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.

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