Contrary to the European experience, demise of caliphate was not a result of purely indigenous struggle of Muslims.
LAHORE: This is with reference to Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy’s article of March 23 titled “On choosing Caliphs and Popes.”
The history of Christian Europe and Caliphate of the Muslim civilisation followed distinctive paths. Historians and even average students of history recognise this distinction. The structure of ruling and the role religion played do not mirror each other. Critics of the caliphate system would be naive to consider them identical and draw analogies between the two.
The internal struggle of Christian Europe against the political role of the religious authority directly stemmed from the latter’s failure to cater to the needs of the people. This internal struggle was not fanned, manoeuvred or forced upon them by any external power. Therefore, the idea of “separation of church and state” took root indigenously, gained momentum and was eventually accepted as the norm de facto. On the other hand, Islamic civilisation thrived under the system of caliphate. It did not have a “Dark Age” to begin with and did not suffer from the kind of intense rivalry that dominated the geopolitics of the kingdoms of medieval Europe.
Contrary to the European experience, the demise of caliphate was not a result of a purely indigenous struggle of the Muslims. The imperial West, in particular the British, played an active, conscious and planned role in order to dismantle the caliphate. The West needed to place loyal dictators in the various fragments of the caliphate and thwarted all efforts for the latter’s restoration. The current secular order of nation states over much of the Muslim world was a foreign construct engineered by the West. Professor Hoodbhoy himself recognises this fact by stating that before Kemal Ataturk eliminated the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924, “a caliphate had been the norm”.
Rationally, to understand the selection of a new leader in a position, requires one to consider all aspects of the structure of ruling, and not merely the scope of the leader’s authority. Sharia stipulates that the new caliph has to be confirmed within three days. Also, history of the caliphate shows that the selection of new caliphs was not prone to unreasonable delays. The analogy of infallibility, too, is invalid. The caliph is not infallible. And to validate that allegation would require historical proof and textual evidence from the works of renowned classical scholars. The trend of Christians moving away from the Church, because of its stance on some issues may be valid. However, the trend in the Muslim world is different. Mosques and Islamic centres flourish in Muslim communities living in the West, and there is a growing rate of non-Muslims acceptance of the Islamic faith. These and many other indicators point to the growing role of Islam in politics.
The definition of a caliphate and the scope of its authority has historically been the same. It is for this reason that we find that no one in the Muslim world is able to claim this label for himself. No monarch in the Arab world would call himself a caliph. No leader of any of the various movements in the Muslim world would label himself as one. And this is precisely because the idea of the seat of the caliphate is clear in the thoughts of the Muslim world and its scholars.
Professor Hoodbhoy makes a biased comparison when he refers to the viewpoint of a lone and lesser-known scholar Taha Hussein, and states it to be in strong conflict with all the other scholars who have been surprisingly categorised under one label of being “influenced” by Maulana Abul ala Maududi and Syed Qutb. Coming from someone in the field of science, the lack of substance in this notion is either deliberate or due to lack of knowledge of history of scholars of Islam.
Engr Sharique Naeem
Published in The Express Tribune, March 31st, 2013.
