanid empire in
which a worthy emperor, in order to dispense total justice, had to project an absolutist, god-like aura.
The actual powers of the caliph, both in reality and in the Law of Islam, were rather limited, and in
some cases drastically so. This was the second model of the caliphate.
As the actual power of the Baghdadi caliphs waned, a third model arose in which the caliph was
primarily a symbolic and spiritual authority; the actual rulers of various provinces were often local
governors or invading military commanders who, lacking inherent legitimacy, paid homage to the
caliph. This age lasted for some five centuries. It is in this classical era that Islamic law, theology, and
political thought crystallized. The caliph’s symbolic power was indispensable, and the possibility of its
recovery of actual power was not far-fetched. The famous twelfth-century Islamic hero, Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn
(Saladin), who took Jerusalem back from the Crusaders and won hearts by showing great
magnanimity, died seeking but not attaining the approval of the caliph in Baghdad; the caliph’s
approval mattered for a ruler’s authority to be legitimate, no matter his accomplishments.

The caliph, it became increasingly clear to Muslims, represented two crucial continuities for the
Muslim umma: (1) the symbolic connection back to the Prophet ‫ ﷺ‬and the Rightly Guided caliphs,
whose conduct remained the gold standard, and (2) the spatial continuity (or unity) of all Muslims, who
now lived in networked societies stretching over parts of Africa, Asia, and Europe and ruled by various
local kings and governors. These two continuities made political fragmentation, religious sectarianism,
and cultural rivalries manageable, averting the worst centrifugal tendencies and preventing a collapse
of the region into constant warfare and savagery. These societies were largely self-governed by the
Law of Islam as administered by local rulers and scholars. The kings or sultans served as ‘butlers’ or,
more grandiosely, as the executive branch, who were important for defense and upkeep of the Law
but nevertheless disposable. They came and went without changing the norms, laws, or institutions of
this mega-society. This third model has been called “classical Islamic constitutionalism.”31 It is
important because, with the exception of the first couple of centuries, it is what the caliphate has
actually looked like throughout most of Islamic history.
Things were far from perfect, and the most influential ʿulamāʾ who deliberated on political matters,
from al-Mawardi (d. 450/1058), al-Juwayni (d. 478/1085), al-Ghazali (d. 505/1111), to Ibn Taymiyya (d.
728/1328), considered the actual loss of the caliph’s power to military usurpers unacceptable, though
they deemed it tolerable as an exceptional situation. Al-Ghazali likened accepting the Saljuq sultans of
his time, who only nominally accepted the supreme authority of the Abbasid caliph but in fact flouted
his authority, to the eating of carrion: it was permitted only to save life in the absence of wholesome
food. Others, in particular Ibn Taymiyya, agreed, as we shall see below. During the first half of this
model before the Mongol attack in 656/1258, the Baghdad-based caliph’s symbolic power was
significant, but even afterward in the Mamluk period, when the Abbasid caliph, now in Cairo, lost all
power, in distant Muslim lands such as Delhi and Timbuktu, his letter of investiture was crucial to
marking the difference between mere usurpation of power and legitimacy and belonging to the Muslim
body politic.

A fourth model of the caliphate, which was an amalgam of the second and third ones, came to the fore
when the Ottomans politically united Eastern Europe, Western Asia, and North Africa under one
empire that lasted for about four hundred years as one of the most successful, stable, and powerful
empires of the time. The Ottoman sultans (who took on the title “caliph” after defeating the Mamluks in
Cairo), upheld the Shariʿa Law that was expounded and administered by the scholars as muftis and
judges. The caliph-sultan’s powers, therefore, were limited. We have cases of sultans who were
deposed because of the verdict of the chief qadi (judge). Yet the sultans could gain power and act
despotically as well, flouting Islamic norms on matters that touched on their crucial interests. In
contrast to the Ottomans in the Middle East and North Africa and to the Mughals in India, who ruled
over a Hindu majority, their Shiʿa rivals, the Safavids, based their legitimacy on strong theocratic
claims. The Ottoman claim to the caliphate was at times imagined in mystical ways. Anatolian Sufism
helped imagine the Ottoman caliph as a ruler, spiritual guide, and lawmaker for all Muslims, even
though no political effort was made—and was perhaps unthinkable—to join the three vast Muslim
empires into one political order.32
The crucial common factor in the last three models of the caliphate is that the caliph did not wield
religious authority except in limited public matters. For the Ottomans, the mystics could imagine the
caliph to be God’s shadow on earth, and even the occult could be used to make prophecies and justify
policies, but the Hanafi legal establishment, the backbone of the empire, ensured that such claims
remained within the Sufi lodges. Bernard Lewis, the famous hawkish neo-conservative doyen of
Orientalist studies, acknowledged this much: there has been and can be no theocracy in (Sunni)
Islam. This is thanks to the inherent epistemological pluralism of Sunni jurisprudence and the lack of
any institution like the medieval Church to speak for God. The multiplicity of voices interpreting
scripture and tradition meant two things: that religious authority was divided and polyphonic and that
the ruling elite could never control the religious authority, and as a result, an organic system of socio-
religious checks and balances emerged.

The third and fourth models of the caliphate, which lasted a combined total of a thousand years, were,
in short, neither theocratic nor absolutist. They guaranteed a large measure of freedom to
communities under their rule: Muslims of different rites, Jews, Christians, and others could live as
relatively free communities. Although far from perfect, this system worked more effectively in
facilitating a fair and God-centered life than modern Muslim states and even many democracies.
Unlike the modern liberal model, communities and hence communal norms were deemed necessary
for any decent human existence, which is why even non-Muslims were free to live by the religious
norms in which they believed. The needle of the balance between individual and communal rights
tilted often in the latter direction. The Ottomans, like the Romans had been vis-à-vis the Greeks, were
administrators and institution builders, and turned the Qur’anic model of protected
communities, dhimmis, into an institution of multiple religious communities represented by their
leaders in the capital. This became known as the millet system.33

When the modern nation-states of the nineteenth century confronted the Ottomans, for the first time
becoming their equals and quickly surpassing Ottoman economic and military might, the Ottomans
adjusted and ultimately made great strides in modernizing their army, economy, and society—in that
order—in a relatively short time. The old organic, socially, and communally grounded limits on the
sultan’s power were replaced with a constitution, but the Ottomans did not survive the First World War.
Modern historians have suggested that the old idea of an unsustainably decrepit regime—the idea of
the Ottoman Empire as the “sick man of Europe”—was incorrect; in fact, the Ottomans could have
survived had they bet on a different side in the war or somehow survived it. We might call this short-
lived constitutional caliphate a fifth potential model of the caliphate.

The theory of the caliphate

Trying to separate the essence of the caliphate from its various manifestations, the Sunni tradition
theorized the caliphate meticulously, establishing the foundation of its obligation, its functions, nature,
and limits, and responding to its transformations while also trying to stay true to the Rashidun model.
This was a complex exercise; every disagreement that could be conceived was had, and the leading
jurist-theologians built and continually rethought a careful edifice of proofs and justifications.
Unsurprisingly, careful theorization of the institution took place first at the hands of the Sunni ulama in
the fifth/eleventh century precisely when the institution’s existence was threatened. The sheer
necessity of the caliphate for the continued unity and existence of the religious community during the
first two centuries made extensive theoretical defense superfluous, even though we find one of the
earliest preserved epistles in Islam, that of the Umayyad secretary ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd al-Kātib (d.
132/750), concerned with theorizing and defending the caliphate as a divinely mandated institution
that continued the Prophet’s mission.34

All surviving Muslim schools and sects agreed on the obligation of appointing one leader for the
Muslim community. The Sunnis and the Shiʿa agreed on this point but their conceptions of the office
differed. The Imami Shiʿa included belief in an imam—a chosen scion of the Alid family—in the very
definition of faith, and an obligation upon God (as a matter of luṭf, or divine grace), which meant that
knowing and believing in one true imam (even if he was not in power or physically existent) to be an
obligation upon all humans.35 The Zaydi Shiʿa believed in the right to rule of a scion of the Alid family,
but one who showed his fitness for the office by successfully rebelling against unjust rule and claiming
leadership. The Sunnis, in contrast, considered establishing the caliphate to be a collective obligation.
The difference is subtle: for the Shiʿa, not believing in the right imam is heretical and may
even invalidate one’s faith; for the Sunnis, failing to install a rightful imam or failing to strive to do so is
sinful. The Ibāḍīs—the moderate and the only Kharijite sect to survive past the formative period—
believe in the obligation of a just imam/caliph, but, unlike the Shiʿa and most Sunnis, and like most
post-Ottoman Sunnis, they do not require that the candidate be from Quraysh or any particular
lineage.36
Opinions varied as to the possibility of Islamic life without a caliph. Some, like al-Ghazali, went so far
as to deny the legitimacy of Islamic life under such conditions. Others, like his teacher and the chief
Ashʿari theologian and Shāfiʿī jurist of his time Abū al-Maʿālī al-Juwayni, considered such a scenario
in his brilliant, imaginative treatise Ghiyāth al-umam fī-l-tiyāth al-ẓulam.37 There he imagines dystopian
futures in which Muslims may not have a caliph with proper qualifications, or no caliph at all, leaving
the scholars to lead the community, and finally, the absence even of qualified scholars and instructions
about what Muslims might do in such cases. Not satisfied with citing a few indirect verses and solitary
(āḥād) ḥadiths, he insists that since the definitive obligation of the caliphate requires absolute proof, it
must be established on the basis of the consensus of the Companions, the highest imaginable
authority for a religious obligation.38 He argues that numerous rational people cannot agree on an
answer to a question that accepts multiple rational answers unless there is a reason, and that reason
in the case of the Companions must have been their shared understanding of the teachings of the
Qur’an and the Prophet ‫ﷺ‬. The consensus, therefore, was neither accidental nor one born out of mere
necessity. As the initial disagreement of the Medinan Helpers (Anṣār) in their meeting at the Portico of
Banū Sāʿida shows, it was arrived at after deliberation as Abū Bakr and ʿUmar saw clearly, and
everyone subsequently agreed, that its need was created by the indubitable obligations of Islam.

In the post-Mongol period (seventh/thirteenth-century onward), the earlier tendency to pragmatically

justify usurping strongmen in conditions of dire urgency and insecurity led to the justification of any
usurper who could defend the community or some part of it. The most original writers of this period,
including both Ibn Khaldun and Ibn Taymiyya, asserted the obligation of the caliphate but also broke
new ground in political thinking. Ibn Khaldun theorized the social, material, and psychological bases of
political power, thus giving birth to a theory of history and politics several centuries before such
thinking became common in the modern period. Ibn Taymiyya, without questioning the obligation of
the caliphate, recognized the utter inefficacy of the post-Mongol caliphate and sought to recover
communal vibrancy and an ascending political model in which upholding the Shariʿa became the
central dimension of the ruler’s legitimacy. Before the Mongol destruction of Baghdad, the caliphate
was seen as having created the world in which the Shariʿa could be articulated and developed. This
fact, coupled with the caliphate’s claim of continuity to the Prophet ‫ﷺ‬, was stronger than any particular
scriptural justification: the caliphate had been bigger than the Shariʿa. The ʿulamāʾ, like al-Mawardi
and al-Ghazali, provided proof for the caliphate only when they felt it was threatened. Now, in the post-
Mongol world, it was the Shariʿa that provided the impetus to create Islamic governments everywhere
until the proper caliphate could be restored. Ibn Taymiyya provided only the first arguments for such
Islamic politics; scholars from all schools subsequently—and especially in Ottoman political thought—
recognized this natural development of “Shariʿa politics.”39

To give substance and texture to the claims just put forth, let us consider a sampling of the types of
claims and justifications for the caliphate provided by scholars from a broad range of schools. The
encyclopedic Ẓāhirī scholar Ibn Ḥazm (d. 456/1064), writing in Spain and hence outside of the
traditional lands of the Abbasid caliphate, noted:

“All Ahl al-Sunnah, all Murjiʾa, all Shiʿa, and all Kharijites have agreed unanimously on the
obligation of the Imamate and that the Ummah has an obligation to obey a just Imam who
establishes the rulings of God over them, managing their affairs with the Law brought by
 the Messenger of God. The only exception are the Najadāt of the Kharijites, who said that
people have no obligation to have an imam; it is upon them, rather, to fulfill each other’s
rights.”40

Ibn Ḥazm’s reference is to a handful of radicals during the Second Civil War (AH 60–70s), when the
Kharijites and a few Muʿtazila could even question the obligation of the caliphate in the heady days of
early schisms. But then, even basic doctrines such as the authority of the hadith, the validity of rational
analogy, the righteousness of the last two Rashidun caliphs, and even the sanctity of Muslim life were
fair game for these groups. One such free-thinker argued almost counter-factually: if all believers
volunteered to live by the divine law, no government would be necessary. Note that he did not suggest
a secular government as an alternative, but denied the need for a political order altogether. Another
argued, almost hyper-factually, that this no-imam situation applied only in times of civil war, and
allegiance to no imam was necessary during one.41 On the whole, however, the necessity of a caliph
was far more unproblematically and unanimously agreed upon than many other doctrines now taken
to be fundamental.

The Creed (al-ʿAqāʾid al-Nasafiyya) of the leading Hanafi-Maturidi authority Abū Ḥafṣ al-Nasafī (d.
537/1142) reads: “Muslims must have an imam to enforce their rulings, establish ḥudūd, and defend
borders … .” Commenting on this, the Persian polymath and Ashʿari theologian al-Taftāzānī (d.
792/1390) wrote:

“There is consensus that installing an imam is an obligation. The disagreement is on

whether the obligation is upon God or upon creation, by revelational evidence or rational.
And [our] school holds that it is an obligation upon the creation through revelation, as the
Prophet ‫ ﷺ‬said, “Whoever dies without knowing the imam of his time dies in pre-
Islamic ignorance,”42 which is why the Ummah made the installing of an imam their utmost
concern, even before his burial (i.e., of the Prophet), and so it should be after the death of
every imam, as many obligations of the Sharīʿa depend on him.”43

Commenting on the situation in his day when the central lands of Islam, Syria, and Egypt, were under
the Mamluks and the east (Persia and Transoxiana) was ravaged by Tamerlane (Tīmūr Lang),
Taftāzānī explained why there must be only one imam for all regions:

“If it is said: why is it not sufficient to appoint a ruler in every region, or why is it obligatory
to appoint one who has the general authority (al-riyāsa al-ʿāmma)?” we say: because that
would lead to conflict and animosity, which would lead to the corruption of the affairs of
religion as well as this world, as we witness in our own times.”44

He then goes on to ask, in typical dialectic style, why a conqueror like the Turks of his day (he most
likely had Tamerlane in mind) could not suffice and why, therefore, there needed to be an imam. To
this, he responded that such a ruler over all Muslim lands would still fulfill some of the functions but
that “the matter of religion, the most important of all ends and the central pillar of all else, would be
corrupted without it.”45

Writing about the same time in the western parts of the Islamic world, the great historian and Mālikī
jurist Ibn Khaldun (d. 808/1406) summed up the consensus succinctly:

“Appointing a leader is obligatory. Its mandatory nature is known through revealed law by
the consensus of the Companions and the generation of the Followers. It is so because the
Companions of the Prophet (God’s peace and blessings be upon him) hastened, upon his
death, to pledge allegiance and submit consideration of their affairs to Abu Bakr (May God
be pleased with him). And it was thus in every age thereafter, and the matter was
established as consensus indicating the obligation of appointing a leader.”46
Ibn Khaldun then goes on to argue, in accordance with his Ashʿari commitments, that the obligation of
establishing the caliphate (like all other obligations) derives from the revealed law and not reason and
hence cannot be suspended by rational judgment.
It is an understatement to note that Ibn Khaldun upheld the caliphate; he wrote his masterpiece to
explain its history and advocate its return. A leading Western scholar of Islamic civilization, Hamilton
Gibb, argued that the caliphate occupied a central position in Ibn Khaldun’s thought. This can be
inferred from the way that his chapters are logically organized to culminate in the caliphate, where he
then discusses elaborately the organization associated with it before going on to analyze the causes
of the state’s decay and its final destruction. It is impossible to avoid the impression that he, in addition
to analyzing the evolution of political power and group solidarity, was, like other Muslim jurists of his
time, concerned with the problem of reconciling the ideal demands of the Shari‘a with the facts of
history.47 Others, including the Muʿtazila, Shiʿa, traditionalists like Ibn Taymiyya, argued that the
obligation of the caliphate, like all other obligations, is known by both revelation and reason.48

Scholars offered numerous reasons, or rational functions, that necessitate a government. For some,
these functions are the cause or part of the cause of the obligation; for others, they are its benefits, but
the obligation itself stands independent of any benefits. To those who emphasized the absolute ritual
necessity of the caliphate for the validity of Islamic life, such as al-Mawardi and, even more so, al-
Ghazali, it was an obligation to install a caliph even if he no longer possessed effective power
(shawka, munna) and had to depend on others (e.g., sultans) for upholding its basic functions. For
others, like al-Juwayni and Ibn Taymiyya, effective power to uphold the ḥudūd, maintain law and order,
and defend the community and its religion was a necessary ingredient of the definition of a caliph.

The ʿulamāʾ have continued to faithfully reproduce this line of reasoning until today. An
eleventh-/seventeenth-century Damascene jurist notes in his authoritative compendium of Hanafi
jurisprudence:

“The major imama (khilāfa) is the right of general disposal over the people. Its investigation
is in Kalam (i.e., theology) and establishing it is the most important of obligations. Hence,
they (the Companions) gave it priority over the burial of the Possessor of Miracles49.‫ﷺ‬

Why has the caliphate been so central to Islamic creed? Chiefly, because it was the defining problem
of Islam—as Trinity was for Christianity. Theorizing the rightful leadership of the community was
central to defining faith since the early splinter sects had called into question the mainstream
community’s rectitude and fitness as the carrier and embodiment of God’s message. Justifying the
rectitude of the community that preserved the Qur’an and the Sunnah of the Prophet ‫ ﷺ‬was, therefore,
the central ‘problem space’ within which much of Islamic thinking was formed during the first two
centuries of Islam.50

The first instance of the Companions’ unanimous decision to declare political unity of the Muslims a
top concern, reflected in the election of Abu Bakr, was truly consolidated in their consensus to go to
war against those who had seceded from the Medinan authority. They did not merely express abstract
opinions on the matter but took up arms on its basis. In doing so, they followed the Prophet’s own
conduct toward those who abandoned the community or tried to divide it.51 This initial consensus of
the Companions was confirmed time and again. The next clear confirmation of consensus is
witnessed when ʿAli (based in Iraq) battled against Muʿawiya (based in Syria) at Ṣiffīn; ʿAli never
entertained the idea of splitting the difference and dividing the Muslim community into two halves to
avert the bloodshed, which turned out to be massive. Similarly, when ʿAbdallāh b. al-Zubayr in Mecca
confronted the Umayyads in Syria, dividing the community for the sake of peace was similarly never
considered a possibility. When Ibn ʿUmar and other leading authorities refused to give allegiance to
Ibn al-Zubayr, they did so precisely on this basis: the community had not united under him yet.52
The classical Sunni ʿulamāʾ’s view of the functions of the caliph is best captured in a statement
attributed to Imam ʿAli. When the radicals in his army contested his right as the leader to accept
arbitration in the battle against the Syrian rebels, he responded by emphasizing the necessity of a
human leader to govern the affairs of the umma:

“ʿAli said, “People must have leadership (imāra), be it pious or impious.” They asked, “O
Commander of the Faithful, we understand the pious, but why if it is impious?” He said, “By
it [legal] ḥudūd are established, public streets are protected, jihād is made against the
enemy, and the spoils are divided.”53

If government in general was a rational necessity, the caliphate was seen as the properly Islamic form
of government. A helpful analogy to understand this is marriage, the pairing of males and females for
companionship and reproduction: all human cultures settle on some form of this institution, adding to it
constraints, ceremonies, rituals, and invocations of blessings. An Islamic marriage is not
fundamentally different in terms of its basic function, but many forms of cohabitation prevalent in other
traditions are prohibited and certain constraints, rituals, and legal norms added to it make of it a
distinctively Islamic form of marriage. Ibn Taymiyya, thus, explains in al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya:

“It must be known that the governmental authority (wilāya) of people’s affairs is one of the
greatest obligations of religion, and, in fact, the religion cannot be established without it, for
the well-being of the Children of Adam cannot be secured except by their coming together
to fulfill each other’s needs. . . This is why all things that [God] has obligated, such
as jihād, justice, establishment of the pilgrimage, Friday congregations, Eid festivals, aiding
the oppressed, and the establishment of God’s ḥudūd can only be established with power
and authority.”54

What sets the caliphate apart from any other government is, first and foremost, formally speaking, the
constitutive principle (its source, limits, ends, and functions).
The definitive classical work on the caliphate was authored by al-Mawardi, the chief judge of Baghdad
and the leading Shāfiʿī of his time. It gave the standard description of the caliph, namely, that a caliph
is “the successor of the Prophet who protects the religion and manages and governs worldly affairs of
the community by it.”55

Nearly all definitions mention these elements, namely, that a caliph

1. stands in the Prophet’s place, but is neither a prophet nor infallible, and commands the
allegiance of the entire Muslim community, and
2. governs the religious and worldly affairs of the Prophet’s community, which effectively means
that he protects the religion, defends borders, upholds law and order, and (re)distributes
resources.
In other words, a caliph is defined as the leader of all followers of the Prophet Muhammad ‫ ﷺ‬and
not primarily as the ruler of a territory, a country, a sect, or a chosen group of Muslims—even though
he inevitably rules over and defends the territory of Muslims.56

Caliphate is not kingship

Since the earliest times, Muslims made a distinction between a properly Islamic government, which
they came to call khilāfa, and political authority in general, which they called mulk. It should be noted
that the word mulk has dual connotations in the Arabic language: it could simply refer to any kind of
political authority, one particular species of which would be the Islamic caliphate. It could also denote,
pejoratively, the stereotypical kingship characterized by arbitrary power in which the ruler treats his
subject and wealth as his personal property. As noted earlier, the early Muslims avoided using the
term malik (king) for their ruler because they despised the inegalitarianism implied by this term.57 A
revealing hadith is reported in al-Bukhari, where Companion Jarir b. Abdallāh states that a wise man
from Yaman told him,
 “You O Arabs will do well so long as you consult when your chief dies, for when it is taken
by the sword, they become kings (mulūk), their wrath is like the wrath of kings and their
pleasure is the pleasure of kings.”58

This distinction remained operative throughout the medieval period. A Mālikī scholar al-Maqarrī al-
Tilimsānī answered revealingly when some Sufi mendicants (fuqarāʾ) asked him about Muslims’
misfortune with respect to their kings (mulūk), who often act without fairness and piety. He answered,

“It is so because kingship (mulk) is not in our Law (sharʿ); rather, it is in the law of those
before us, as God mentioning His favors upon the Israelites. . . . He [God] has
not legitimized for us anything but khilāfa.”59

Al-Maqarrī then goes on to identify the difference between the two as primarily relating to whether one
treats authority as personal and passes it on to one’s sons dynastically. What makes the caliphate
different from kingship, then, is that in the former, the interests of the umma are front and center and
authority is exercised as a trust.
Ibn Taymiyya is even more explicit. The obligation is not fulfilled with kingship, even if there be one just
king over all Muslims, but the obligation is to install a caliph, an accountable ruler who will wield power
as a trust, in the footsteps of the Prophet ‫ ﷺ‬and the early caliphs, rather than arbitrarily.

“The question arises whether kingship (mulk) is lawful and the Prophetic caliphate simply
preferred or whether it is unlawful and may only be justified in the absence of the
knowledge [that is it obligatory] or the power to establish the caliphate.

In our view, kingship is essentially unlawful, and the obligation is to establish a prophetic
caliphate. This is because the Prophet ‫ ﷺ‬said, “You must follow my practice and the
practice of the rightly guided caliphs after me; stick to it and hold fast to it. Refrain from
(unjustified) innovations and remember that every (such) innovation is an error” … This
hadith is therefore a command; it exhorts us to follow necessarily the practice of the
Caliphate (of the Prophet), enjoins us to abide by it, and warns us against deviation from it.
It is a command from him and definitely makes the establishment of the caliphate a duty …
Again, the fact that the Prophet ‫ ﷺ‬expressed his dislike for the kingship that would follow
the prophetic caliphate proves that kingship lacks in something that is compulsory in
religion… Those who justify monarchy argue from the words of the Prophet ‫ ﷺ‬to
Muʿawiya, “If you acquire kingship, be good and kind.”60 But there is no (cogent) argument
in this … The establishment of the caliphate is an obligatory duty, and exemption from it
may be permitted only on grounds of necessity.”61

The loss
The religious necessity of the caliphate remained unquestioned until the twentieth century, when the
arguments for abolishing the Ottoman caliphate were articulated by Turkish nationalists and made
palatable, at least to the elite, by a century of secularization and Europeanization. A fateful moment in
this transition was the seven-hour long speech by an Ottoman modernist scholar, Seyyid Bey, in the
Turkish Grand National Assembly (TGNA) in 1924, in which he made the case for a Turkish republic,
tragically, on Islamic grounds.62 The Kemalists’ aggressive secularization campaign and violent de-
Islamization of social life in the following decades was certainly not part of Seyyid Bey’s plan, but he
was not the first nor the last scholar to be used as an intellectual mercenary and then discarded by a
strongman. What Atatürk did next, suffice it to say, inspired Hitler and Mussolini.63
The most influential theoretical defense of the abolition of the caliphate and defense of what might be
called political secularism came in the wake of the dissolution of the caliphate when the Azhar-trained
Egyptian scholar ʿAli ʿAbd al-Raziq (1888–1966) wrote his al-Islām wa-uṣūl al-ḥukm (Islam and the
Foundations of Rule, 1925). He argued that Islam is a private religion and all political actions of the
Prophet ‫ ﷺ‬and his successors (that is, the caliphs) were accidental and conceptually separate from
Islam as a religion. ʿAbd al-Raziq had spent two years at Oxford when his education was cut short by
WWI, and his family had played a founding role in the Liberal Constitutionalist Party (Ḥizb al-Aḥrār al-
Dustūriyyīn, a breakaway from the Wafd, which was a secular nationalist anticolonial party; the Ḥizb
al-Aḥrār had an even more secular agenda as it advocated the emulation of Western countries). ʿAli
ʿAbd al-Raziq himself was a politician and had run, unsuccessfully, for a seat in the Parliamentary
elections of 1923-24 on the party’s ticket.64 He wrote, in short, as a politician with a clear agenda, not
merely a scholar, although posterity has misread his work as a heroic heresy with mystical depth. His
book betrays a forced, ahistorical reading of both the Prophet’s mission and the succeeding caliphs
and an equally shallow understanding of modernity. The Azhari establishment condemned the book
and formally defrocked its author, and the leading scholars of the Muslim world authored numerous
detailed refutations.65 In fact, ʿAli ʿAbd al-Raziq’s controversial book ended up focusing the attention
of the leading scholars of the twentieth century on this question, furnishing, in defense of the caliphate,
the closest example in the modern period of a renewed consensus of leading Islamic authorities
across the world. The power of an argument, however, often lies not in its theoretical cogency but in its
timeliness. The Arab nationalists and secularists could not have asked for a better way to boost their
agenda.

Did the Prophet ‫ ﷺ‬establish a state?

ʿAli ʿAbd al-Raziq’s case was based on the argument that the Prophet’s ‫ ﷺ‬message was religious and
spiritual, not political. He offered as evidence the claim that the Qur’an never commanded the
caliphate, nor did the Sunna.66 He must have known that the Qur’an not mentioning or naming a thing
is barely an argument for its non-obligation or non-validity. After all, the Qur’an does not give the
number of the daily prayers, nor specify the geographic coordinates of the city in which the Prophet of
Islam ‫ ﷺ‬was born, nor that in which he is buried, etc.; these are known only through the transmission
of such knowledge through the Companions and the succeeding generations. The Qur’an, the
scholars had generally argued, mentions the direct and indirect obligation for the believing community
(referred to in the Qur’an as the believers or the umma) to be united under a ruler from among them
and contains numerous constitutional, political, and legal commandments—rules that can only be
implemented in an autonomous Islamic polity. The signification of direct commands like 4:59 (“Obey …
those in authority among you”)67 was consolidated by innumerable indirect commands and references.
For instance,

1. the imperative to be a distinct community whose members were forbidden to make

compromising alliances with outsiders;
2. the command to make war, peace, and political treaties as a sovereign community;
3. obeying no other law but God’s, hence requiring the community to be legally sovereign;
4. upholding the Law in all areas of collective life, including the penal code, marital and social life,
commercial and financial regulations, and so on; and finally,
5. a distinct “foreign policy” as the Prophet ‫ ﷺ‬dispatched epistles to the neighboring sovereigns and
emperors (which implied the obligation on his successors to follow up on them), in addition to his
punitive campaigns against claimants of prophecy like Ṭalḥa, Musaylima, and other tribes that
acted treacherously and rebelliously after entering Islam,68 and his command to prepare a
punitive campaign on the Roman border just before his return to his Lord, and so on.
All of these factors required, beyond doubt, that the followers of the Prophet ‫ ﷺ‬form a sovereign
political community and control, if not monopolize, the means of violence. The aforementioned are
historically undisputed facts that indicate that his successors merely obeyed his commands and
continued his policies. From a historical perspective, had the Companions and then the Umayyads not
continued the Prophet’s political and military activism, Islam would have been little more than forgotten
tribal lore in history.
The Sunnah has been far more explicit on the question of successorship. Numerous hadiths
command obedience to those who succeeded the Prophet ‫ ﷺ‬as mentioned in Ibn Taymiyya’s quote
above. In fact, ʿAli ʿAbd al-Raziq seems to have been unaware that the leading ʿulamāʾ had
addressed his concerns at great length. Al-Juwayni, being an Ashʿarite who did not accept unitary
hadiths (āḥād) as grounds for certitude, limiting definitive knowledge to multiple concurrent (mutawātir)
reports alone, had written his aforementioned work explicitly to furnish an incontrovertible proof for the
necessity of the caliphate. In contrast, Ibn Taymiyya, who emphatically argued for the possibility of
certitude based on less-than-concurrent reports and for the efficacy of reason in establishing religious
obligation, did not shy away from using numerous sound hadiths in establishing the same while also
appealing to consensus and rational arguments.69
ʿAbd al-Raziq’s crucial error, however, was conceptual: he seems to have picked up the modern
religion-versus-politics dichotomy during his sojourn in Europe and, unaware that these were recently
constructed categories foreign to Islam and perturbed by the autocratic tendencies of the rulers who
used religion to prop up their decadence, applied them to Islamic theology and history. To anyone not
schooled in western secularism, it would seem arbitrary and unjustifiable to declare certain Qur’anic
and Sunnaic commandments ‘religious’ and others ‘secular.’

What gaveʿAbd al-Raziq’s attack its potency was that he knew the stakes well: he not only
undermined the aforementioned scriptural evidence and traditional discourse on the subject, but went
for the jugular by attacking Abu Bakr and the rest of the Companions for the ridda wars that were the
first step in consolidating the Medinan political authority in Arabia. According to ʿAbd al-Raziq, they
had essentially agreed, willingly or unwillingly, with Abu Bakr to engage in a worldly war in the name of
religion against perfectly good Muslim tribes who merely resisted Medinan authority.70 Wittingly or not,
ʿAbd al-Raziq was willing to discard not only consensus but also the integrity of the closest
Companions around the Final Messenger of God, the same men whose integrity is assured in the
Qur’an, and indeed, the integrity of whose consensus is the only guarantee of the preservation of the
Qur’an itself. Together, this coupling forms the very foundation of Islam.

Longing for the caliphate

To appreciate how deeply Muslims have felt the ideal of continuity and unity embodied in the caliphate,
it helps to get a glimpse of how the loss of and rupture in the caliphate have been historically
experienced at not only political but also emotional and cultural levels. Islamic studies scholar Mona
Hassan has richly chronicled this experience in the wake of the Mongol sacking of Baghdad in
656/1258 and then again some seven centuries later in 1924.71

Numerous Islamic scholars, activists, and transnational movements have kept alive the idea of a union
of Muslims over the past century. Whereas most such groups consider a reconstituted caliphate a by-
product of their revivalist and reformist activities, a few such movements have made it their primary
objective. For groups most directly dedicated to resurrecting the caliphate like Ḥizb al-Taḥrīr (The
Liberation Party) of Palestinian-Jordanian and Tanzeem-e-Islami (The Islamic Organization) of South
Asian provenance, now both international, caliphate is not only a fruit of collaboration among reformed
Muslim societies and states but the political end of the struggle as well as the instrument of attaining a
desirable state of affairs and warding off internal and foreign threats to Muslims.72 Over the course of
the twentieth century, ambitious political leaders of Muslim states have worked to create links and
institutions at the international level to inch toward greater pan-Islamic collaboration. In the post-WWII
era of developmentalist policies, nation-state politics largely trumped any serious attempts.73 Today,
such aspirations have resurfaced once again.74 Non-state actors, like the ones mentioned earlier,
have been more successful in keeping the idea alive. The most significant ones have been the socio-
religious reformist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood (in Arabic speaking countries) and
Jamaat-e Islami (in South Asia) that have sought to restore the caliphate only as a distant goal, never
making it their priority. Only in times of crisis, such as the Israeli occupation of Palestine, would the
pan-Islamic sentiment find a vent. In the era of statism (1940s–80s), the Islamic movements mobilized
the masses to take the helms of various states. They often failed, and where they succeeded, as in
Iran and Sudan, they often discovered that the internal, secularizing logic of the nation-state model
was far stronger than their own ideological aspirations and often succumbed to repression, corruption,
and self-serving regional and geopolitical concerns. Statehood never seriously took root in the Muslim
world, and whereas socially, Islamism became increasingly popular, it never fulfilled its promise. The
idea of the caliphate remained on the backburner as the ultimate goal that had to be realized as the
final step after the attainment of democracy and progress.75

The present: Failing states

The Arab Revolt (1916–1918) began a century and God-knows-how-much-longer era of political
illegitimacy and instability in the Arab Middle East. Today, the region is increasingly convulsive. One
contemporary historian notes, linking the fall of the Ottoman Caliphate to the malaise in the
contemporary Middle East,

“I think everyone is rational to be pessimistic about the prospects for the region. None of
these problems have a short-term solution.”76

Similarly, in his aptly titled A Peace to End All Peace (1989), historian David Fromkin wrote, reflecting
on the continuing legacy of the European partitioning of the region:

“Continuing local opposition, whether on religious grounds or others, to the settlement of

1922 or to the fundamental assumptions upon which it was based, explains the
characteristic feature of the region’s politics: that in the Middle East there is no sense of
legitimacy—no agreement on rules of the game—and no belief, universally shared in the
region, that within whatever boundaries, the entities that call themselves countries or the
men who claim to be rulers are entitled to recognition as such. In that sense, successors to
the Ottoman sultans have not yet been permanently installed.”77

Today, the future of Muslim nation-states is less certain than it has ever been over the last century. At
least one reason for the unlikeliness—and, in the words of one scholar, the impossibility—of the
nation-state is ideological: Islam.78 That is, given the deep roots of Islam in these societies, alternative
attempts at constructing legitimacy through secular—whether nationalist, regional, leftist-
internationalist, or other—narratives have failed. As the Arab scholar Nazih Ayubi described it in his
influential study Overstating the Arab State (1996), twentieth-century post-colonial Arab states are not
strong but fierce—meaning, they are weak, illegitimate, and hence ferocious.79 Because they do not
command people’s broad allegiance (but only that of the elite benefitting from them), they can only
assert control through brute force, often combined with and legitimated through extraneous factors
such as regional threats and animosities (e.g., Israel, Zionists, crusaders, Shiʿa, Sunnis, etc.) and the
exploitation of religious and ethnic divisions. As the elite realized the failure of their secular programs,
especially with the failure of Nasser-led Arab nationalism and the epic humiliation of the Arab armies at
the hands of Israel in 1967, they hoped to exploit Islam more effectively. The results have been
unimpressive for a number of reasons.

First, although the rulers could control some of the ʿulamāʾ and religious institutions, Sunni Islam has
never been amenable to a clerical hierarchy, and such attempts invariably engender or strengthen
alternative, competing claims of religious authority. An example is the Egyptian state’s attempt to
control the ancient al-Azhar University. Islam being a strongly scripturalist religion, the spread of
literacy only facilitates the availability of its anti-authoritarian, if not anti-clerical, message to all
believers. The same spirit of Islam that had thwarted the absolutist ambitions of the Umayyad (in the
form of rebellions) and then the Abbasid caliphs (in the form of the heroic resistance of Imam Ahmad
b. Hanbal) refuses to be manipulated by the military autocrats and monarchs of today. Another, and
perhaps the most important, ideological factor obstructing Islam’s recruitment in the nation-building
project is the global nature of the Islamic community and the essentially territorial nature of the modern
state.

This illegitimacy of the state in Muslim-majority regions has had devastating consequences. Terrorism
has been a direct and unavoidable consequence. These insecure, weak, and fierce states inevitably
govern through repression and turn religious and cultural authorities into mercenaries against their
own societies. Weaponing globalism for their cause, the autocrats hire global mercenary “ʿulamāʾ”
against socially invested scholars. The oppressed inevitably look to the international community, which
seldom helps except when moved by its own interests. This further deepens the illegitimacy of the
state on the one hand and the distrust of any would-be reformers (who now can be labeled by the
autocrats as foreign agents) on the other.

The secular theology of the modern state

These problems are not accidental but essential to any state that has to contend with a popular
religion that it cannot re-create for its own purposes. In addition, Islam is conceptually unique in its
ability to challenge modernity not only theologically but also politically through its own compelling
notions of belonging, solidarity, rule-of-law, and tolerance for plurality. Aspects of this Islamic
exceptionalism have been recognized by both scholars who study the tradition as well as those who
investigate the lived experience.80
No nation-state can do without demanding near-total loyalty to the state and exclusion of outside
interests and influences. It makes and implements laws and makes life-and-death decisions, drafting
citizens to kill and die for its interests. In a liberal democracy with an impartial judiciary, this demand is
presumably not arbitrary and the powers of the state are checked, but this is rarely the case in reality.
Liberal democracies have shown themselves to be helpless before predatory capitalism and
incompatible with religious commitment, community ethics, and now ecological sustainability. Lacking
any collective and transcendent moral ideals, citizens in the modern state are either manipulated by
large, multinational corporations or ethno-nationalist demagogues, or both. Liberal democratic or not,
the modern state effectively functions as the absolute arbiter of the law, ethics, and lives of its citizens.

The modern nation-state, precisely defined, is an institution foreign to Islam in any of its recognizable
forms. Commonplace knowledge to the scholars of Islamic tradition and history, this incompatibility
has been powerfully argued recently by Wael Hallaq’s important book The Impossible State. He
contends that the modern nation-state is an amoral, if not immoral, institution, and an unsuitable home
to Islam. His case, however, is based on a particular notion of the ‘state,’ and this has caused much
confusion among non-specialists. A digression to clarify this claim, therefore, is in order.
Whether and when we can use the term ‘state’ to describe the early Islamic forms of government
depends on how we settle the thorny question of the definition of the state. The modern state has so
ubiquitously conquered the contemporary world and imagination as to threaten all historical
understanding and along with that, any historically extended and authentic alternative. European
intellectual historians generally agree that the concept of the state emerged in Europe between 1300
and 1600 due to a number of specific developments.81 What set it apart from any prior form of rule is
the confluence of a number of conceptions that constructed the state as “an omnipotent yet
impersonal power”: (a) the state as a separate legal and constitutional order that governs, abstracted
and distinct from the monarch or the officials who hold office, (b) the state as the sole source of law,
exclusive of God, the Church, or the Holy Roman Empire, within its own territory, and (c) the state as
the sole appropriate object of its citizens’ allegiance.82 Secularity, territoriality, abstraction (i.e.,
impersonality), and sovereignty are thus held to be the necessary ingredients of the modern state.
This maximalist definition of the state employed by historians is to be contrasted with the more widely
employed minimalist definitions, such as the one offered by Charles Tilly, who sees states as
“coercion-wielding organizations that are distinct from households and kinship groups and exercise
clear priority in some respects over all other organizations within substantial territories.”83 The
Medinan order certainly represented such a ‘state’ by the time the Prophet ‫ ﷺ‬passed away, one that
was further consolidated by the end of Abu Bakr’s reign. This latter use of the term, however, is too
imprecise to be meaningful, and, following Hallaq, we are better off using the term ‘government’ or,
better yet, ‘governance’ rather than ‘state’ to capture the essence of premodern Islamic forms of
political authority.

Strictly speaking, the modern state is an abstract, impersonal institution apart from any particular
individuals or dynasties that hold its reigns. Being a seventeenth-century European development, it is
a new species of power foreign to Islamic theology or jurisprudence. Political philosophers and
historians have long suggested that as an institution, it assumes the powers that belonged to God in
traditional Christianity. To quote Carl Schmitt in his essay “Political Theology,” perhaps the most
quoted words in modern political theory:

“All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological
concepts not only because of their historical development—in which they were transferred
from [Christian] theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent
God became the omnipotent lawgiver—but also because of their systematic structure, the
recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts.”84

The obvious thing to note in this observation is that the theological origins and pretensions of political
concepts define the modern state: sovereignty (a god-like, unquestionable authority to make laws and
decide exceptions to them), territory (a bounded area where the sovereignty of the state is supreme),
national community (the believers in the nation’s greatness and mythic past), and citizenship (rights
given to individuals on the basis of relation to the state, denied to non-citizens),85 and so on. But its
greater insight, I think, is to point out the ideologically secular structure of the state; it is not an empty
space to be filled by whatever ideology, but possesses one of its own. This is what Wael Hallaq
alludes to in the following passage:

“Modern Islamist discourses assume the modern state to be a neutral tool of governance,
one that can be harnessed to perform certain functions according to the choices and
dictates of its leaders. [It can be turned into] … an Islamic state implementing the values
and ideals enshrined in the Qur’an and those that the Prophet had once realized in his
“mini-state” of Medina. … [This is not so.] It inherently [emphasis in the original] produces
certain distinctive effects that are political, social, economic, cultural, epistemic, and, no
less, psychological, which is to say that the state fashions particular knowledge systems
that in turn determine and shape the landscape of individual and collective subjectivity and
thus much of the meaning of its subjects’ lives.”86

One of the reasons for this ideological power of the state is that the state is its own lawgiver, judge,
and executioner. This awesome and total power devolves to a seemingly immaterial, abstract entity
but, in reality, is always wielded by some group of men. Furthermore, these authorities of the modern
state are enforced (of course, always selectively) by global powers in the name of the international
agreement that is the nation-state system. When the powers of this leviathan were found too absolute,
the ideas of institutional checks and balances and the separation of powers inscribed in a constitution
and democratic processes were born. Yet, all these checks and balances reside within the state. In
imperfect democracies (are there any perfect ones?), the totality of this power becomes clearer, and
the separation of powers becomes often less than effective. But, as numerous legal historians have
argued, the separation-of-powers hypothesis does not hold in reality in even the most institutionally
developed nation-states like the United States.87 When the state acts as a unified actor, as in times of
real or fabricated crises, wars, and triumphs—which are potentially continual or even constant—it acts
as an absolute power, a “mortal god,” as the Leviathan, a mythic creature of unlimited power—as
imagined by the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes.

The insurmountable trouble for Islamic theology is not that the rulers as individuals may go rogue or
engage in war, enact discriminatory policies, and arbitrary executions, which are all comprehensible
evils and inevitable realities in political life. Religious authorities have always felt free to invoke Islamic
norms to critique and censure the rulers, at times even justifying armed rebellion. Rather, the
“impossibility” of the modern state within an Islamic framework, as argued by Hallaq and others, is that
the state is, by definition as well as structurally, supreme. Religious opinions and institutions are
authorized by the state, not the other way around. Even if the state elite are “Muslim” or “Islamic,”
these scholars argue, structurally the modern state cannot be Islamic; it is secular and secularizing.
And yet, being secular has never stopped the state elite anywhere, including in Europe and America,
from exploiting religion to further their ends. The idea of an Islamic state, therefore, is an oxymoron,
and the experiences of the actual states that have claimed to be Islamic over the last several decades
only confirm this.
Another, and even more concrete, incommensurability with the demands of the modern state’s
territorial sovereignty is that Islam brooks no differentiation of rights and duties of Muslims based on
regional or territorial affiliation. Numerous scriptural commandments of solidarity and mutual support
make it impossible to cut off Muslims in one region from the needs, rights, wealth, and suffering of
other Muslims, except on temporary and pragmatic grounds. To act in response to the oppression of
the Rohingya, the Uyghurs, the Palestinians, and the Kashmiris is, therefore, a direct Qur’anic
command to all Muslims, a command whose enactment is subject only to considerations of distance
and feasibility. A political structuration that circumscribes the loyalties of individuals to the territorial
boundaries of the state is in essential conflict with Islam. Even more problematic to the demands of a
territorial state is its citizens’ allegiance to a religious authority emanating from outside its borders. The
widespread scholarly, intellectual, and Sufi networks that have defined the lands of Islam in the past
continue to pose a challenge to the demands of the nation-state. Of course, limited municipal or
administrative independence of territorial or regional governments is indeed possible (and desirable),
but the sovereignty claimed by the nation-state goes far beyond this. It is, therefore, crucial to
distinguish the state, an abstract and sovereign entity, from government, the name for the
administrative and legal apparatus in a region. Accordingly, the imagination of a future caliphate must
not be deluded into thinking that local governments, institutions, communities, and histories must be
destroyed to create a regional superstate.

Many other critiques of the nation-state can be made, and indeed have been made, but our purpose is
not to offer a comprehensive critique but to present some reasons for why the nation-state has had
such a deeply troubled career in the lands of Islam, and why the end of the nation-state may offer a
historical opportunity for the reconstitution of a more Islamic and humane form of political existence for
Muslims.