In this post, Professor Mona Hassan clarifies how the vision of an Islamic caliphate remarkably endures – even after the abolition of the Ottoman caliphate one hundred years ago – and how it remains deeply misunderstood.

In the words of the late, great, Shuhada Sadaqat, known in the earlier part of her life before her reversion to Islam as Sinéad O’Connor: “Ok, I want to talk about Ireland. Specifically I want to talk about the famine.” An odd place, perhaps, to begin an exploration of the caliphate as a tool for reorienting hegemonic narratives of ancient history, but bear with me. A fact about world history that is, it seems, frequently rediscovered, but never truly sedimented is that the Ottoman Empire came to Ireland’s aid when between 1845 and 1852 its colonial occupier Britain had imposed upon it a famine that killed around a million people

The catastrophe is unending: at every scale and each site. Even aside from the desolation of Gaza and the siege of Aleppo (although of course there as well), evil is embedded into modern forms of life: through the deep desire for recognition, through the need to survive at any cost.

Benjamin, famously: that things go on like this is the catastrophe.

Does the caliph ever die? Historical reflections on legitimate political and religious authority during and after the caliphate. This post examines the historic relations of religious and political authority in Islamicate societies and reflects on the tension between and transformations of political and spiritual conceptions of khilāfah to query whether the caliph ever dies, even when the office has been abolished, as a token of Muslim aspirations for a divinely sanctioned social and political order of justice.

On the occasion of the International Day to Combat Islamophobia on 15th March, the ReOrientations blog has published a pedagogical pack for teaching Islamophobia. The pack primarily draws on resources produced by ReOrient and the Critical Muslim Studies project.

Islamophobia is not a comfortable study in the academic world in general and particularly in French academia especially when the researcher is Muslim. It is not a mainstream topic in social sciences disciplines like geography, and my experience as a French Muslim geographer can attest to this. The traditional French scientific culture expects researchers to be objective, neutral and external to their object of study.