Recent calls for the restoration of an Islamic caliphate have been met with fear in some quarters and scepticism in others. Could it really happen? David Rutledge spoke to writers and activists who believe that the historical conditions may be more favourable than we think.

Since the Ottoman Caliphate was abolished in 1924, the issue of its restoration has been simmering away throughout the Muslim world. Since July this year, however, when a man calling himself Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi appeared in Mosul’s grand mosque and proclaimed himself caliph of a new global Islamic order, calling all Muslims to flock to his banner—the black flag of IS—the issue has taken on new urgency.

The majority opinion among Australian Muslims seems to be that IS is a disgrace to the faith, and that their claim to the loyalty of Muslims worldwide is Islamically invalid. The question remains, however: could the restoration of the caliphate—a pan-Islamic political entity under sharia law, occupying territory currently under the jurisdiction of nation states—be a realistic prospect?

The choice for policymakers is whether they want to imitate King Canute and try to hold back the tide of history, or whether they can try to accommodate a world that has many centres and many narratives, and find strength in that diversity, not fear. Salman Sayyid, author

It depends on who you ask. For Paul Heck, associate professor of Islamic Studies at Georgetown University in Washington DC, the caliphate is neither possible nor really necessary.

‘Muslims don’t need a caliphate to be Muslims,’ he says. ‘They’ve got their scholars, they’ve got their local organisations, and to be honest, I think religion flourishes much more on the local level, rather than having this central institution that says, “We represent Islam.” Then it becomes bureaucratised, it becomes centralised, and that just turns off the human spirit.'

‘You see it now, you have all these ministries of religious affairs in Muslim majority societies. They define what your beliefs are, and it just turns people off, it turns off a lot of the youth.’

‘I just don’t see the international order suddenly being dismantled. The ruler in Rabat, or the ruler in Riyadh, or the ruler in Jakarta, or in Turkey—they’re not going to suddenly want to give up their jobs. There’s too much invested at the moment in the assumptions of the nation state’.

Listen: Arab armies and the struggle against IS

For others, such as Uthman Badar of Hizb ut-Tahrir—an international political group dedicated to the restoration of the caliphate, whose spokesperson Wassim Doureihi was grilled by Emma Alberici on ABC TV’s Lateline this week—the nation state is precisely what the caliphate comes to dismantle. He sees the caliphate as a vast aggregation of provinces, where national presidents and prime ministers are recast as provincial governors.

Badar does not imagine that current leaders of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere will happily step aside and cede their authority to a new caliph, but nor does he foresee a bloodbath.

‘It’s a struggle; this is not just a proposal among other proposals that we’re submitting to the parliaments of these countries. Our party has been banned from day one in every single Muslim majority country that we’ve operated in. What we’re calling for, according to them, is treasonous. We’re very clear about that: we’re seeking radical revolutionary change.’

‘But that doesn’t necessarily mean war. We seek public opinion, working among the people—and among those who have power and influence—to convince them that this is both a religious obligation and the need of the time. We don’t adopt violence or material struggle as a means of change. The material struggle may seem more sexy in certain regards, and more of a shortcut, but it’s not. It doesn’t work.’

According to Badar, the significance of IS’s claim to have restored the caliphate has as much to do with the international response to that claim as the validity of the claim itself.

‘In origin I don’t think it’s different to any of the other armed groups who at various times have claimed similar things—not the caliphate, but the establishment of an Islamic state,’ he says. ‘We had the Shabab in Somalia, we’ve had other groups in North Africa, but the difference here is really how powerful states and the media have responded, in order to prove that there’s a massive threat, and to justify intervention.’

‘[IS] is doing a number of actions that are very concerning, that we don’t agree with, in terms of how it’s dealing with certain minorities in the region—these beheadings that we’ve seen—but the approach I’d take is to talk about the act, and not necessarily about it being done by a particular group.’

‘I’m happy to say I absolutely oppose the beheading and the killing of journalists and aid workers. I oppose that 100 per cent, it’s not condoned Islamically.’

Such assurances will do little to sway the opinion of anyone to whom the word ‘caliphate’ means forced conversion at the point of a sword, rather than the gentle appeal to hearts and minds. The conditions for its restoration, however, could have less to do with Islamic militancy than with developments on the secular liberal side of the ideological divide.

‘While the triumphant claims of “the end of history” and the beginning of the so-called New World Order were derided at the time in some quarters and have subsequently been exposed as erroneous, it may be that the end of the Western history is in sight, where the dominant narratives, universals and hegemonic discourses that have stemmed from the West throughout the 20th and 21st centuries are not only challenged, but eventually overturned,’ writes Reza Pankhurst in his 2013 book The Inevitable Caliphate?

‘As the people of the Middle East and beyond find their voice and are able to articulate their demands for good governance publicly, it would be foolish to try to sideline those who propose Islamic solutions.’

There are some who, in these panicky times, will discern a hint of menace in that quote. ‘Islamic solutions’ raises the spectre of sharia law, that terrifying term which for many people symbolises a medieval array of human rights abuses, particularly against non-Muslims.

It’s often forgotten that for great swathes of the caliphate’s history, Christians and Jews lived harmoniously alongside their Muslim neighbours. But given the depth of sectarian animosity in the Islamic world today and the extreme antipathy displayed among fundamentalist Muslims towards all manifestations of secular liberalism, it’s hard to imagine that an Islamic polity under sharia law wouldn’t raise serious concerns about the rights of minorities under its rule.

That might especially apply to those who align with what Catholic theologian and gay rights activist James Allison calls the ‘non-pathological minority variant’ on the spectrum of human sexuality (it’s hard, as yet, to imagine Islamic jurists being happy with the ‘non-pathological’ part of that description).

Reza Pankhurst, however, is not arguing the toss over whether the caliphate would be a good thing or a bad thing. His point is simply that sooner or later, these issues are going to leave the realm of the speculative and arrive on the doorstep of the west. That won’t be because of a return to medievalism, but precisely the opposite: as western hegemony continues its supposed slow decline, the caliphate begins to look more and more like a credible vision of the future. You could say it’s postmodern—not in the sense of sceptical, anti-essentialist, or given to celebrating the anarchic free play of the floating signifier (far from it) but in the literal sense of ‘what comes after modernity’.

The erosion of the nation state—that central plank of modernity—is nothing new. National borders have meant little to the global economy for decades now. The movement of human populations, whether within large supra-national entities such as the EU or between sovereign nations in leaky boats, increasingly undermines the viability of that chimerical entity known as border security.

As larger and larger Muslim communities find themselves living outside Muslim-majority nations, coming into contact with other Muslims from different parts of the world, the sense of pan-Islamic connection becomes stronger—a sense that is only strengthened when these minority communities consider themselves under threat. As Muslims see themselves, rightly or wrongly, as targets of suspicion in non-Muslim societies, Islam’s self-perception as a trans-national entity becomes stronger.

‘Ultimately, what I think the caliphate represents for most ordinary Muslims is a symbol in which Muslims matter in the world, in which Muslims have a mechanism to direct their concerns at some institutional framework, with some idea that this would be effective,’ says Salman Sayyid, author of Recalling the Caliphate.

‘In the absence of that kind of political mechanism, you open the road to perpetual violence. That’s where we are. The level of insurgencies, terrorism, whatever you want to call it, is directly related to the absence of institutional mechanisms.’

Dreaming of the Caliphate Saturday 11 October 2014 Listen to this documentary to hear the full story at Encounter. More This [series episode segment] has image, and transcript

The institutional mechanisms on offer to Muslim minorities in the west, according to Sayyid, are looking less and less viable.

‘The caliphate is an attempt to accept that the nation state model is not fit for purpose in a world of globalisation. It’s not an attempt to go back to the Middle Ages, it’s really an attempt to try to have a future in which you are the authors of your own future, rather than reading someone else’s script.’

‘We are now moving towards the decentring of the west, and you see the struggles in nearly all western societies—Australia, the UK, the United States, Canada—all of them are struggling with this possibility.’

‘The choice for policymakers is whether they want to imitate King Canute and try to hold back the tide of history, or whether they can try to accommodate a world that has many centres and many narratives, and find strength in that diversity, not fear.’

So is a restored caliphate likely?

‘Dreams can come true, I can certainly imagine certain scenarios where you have Muslim governments cooperating with each other for sustained projects,’ says Sayyid. ‘We’re on the cusp of that—greater representation for Muslim sentiment and Muslim voices—and the world will need to adjust to it.’

‘The other scenario is what we’re being offered now: years of endemic violence. The neo-conservative dream is that by exercising western powers ruthlessly enough, we will be able to disaggregate these demands, and silence Muslim expression.’

‘My suggestion would be that the choice we face now is either greater democratisation—which means decolonisation—or perpetual dirty war, which will not only corrode societies that fall victim to drone attacks, assassination, invasion and so on, but that kind of war will also delegitimise the democratic order in western countries themselves.’

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