CALIPHATE

CALIPHATE . The office of "successor" to the prophet Muḥammad as the leader of the Muslim community is a uniquely Islamic institution. Hence the anglicization caliphate is preferable to inadequate translations of the term khilāfah. (This article will not address the concept of khilāfah in Islamic mysticism.)

Upon Muḥammad's death in ah 11/632 ce there was in existence a self-governing, powerful Islamic community, or ummah. It had been shaped by the Prophet in conformity with the revelations he had received, and by the end of his life, his temporal as well as his spiritual authority was unassailable: he was the governor of the ummah, an arbitrator of disputes within it, the commander of its military forces, and its principal strategist. He had deputized others as his representatives to distant tribes and regions. The term khilāfah in the pre-Islamic sense of "deputy" was apparently used in reference to these assignees.

To the ummah the Prophet's death was a shocking, even inconceivable event. The Muslims were suddenly bereft of divine guidance, the source of Muḥammad's charismatic authority. Yet they were sufficiently imbued with the Islamic vision to persevere in efforts to shape the ideal society embodied in that moral imperative.

But who was to lead this society? What was to be his authority? The caliphate, the expression of the temporal leadership of all Muslims conceived as a single community, was the institutional answer. It had emerged ad hoc, however, in response to a crisis. Evolving practice framed theoretical constructions, especially in the absence of any agreed Qurʾānic foundation. Hence the conduct of those holding the office, the caliphs, elicited sharp and continuing controversy over not only individual moral qualitites but also the character of the institution itself.

The forces at work in this controversy may be divided for the purposes of analysis into Islamic theories of the caliphate and historical influences on the institution.

Classical Theories of the Caliphate

The majoritarian, Sunnī view of the origins of the caliphate is that Muḥammad left no instructions for the future leadership of the ummah. Yet on his death the community desperately required an acknowledged leader, since all the latent rivalries that the prophetic message had overwhelmed reemerged in tribal factionalism. The innermost core of the Muslims responded by acclaiming as their leader one of the earliest of their number and certainly among the most prestigious, Abū Bakr (r. 632–634). Whether he was actually proclaimed khalīfāt rasūl Allāh ("caliph of the messenger of God") is unclear, but all Sunnīs regard him as the first caliph. His role was to lead the ummah in peace and in war as the Prophet had done, and to lead the ritual prayers and conduct the pilgrimage, both of which duties he had previously performed on Muḥammad's behalf. Absent from this formulation was the prophetic role that had clothed Muḥammad's acts with nigh impeccable authority. Theoretically, a divinely guided community of Muslims selected the early Sunnī caliphs, while its act of acclamation, the bayʿah, constituted an elective ideal that deprecated all subsequent dynasticism.

Evolved Sunnī theory required that a caliph be an adult male from the Quraysh, the leading tribe of Mecca. Soundness of mind and body, knowledge of the religion, piety, and probity are frequently listed among Sunnī criteria. Caliphal preogatives were to lead the prayer, to be recognized in the Friday sermon as the leader of all Muslims, to coin money, to command the army, and to receive on behalf of the ummah a fifth of all booty. Later, the Abbasid caliphs (750–1258) arrogated to themselves the right to wear the presumed mantle of the Prophet, a sacred relic in their possession.

Sunnis generally describe the caliph's duties as follows: to defend the domain of Islam and to extend it if possible, to uphold the sharīʿah, the prescribed conduct for a Muslim, to ensure law and order so that Muslims might observe the sharīʿah in peace and security, to collect canonical taxes, and generally to administer the ummah in consultation with selected counselors.

The Shīʾī conception of the caliphate differs from the Sunni in the manner of origination and the consequences flowing therefrom. Out of certain verses of the Qurʾān and from selected ḥadīth (reports of the Prophet's words or deeds), the Shīʿah adduce that Muḥammad had indeed chosen a successor: his first cousin, son-in-law, and early convert, ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭalib. According to the Shīʿah, a conspiracy among the companions of the Prophet denied ʿAlī his rightful position, plunging the community into error the instant Muḥammad died. That the prophet had himself selected ʿAlī establishes to Shīʾī satisfaction a leadership of far greater charismatic authority than the Sunnī version, a leadership that for most of the Shīʾī grew to incorporate impeccability and infallible interpretation of scripture.

ʿAlī did become the fourth caliph, the last of the so-called Rāshidūn or "rightly guided" caliphs, but his designation by the assassins of his predecessor, ʿUthmān ibn ʿAffān (644–656) of the clan of Umayyah, precipitated a civil war that rent forever the fabric of the community. When ʿAlī was killed in 661, the caliphate passed to the Umayyads (661–750). The Shīʿah would thereafter cleave to the view that only the ʿAlids, ʿAlī's progeny, could claim the caliphate; their claim alone was divinely sanctioned. Yet the inability of the Shīʿah never to agree on a particular candidate among ʿAlī's descendants condemned their movement to martyrdom, factionalism, and futility.

The conflict between ʿAlī and the Umayyads spawned a third interpretation of the caliphate, that of the Khārijīs. In the view of these numerically few but very active dissidents, hostile to both parties following the civil war, the caliph was liable for deposition should he deviate an iota from Muḥammad's practice. The Kharijis thus depreciated the office to no better than a tribal chieftainship. Arab nomadic groups were, in fact, the milieu from which they drew their support.

Historical Influences on the Caliphate

The evolution of the caliphate reflects in microcosm the forces molding Islamic civilization. Foremost of these was the Islamic moral imperative, expressed in the Qurʾān and the sunnah, or custom, of the Prophet. However visionary and inspirational these Islamic teachings were, they offered little specific guidance on the shape of Islamic leadership, principally the prophetic model and a framework of moral principles. But various non-Islamic influences heavily warped these Islamic precepts.

In the first Islamic century Arab tribalism was a continuing challenge to the developing caliphate. Inherited and/or acquired prestige, directly linked to lineage, constituted the basis of Arab leadership concepts. Traditionally power was closely associated with the numerical strength and past reputation of the lineage. Early Muslim caliphs lacked such esteem; only ʿUthmān had both tribal and Islamic prestige. His well-intentioned effort to use tribalism as well as Islamic prestige to enhance the caliph's authority was a major cause of his downfall. Mutual hostilities among the tribes plagued the early Muslim community: the Umayyads were constrained to form tribal marriage alliances to solidify their authority, but rising criticism of their reliance on Arab social custom was a crucial element in the dynasty's overthrow.

The later Umayyads and the early Abbasid dynasty were deeply affected by the tradition of imperial authority in the lands they had conquered. Its advocates, usually newly converted scribes, envisaged a rigidly hierarchical society of privileged rulers and taxpaying ruled, with the caliph as supreme arbiter in all matters. The Abbasid caliphs, therefore, withdrew within a royal city, appeared in public only on ceremonial occasions, ruled despotically and pursued a lifestyle greatly at variance with the Islamic values expressed in the Qurʾān and sunnah.

The Abbasids never exclusively adopted their imperial tradition inherited largely from the Sasanid Persians. They were acutely conscious of having acquired power by criticizing the alleged impiety of the Umayyads, so they patronized the ʿulamāʾ (religious scholars) as well as poets, musicians, and wine merchants. Even the Islamic aspects of the caliphate, however, succumbed to imperial majesty. Assuming charismatic throne-names, the Abbasids, following the later Umayyads, asserted that their authority derived directly from God, not from Muḥammad and certainly not from the ummah. If most of the pious shunned their patronage, still it was during the early Abbasid caliphate that Islamic civilization attained its full grandeur.

By the middle of the tenth century, however, the caliph was a virtual prisoner in his palace, his authority and his majesty evaporated. Between 945 and 1055 the Buyids, tribesmen from Iran professing Shiism, ruled the caliphal capital of Baghdad yet retained the Sunnī caliphate, perhaps recognizing that a pliant puppet symbolizing the unity of Islam was politically more useful to them than a Shīʿī caliph demanding at least their respect. Furthermore, the Buyids refused to recognize the Shīʿī Fatimid caliphate that had emerged in North Africa in 909 and was preparing to advance eastward to establish itself in Cairo (969) with the hegemony of the Muslim world as its manifest goal. As an extremist Shīʿī dynasty, the Fatimids were a menace to both Sunnī and moderate Shīʿī Muslims.

Such a threatening Shīʿī presence in North Africa evoked a response from the remnant of the Umayyad dynasty in Spain (755–1031). Heretofore content with lesser titles despite nonrecognition of their Abbasid successors, the Spanish Umayyads now claimed the caliphate in 929 as a rallying point for nearby Sunnīs. The simultaneous existence of two Sunnī caliphs presented a challenge to those religious scholars bent on accommodating their political theory to the actual historical process. Abū Manṣūr ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Baghdādī (d. 1027), for example, argued that if an ocean should separate the ummah into two distant parts, a second caliph was unfortunately justifiable. This view was firmly rejected, however, by the jurist Abū al-Ḥasan al-Māwardī (d. 1058), who would condone no attenuation of the caliphal prerogatives.

Rescue, if it can be so characterized, came in the form of the Seljuk Turks, tribesmen from Central Asia who styled themselves champions of Sunnism while continuing to dominate the caliph. In the eleventh century they reversed the tide of political Shiism, yet in their train came a new influence damaging to the concept of the caliphate: visions of world domination nurtured among pastoralists of the broad Asian steppes. Incipient with the Seljuks, the view reached full force among the pagan Mongols, who would suffer no rival, however moribund, to a Mongol khanate destined to rule the earth. Their assault on Baghdad in 1258 extinguished the classical caliphate.

Although they soon became Muslim, those Mongols who ruled in Islamic lands and the Turco-Mongol dynasties that succeeded them gave little heed to the caliphate. They claimed to rule by divine right and garnished their own tradition with the Persian concepts of a functionally hierarchical society. Islamic scholarship adjusted, however reluctantly, to this new reality: henceforth the ʿulamāʾ, claiming to be the guardians of the sharīʿah, conferred the title of khalīfat Allāh ("deputy of God") upon any ruler who upheld that body of sacred law and ruled righteously. The once-exalted title became one of many with which Muslim rulers of succeeding centuries adorned their chancery documents.

The Mamluk sultans of Egypt, however, adopted an alleged scion of the Abbasid house as legitimator of their oligarchic rule, seemingly a residual authority during the tension-laden interlude between the death of one ruler and the consolidation of his successor. Until 1500, Indian kings used to seek investiture documents from this "shadow caliph" to bolster their tenuous legitimacy. The Ottoman conqueror of Egypt, Yavuz Sultan Selim, then took this putative Abbasid caliph to Istanbul in 1517, an event subsequently exploited by Ottoman sultans of the nineteenth century to substantiate their own caliphal claims.

By the late nineteenth century the force of European imperialism had sparked a revival of the caliphate in a new form that engendered as much controversy among Muslims as had the classical version. The Ottoman sultan, ruling a sprawling empire threatened by European powers, sought to elevate his prestige and retain a link to his lost Muslim subjects by recasting the caliphate into a spiritual office. This device appealed to Muslims under colonial rule, such as in India, tsarist Russia, the Malay Peninsula, and the Indonesian archipelago. Even in British-occupied Egypt it elicited a favorable response. But within the Ottoman empire, non-Muslim nationalists struggling for independence regarded the revived concept of the caliphate as an instrument to marshal Muslim support for their suppression. By the eve of the First World War this view was shared even by some Muslim Arabs who decried the Ottoman caliphate was a sham lacking the slightest trace of a Quraysh pedigree. Both Islamic reformers and Muslim nationalists reviled the Ottoman sultan/caliph and, citing classical scholars to support their contention, characterized the Rāshidūn as the only true caliphs.

In retrospect, it is not surprising that the most secular of the nationalist movements in Muslim countries, the Turkish, should have abolished the Ottoman caliphate in 1924; at the time it came as a shock to the entire Muslim world. The Indian Khilafat Conference (1919–1933), advocating self-rule for Indian Muslims because they owed spiritual allegiance to the caliph, found its cause hopelessly undercut. Muslims elsewhere demanding independence from colonialism had to revise their strategy once they overcame their disappointment.

In the newly independent Arab world a contest for the caliphate emerged, but the effort to revive the "true" caliphate was short-lived. Three conferences over a brief span (1926–1931) broke up in disarray. It was soon apparent that new nation-states opposed the restoration of such a vaguely defined but potentially influential institution unless their own governments could control it.

The quickened religious pulse in the Islamic world today has evoked no noticeable inclination to revive the concept of the caliphate. It would seem that however much Muslims may desire a greater sense of unity, any expression of such sentiment is unlikely to assume the caliphal form.

See Also

Imamate; Modernism, article on Islamic Modernism; Ummah.

Bibliography

Historical Surveys

In addition to Dominique Sourdel's comprehensive article "Khalīfa" (and its references) in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed. (Leiden, 1960–), the only full treatment of the concept of the caliphate and its role in Islamic history is the book by Thomas W. Arnold, The Caliphate, the second edition of which, with an additional chapter by Sylvia G. Haim, is to be preferred (Oxford, 1965). Its heavy emphasis on classical Sunnī texts may be leavened by the insights and balance of Marshall G. S. Hodgson throughout the three volumes of his The Venture of Islam (Chicago, 1974). Al-Mawardi's exposition of the Sunnī caliphate is ably assessed by H. A. R. Gibb in an article, "Al-Māwardī's Theory of the Caliphate," in his Studies on the Civilization of Islam, edited by Stanford J. Shaw and William R. Polk (Boston, 1962). The chapter "Caliphate and Sultanate," in the pioneering Islamic Society and the West, vol. 1, part 1, by Gibb with Harold Bowen (Oxford, 1950), unduly reflects the views of Sunnī theoreticians of the caliphate.

Interpretive Works

Most valuable for its able exposition of the early caliphate against the background of Arab culture is H. M. T. Nagel's article, "Some Considerations concerning the Pre-Islamic and the Islamic Foundations of the Authority of the Caliphate," in Studies on the First Century of Islamic Society, edited by G. H. A. Juynboll (Carbondale, Ill., 1982), pp. 177–197.

The growth of Persian influences on Islamic ruling institutions is best found in the two-part article by Ann K. S. Lambton, "Quis custodiet custodes? Some Reflections on the Persian Theory of Government," Studia Islamica 5 (1956): 125–148; 6 (1956): 125–146. She continues her analysis into the Turko-Iranian period, but her work should be supplemented by Osman Turan's article "The Ideal of World Domination among the Medieval Turks," Studia Islamica 4 (1955): 77–90. The chapter "The Mongols, the Turks and the Muslim Polity" in Bernard Lewis's Islam in History: Ideas, Men and Events in the Middle East (London, 1973) puts Turan's thesis in a broader perspective.

Intellectual aspects of the recent phase of the history of the caliphate are perhaps best dealt with in Albert Hourani's Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1789–1939, 2d ed. (Cambridge, 1983). The Turkish perspective is outlined in the analytical chapters of Bernard Lewis's The Emergence of Modern Turkey, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1968), while the abolition of the caliphate and the reaction to it in the Arab world is covered in detail in Arnold Toynbee's "The Islamic World since the Peace Settlement," in the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Survey of International Affairs, 1925, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1927).

Herbert L. Bodman, Jr. (1987)