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Dear Reader:
The article below began life as a presentation at a Muslim conference in
Toronto a week ago and is today published in Turkish and English by a
newspaper in Turkey.Also: I appeared August 22 on Sun News Network's The Arena with Michael Coren, and discussed "Hamas and ISIS on the Rampage." It's studio quality and 8 minutes long. Click here. Yours sincerely, Daniel Pipes The Caliphate Brings Trauma
by Daniel Pipes
Aydınlık (Turkey) August 24, 2014
  Be the first of your
friends to like this.The classic concept of the caliphate – of a single successor to Muhammad ruling a unified Muslim state – lasted just over a century and expired with the emergence of two caliphs in 750 CE. The power of the caliphate collapsed in about the year 940 CE. After a prolonged, shadowy existence, the institution disappeared altogether in 1924. The only subsequent efforts at revival were trivial, such as the so-called Kalifatsstaat in Cologne, Germany. In other words, the caliphate has been inoperative for about a millennium and absent for about a century.
No matter how calamitous the fate of Caliph Ibrahim and his grim crew, they have successfully resurrected a central institution of Islam, making the caliphate again a vibrant reality. Islamists around the world will treasure its moment of brutal glory and be inspired by it. Looking ahead, here is my more specific forecast for the current caliphate's legacy: 1. Now that the ice is broken, other ambitious Islamists will act more boldly by declaring themselves caliph. There may well be a proliferation of them in different regions, from Nigeria to Somalia to Afghanistan to Indonesia and beyond. 2. Declaring a caliphate has major implications, making it attractive to jihadis across the umma (the worldwide Muslim community) and compelling it to acquire sovereign control of territory. 3. The Saudi state has taken on a quasi-caliphal role since the formal disappearance of the Ottoman caliphate in 1924. With the emergence of the Raqqa caliphate, the Saudi king and his advisors will be sorely tempted to declare their own version. If the current "Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques" (as the Saudi king like to be called), who just turned 90, does not indulge this claim, his successors might well do so, thereby becoming the first caliphate in a recognized state.
5. This profusion of caliphs will further exacerbate the anarchy and internecine hostility among Muslim peoples. 6. Disillusion will quickly set in. Caliphates will not bring personal security, justice, economic growth, or cultural achievement. One after another, these self-declared universal states will collapse, be overrun, or let lapse their grandiose claims. 7. This caliphate-declaring madness will end some decades hence, with a return to roughly the pre-June 29, 2014, conditions. Looking back then on the caliphal eruption, it will appear as an anachronistic anomaly, an obstacle to modernizing the umma, and a bad dream. In short, declaring the caliphate on June 29 was a major event; and the caliphate is an institution whose time has long passed and, therefore, whose revival bodes much trauma. Mr. Pipes (DanielPipes.org) is president of the Middle East Forum. This paper was first delivered at a QeRN Academy conference on "The Caliphate as a Political System: Historic Myth or Future Reality?" in Toronto on August 16, 2014. © 2014 by Daniel Pipes. All rights reserved. |
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