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This chapter analyzes the vibrant discussions of the early twentieth century over how to revive a caliphate best suited to the post-war era. While some advocated preservation of a traditional caliphal figurehead, many Muslim intellectuals were greatly persuaded by new models of internationalism embracing the nation-state and proposed international caliphal councils and organizations, similar to the League of Nations, or other purportedly spiritual institutions, similar to the refashioned papacy, to preserve the bonds of a transregional religious community. To varying degrees, all the participants in the debate over reviving a twentieth-century caliphate were influenced by an intriguing confluence of both the historic transregionalism of the Muslim community as well as the modern thrust of the new age of global internationalism.

This chapter explores the contentious debates among modernist and traditional Muslim scholars in the Turkish Republic and Egypt over the future of the caliphate. Scholars and intellectuals on both sides of the divide faced serious consequences for their positions: İsmail Şükrü's publisher was brutally murdered by Mustafa Kemal's lead bodyguard, Seyyid Bey was sidelined from power after justifying the new Turkish regime, and Mustafa Sabri lived in double exile in Egypt. Although not directly instigated by his intriguing views on the caliphate, Said Nursi survived multiple poisonings, imprisonment, and exile within Republican Turkey for his charismatic potential and activism. The separation of the caliphate from the Ottoman Sultanate followed by the Ottoman Caliphate's abolition had opened up the possibilities for new and passionately contested configurations of power.

This chapter begins with a discussion of how the embodied practice of the earliest generations of Muslims was essential in consolidating a nearly universal Islamic consensus upon the obligation of appointing a leader for the Muslim community. As such, the caliphate was incorporated into Sunni Islamic law as a legal necessity and a communal obligation, and Muslim scholars attempted to address the institution's increasing divergence from ideals over time. Following the destruction of the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad in 656/1258, Muslim scholars of Mamluk Egypt and Syria drew from this rich tradition of Islamic political thought and jurisprudence to articulate creative solutions that bolstered the socio-legal foundations of the reconstituted caliphate in Cairo. As intellectual predecessors, teachers, disciples, colleagues, rivals, and adversaries, these premodern scholars were connected to each other through intricate social webs that traversed the centuries of Mamluk rule from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries.

This chapter considers a protracted poetic debate between one of the last Ottoman şeyhülislams Mustafa Sabri and the Egyptian Prince of Poets Aṭmad Shawqī, conducted through the Egyptian press in the 1920s, to illustrate how modern regional contexts and professional affiliations created divergent interpretations of the Ottoman Caliphate's significance, even among those Muslim elites who shared an intense devotion to defending its legacy. For Mustafa Sabri, who hailed from the Ottoman religious hierarchy, the abolition of the caliphate meant a loss of the primacy of Islamic law, whereas for Aṭmad Shawqī, who assailed the British with his poetic pen, it meant the loss of the last great Muslim power in an age of colonialism.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book explores the complex constellations of meanings and networks that shaped Muslim reactions to the remarkably unexpected disappearance of an Islamic caliphate in the thirteenth and twentieth centuries. It probes the collective memories encircling the caliphate, as an institution enmeshed with the early history of Islam, which circulated widely across Afro-Eurasia and created a shared sense of community among disparate peoples at the same time as it gave rise to differing and competing visions of the community's past, present, and future. The book asks two essential questions: What did Muslims imagine to be lost with the disappearance of the Abbasid and Ottoman caliphates in 1258 and 1924 respectively? And how did they attempt to recapture that perceived loss, and in doing so redefine the caliphate for their times, under shifting circumstances?

This chapter considers problematic questions of political and legal legitimacy for premodern Muslim states in the wake of the Abbasid Caliphate's demise. Similar to the self-image of Byzantium as a Second Rome or the way that medieval rulers in western Europe appropriated Roman symbols, the Mamluk State reinvented the Abbasid Caliphate of Cairo through elaborate rituals and ceremonies reminiscent of a glorious past, and legal scholars articulated creative jurisprudential solutions. Within Mamluk domains, the dilemma of caliphal absence was thus resolved by resurrecting the Abbasid Caliphate in Cairo as a doubly political and spiritual institution, where the caliph delegated his authority to govern to the sultan and radiated metaphysical blessings through his continued physical presence. This fraught relationship between caliphal authority and the wielding of power notably continued to surface as a magnet for political activity and debate, including the ever-potent threat of rebellion, over the centuries of Mamluk rule.

This chapter establishes the intense desire and nostalgia for Baghdad as the Abbasid Caliphate's cosmopolitan capital and its centrality in the Muslim imaginary, among the near and the far. Poetry, historical chronicles, and scholarly literature from Muslim Spain in the west, Yemen in the south, and Egypt, western North Africa, geographical Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia, and India further east richly illustrate a shared perception among interconnected literary elites about the Abbasids' temporal and spiritual preeminence, despite all of their political reversals. For many premodern Muslims, the world without a caliph was so unimaginable that it boded the imminent end of time itself—an eschatological interpretation that reverses contemporaneous Christian views of empire.

This epilogue discusses the later birth and development of Islamist movements of widely divergent strains, contrasts their stances with those held by the majority of Muslims, and further contemplates some of the book's central themes. It emphasizes broader patterns regarding the dynamic intersection of faith, community, and politics across time and space, and highlights differences among the premodern and modern contexts of religious communities and their imaginaries. In the modern context, the surging currents of nationalism, colonialism, materialism, and internationalism were influential in shaping the overall tenor of intellectual and social responses to the symbolic communal loss of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924. Nationalist politics seeking to thwart European colonial incursions and to either embrace or reject the narrowing Turkification and centralization of the Ottoman Empire helped form the reactions of Muslims in Turkey, Egypt, Syria, Palestine, India, the Indonesian Archipelago, and elsewhere. Yet the ideas generated by other traditionally trained Islamic scholarsmore closely paralleled patterns from the past, by forging jurisprudential accommodations of new political realities and by encouraging others to focus on the everlasting Divine.

This chapter has identified the wide gap between the professed democratic principles as embodied in the Constitution and the operational realities of authoritarianism during both periods of military rule and some periods of elected civilian government in Pakistan. It argues that the current democratic dispensation may not be irreversible because of three challenges. First, the repeated military rule has created a constituency of stakeholders who have benefited economically and socially from military rule and constitute a significant political force that has the potential to destabilize democracy. Second, Islamic political parties take part in elections and sit in Parliament not out of a commitment to democracy but as a means to gain political legitimacy for the purpose of establishing a theocratic Islamic political and economic system. And, third, the militant Islamic groups, which systematically use violence and intimidation, aim at overthrowing the existing political order for establishing an Islamic Caliphate.

This chapter provides a detailed account of Boko Haram’s ambitious attempt at establishing an Islamic caliphate in captured territories across the northern states of Borno, Yobe and Adamawa. It shows Boko Haram at its glorious peak of insurgency scoring some relative amount of success against the surprisingly helpless and under-motivated Nigerian military. The chapter reveals Boko Haram’s guerrilla and terrorist tactics and brazen attacks during this period: 2013-2015, including its infamous kidnap of nearly 300 boarding school girls in Chibok local government area of Borno state, the successful raiding and suspension of the strongly fortified military post at Baga town in Borno state that enabled one of its highest number of recorded killings- up to 2000 people in three days. The chapter provides textual evidence that relays a graphic portrayal of Boko Haram’s extra-territorial ambition that involves verbal threats to Western interests, denunciation of attacks on Muslims across the globe and actual terrorist attacks in neighbouring countries of Niger, Chad and Cameroon.