“My name is Shāh Ismā`īl. I am God’s mystery. I am the leader of all these ghāzīs./

My mother is Fātima, my father is `Alī; and eke I am the Pīr of the Twelve Imāms./

I have recovered my father’s blood from Yazīd. Be sure that I am of Haydarian essence./

I am the living Khidr and Jesus, son of Mary. I am the Alexander of my contemporaries.”

No. 15 Divān-e Khatā’ī, tr. V. I. Minorsky

Writing in the May 1924 Atlantic Monthly, N.V. Tcharykow, self-described “serf-owner, ambassador exile” of Tsarist Russia, a former Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, who described in his autobiography various misadventures in Central Asia and Afghanistan as well as martial encounters against Ottomans and their allies in the late 1870s, observed with some evident satisfaction, tinged only with regret that Russia had not accomplished the feat itself by conquering Constantinople when it could have in 1878[1]: “Since Turkey has become a republic and the Caliph has been deprived of all political power in it, the Mohammedan world, with its two hundred million believers spread all over our globe, is passing through a crisis not unlike the one which arose in Roman Catholic countries and consciences when the sovereign Pope of Rome was suddenly reduced to the status of ‘prisoner of the Vatican,’ Rome having been taken and occupied by the troops of the King of Italy.”[2] An unreliable analyst forging incompatible historical analogies, Tcharykow, nevertheless grasped the obvious problem of competing forms and understandings of sovereignty juxtaposed in an apparently necessary conflict between a modern nation-state (whether republic or constitutional monarchy) and religio-political governance, between nationalism and political theology.

Moreover, his comparison of Pope and Caliph, as he acknowledged, had a prior history. Indeed, the genealogy of the Latin Christian comparison reaches back to at least the First Crusade where the Gesta Francorum fancies Kerbogha addressing a letter to the Abbasid Caliph as “nostro apostolico,” a reference to the Papal title.[3] The characterization of the Caliph in Baghdad as “Saracens’ Pope” was a commonplace for Joinville in the late 13^th century narrating his experience of the Seventh Crusade with St. Louis.[4] While the inexact identification projects Latin Christian concepts onto Islamicate societies, much like the assumption that Muslims worshipped “Mahomet” based on Christian worship of Jesus, the comparison captures a historical relationship between post-imperial commonwealths and institutional expressions of political-theological legitimacy and sovereignty.[5] Consequently, Ibn Khaldūn, a perceptive Muslim universal historian, concludes his analytical account of Khilāfah in al-Muqaddimah with a discussion on the titles of “Pope and Patriarch” among Christians and “Kohen” among the Jews as examples of other cases of religious succession to the prophets, Moses and Jesus.[6]

He, however, explains the apparent division between political and religious authority in these traditions as a contrast to khilāfah that uniquely integrated the two in Islam’s universal mission of jihād and conversion of the world.[7] Evidently, he did not fully appreciate the features of crusading(!)… Ibn Khaldun neglects to remind his reader here, what he does elsewhere, that the actual history of the Caliphs accommodated exactly such a division, paralleled in Sunni Islamicate political theory since the late Buyid and Seljuk eras.[8] For him, the material question of the Caliphate was not of conceptual change but of waning social forces, a depletion of asabiyyah, whereas predecessors like al-Māwardī and al-Ghazālī famously elaborated new ideas about legitimate Muslim rulership in religious discourse, while others like Nizām al-Mulk representing a Persian bureaucratic and administrative class hearkened  to long-standing traditions of political wisdom emphasizing the legitimating value of justice as a unique function of kingship.[9]

Proponents of this latter political tradition, however, never acquiesced to the abdication of religious sovereignty by Caliphs (at least). A text, known as the “Testament of Ardashīr” (andarz/`ahd), purporting to be a translation of the great Sassanian emperor’s advice to future rulers that circulated propitiously in Caliph al-Ma’mūn’s Baghdad, dramatizes the problems of sovereignty and subjectivity in a contest of religious and political authority:

“Know that royal authority and religion are two brothers in perfect agreement with each other. Neither can subsist without the other… The very first thing which I fear for you is that people of low social standing will surpass you in the study of religion, its interpretation, and in learning it and that your confidence in the power of royal authority will lead you to underestimate them… Know that there can never come together in a single state a concealed religious leader and a declared political leader without the religious leader usurping the power from the political leader because religion is the foundation and royal authority the pillar… Know that your rule extends only over the bodies of your subjects, and that kings have no rule over hearts. Know that even if you subdue the power of people you shall not subdue their minds… The king ought not to concede to worshippers, ascetics, and the pious that they are worthier of the religion, more fond of it, and more angry on its account than himself.”[10]

Much could be said about the “Testament”, but it must be immediately affirmed that the very image of the interdependent brotherhood of religion and state/kingship that motivated Ardashīr’s advice not to cede religious authority to scholarly or priestly specialists could likewise serve as an indictment of corrupted state or royal power. Epistle 22 of the Ikhwan al-Safa accomplishes just such a critique emphasizing that violence between peoples and religions was an epiphenomenon of the state, religion’s younger brother and “faith’s specious counterpart.” Religion’s injunction to command the good and forbid the wrong are arrogated, perhaps necessarily, by kings seeking political primacy over the adherents of a religious tradition. “The slaying of selves is practiced in all faiths, creeds, and confessions and all earthly dominions. But in religion, the mandate is for self-sacrifice (nafs). In politics it usually means slaying others to gain power.”[11] 

 Reflecting the hadith that declared the greater jihad was that against the nafs, embodying the damaging characteristics of human nature, the Brethren of Purity articulated the religious subjectivities of spiritual discipline that could allow for social harmony and human sovereignty as “vice-regents/stewards.”

Despite a critique of royal power, particularly contemporary caliphal governance, as corrupt and tyrannical, even dissident underground intellectuals like the Brethren of Purity had difficulty imagining how to command the good and forbid evil and how to organize human polities, without kingship. Nevertheless, there are hints of a more interdependent conception of kingship in the Brethren’s indictments of misrule and disorder, what al-Ghazali would have called “the Caliphate of Satan” rather than that of God.

 Already before the Mongol Il-Khan Hülegü sacked Baghdad and executed the Abbasid Caliph, religio-political experiments and social capillaries and networks of spiritual power had begun to re-orient the trajectories of Muslim polities and the articulations of authority and subjectivity. Building on sufi tariqah bonds that deepened the psychic and social subordination to the spiritual authority of the murīd’s spiritual director, the murshid, dervishes were to be like corpses in the hands of their shaykh, to disclose their inner thoughts, desires, and even dreams for interpretive and disciplining review, as Shihāb al-Din Abu Hafs `Umar al-Suhrawardī  (d. 1234) instructed in his influential sufi conduct manual, `Awārif al-ma`ārif.[12] Such subjective sentiments of spiritual training translated into what Ardashīr warned of, “concealed leaderships” among religious figures. Moreover, urban networks of futuwwah/javānmardī clubs developed social solidarity, “chivalric” ethics, physical training, and spiritual discipline for artisanal craftfolk as a popular form of sufi culture conjoined to local militias. Drawing together these capillaries of socio-spiritual power based on sentiments of loyalty to leaders, whether shaykhs, great scholars, artisanal masters, Caliph al-Nāsir li-Dīn Allah–in sharp contrast to the policies of his forbear al-Ma’mūn—licensed himself as a faqih (jurist) in each of the madhāhib (legal/ritual orientations), transmitted hadith, patronized and integrated futuwwah groups as their universal head, and sponsored his vizier Shihāb al-Din Abu Hafs `Umar al-Suhrawardī’s works on conduct and discipleship in the emerging tarīqah form of Sufism.[13]  A contemporary who served al-Nāsir and his successor after fleeing the Mongol invasions of Transoxiana that destroyed the Khwarazmshahs until his death in 1256 in Baghdad, Najm al-Dīn Rāzi elaborated a mystical theosophy of kingship in his influential Persian sufi classic Mirsād al-`Ibād, including a chapter “On explaining the spiritual journeying of kings and the lords of command.” This chapter understood sovereignty through the acquisition of divine attributes in an anthropology of Adamic khilāfah recognizing humankind as uniquely theomorphic beings that could return to their primordial spiritual origins.[14] 

 The devastating loss of the Caliphate with the execution of al-Musta’sim in 1258 stimulated new discourses and concepts among Sunni religious scholars that Mona Hassan has carefully examined in her wonderful study.[15] It also unleashed creative religio-political projects in the aftermath of Chingisid universal empire after the last Ilkhan Abu Sa`īd Khan perished in 1335, projects that accelerated the sacralization of political rulers and politicized sacred authority. Sufis like Naqshbandi Khwaja `Ubaydullah Ahrār ruled in Bukhara or Samarkand, while Turkic tribal warlords like Timur styled themselves “refuge of the Caliphate” and second Alexanders. Philosophically inclined scholars like Nāsir al-Dīn Tūsī and Jalāl al-Dīn Davānī seemed to imagine they might be Aristotles to the next Alexander and composed mirrors for princes that built upon Najm al-Dīn Rāzi’s universalist geopolitical theology and incorporated the vocabulary of Ibn al-`Arabī’s mystical theosophy. Shah Ismā`il, scion of the Safavid Sufi order and descendant of Uzun Hasan of the Aqquyunlu Türkmen tribal confederation, rallied his devoted Qizilbash partisans in Türkmen verse not on the basis of the office of the Caliphate in nostalgia for it but rather on the more radical messianic fulfillment as Mahdī (the rightly guided Imām of the age), universalist representative of Adamic khilāfah, astrological divination as sāhib-i kirān (master of the auspicious conjuncture), and as Sufi shaykh and insān al-kāmil (completed human and embodiment of the divine attributes).[16]

This piece has been written as a series of historically descriptive or analytical statements. But, in reality, it is formed by unresolved queries. Is any of this Islamicate history of political and theological understandings of the Caliphate and variety of political and religious forms that filled its absence of any relevance to contemporary Muslim politics that step out of the Shadow of God? What is clear, according to a recent political opinion study of views of the Caliphate in the Muslim world, is that khilāfah means to many Muslims now what it has always meant: social welfare and justice.[17] While modern Islamic political thought has transformed the conceptions of Khilāfah to democratize it as ummah or as the ideal (and impossible, as Hallaq would have it) state, has it genuinely transcended the modern nation-state form and corollary ideas of sovereignty and political subjectivity? As Graeber and Sahlins assert, “Even when kings are deposed, the legal and political framework of monarchy tends to live on, as evidenced in the fact that all modern states are founded on the curious and contradictory principle of ‘popular sovereignty,’ that the power once held by kings still exists, just now displaced onto an entity called ‘the people.’”[18] So whether Adamic, Ummatic or Monarchic, the Caliph, like Kantorowicz’s King, never really dies?! When Allah created Adam and Hawa and announced to the angels his providential plan (not a biblical lapsus leading to punishment in earthly exile), “I am placing a vicegerent upon the earth,” they replied “Will You place therein one who will work corruption in the land and shed blood, while we sing your praise and call you Holy? He said, “Truly I know what you know not.” (Qur’an 2: 30). We, like the animals in the epistle 22 of the Brethren of Purity, might agree that the angels were right about us. What did God know that the angels did not? What redemptive meaning might there be to humankind’s stewardship on earth? It might mean that the Caliph has as many bodies as there are humans on earth, striving to fulfill their theomorphic nature.