Caliph: Encyclopedia II - Caliph - Reasons for the fall and continuing dormancy of the Caliphate

Caliph - Reasons for the fall and continuing dormancy of the Caliphate

Once the subject of intense conflict and rivalry amongst Muslim rulers, the caliphate has lay dormant and largely unclaimed for much of the past 81 years. The reasons for this are varied and complex. During the first half of the European Middle Ages, the balance of power between the West and the Muslim World was tilted heavily in the latter's favor. Within 150 years of Muhammad's death, the Islamic Caliphate had grown to swallow fully half of the Christian world, which had been mired in internal conflict and was caught off-guard by the Islamic expansion. Powerful and highly advanced Muslim civilizations in the Middle East and Spain became home to some of the world's preeminent centers of culture, trade, and learning, giving rise to groundbreaking Muslim acheivements in medicine, philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, and architecture. The sacking of Baghdad by Hulagu Khan in 1258 and the subsequent fall of the Abbasid Caliphate marked the end of this prolific period of the Muslim World's history, and subsequent centuries failed to produce scholarly achievement and technological or intellectual progress of the significance that had characterized earlier Muslim civilizations.

The void in Muslim geopolitical and military strength was filled by the emergence of the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires, and for a time, the Muslim World maintained its advantage vis-a-vis Europe. However, ongoing intellectual stagnation rendered the various Muslim nations unable to respond to Europe's burgeoning resurgance. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 effectively ended centuries of destructive religious conflicts in Europe, and the subsequent creation of nation-states enabled European powers to direct their territorial ambitions outward. The Rennaisance, the Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution had ushered in radical social, political, and economic changes, and the absence of analagous phenomena in the Muslim World made European powers well-positioned to challenge the long-standing dominance of their Islamic rivals. The Industrial Revolution was also a significant factor in the decline of the Muslim World's relative strength throughout this period; by and large, Muslim nations failed to industrialize as effectively as their European counterparts. While economies in the Muslim World remained agrarian and land-based, those of Europe came to be dominated by industry and manufacturing. Along with the easing of restrictions on interest, the creation of joint stock companies, and an increase in trade triggered by the issuing of paper currency, industrialization led to the accumulation of private capital and spurred rapid economic growth across Europe. Meanwhile, Muslim economies deteriorated as trade routes shifted away from regions controlled by Muslim Empires, depriving them of vast amounts of tax revenue. Efforts aimed at spurring various forms of revival proved unsuccessful; partly because the Ottoman Empire had outlawed printing presses, the Muslim World could not duplicate the explosion in knowledge and new ideas that had fueled Europe's resurgance. Furthermore, the Ottoman government began to be plagued by instability, poor leadership, and archaic political norms (such as the practice of fratricide within the Ottoman House) and was ill-equipped to reverse its decline. Aided by unmatched advances in military and naval technology, European powers attacked and steadily gained control of lands that had been under Muslim rule for centuries, such as Egypt and India, and imposed oppressive economic and political systems predicated on notions of European racial superiority. By the end of World War I, most Muslim lands had fallen under foreign occupation, and the Ottoman Empire (the last entity to actively claim the caliphate) had been virtually destroyed.

Under varying degrees of European direction and influence, the Muslim World was subsequently reshaped along secular nationalist lines and heavily influenced by Western or socialist political philosophies. Colonialism eroded traditional Islamic norms and replaced them with European practices. Even after gaining independence, many Muslim countries modeled their political, economic, legal, and educational systems after those of European nations. The role of mosques and the religious establishment was substantially reduced in most Muslim countries, leading to the emergence of political and military elites that viewed Islam as a personal matter and not a basis for political unity or a viable foundation for a modern state. The increasing marginalization of religious institutions led many Islamic leaders to hermetically seal themselves from Western influences. This helped create a stark dichotomy between Western-educated elites and religious leaders, who resisted the rapid social changes and were ill-equipped to confront the challenges they presented. Furthermore, the division of the Muslim World into distinct nation-states caused political and cultural differences between Muslim countries to become more pronounced and prevented large-scale interstate cooperation from taking place.

Today, the Muslim World is plagued by widespread poverty, corruption, illiteracy, and instability. Many Muslim nations, particularly those in South Asia and the Middle East, lost the brightest and most talented members of their workforce during a wave of emigration to the West in the latter half of the 20th century, further stunting development (a phenomenon termed "brain drain"). The above effects, coupled with the prevalence of old grudges and rivalries between Muslim regimes (particularly in the Arab world), have thus far prevented a re-emergence or revival of Islamic Civilization. Though Islam is still a dominant influence in most Muslim societies and many Muslims remain in favor of a caliphate, tight restrictions on political activity in many Muslim countries coupled with the tremendous practical obstacles to uniting over fifty disparate nation-states under a single institution have prevented efforts to revive the caliphate from garnering much active support, even amongst devout Muslims. Popular apolitical Islamic movements such as the Tablighi Jamaat identify a lack of spirituality and decline in religious observance as the root cause of the Muslim World's problems, and claim that the caliphate cannot be successfully revived until these deficiencies are addressed. No attempts at rebuilding a power structure based on Islam were successful anywhere in the Muslim World until the Iranian Revolution in 1979, which was based on Shia principles and did not deal with the issue of a global caliphate.

Various Sunni Islamist movements have gained momentum in recent years, calling for a restoration of the caliphate. However many such movements have as yet been unable to agree on a roadmap or a coherent model of Islamic governance, and dialog on this issue amongst Muslim activists and intellectuals has yielded no clear consensus on what a modern Islamic state should look like. Islamic religious scholars and institutions have struggled to define the applicability of centuries-old doctrines within the context of a modern society, and Islamic scholarship is generally thought to have failed to keep pace with scientific, technological, and social progress. Many questions on the form a modern Islamic caliphate would take, such as whether the concept of the caliphate is compatible with the modern nation-state construct, have received minimal attention in traditional Islamic scholarly circles. Mainstream Islamic institutions in Muslim countries today have generally not made the restoration of the caliphate a top priority and have instead focused on other issues. Most regimes have actually been hostile to such a call.

One transnational group, the Hizb_ut-Tahrir, has tried to recruit the world's Muslims to a renewed caliphate. They have published a draft constitution at [1].

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Reasons for the fall and continuing dormancy of the Caliphate", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki