The lure of the caliphate

There is a strand in messianic Islam, however, that does not feature in its Christian counterpart: the restoration of the caliphate, or what is supposed to be the true Islamic state under Sharia law and governed by a caliph, a Muslim sovereign who claims authority over all Muslims. There are several hadiths predicting that a true caliphate will follow unjust kingdoms as part of the End Times scenario. And the belief in the divinely sanctioned appearance of a true caliph has a deep association with the final battle against evil. Actual historic caliphates, such as the Sunni Abbasids (750-1258) and Ismaili Fatimids (909-1171), were propelled to power by messianic movements; though the final battle did not happen, al-Mahdi—the messiah—was used as a caliphal title.

Except at the very beginnings of Islam, and for a brief period in the High Middle Ages, the caliphate was not much of a functioning institution. But it did provide a powerful model of Islamic governance that, as Wael Hallaq, a leading authority on Islamic law who teaches at Columbia, argues, rested on “moral, legal, political, social and metaphysical foundations that are dramatically different from those sustaining the modern state.”…

Hallaq’s analysis suggests that, for all the sadistic horrors that ISIS’s leaders exhibit in their campaign of “shock and awe,” they also aspire to a moral order that transcends not just the boundaries of the national state, but the moral logic underpinning it. Anchored in apocalyptic ideas that give it special meaning and purpose, this kind of transnational Islam seems to hold special appeal to young Europeans caught between competing identities, such as French-born people of North African descent who do not speak Arabic yet fail to gain acceptance as full citizens of France. The same considerations may well apply to three teenage Muslim girls from London’s Bethnal Green Academy School who recently flew to Turkey and have now been confirmed as having crossed into Syria to join ISIS. In Bouzar’s book, Samy explains that for such recruits, knowledge of Arabic is not necessary; the recruits are grouped by language and origins—the French-speakers, the English-speakers, the Chechens, the Moroccans—and united under the banner of jihad.