Multiple Sovereignties and Nation–States

The crisis of religious authority in the Muslim world was intensified by the colonization of Muslim countries by European powers, which began in the 17th century but was accelerated in the 18th and 19th centuries. This process culminated in the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire following its defeat in World War I and the establishment of British and French control over its Arab regions under the Mandate system.10 The Muslim world had fragmented into several autonomous polities in the very first centuries of Islam—the breakaway Umayyad Caliphate of Spain in the eighth century providing the earliest major example. However, the fiction of the unity of the ummah, at least among the demographically predominant Sunnis, had been maintained until the advent of European colonialism through the institution of the caliph as titular head of the Muslim world.

The caliph’s power was, for long periods, marginal, such as during the latter part of Abbasid reign from the middle of the 10th to the middle of the 13th century (when the caliph reigned by permission of Turkic dynasties that controlled Baghdad). The Ottoman emperor took the title of caliph in 1517 when his armies captured Egypt, where Mamluk rulers had kept the institution nominally alive by installing scions of the Abbasid dynasty after the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258. The Ottoman appropriation of the title demonstrated decisively that the caliphate had become tied to force and conquest and therefore had little religious sanction or significance.

In reality, the religious significance of the caliphate had always been in some doubt. The institution evolved from the Prophet’s tradition of nominating a prayer leader when he himself was unable—for health or other reasons— to lead prayers. Muhammad elected not to nominate a political successor, preferring that the community of believers choose its own leader after his death. This process was problematic from the beginning, as the selection of the very first caliph was challenged by those who wanted succession to be restricted to the House of the Prophet. Three of the first four caliphs were, in fact, assassinated, demonstrating the extent to which the legitimacy of the institution was contested. The religious sanction for the caliphate was further weakened when Muawiya transformed it into a hereditary monarchy, establishing Umayyad dynastic rule.

Despite its shortcomings, the existence of the caliphate offered most Muslims a feeling of continuity and at least a formal locus of political authority, however geographically distant. Consequently, a great sense of loss was felt when the caliphate was abolished after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, when the Republic of Turkey was established. The concept of the ummah was deprived of political significance, although it continued to have emotional appeal for many Muslims. Some Islamists, for example, the Hizb–ut–Tahrir and Al Qaeda, express nostalgia for the institution of the caliphate and are committed to its revival.

The restoration of the caliphate, however, is not widely supported. Most Muslims, including most Islamists, are at ease working within the parameters of the nation–state, despite the fact that the importation of the European concepts of the “sovereign state” and “nationalism” compounded the problem of decentralized and multiple authority structures in Islam. As established by the Westphalian European system, sovereignty resides in the nation, embodied politically and territorially in the state.11

The importation of the nation–state model also bolstered the already existing anticolonial movements in Muslim–majority countries. Such movements often combined elements of territorial and ethnic nationalism with such ingredients as resistance to foreign domination, all the while drawing on Islamic heritage. Thus the concept of jihad reentered Muslim popular imagination in the 19th century as a religious doctrine enjoining resistance to foreign rule.12 During the colonial period, such resistance in the name of Islam was territorially limited to liberating particular colonial possessions. For example, in the latter part of the 19th century, the Mahdi’s jihad focused specifically on the Anglo–Egyptian Sudan, just as the jihad of the Indian “Wahabis” was directed only against the British in India.

The nationalist political project, even where it employed Islamic vocabulary, called above all for the construction of a modern, quasi–secular, independent state on the basis of the European model. This agenda promised an end to the humiliation of European colonialism, the implementation of a state–driven economic development program, and the assertion of a modern national identity based on watan, or homeland.

The Muslim world’s emergence from colonial rule brought both general education and religious teaching largely under the control of the postcolonial, nationalist state. The increase in state power at the expense of the authority and autonomy of the ulama had major implications for the interpretation and enforcement of Islamic law. As the Islamic legal scholar Khaled Abou El Fadl has pointed out, “The disintegration of the role of the ulama and their co– optation by the modern praetorian state, with its hybrid practices of secularism, have opened the door for the state to become the maker and enforcer of the divine law; in so doing the state has acquired formidable power that has further ingrained the practice of authoritarianism in various Islamic states.”13 Accordingly, many who desire to make societies more Islamic believe that this can be achieved only by using the state as an agent for Islamization through legal decree and coercive enforcement.

The primacy of the territorial state has also been both acknowledged and legitimized in the Muslim world by the creation of numerous interstate organizations that deem themselves “Islamic” or “Muslim.” The leading example is the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), whose members are sovereign, territorial states with majority Muslim populations. These interstate organizations explicitly acknowledge the doctrine of noninterference in the internal matters of their members. They operate largely on the basis of realpolitik with their members pursuing individual political, military, and economic goals, while sometimes using Islamic vocabulary to justify their policies.14


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