Caliphate

Caliph (خليفة) was the title taken by Abu Bakr, the father-in-law of Muhammad, when he succeeded him as leader of the Ummah, or community of Islam, in 632.

The holder of this title claims rulership over all Muslims. The Caliph combines four roles that are often distinct in the Western world. These roles are:

Spiritual leader of Muslims, the one who guides Muslims in new matters,
Religious leader of Muslims, the one who enforces Sharia,
Political leader of Muslims, the one who conducts relations with other states and administers the government,
Military leader of Muslims, the one who orders and conducts military affairs, in particular those regarding the conflict between dar al-Islam and dar al-Harb.

In the Catholic Church, the first two are combined in the office of the Pope. The last two are combined in military dictatorships. Islam may be unique in being the only system to combine all four.

Following the conflict between the Fatimids and the Abbasids, other Muslim rulers began to claim the caliphal title. With defeat of these peripheral caliphates, the caliphate of the Ottomans began increasingly to be considered the undisputed primary caliphate. Thus, by the eve of the First World War the Ottoman caliphate represented the largest and most powerful independent Islamicate political entity.

The English word "Caliph" comes from Arabic via French, which got it from Latin (calīpha), which romanized the Arabic word, Khalīfa (probably خليفة), literally "Successor of the Prophet." Khalīfa originates from the verb khalafa, meaning "to succeed" or "to be behind." Some Orientalists wrote it as KhalÃÂÃÂ®f. Some movements in modern Islamic philosophy justify religious leadership via khalifa, meaning roughly "to steward" or "to protect the same things as God," and propose this to renew the Caliphate.

Table of contents

1 Famous caliphs
2 Dynasties
3 Current

Famous caliphs

The Four Righteously Guided Caliphs:

Other caliphs, some self-proclaimed:

Abd-ar-rahman IV
Abd-ar-rahman V
Abd Allah ibn Zubayr
Haroun al-Raschid, hero of many stories in 1001 Arabian Nights
Umar bin Abd al-Aziz

Dynasties

The first four caliphs were followed by:

The Umayyad dynasty in Damascus (661-750), followed by the
The Abbasid dynasty in Baghdad (750-1258)
After the sack of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258, the Mamluk rulers of Egypt set up an Abbasid as a puppet Caliph in Cairo. These Caliphs lasted until the Ottoman conquest in 1517
In the 19th Century, the Ottoman Sultans began to claim the title of Caliph, saying that it had been passed from the last Abbasid to Sultan Selim I, although there is no evidence of this. After the abolition of the Sultanate in 1922, the Caliphate continued for two more years under the Ottoman Prince Abdul Mejid II, before being finally abolished at the behest of Kemel by the Grand National Assembly in 1924.

Other regional dynasties set themselves up as Caliphs:

The Shi'ite Fatimid dynasty in North Africa and Egypt
The Umayyad Emirs of Cordoba, Spain, declared themselves as Caliphs again in the 10th Century
The Almohad dynasty in North Africa and Spain

Current

Currently, there is a movement in many countries to rise a new caliphate in The Modern Moslem World. Among these movements is The Hizb'ut'Tahrir.

International terrorist group Al-Qaida plans to overthrow other governments in the Middle East with the help of allied movements so that it would establish a Wahhabi caliphate across the Muslim world. Jemaah Islamiah leader Rahman Ismauddin, better known as Hambali, wanted to establish his own caliphate across Southeast Asia. It would have composed of Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Brunei, Cambodia, and Thailand.

Currently, there is a growing movement in the Muslim world for the return of the caliphate. Groups such as Azmat-e-Islami and Hizb'ut'Tahrir are actively working for the re-establishment of the caliphate. In the summer of 2003, in Egypt, there was a failed coup by some top officials in the Egyptian army to give allegiance to the caliphate, but secret intelligence discovered the plot, and killed all those involved. The official press statement regarding the incident cited military practices with live ammuniation. The goal of the coup was to initiate a caliphate which would encompass the entire Muslim world, from Morocco to Indonesia; not as a union of states, but the amalgamation of all 53 Muslim states -one army, one currency, one religion, one brotherhood.