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. Historiographical algorithms (whether Eurocentric or avowedly decolonial) view the historical record of the caliphate as just another instance of le pouvoir: an imperial formation not unlike the European colonial-racial empires. The ignoble record of the various caliphs and caliphates, their internecine conflicts, their cruelties and injustices, and their inability to provide sustained solidarity when confronted with threats to the Muslim Ummah offers eloquent testimony to those who wish to dismiss the very idea of the caliphate.

The ongoing contention over the importance of the caliphate and the meaning of its de facto abolition is, in itself, a sign of the times. First, it signals the difficulty of imagining forms of sovereignty that are not merely colonial-racial imperial formations in the service of capital. This apparent impossibility reveals the extent to which even decolonial thought remains haunted by the spectre of Orientalism. This manifests in the political field as a prevailing suspicion that frames every exercise of non-Western power as inherently repressive, not because of what it does, but because of what it is: power. As a result, every attempt to forge sovereignty is understood as a repetition of European imperial and colonial-racial logics.

Secondly, suspicion of the very idea of a caliphate forecloses any political path towards overcoming Eurocentrism, in favour of projects of epistemic delinking or moralising indictments. The entanglement of power and knowledge calls into question the tradition that holds the relationship between the two to be inherently antagonistic, for example, in the assumption that truth necessarily stands in opposition to power. Such arguments carry particular weight for certain expressions of Muslimness that seek to preserve the world as it is, precisely because, ironically, they dare not imagine that another world is possible.  Yet the relationship between the political, the ethical, and the epistemological is not one of externality. As a conceptual site, the caliphate gestures toward an alternative through which to reconfigure these entanglements. More than a historical institution, it signifies a potential horizon for liberation struggles grounded in the articulation of a counter-power capable of contesting the colonial construction of the category of the human through the expulsion of Muslimness. Put differently, it offers decolonisation, not merely a decolonial turn.

Thirdly, in the absence of the caliphate, the capacity to build a transnational collective will, one that seeks to make the world a safer place for the expression of Muslimness and, in so doing, underwrites the planet’s fundamental pluralism, is repeatedly and violently interdicted. The various attempts to construct national Islams are not only the hallmark of Kemalism within Muslimistan, but also to be found in other Islamophobic projects which read Muslimness as a sign of the obstinate barrier to the integrated future-oriented societies. The interdiction of Muslimness not only inscribes the ideal of Westphalian polity where a homogenous people have no concerns beyond the boundaries of government, whose territory they inhabit, but also marks out the nation-state as the only legitimate space for the political. The primary political task is to assemble, from the fragments of existing cultures and communities, a new collective that wills a future other than the mere continuation of the present. For such a project to succeed, it must escape the enclosure of societies and cultures within the framework of the encroaching ethnonationalist state. In this sense, the caliphate names a configuration of political order that transcends both the nation-state and the racial-colonial empire. It gestures toward the possibility of a collective will that exceeds the limits imposed by national and imperial formations.

Finally, the refusal to take the caliphate seriously as a political formation undermines the capacity for strategic thinking. Strategy is not reducible to technocratic and managerial planning; rather, it refers to the means by which power, whether as a relationship or a resource, is generated within an environment marked by intense competition and conflict. Without attending to the geopolitical challenges that the caliphate confronted, and the efforts it undertook to overcome them, a vital archive of how to act in the world is lost. The chancelleries of Muslimistan have only Western International Relations to draw upon, and such knowledge can only lead to the continual reproduction of a Eurocentric and thus Islamophobic world. Within this framework, Muslimness becomes palatable only when disembodied from sovereignty, and Muslim power is invariably read as excess, threat, or anachronism.

The centennial of the passing of the caliphate takes place in the shadow of livestreamed genocide and the hollowing out of post-Shoah international liberal order.[ii] Counterfactuals abound: could a caliphate have ameliorated the suffering of the Palestinians? Would Zionism have been able to establish a bastion of Western supremacy under its watch? Would a caliphate mean a future without imposed forever wars and failed states, where ‘failed’ is a verb, not an adjective? The horizon of such speculation is the caliphate imagined as the custodian of a racialised Muslimness. What is missing from these imaginings is a caliphate that consolidates a Muslimness which refuses ethnonationalism. The question of whether the caliphate could have authored an alternative history of the world cannot be answered by reference to own history.

The reduction of the history of the caliphate to a history of the ‘sick man of Europe’, or to a treacherous institution that deviated from the piety enjoined by Qur’anic injunctions, or to neo-Baathist takfirist fantasies of gangsters and warlords, performs a historiographical closure. Such reductionism obscures the complexity of the challenges faced, the mechanisms devised to address them, and the limits encountered. Without a history of the caliphate that neither begins nor ends in its indictment or its romanticisation, the space for Islamicate strategic thinking and political literacy is foreclosed, and this foreclosure contributes to the deferral of justice and freedom. The loss of the caliphate is not simply the dismantling of a venerable institution, but of the capacity to imagine sovereignty otherwise, beyond the onto-political confines of the ethnonationalist revanchism.

The ghost of the caliphate haunts us, not only because of the absence of a presence that might have underpinned a different world, but also because, in that absence, a surface of inscription emerges for writing an alternative history of the world. The caliphate is not a historical institution to be resurrected, but a metaphor to be recalled and reimagined: an idea capacious enough to articulate a Muslimness that affirms the planet’s fundamental plurality, protects the commons and resists the enclosures of ethnonationalism.[iii]