On May 23, 2024, in a highly polarised session of the General Assembly, the United Nations formally declared July 11 as the International Day of Reflection and Commemoration of the 1995 Genocide in Srebrenica. At long last, the Bosnian genocide was receiving the international attention and recognition that its survivors had long called for.

The significance of the caliphate, its possibilities and calamities, has been contested along familiar lines: for some, it lacks piety; for others, it lacks modernity. There are those who view it as theologically necessary and those who see it as a manifestation of historical contingency, and in the current conjuncture, characterised by apartheid, genocide, and nation-wrecking campaigns, a dangerous distraction.

The concept of the Caliphate and the subsequent possibilities it offers in the realm of political, epistemological, pietistic and decolonial iterations appears immense and, in some ways, revolutionary. Revolutionary in that its applicability to a multitude of social, religious and political configurations appears endless and profoundly connected to almost primordial conceptions of the Islamicate that were first established in the prophetic community and that continue to dispute and contest Eurocentric formations of the nation state throughout the medieval and early modern period.

The Ottoman caliphate, conversely, was not wholly free of Western influences, or elements that accorded with Enlightenment notions of sovereignty. It was and was not a European empire in its own right, ruling much of what is now remembered as Europe, the caliphal capital marking a once-center, once-boundary of that space.

The state of Israel as a “Jewish” supremacist and belligerent settler-colonial regime embodies the tragic genocidal logic of modernity/coloniality. It tells the story of the destruction of Jewish lives in Europe and SWANA, the Palestinian ongoing Nakba, and the destruction of Jewish-Muslim and Jewish-Arab worlds. In addition to (and constitutive of) a shift from Islamicate to orientalist geopolitics and euro-centricity, the abolition of the caliphate happened at a moment that signalled and anticipated these multiple destructions.

This network, which spans in the contemporary world from the Bandung Conference to Global Palestine, seeks to delink from the Western-imposed imaginaries of the rest of the world. Yet, one lingering question remains: While the Western imaginaries of the Global South should be debunked, what should we do with the images that decolonial projects have of each other in the process of reclaiming their political subjectivity? Are these images a source of potential solidarity or a limitation for South-South dialogues? This is the question I aim to address in this blog.