Daily Times

My article last Tuesday, ‘The Khilafat Movement and Turkish gratitude’ (Daily Times, August 19, 2014) elicited a host of responses. Some readers wondered if I was not falling into the flawed anti-imperialist leftist trap that, because the Taliban, and by that token the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), are fighting the west and especially the US, they are anti-imperialists. I shall be demonstrating that, on the contrary, the Taliban, al Qaeda and ISIS are ideologically the gift of the so-called Afghan jihad sponsored by US and Saudi collaboration. Let me underscore that the Shia version of extremism represented by the Iranian state, Iraqi militias, the recent regime of Nouri al-Maliki and the Lebanese Hezbollah are hardly any better. Radical political Islam, as Wahhabi ideology or in regional and sectarian versions, represents obscurantism and barbarism.
On the other hand, the 20th century Ottoman Empire was a modernising albeit conservative power that had discarded many medieval practices. There is, of course, the question: was not the Ottoman Empire also an empire? What right had the Turks to rule over Arabs? What about the Arab right of self-determination? I shall be addressing these concerns as we go along. However, first I shall explain the concept of caliphate. Many readers have requested some words about it. In my doctoral dissertation, “The concept of an Islamic state: an analysis of the ideological controversy in Pakistan”, I argued that the death of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) in 632 CE created a vacuum. With him ended the roles of the ideal lawgiver, law-enforcer and law-adjudicator combined in one person. His unique quality, according to cardinal Islamic belief or dogma, is that he received direct revelation from God. Furthermore, that the office of prophethood ended forever with his demise. Under the circumstances, the question arose: how should the Muslim community and the proto-state the Prophet (PBUH) had founded continue in his absence? Nothing resembling a general political or constitutional theory was elaborated in the Quran. There were some verses of an ethical, legal and political nature but no sustained discussion on the nature of political or spiritual authority without the Prophet (PBUH). The Quran presented an inimitable, non-transferable model, that of a prophet-in-authority.
Keeping this in mind, we can appraise the question of succession. The majority of Muslims in Medina chose Hazrat Abu Bakr as the successor of the Prophet (PBUH). Among the qualifications invoked to justify his leadership were his close companionship with the Prophet (PBUH) because he was his father-in-law as his daughter Hazrat Ayesha was married to him, his seniority and wisdom as well as the fact that he belonged to the Prophet’s Qureish tribe. A minority view took the stand that leadership should be restricted to the immediate family of the Prophet (PBUH) and, therefore, his cousin and son-in-law Hazrat Ali was the rightful successor. A third claim made by the people of Medina on the grounds that since they gave refuge to the Prophet (PBUH) and that Islam spread from Medina, the successor of the Prophet (PBUH) should be chosen from among them, also cropped up. The choice of Hazrat Abu Bakr prevailed.
A fourth standpoint on succession emerged after the assassination of the third pious caliph, Hazrat Usman. Associated with the dissenters known as Khwarijis, it opened the leadership to any deserving and qualified Muslim, irrespective of tribal origin or nationality. It remained a marginal position. It received support many centuries later from Ibn Khuldun (1332-1406 CE) who asserted that, in the seventh century, the Qureish tribe enjoyed asabiyya or tribal cohesion and solidarity and that resulted in it providing the early leaders. Such asabiyya dissipated and depleted over the centuries and thus the Qureish qualification became obsolete and redundant.
The doctrinal underpinnings of such controversies crystallised 100 to 200 years later into two main sects: Sunni and Shia. The centrepiece of Sunni political theory was that the ruler, called the caliph, was the temporal successor of the Prophet (PBUH) who followed the praxis of the Prophet (PBUH), derived his authority from the people and was answerable for his actions. The Shia position set forth the concept of the infallible imam, limited exclusively to the Prophet’s (PBUH) family. The authority of the imam derived from God.
Conventionally, the first four successors of the Prophet (PBUH), ruling from 632 to 661 CE, became known as the exalted pious caliphs Abu Bakr, Umar, Usman and Ali, who succeeded each other in that order from among the Qureish but from different clans. Thereafter, the caliphate became a hereditary institution. The Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties, and others in Spain and North Africa, all used the honorific title of caliphs and claimed descent from the Qureish. The Shia minority remained mostly out of power, often persecuted though in some places, notably in North Africa and in southern Punjab, Shia states were founded while in Egypt the Fatimids became a prominent power. However, the Sunnis remained the majority of the population and a revival under Salauddin Ayubi resulted in Shiaism being driven out of North Africa. The sack of Baghdad at the hands of the Mongols in 1258 brought to an abrupt end the Abbasid caliphate. It also terminated Arab leadership of the Muslim world. Doctrinal scholars such as Ibn Tamiyyah (1263-1328 CE) de-emphasised the role of caliph in favour of the supremacy of sharia. The ulema and fuquha (scholars and jurists) were declared the guardians of sharia.
Meanwhile, Islam had spread far beyond the Arabian heartland into North Africa, Central Asia, Southern Europe and India. The leadership vacuum took some time to fill. First, the Seljuk Turks and later, in 1299, the Ottoman Turks, both Sunnis, emerged as a great conquering dynasty in the heartland of Islam. The Sunni credentials of the Ottomans were strengthened when, in neighbouring Persia, Ismail Safavid captured power in 1501 CE. He established Ithna Ashari (Twelver) Shiaism as state ideology and forcibly converted the Sunni majority of Persia to Shiaism. This resulted in protracted war between the Ottomans and the Safavids. Yet, even when the Ottomans became the leaders of the Sunnis in the Middle East they did not formally claim to be caliphs. Under what circumstances they invoked the status of caliphs will be presented next Tuesday.

(To be continued)

The writer is a visiting professor, LUMS, Pakistan, professor emeritus of Political Science, Stockholm University, and honorary senior fellow, Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. Latest publications: Winner of the Best Non-Fiction Book award at the Karachi Literature Festival: The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed, Oxford, 2012; and Pakistan: The Garrison State, Origins, Evolution, Consequences (1947-2011), Oxford, 2013. He can be reached at:billumian@gmail.com