“A beginning is always left behind.” – Edward Said (1968, 1)

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 (see Ó Murchadha 2011 – the role of the Ottomans specifically has been the subject of a doctoral thesis by Ahmet Sait Kutgul). Here I want to ask two questions: 1. what does it mean that this information can be well-known but yet constantly surprising? Known but yet not known? And 2. how can what I am going to call a ‘caliphatic imaginary’ for history transform the ‘known’ in ways that wrest historiographic certainty away from Eurocentrism’s common-sense narratological hegemonies?

Nothing compares (to a ‘caliphatic imaginary’…)

… except perhaps the kingship treatise of Philodemus, the 1st century BCE philosopher from Gadara (in what is now Jordan). The treatise goes by the name ‘On the Good King According to Homer’ (or PHerc 1507 in some circles – a reference to the fact that it was found at Herculaneum, where Philodemus died), and consists of a series of requirements for good kingship, illustrated with mythical examples. It has frequently been pointed out, though, that if Philodemus is reading Homer at all, then it isn’t the same text of Homer as the one that we have all been reading (see for instance Fish 2007 who uses the generous term “plus-verse” for what appears to be Philodemus inventing what he wishes Homer would have said). Even more surprising though than Philodemus’ creative attitude to his apparent source, is the fact that he is concerned with kingship – or an apparent authority on the matter – at all. The reason he needs to rely on Homer (or at least his invented Homer) for expertise on kingship is that Philodemus has never lived under a king, good or bad.

In spite of this, Philodemus’ advice to kings is surprisingly practical. The first twenty columns of the treatise are almost entirely lost, but the opening as we have it begins with Philodemus reminding kings that their subjects will not like them if they are not virtuous. This was the mistake he says Paris made, whose people “would not have hid him out of friendship” were he to have been in danger (25.8-1, citing Iliad 3.453), unlike Hector, whose Trojans have a ‘deep love’ (philostorgia) for him. Jeff Fish resolves the puzzle of reading Philodemus’ advice to kings when there are no kings to advise by reading the treatise in social terms. “It was not a stretch for Roman noblemen,” he explains, “like Philodemus’ friend and dedicatee Lucius Calpernius Piso Caesonius to relate their own experience and status to that of kings” (2018, 141). This is in line with many of the ways that Latin literature of the same period is often read, as an extended flattery of its patron. But Philodemus is not alone in submitting to what David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins have called a “ghostly form” of kingship (2017).

The Cosmos and the King

In her book The Discourse of Kingship in Classical Greece (2020), Carol Atack points out that kings have a cosmological function that appears to have little to do with whether there are kings ruling in reality. It is undeniable that the most extensive and most canonical explorations of kingship in Greek literature (that’s to say, Athenian tragedies) were written for audiences who were not living under kings. Much could be said about how this leads to reductionist stereotyping of what it means to rule (it would be unusual to find a classicist arguing that Oedipus, Theseus or Agamemnon are particularly realistic depictions of early kings). But the cosmological, narratological and historiographical possibility of these kings is more important – and more useful for my argument here – than their realism or lack thereof. Claude Lévi-Strauss (1962) famously felt that animals were “good to think with” (bonnes à penser), which explained their frequent roles in myth-making. Kings, for the Greeks, were “good to think with” – they were an imaginary that provided the surface for inscription of ideas about power, virtue and history.

This leads Greek literature of the fifth century BCE to some decidedly odd places. In Herodotus’ Histories, roughly contemporary with Athenian tragedy, Herodotus sketches out a tableau in which the Persians attempt to answer the question ‘how should we be governed?’. A lively discussion ensues, and the conversation eventually turns around the relationship between the question ‘how should we be governed?’ and ‘how can people be free?’. Darius takes the floor, arguing that if freedom is really what is at stake, then democracy will not cut it. “Nothing,” he says, “is better than one good ruler” (3.82.3). Democracy itself ends up articulated around a notion of kingship – it is not so much androids that dream of electric sheep, but the demos that dreams of electric kings. And these electric kings provide the narrative categories by which Greek-language authors tell not just the story of democracy but the story of history. How you think it right to govern – even if that has little to do with how you are actually governed – becomes a historiographical structure.

Historiography as Political Imagination

And as easy as it would be to scoff at Herodotus’ unreasonable Darius (who in spite of Herodotus’ Helicarnassian origins, was of course written for an Athenian audience), historiography continues to be shaped today on the basis of a political imaginary. Westernese historiography may no longer hold electric kings in such high regard, but what structures it instead is an idea of electric democracy, or a democratic imaginary. In spite of liberal democracies’ abandonment (if indeed they were ever there to abandon) of lofty ideals like universal suffrage, or equality, or freedom of speech, most Western liberal democracies narrate themselves as part of a lineage that begins around the time of Herodotus, Athenian tragedy and the reforms of Solon, Cleisthenes and Ephialtes. It matters little that neither Greek democracy nor contemporary democracies have ever been especially interested in such ideals. Nation states are conferred legitimacy on this basis, even when they are established in flagrant violation of anything that could be called a democratic ideal, and the histories of their foundation are re-narrated as stories of striving and progress that would always inevitably have led them out of darkness and into democratic light.

History is not perverted, but made, in this process. The democratic imaginary curates its hegemonic narrative, particularly through a reliance on ethno-nationalism which produces both nations and their histories. The emergence of the so-called state of Israel Athena-like from the head of Zionist Zeus in 1948 is retrojected as the structure of an ancient history that over-relies on Biblical sources and on the names of the Severan provinces (i.e. Judea not Palestina) because the establishment of “the only democracy in the Middle East” implies an ancient Israel as its common-sense beginning. Democracy and ethnonationalism are co-constituents because the hegemonic story of democracy (that it is inherited by modern Europe from ancient Greece and then exported around the world) relies on the idea of finding ancestors in the ancient past for contemporary nations. The democratic imaginary curates both nations and their histories.

History tells a story that proves to us what we already know. We see nations before nations. The kingship imaginary gave ancient Athens its concept of Hellenism too, much as the democratic imaginary gives us ethnonationalism – it is to King Theseus, of course, that the unification of Attica as a series of poleis is usually mythically ascribed (though this Hellenism is not a racial concept, but the result of synoikismos – living together). And this understanding of history as a hegemonic narrative relying on an imaginary of power helps us to make sense of how the Ottoman support of Ireland can be known, but not known. The democratic imaginary sees the Ottoman caliphate as inherently oppressive, contrasting it with European democracies. This falters in the case of Ireland, as Shuhada Sadaqat reminds us. Like the knots that Herodotus’ Persians get themselves into trying to argue for democracy using the imaginary of kingship, the democratic imaginary similarly gets tied in knots. It has to try to argue that starving a colonized population is somehow more civilised – because it is done by a democracy – than an autocratic caliph feeding them. Ottoman-Irish solidarity strains at the limits of history’s discursive function as a common-sense justification of the present world order.

A Truth Not Universally Acknowledged

These limits are unsurprisingly also epistemological. The caliphate produces a historiographical gap in many histories of modern nations – a kind of Dark Ages, or glitch that undermines the hegemonic narrative of continuity between ancient people and modern nation (e.g. ancient Greece and modern Greece interrupted by Ottoman glitch). But this glitch is also the proof that other imaginaries are available – other historiographical machines for the production of radically different histories. Doing history through the lens of a caliphatic imaginary rather than a democratic one could yield vastly different results. The first obvious historiographical shift is the refusal of ethnonationalism. That the caliphate – like kingship or democracy – is cosmological is evident from the much-documented attempts to preserve it from those who did not live under it, the most well-known of which is India’s khilafat movement of the 1920s (see Ozcan 1997 on this). Is so far as it was cosmological, it was also set in opposition with ethno-nationalism. John Willis (2010) tells the story of Abul Kalam Azad and his attempts to prevent Muhammad Rashid Riza from advocating Arab nationalism (via the Arab Decentralization Party), arguing instead for trans-national pan-Islamism as a preventative tincture against the establishment of ethnostates. Undermining ethnonationalism is fundamental for writing a different history, displacing the ‘nations before nations’ model that has structured ancient history with the search for caliphatic community.

But perhaps the most important way that the caliphatic imaginary re-orients history is in its shift from beginnings to endings. If we understand the caliphate as cosmological then we will need not only to rewrite the narrative of history, but also to ask questions about what it means to do history at all. The democratic imaginary is concerned with beginnings – what establishes Europe as an imaginable entity is its classical myth of origin. The caliphatic imaginary, by contrast, might be said to be more concerned with endings. A world ended on the 3rd of March 1924. With it were foreclosed a myriad of answers to Darius and the Persians’ old question: ‘how can people be free?’. The tools for writing the history of that world remain to be produced through the caliphatic imaginary, liberated from the reliance on nationalism and from the common-sense relationship between the contemporary world order and its ‘beginning’ that have animated the pens (and before them the styluses) of Westernese historians of antiquity for centuries. Its history remains to be told – not from ancient beginnings to modernity but from undone ending to a different future. In other words, from caliphate to cosmos.