Criminalizing the Caliphate: Transforming Remembrance into Resistance

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Precis​

Analyzing the years leading up to the caliphate’s abolition in 1924 and the post-9/11 period which saw the relentless securitization of Muslim subjectivity, this paper argues that the very act of remembering and imagining the caliphate as a potential political configuration in the Muslim world has been criminalized. Anticipatory fear is the mechanism of criminalization, used to mitigate any substantial challenge to the hegemonic character of the modern nation-state—in this case, Islam. Both periods are defined by a fear of a future potentiality in which Muslims are the writers of their destiny and reclaim their subjectivity. The orientalism latent in both historical moments—projecting the image of an unchanging, uniform, backward caliphate—has held the concept captive, foreclosing its capacity to narrate itself into the future. Notwithstanding this criminalization, the ummatic memory of the caliphate has proven resilient, and actively recalling and narrating it can transform remembrance into resistance. Further, this criminalization begs the question of the extent to which Muslim imagination of the caliphate—as a medieval institution unfit for the modern age—is informed not by Muslims’ own experiential knowledge and history but by a discourse constructed for them.

Introduction​

Relative to the political history of the world, the current global world order remains in its infancy. Despite this, perceptions of the nation-state model as the model for governance dominate the political imagination of its citizens, to the extent that alternate political configurations seem to only exist in the realm of impossibility. Following two European-led world wars, multiple genocides, intractable and bloody border disputes, mass migration, and the Global War on Terror, the devastation wrought by modernity and the nation-state project has also revealed its fragility. That is to say, the ontological and epistemic incongruencies of the nation-state model, specifically in non-western societies, have posed both political and moral dilemmas. The apparent success of the nation-state as the unequivocal standard of political organization in western societies has drawn the attention of political observers eastward, raising the question of why a purportedly universal model of governance seems to garner such little success in non-western societies. Aside from the contemptuous finger-pointing at Islam as the root of political turmoil in the Muslim world, other more illuminating analyses turn towards the ideological characteristics that undergird the structural foundation of the nation-state project.

One of these characteristics inherent to the formation of the nation-state, as argued by Wael Hallaq in The Impossible State is that of “legislative monopoly…over so-called legitimate violence.”1 The exercise of violence is so deeply ingrained in the architecture of the nation-state project that, without this key property, the nation-state model would be unsustainable.2 Additionally, as Charles Tilly posits, war-making and other forms of organized violence are fundamental in the consolidation of sovereign power in the state. Although the “power holders” had no intention of creating nation-states as a by-product of the coercive exploitation of power, these states nonetheless are characterized by their tendency to monopolize violence.3 This exercise of violence is intimately intertwined with the notion that the state possesses a god-like sovereignty because, as aptly noted by Hallaq, sovereign will without any substantial tool to back it is rendered useless. Thus, if the state stands as the supreme agent over its territory, it only follows that the state also becomes “the God of gods,” possessing the exclusive right to sanction violence as it pleases.4 Comparatively, this notion of the state as a supreme authority capable of enacting its will in a god-like manner, compounded with the inherently violent disposition of the modern-nation state, raises deeply contentious dilemmas in the Muslim world.

In response to modernity’s peculiar way of arousing anxiety within the political and civil fabric of society, European nations have been experimenting with a collective European identity grounded in a shared eidos through the formation of the European Union (EU) and other transnational cooperatives. However, concomitant discussions regarding political unification in the Muslim world are unduly regarded as a harkening for medieval theocracy. Despite the historicization of the caliphate and the internalization of the nation-state model as the pinnacle of humanity’s linear ascent towards civilizational triumph, imagining new frontiers for political unity in the Muslim world has been taking place. Alternative political theories and astute critiques of the nation-state have been brought forth in response to the volatile post-colonial political order.

Islamist thinkers of the 20th century such as Abu al-ʿAlā al-Maududī and Sayyid Qutb, who in response to the political and cultural crisis of post-colonial Muslim nation-states, were proponents of a distinctly theological approach to political governance.5 On the other hand, thinkers such as Ali ‘Abd Al-Rāziq of Egypt contended that the caliphate had no religious value in Islam and thus there was no religious obligation to establish it.6 Although such discussions are of paramount importance in the sphere of theology, my intention is to extend beyond the creedal limitations of discussions on the caliphate and explore how the caliphate—as a site of ummatic memory and Muslim imagination—has and continues to be criminalized.

Expounding upon Ovamir Anjum’s conceptualization of the caliphate as a site of ummatic memory representing the spatial continuity or unity of all Muslims,7 I argue that the very act of remembering, and indeed imagining, the caliphate as a potential political configuration in the Muslim world has been and continues to be criminalized. By synthesizing various prominent voices on the matter, as well as integrating my own, this paper will analyze two distinct post-caliphal periods: the years leading up to the caliphate’s abolition during the rise of the Turkish Republic in 1924 and the post-9/11 period amidst the relentless securitization of Muslim subjectivity under the guise of counterterrorism schemes. In analyzing both periods, this paper employs Brian Massumi’s concept of anticipatory fear, demonstrating how it operates as a mechanism of criminalization by way of mitigating any substantial challenge that contravenes the hegemonic character of the modern nation-state—in this case, Islam.8 These two time periods share in the political and social spaces in which the imagination, remembrance, and reformulation of the caliphate have been criminalized. Furthermore, the orientalism latent in both moments—projecting the image of an unchanging, uniform caliphate—has held the concept captive, foreclosing its capacity to narrate itself into the future.9 Drawing upon this commonality between these two periods, the paper also asks how recalling and narrating this ummatic memory in the current global climate is critical for the organization of spatial, social, political, and cultural networks in the Muslim world.

Before delving into the core analysis of this paper, a brief look at why the nation-state model elicits a moral predicament in the Muslim world is needed to understand the premise on which the caliphate and Muslim imagination has been subjected to relentless criminalization for the past century.

 

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The Predicament​

In The Crisis of the Modern World, René Guénon observes, “So long as western people imagine that there only exists a single type of humanity, that there is only one ‘civilization’, at different stages of development, no mutual understanding will be possible.”10 This statement perfectly encapsulates the predicament in question. The modern nation-state, and by extension the project of modernity as experienced in our day, is an expression of a universalized European experience. Although there are a number of theories on the origins of the state, coercive theories have been found to be more plausible.11 Little wonder then that Max Weber’s gloss on the modern state as, “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory,” has found currency in academic and popular discourse.12 The territorial sovereignty of states was first recognized in the 17th century following the bloodshed of the Thirty Years War and the successive Treaty of Westphalia. For many political theorists, this historical event marked the birth of the nation-state.13

In his article, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” Charles Tilly builds upon this concept of coercive power. He states that a violent sequence of eliminating enemies within and without a specified territory and the coercive exploitation of the resources of that territory led to the organization of socioeconomic networks in which a “distinctive state apparatus grew up within each major section of Europe.”14 Additionally, the increasing threat of resistance from certain fragments of society made way for the power holders to make concessions such as “guarantees of rights, representative institutions, [and] courts of appeal.”15 Thus, the European state-building project, following a trajectory unique to the European historical process, unraveled into the formation and organization of European state systems that continued to transform through widespread war and conflict.16

Over the next three centuries, the philosophical principles and practices of the nation-state took root in Europe and across the globe. Thus, the nation-state model is a political formation that finds its genealogical roots in a distinctly European history. However, unlike Europe, the emergence of nation-states within the Muslim world was far from organic. As Nader Hashemi highlights, the all-consuming “Wars of Religion” in Europe ignited an intellectual and moral disenchantment with religion as practiced at the time, prompting Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke to theorize new articulations of religion. The question of religious pluralism was one that reached a crisis point and threatened to tear apart the very fabric of European society.17 Hashemi aptly notes that the nature of European society’s relationship with religion weighs greatly on its historical experience with religious tolerance—or in Europe’s case, a lack thereof. From this looming crisis blossomed the origins of Western secularism as a promising remedy for a battle-worn society.18

Comparatively, Muslim societies had a rather tolerant experience with religious pluralism and thus never found themselves enthralled in the wars and intellectual strife that characterized early modern European political history.19 In fact, as Hashemi argues, the dynamic of religion in society was not only uncontroversial but was a key agent in constructing social cohesion, stability, and a mechanism for accountability that prevented the abuse of power.20 Consequently, the question of secularism in the Muslim world becomes a contentious one with very little grounding to support its supposed universality. This is eloquently captured in Joseph Kaminski’s Islam, Liberalism, and Ontology: A Critical Re-evaluation:

By contrast, the Muslim experience has been marked by the perception of secularism as an alien ideology imposed from the outside, first by colonial and imperial invaders, then by local elites who came to power during the post-colonial period. Once again, this time in practice, secularism in the Muslim world has hardly been linked with progress and liberation in the minds of many of the people living there.21

By means of European colonization in the 19th century, premodern forms of Islamic governance based upon the Sharīʿa were “structurally dismantled” and “reduced to provide no more than the raw materials for the legislation of personal status by the modern state.”22 The quintessential aim of the colonial project was not only the material exploitation of the land and its people, but the systemic reengineering of the political, legal, and cultural fabric of society. In continuity with the colonizer, post-colonial nationalist autocrats upheld the colonial project with far greater force than their predecessors whilst paying lip service to the Sharīʿa and Islam.23 What makes the nation-state model fundamentally incompatible in the Muslim world is an ontological question in as much as it is a political and moral one. The conditions in which the nation-state emerged cannot be divorced from its genealogical origins and central features. It carries a distinctive historical ethos in which the nation-state is politically and ideologically sovereign, granting it supreme authority over its territory.24 Carl Schmitt’s rendition here is perhaps most well-known:

All significant conceptions of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development—in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver— but also because of their systemic structure.25

The ontological grounds of the Islamic system of governance stand “on moral, legal, political, social and metaphysical foundations that are dramatically different from those sustaining the modern state.”26 For this reason, it is grievously misleading to present the nation-state model as a standard upon which all other political formations are judged, especially in the analysis of the historical caliphate and in present-day re-imaginings of it. Additionally, in the Muslim world, the notion of a supreme sovereign authority to which all people must submit did not exist, nor did people consider themselves sovereign in this sense.27 Although this is a topic beyond the scope of this paper, it suffices to say that such overt structural differences in the imaginary of sovereignty, authority, and governance between the nation-state model and an Islamic approach to political life cannot go understated.

Although the question of the re-establishment of the caliphate system has been addressed since the abolition of Ottoman rule, the Muslim struggle for unity, political legitimacy, and self-governance within a hegemonic global system persists until this day. As a highly controversial yet deeply misunderstood notion, the potential of such a political system in the Muslim world today is often overshadowed by the horrific and fraudulent use of the term by ISIS. For this reason, evoking the term caliphate elicits visceral reactions from some Muslims whilst conjuring images of medieval barbarity for others within the global political imagination. The condition to which the notion of the caliphate has fallen calls for a critical examination of why a supposedly outdated political configuration continues to live on in the consciousness of Muslims. In the following section, I will introduce the concept of the caliphate and its ontological significance in the Muslim world.

 

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The Caliphate​

The term caliphate, khilāfa in Arabic, is a term associated with the inception of humankind. As referenced in the Qur’an, when Allah created Adam n, He placed upon him and his progeny the responsibility of being the vicegerents of Allah on earth.28 In the narrower political register, the term caliphate denoted the supreme leadership of all Muslims.29 Throughout the centuries, however, the notion of the caliphate underwent much theorization as Muslim leaders vied not only for political leadership, but also theological legitimacy. In turn, the caliph came to represent both a spiritual attachment to the memory of the Prophet H and the Rightly Guided caliphs M. This second point is of critical importance to the ontological weight of the caliphate for Muslims. In Recalling the Caliphate, Salman Sayyid argues that Islam is what gives Muslims a name in the world. By virtue of the act of naming, which is coterminous with the act of becoming, Islam is that which “brought Muslims into history.”30 Thus, if it is Islam that informs the ontological and epistemic grounds of the caliphate, then the ontological implications of the caliphate cannot be severed from Muslim subjectivity.

Further expounding on the spiritual attachment that the caliphate has to the Prophet H, Sayyid argues in A Fundamental Fear that it was the Prophet who acted as the unifying center for the Umma and the master signifier of Islam. Following his departure, Islam itself thus became the focal point of unity and the successors of the Prophet H, the caliphs, became the representatives of Islam as a master signifier and the center of political and cultural Muslim identity.31 This is not to evoke rose-tinted truisms of what the caliphate was historically. On the contrary, the caliphate was an institution that was subject to the political climate of its time. With shifting frontiers and vying opposition, there were times throughout its history that it carried little to no political authority. Having said that, it is very telling that at no point during its symbolic reign did calls for its abolition or abandonment emerge. For this reason, the abolition of the caliphate and the subsequent post-caliphal period of Muslim history not only carry great historical weight for Muslims today, but also an ontological significance that cannot be understated.

Mona Hassan, in her book Longing for the Lost Caliphate, captures how the intricate narrative and symbolic aspects of the caliphate wove itself into the collective memory of Muslims across time and space:

The caliphate, as a vehicle or lieu of Muslim collective memory, combined the profane (or the mundane narrative history of the community) with the prophetic (or the religious injunctions derived from the community’s discourses and embodied practices). The worldly, or secular, and the sacred, or metaphysical, conjoined in particularly powerful ways to imbue the caliphate with utterly deep cultural resonance that traversed vast lands and even centuries…The obliteration of the caliph and his dynasty ruptured one of the community’s most significant and symbolic modes of connectivity to the Prophet Muhammed and their shared history.32

The question of this alternative political formation in the Muslim world is not only a question of collective Muslim unity and agency. On the contrary, the very notion of a political formation grounded in an ummatic memory is a profound expression of being in this world that transcends time, space, and nationalistic bounds. This expression of ummatic being, which is embodied in the figure of the caliph, is key to understanding why many Muslims continue to long for the idea of a caliphate. Aptly described by Ovamir Anjum, the caliphate has always represented a “spatial continuity (or unity) of all Muslims”33 and thus represents a site of ummatic memory. It is in this realm of continuity that Muslims have attached and continue to attach themselves to the memory of the caliphate as the center of Muslim political and cultural identity. Due to its transnational orientation, this expression of ummatic memory poses a substantial challenge to the hegemonic character of the current world order because it remains as one of the few ontological frameworks in direct contention with the nationalist-bound, self-deifying nature of the modern nation-state. It is this very point of contention that has paved the way for the criminalization of the caliphate and the act of recalling this memory.

The dominant world order does not simply care to mitigate the challenge posed by Islam and the emergence of an alternative political model in the Muslim world. In fact, modern nation-states engage in an exercise of power rooted in fear of this potential. Whether this challenge has been actualized or not is irrelevant to this point. The perceived threat being in a state of indeterminate potential is reason enough to counter it. This is what Brian Massumi describes in his book, Ontopower: Wars, Powers, and the State of Perception. According to Massumi, preemption as an “operative logic of power” has emerged as the defining political logic of our times. What makes this logic so potent is how it marries “an ontology with an epistemology in such a way as to trace itself out as a self-propelling tendency that is not in the sway of any particular existing formation but sweeps across them all.”34 In other words, a threat that was once characterized by certain knowledge (an epistemology) has now transformed into a state of being defined and governed by anticipatory fear (an ontology). Massumi notes that “fear is always a good reason to go politically conditional,”35 as it empowers states to exercise power preemptively without need for empirical justification.

Although I agree with Massumi that preemption has become the operative logic of our times, I propose that elements of this logic existed as early as the post-colonial period in the Muslim world. As the core thesis of this paper argues, the following section will delve into how anticipatory fear was employed as a mechanism to criminalize the act of remembering the ummatic dimension of the caliphate as early as the 1920s, leading up to its abolition and the subsequent rise of the Turkish Republic. Additionally, I will argue how, with time, this operative logic of power culminated in a dubious yet highly sophisticated system of securitization of Muslim subjectivity under the guise of counterterrorism schemes in the post-9/11 era. This is not to say that events in the period between 1924 and 2001 did not play a significant role in the criminalization of Muslim subjectivity. However, due to the scope of this paper, this intermediate period will not be explored.

 

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From 1924 to Post-9/11: Criminalizing the Caliphate​

The years leading up to the abolition of the caliphate and the break-up of Ottoman domains was a period in which the Muslim world stood at a crossroads. The perceived triumph of modernity and Enlightenment ideas, compounded by the expansion of European colonial dominance, propelled a desire amongst the secularized elites of Muslim-majority lands to imagine a future forgoing the centrality of Islam in the state and in society. This is particularly true for the Turkish Republic, which was born out of the ashes of the vanquished Ottoman caliphate. The success of Turkish secularism in the early years of the Republic came at the expense of this ummatic memory that permeated all spheres of Ottoman society. By way of political intimidation, opportunism, and the suppression of dissent, Mustafa Kemal demonstrated in the latter years of his political career the necessity of criminalizing this memory and weaponizing anticipatory fear to succeed in his nation-building project.

Following his success as the leader of the national liberation movement against European colonial forces, Kemal made no secret of his contempt for the old Ottoman polity. His push for the primacy of Enlightenment ideas, such as positivism and solidarism, set forth a secularizing project that would force Islam to withdraw from public life.36 Recognizing the strong hold that Islam had on a society that had been ruled in the name of God for over six centuries, Kemal was calculated in his efforts to ensure the criminalization of this ummatic memory subdued any potential threat to his secularizing project, including dissidence and rebellion. This meant the creation of a nationalist vernacular Islam curated by a secular elite that accepted the preeminence of the state-building project.37 In other words, it was no longer God but the state that sanctioned religious practice and determined who was a “good” or “bad” Muslim.

Among the many reforms imposed on Ottoman society to sever the memory of Islam from public life, Kemal turned his immediate attention towards the institutional structure of the Caliphate. On October 30, 1922, whilst presiding over the Turkish Assembly, Kemal and his deputies presented their initial draft proposal calling for the dethronement of the Ottoman Dynasty. This proposition of separating the institution of the sultanate from the caliphate was the first step in subduing the political and religious authority of the caliph. Despite his efforts to silence all dissent, this proposal ignited heated debate between the Kemalists and the Committee of Şeriat (Sharīʿa), who argued for the inseparability of the sultanate from the caliphate. Regardless of his efforts to appropriate religious discourse to justify his state-building ambitions, Mustafa Kemal soon set aside political conventions for a more hostile approach. He mounted the podium, swung his hand as though he was carrying a sword, and pointed it at the neck of the influential scholar Hoca Mustafa Efendi declaring:

Sovereignty is acquired by force, by power and by violence…this will be done at any price. [If you all agree on this,] it would be very appropriate from my point of view. Conversely, the reality will nevertheless be manifested in the necessary form, but in this event, it is possible that some heads will be chopped off.38

These infamous words are a mere glimpse at the politics of intimidation employed against all who evoked the primacy of the caliphate and its rightful place in the future of Ottoman society and the Muslim world. The separation of the sultanate from the caliphate was a highly opportunistic move by Kemal to consolidate power. Threats of violence and death as well as targeting and purging “problematic” ulema from the Grand Assembly were commonplace in operative strategy.

Continuing with his strategy of suppression and intimidation, Kemal ordered the immediate dissolution of official Islamic institutions and deprived the Office of the Caliph of state funding as a means of weakening its authority.39 More significantly, Kemal prohibited the reigning caliph at the time, Sultan Abdülmecit II (r. 1922–1924), to refer to himself as Halife-i-Resullulah (the successor of the Messenger of Allah),40 and exchanged prayers for the caliph during Friday sermons for prayers “to the nation and republic.”41 This profound antagonism towards the institution of the caliphate illustrates an overt criminalization of an ummatic memory, which connected Muslim subjectivity to the memory of the Prophet H. By subsuming Islam under state authority, dissolving Islamic institutions, and eventually abolishing the caliphate in 1924, Kemal succeeded in severing a spiritual and spatial bond between Islam, Muslims, and their history. More significantly, the hold that Islam possessed on both Muslim subjectivity and imagination was concentrated in the institution of the caliphate. Thus, to neutralize this threat against the republic’s secularization project, Kemal set his eyes on its abolition. I argue that the Kemalist regime embraced an ontology of fear that not only aimed at mitigating a present threat, but also a future potentiality. The secular republic thus became a state defined by the fear of a caliphate which had the potential to narrate itself into the future of the Muslim world, hence thwarting the nationalistic ambitions of the secular regime. As such, this anticipatory fear was weaponized as a mechanism to criminalize the act of imagining and even evoking a memory of the caliphate.

It is important to note that this strategy of criminalization was not always an overt endeavor. Efforts to severely undermine the authority, legitimacy and credibility of the Caliph began long before its abolition. During the reign of Sultan Vahideddin (r. 1918–1922), the secularist intelligentsia employed what Nurullah Ardıç identified as a meta-discursive strategy in which Islamic justification was used to establish the “un-Islamic” nature of the Ottoman caliphate. Through questionable recounts of the historical caliphate and reinterpretations of Prophetic hadiths, Kemal and the secular thinkers of the Grand National Assembly often resorted to such philosophical arguments not only to accuse the reigning caliph of corruption and despotism, but also of high treason against the memory of the “true” caliphs.42 Aptly conceptualized by Ardıç, the secularists “often resorted to a mixture of Islamic and nationalist rhetoric in order to justify their politico-religious arguments and ideological positions.”43

An intriguing account of deputy Feyzi Bey highlights the extent to which the secularists were willing to instrumentalize religion for political gain. By making reference to theological and jurisprudential principles of Islamic governance, the secular elite claimed that the caliph must not only be a “great imam” but also a mujtahid (an authority on Islamic law).44 Referencing these claims, Feyzi Bey reported that the faithful believers across Anatolia agreed with the secularist narrative that the reigning caliph no longer embodied these requirements, thus claiming that the Friday prayers held in the name of the reigning sultan were no longer valid.45 An in-depth analysis of the prevailing secularist rhetoric at the time is beyond the scope of this paper. However, such accounts unveil how Islam itself was instrumentalized to both legitimize the reigning caliph of the time and, more significantly, to isolate the caliphate from its ummatic memory.

Fast forwarding to the post-9/11 period and the Global War on Terror, this elementary use of the operative logic of preemption and anticipatory fear in the early years of the Turkish republic has since evolved into a highly sophisticated system of criminalization and securitization of Muslim subjectivity and imagination. Authors over the past several years have produced a plethora of literature exploring Muslim subjectivity, the state, and counterterrorism. Many scholars agree that Muslims are trying to navigate a political era in which expressions of Islam have been constructed “as an existential threat that requires extraordinary and emergency procedures outside the bounds of regular political procedure.”46 Factors such as mass migration from Muslim-majority nations and “terrorism” have greatly used to create the fear of an enemy that is resistant to detection and is unbound by conventional battle frontiers. Given that the supposed threat to the state is indeterminately potential, as Massumi illustrates, “the most effective way to fight an unspecified threat is to actively contribute to producing it.”47

 

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A common thread that weaves across global Muslim communities is the visibility of Islam in a society that perceives religious externality as a threat. Taking Europe as an example, prominent political figures and intellectuals in France, Spain, and Italy have framed Islam as an inherently violent political ideology seeking to overrun and destroy the European way of life.48 This hostility is extremely palpable not only in public policy and media, which have been key in actively producing this boogeyman image of Islam, but it has also pervaded public life insofar as Muslim subjectivity exists only as it is defined (as a potential menace to society) and is incapable of defining itself. Taking France as the gold standard of Islamophobic discourse, the recent adoption of the Anti-Separatism Bill in 2020 expanded governmental powers to persecute expressions of Islam in the public sphere. Within the first two years of its adoption, this bill enabled the control of “1,030 public establishments (mosques, schools, cultural and sporting establishments, or public houses) believed to be run by ‘Islamists’…By 2021, this led to the closure of at least 37 mosques, 4 schools, and 210 public houses run by French Muslims.”49

This indeterminate threat becomes even more concerning to state security when the question of Muslim political unity and agency emerges. Due to the lack of an alternative political entity to represent the political and religious needs of the Umma, discussions regarding Muslim subjectivity, political agency, and imagination primarily exist in social and communal spaces. I argue that, since the abolition of the caliphate, expressions of Muslim unity and agency, including conceptualizations of an alternative model for Muslim political agency, have also become the target of criminalization. Spaces for Muslims to remember the caliphate as a site of ummatic memory and draw upon that memory to imagine a future for autonomous Muslim political agency has become reason enough for states to frame expressions of Islam and Muslimness as an existential threat in the name of national security. Further, in actively producing this threat, the state also wields the power to define it as it pleases. Discussions on Muslim subjectivity and agency are stripped of the autonomy to narrate it outside of its given definition. Thus, the caliphate as an ummatic memory, and by extension Muslim imagination, is defined, confined, and even criminalized. A poignant example of this is when top ranking US officials consistently made reference to “an Islamic caliphate extending from Spain to Indonesia and ruling by Sharia law” in the early period of the War on Terror, consciously constructing the caliphate as something scary to be feared.50

Both periods discussed above are characterized by an ontology of fear. Both the early Republican era of the Turkish state and that of the post-9/11 securitization of Muslim subjectivity are defined by a fear of a future potentiality in which Muslims are the sole writers of their destiny and reclaim their subjectivity. My intention in emphasizing the caliphate as a site of ummatic memory is not only to highlight the criminalization of an ummatic memory and Muslim subjectivity in these periods, but also to problematize how such criminalization has potentially restructured Muslim imagination, remembrance, and reformulation of the term “caliphate,” binding it within the very frameworks that Muslim thinkers have desperately been trying to escape. In other words, I submit to the reader to examine their own perception of the caliphate, both in its historical form and in its contemporary conceptions. In doing so, one is not only confronted with the orientalist contours that have shaped notions of the historical caliphate, but it also reveals the potential limitations mainstream political imagination has placed on Muslim political unity.

Although concerted efforts to criminalize and suppress the memory of the caliphate have been made, as shown above, this memory in the Umma has proven resilient in its ability to withstand the test of time. I contend that in the social spaces where Muslim subjectivity and agency are being criminalized, actively recalling and narrating an ummatic memory can transform remembrance into resistance. Additionally, globalization’s influence on the emergence of trans-localities and the subsequent development of trans-local affiliations has posed a substantial challenge to the character of the nation-state.51 The trans-locality of this ummatic memory and the social spaces in which it is discussed facilitates a prospective alternative model of governance in the Muslim world that is historically informed, and not historically incarcerated. As previously mentioned, the criminalization of the notion of the caliphate begs the question of the extent to which Muslim imagination of the caliphate is informed by Muslims’ own experiential knowledge and history as opposed to one that has been constructed for them. Thus, I believe that a serious reassessment of the notion of the caliphate as an orientalized, unchanging, medieval political formation must first be challenged. Outward efforts towards dismantling the orientalist grip on imaginations of the caliphate do not suffice. We must also turn inwards and challenge our self-orientalized perceptions of the caliphate that render it powerless in narrating itself into the future.

With the ever-increasing presence of non-nation-state actors and the redistribution of power to local structures of governance, the conditions in which a caliphate model free from orientalist imaginings can be reformulated as a supranational, or perhaps even a post-national entity, appear hopeful. Although the rise of populism has erupted across the globe in response to cosmopolitan visions for a global world government, I remain unconvinced that it has been consequential enough to offset the global move towards decentralization. The increasing economic interdependence of nation-states, the emergence of a multipolar world order, and the rise of transnational and multinational corporations over the economies of nation-states has rendered the nation-state’s totalizing grip on power increasingly obsolete.52 Consequently, these social spaces in which the re-imagining of the caliphate as a site of ummatic memory provide fertile ground for the organization of spatial, social, political, and cultural networks rooted in a collective Islamic ethos.

 

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Conclusion​

In the contemporary world order, where dominant nation-states function as empires, the long-term sustainability of the nation-state model has come into question, particularly regarding its ability to adapt to changing conditions. The deep fractures emerging within political and civil societies worldwide necessitate a thorough re-examination of traditional statecraft. This paper, though not exhaustive, explores how the caliphate—both as a memory and as a potential political framework in the Muslim world—has been and continues to be criminalized. This is illustrated through a comparative analysis of two pivotal periods: first, the years leading up to the abolition of the caliphate during the rise of the Turkish Republic in 1924, and second, the post-9/11 era, characterized by the intense securitization of Muslim identity under the pretext of combating “radical Islam” and implementing counterterrorism measures.

In examining both periods, this paper utilized Brian Massumi’s concept of anticipatory fear to illustrate how it functions as a tool of criminalization, suppressing any significant challenges to the dominant structure of the modern nation-state—in this case, Islam. The paper also provided a concise overview of the moral and political dilemmas facing the nation-state model in the Muslim world, emphasizing the ontological importance of the caliphate to Muslim identity. Ultimately, I argue that the very spaces where the caliphate, as a symbol of ummatic memory, has been criminalized hold the potential to transform the act of remembrance into an act of resistance. To envision a future for Muslim political agency, any new conceptualizations of a caliphate model in the Muslim world must include the de-orientalization of the collective Muslim imagination.

By virtue of its domineering spirit, the nation-state model has not only taken hold as the de facto political configuration of our times but has also taken hold of our imaginative capacity as thinking beings. This totalizing grip can be undone by means of intellectual courage and discerning vision. That is not to oversimplify the complex intricacies of our current socio-political context, nor is it to evoke a rose-tinted truism of what an alternative model of governance for the Muslim world could entail today. However, I submit to we must consider the power of imagination in a world governed by it. History teaches us that the act of world-making, including the creation of power structures, “no matter how long-lived, are never immutable and that, slowly or rapidly, such structures change, metamorphose or disappear altogether.”53 Although the acuity of the events of the 19th and 20th centuries remains palpable as the ongoing political and philosophical uncertainties engulf the Muslim world, it is worth recalling the words of the philosopher-poet Muhammad Iqbal that the world “is not a block universe, a finished product, immobile and incapable of change.” Rather, “[d]eep in its inner being lies, perhaps, the dream of a new birth.”54



Suggested citation:

Ilham Ibrahim, “Criminalizing the Caliphate: Transforming Remembrance into Resistance,” Ummatics, Sep 2, 2024, https://ummatics.org/papers/criminalizing-the-caliphate


Ilham Ibrahim is a graduate student of sociology at Ibn Haldun University in Istanbul. Her research interests include sociology of religion and secularism, ethnography of the state, and anthropology of Islam. Her Masters dissertation focused on religious and secular reforms during the postcolonial socialist periods of Somalia.