Caliphate

Caliphate, office and realm of the caliph as supreme leader of the Muslim community and successor of the Prophet Muhammad. Under Muhammad the Muslim state was a theocracy, with the Shari'ah law, the religious and moral principles of Islam, as the law of the land. On his death in ad 632, a group of Islamic leaders met in Medina, the capital of the Muslim world at that time, and elected Abu Bakr, the Prophet's father-in-law and closest associate, to lead the community. Abu Bakr took for himself the title khalifat Rasul Allah (Arabic, “successor to the Messenger of God”), from which the term caliph (Arabic, khalifah,”successor”) is derived. The caliphs were both secular and religious leaders. They were not empowered, however, to promulgate dogma, because it was considered that the revelation of the faith had been completed by Muhammad.

The Sunni (followers of the Sunna hadith, the body of Islamic custom or the Way of the Prophet), who constitute a majority of Muslims, generally consider the period of the first four caliphs the golden age of Islam. Other sects, however, as they were formed, came to regard this period and subsequent caliphates differently, and as a result great hostility has frequently arisen between Sunni and other Muslims, such as the followers of Shiism, concerning the caliphate. During the course of Islamic history the issue of the caliphate has probably created more dissension than any other article of faith.

Based on the examples of the first four “rightly guided” caliphs and companions of the Prophet, the Sunni formulated the following requirements of the caliphate: the caliph should be an Arab of the Prophet Muhammad's tribe, the Quraysh; he should be elected to his office and approved by a council of elders representing the Muslim community; and he should be responsible for enforcing divine law and spreading Islam by whatever means necessary, including war. In the history of the caliphate, however, all these requirements were rarely met. In practice, the position of caliph has been filled by hereditary succession, though many Muslims, later disapproved of this as a deviation from the essential nature of Islam. The Shiites, in contrast, believing that the Prophet himself had designated his son-in-law, Ali ibn Abi Talib, as both his temporal and spiritual successor, accepted only Ali's descendants (by Fatima, Muhammad's daughter) as legitimate claimants to the caliphate.

Since the doomed attempt of Ali and his son Husain to succeed to the caliphate, the major dynasties of caliphs have been the Umayyads, the Abbasids, and the Fatimids. From about the 13th century various monarchs throughout the Muslim world, particularly the sultans of the Ottoman Empire, assumed the title caliph indiscriminately without regard to the prescribed requirements of the caliphate. The title held little significance for the Ottoman sultans until their empire began to decline. In the 19th century, with the advent of Christian powers in the Near East, the sultan began to emphasize his role as caliph in an effort to gain the support of Muslims worldwide. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, Turkish nationalists deposed the sultan, and the caliphate was finally abolished (March 1924) by the Turkish Grand National Assembly. This brought consternation to many sections of the Muslim world, but subsequent efforts to resolve the issue have been abortive, and the restoration of the caliphate is now regarded by many Muslims as irrelevant to modern Islam.