WORDS: ABDULLAH YOUSEF
Just as the incoming end of the human lifespan involves a gradual accumulation of pangs and agonies before one’s final demise, as narrated by the holy Prophet SAW, so too do families, tribes, and peoples — most notably empires and civilizations. The last imperial Muslim power to have died, the seat of the disputed-then-destroyed caliphate, is one such example that is long-lasting in the hearts and minds of Muslims today worldwide. Widespread nationalist movements and secular authoritarian states became the norm for Muslim populations in the post-caliphate era, yet the grip the Ottoman Turks still have on the collective psyche of the Ummah lasts to this day. It’s a wide spectrum of nostalgic yearning to hateful disdain, and one of our most fascinating aspects as a people in modernity.
It’s not without reason — after the passing of The Chosen One (SAW), the demographics of the Ummah changed rapidly after a series of magnificent conquests. The Arabs who started as the majority of Ishmaelites became, just a century later, a ruling minority outnumbered by thousands more Persians, Turks, Levantines, and more — all peoples who were acclimating to the new Islamicate ruling their lives, not yet knowing that soon their descendants would all have a share in joining, loving, and enforcing God’s law in their own right. The Ottomans proved to be our most famous and successful example after the Arabs. Though Persians, Africans, Mongols, and all other sorts of the sons of Adam took ahold of God’s rope and went on to rule their people (sometimes converting them en masse) with His religion, it was the Ottomans who, above all, took the special role of being stewards to millions who weren’t their own, an honor once bequeathed to the Arabs before them, in Allah’s name for centuries.
The transition from the rule of the Arabs (Umayyads and Abbasids) to a chaotic interregnum of emirates and sultanates, succeeded by the dominant rule of the Ottomans, shows something about the reality of the concept of caliphate that many minds don’t yet seem to understand. Though a political position it can be, it’s the spiritual role of the Caliph that matters far more and is more “transferable” than you think. Plenty who hear this kind of talk will counter with hadiths (disregarding context or the explanations of the scholars) about the exact conditions of becoming Caliph in the physical sense — a recognized political office in the imperial hierarchy, but something about that rhetoric still seems incomplete. This view of Islamic leadership, one that denies the spiritual in favor of the secular pole of the caliphate is reactionary due to the modern Muslim situation; one defined by being (current) civilizational losers who’ve fallen behind in warfare, the scientific, political, and technological.
In the world of the Rashidun Caliphs, companions of the Beloved (SAW), the caliph of the Muslims, were two men in one. He was the military commander/ lawgiver who directed the “secular” management of the dunya that humanity contends with, from taxes to peace treaties to the minting of coins; but he was also the religious guide, the Imam who acted as spiritual father to all Muslims living in his domain, ensuring that Islam was well and alive in people’s hearts. When you hear Muslims today, however, they don’t yearn for a caliph for his spiritual authority and direction in matters of religious practice. It’s only when you acknowledge the spiritual pole of the caliph that you realize most Muslims aren’t yearning for a Caliph at all. They want a ruthless, strongman sultan; a charismatic military figure that will tear them out of their political and social insecurities when compared to other current powers globally. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course, but on its own, it leads to a demoralizing view of Islamic history that makes it seem even to the most shrewd of Muslim political and academic minds that our role in the fate of mankind is forever limited or even “over.”
The common historical outlook on the office of the caliph is that after various bloody civil wars and uprisings at the hands of non-Arab military leaders in the Abbasid era, the role of the caliph was curtailed and reduced such that his political power was null compared to the Sultans who commanded the real muscle in the Islamic realm. Sultans waged war and collected taxes, enforced laws, and were patrons of poets, scientists, artists, and holy men. The Caliph, however, now just sat there in idle contemplation and pointless luxury. By the time the first crusade made landfall in the Levant, the caliph was a meek, androgynous fellow who organized “councils” dedicated to solving the realm’s problems that went nowhere. He was a glorified minister of the interior.
On its face, this is true. But to speak of these historical realities with the implication that the role of the Caliph itself somehow was swooped up by the winds or melted away in the storm is a subtle, yet dangerous obfuscation. The dispensation with the office of the caliph as he who holds authority doesn’t mean dispensing with the caliph himself. Rather, one can contend that a caliph, in the spiritual sense, always exists. If one recognizes that one of the titles of the caliph is “Shadow of God on Earth,” then by definition that shadow is always present, regardless of the contemporary conditions that determine where that office is or who occupies it. After the demise of the four Rashidun caliphs, one can argue that the mantle of the Spiritual Caliph and the person of the officially declared caliph in any Islamic imperial power have rarely intersected.
To many friends both educated in the sciences of the religion and otherwise, depending on your orientations and view of history, this might sound strange — like something from fringe sects use to justify their mythologies. I’m willing to not force myself much here despite the fact much of these ideas are found in the scholarly literature (Shah Waliullah Dehlawi and Ibn Arabi are probably the most known examples). I’m willing to argue here, however, that you don’t even need to commit to either of these fringe orientations to see our spiritual destiny this way. Historical and spiritual arguments can be made, without citing unorthodox views most of Ahlul-Sunnah hold, as to why this view is both reasonable and consequential to Muslim morale and vigor.
I feel I must emphasize that this isn’t a purported thesis, or something bordering on a manifesto detailing concrete beliefs. What I merely hope this does is generate a more dynamic view of what leadership, in our most highly reachable form as the Ummah of the Prophet (SAW), discussed by those with real insight into the topic. From my discussions and research with those who are interested in the topic of caliphate, what I’ve found is that it’s a topic that generates the most pushback, reluctance, and hubris not just from young terminally online extremists who boast about “global caliphate,” but from those who have completely resigned the topic to a deflated sigh of “Allah knows best.” When you sincerely adopt the belief that the Ummah is, somehow, meant to go on without a caliph, what you’re saying is that you’re content with the current lot of Muslims worldwide — another way of saying you’re either complicit or ignorant about the trash world we’re suffering in.
The reason this topic is important — and why many need to change their tune about it — isn’t because any Muslims believe they can institute a caliphate in their lifetime. It’s about a change in spiritual attitude. How you think about Muslim leadership and the spiritual undercurrents of our situation goes much deeper than just determining what your individual Islamic political beliefs are. This cuts into how you, an inductee into the spiritual order that is the nation of the Prophet (SAW), view your commitment to the Muslims around you. It’s a journey towards the ultimate clear pill. To connect yourself to the history and future of Muslims in this way is to recognize the role we play in the eventual fate of mankind.
Allow me to propose a scenario. Think of your favorite Islamic imperial power in pre-modernity, at the height of its decadence and prosperity. The benevolent caliph is, by all accounts, as standard as they come. He’s seen publicly every Jummah prayer, both Eids and other ceremonies with his entourage, and issues edicts whenever a matter of importance becomes known to the people. He has been given the bay’ah, the oath of allegiance, by all major tribal leaders and nobles of his court. If he’s even better than that, he brings in men of religion to his court to debate matters of divine law and creed in his presence.
However, regardless of his degree of personal religious practice, he inspires no religious adherence on his own. The Islamic adherence that pervades the lives of his court and subjects is a wave generated by his predecessors, and he’s just riding it. In this case, what exactly makes him Caliph? Religious matters are no longer in his hands. His military is commanded by an arrogant class of former slaves turned emirs, because a long period of peace has turned the men who perform state violence complacent and lagging behind in capabilities compared to their enemies. Though he may not officially be a figurehead now (as was officially declared in the early 20th Century by modernist revolutionaries in the Ottoman Empire), functionally he was. Someone, or multiple men, were running things such that Islam was kept alive — they just weren’t called “Caliph of the Muslims.”
Call them awliyah, qutbs, mystics — whatever you want — the point is that clearly, at some point after the end of the Rashidun era, the temporal and spiritual caliphs ceased to exist as one man and have been separated ever since, only converging at rare points in time where even then you could debate if said popular caliph wore the spiritual mantle of the role as well. When the crusades rendered the Levant under foreign occupation and Jerusalem was lost, Sultan Salahuddin is still, to this day, viewed with such reverence that some may argue he was the spiritual caliph of his time, even though an official Abbasid caliph resided in the east.
The Ottomans — the history of whom inspired this essay — have a more complicated relationship with the office of the caliphate that renders further scrutiny. The Ottomans were not Quraishi Arabs and did not claim the title of Caliph immediately upon the founding of their sultanate. In fact, by the passing of Mehmed II (the conqueror), the empire was more westward looking — Mehmed was far more interested in becoming a Muslim Roman Emperor than the ruler of all Muslims of the East, so much so that the pope in Rome trembled at the idea that al-Fatih would soon come for the Vatican itself should his victories spread too far into the Mediterranean islands. It wasn’t until Selim I, his grandson, destroyed the Mamluks and brought their lands into his fold (including the Two Holy Mosques) that the title began to matter to them much more, eventually adopted by his progeny as a means to legitimize themselves in light of the traditional Islamic hierarchy of rule.
This leads to a contradiction on its face. How can we claim the Ottomans were sincere caliphs while also claiming that they used the title of caliph cynically once hundreds of thousands more Muslims became their subjects? I’d argue that it’s not a contradiction at all. To say so implies that the Ottomans needed to heed loyalty to the caliphate as an “institution” with sincerity to be eligible for it when no such cohesive institution ever existed. Without even intending or aspiring to a caliphate as an end goal, the Ottomans gained its title by right of swift conquest — the only way it has been gained since the Rashidun caliphs left this world.
People in olden times accepted the caliphate of the Ottomans not because of their dogmatic ideas about what a caliph should be, like the ideological plague we have now where many intellectuals today have ridiculous fantasies about a council of academics and scholars electing a caliph from a pool of candidates, where the oath of allegiance is given next to a podium sculpted from Italian maple wood. They accepted the Ottomans because of what they achieved in the reality they saw before their eyes. They’d breathed life into what was, finally, a unified Muslim Empire stretching from far north to far south, east to west, after centuries of unending chaos and uncertainty brought about by a hodgepodge of foreign invaders and rivaling ex-slave despots. And, with great pain and (sometimes) cruelty, kept it running, constantly transforming themselves for that vision for more than five centuries.
Thus the caliph, whether temporal or spiritual, has long been acknowledged as he who brings the Ummah results as it relates to their political power, safety, and capability to spread their faith. This doesn’t include defensiveness and hubris about how Muslims are “actually doing great.” Not multi-billion-dollar luxury construction projects funded by oil money, or councils of self-flagellating heretical mullahs rocking their heads and mumbling for thirty years about their commitment to Jerusalem. It’s whoever builds in those spiritual undercurrents as a means of the divine to keep Islam alive and well in any condition, throughout all time, until the eschaton where it all comes to an end.
This is the eventual point of it all. Muslims shouldn’t be deflated at the impossibility of the re-establishing of a temporal caliphate in the traditional means we understand it — rather, they should understand its spiritual and political functions and apply that to our situation from the ground up. We’re accelerating into a time now plagued not just with social diseases and myopic ignorance of the masses (including Muslim masses), but one where such forces are reinforced by technocratic, oppressive biotech cyberspace that will soon infect every aspect of our lives. There’s no avoiding it by declaring it haram from the rooftops, no overarching fiqh opinions issued by modern scholars that will stop much of the Ummah from sheepishly being led towards the ends of forces they don’t understand one bit, but the principles of our creed and faith remain for those with the will to submerse themselves into the ultimate gift of Islam’s truth — one that is all enduring.
Not every Muslim plays a role in the hidden workings that lead to the next Islamic prosperity boom. Still, those who can become aware of their situation — intelligent minds of high energy and consciousness — will all make their contributions towards that end. This is the new reality of what we, following in the footsteps of the Prophet (SAW), must embrace. The new Tasawwuf, as our friend Ibn Maghreb describes, keeps man tamed in the service of Allah while rejecting the machine-god worshipping, biodata technocracy of the current century. A satanic world envisioned by Faustian lunatics filled with the grandest of delusions to keep man a gluttonous, drunk, cooming peasant that’s digitally recorded from hair follicle to toenail.
The Muslim leaders who will spare large swaths of the Ummah from this fate will become the new caliphs. Maybe we won’t call them such, but deep down, in spirit, the angels will record their deeds as equivalent in rank.