Earlier this year at The White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism, President Obama took heat from critics for refusing to link acts of terror with Islam. He should be lauded for not bending to political pressure. But there still remains a long way to go in terms of how we talk about the nexus of geopolitics and Islam. This is perhaps most lucidly demonstrated by the way the word “caliphate” has been thrown around without paying much attention to what it means, to whom, and why.
Policymakers use the term with an air of condescension and incredulity — “They want a caliphate!” — a tone generally reserved for the guy who proposes ditching wi-fi and going back to the good old days of dial-up. Liberal ideas of “universal” progress find it difficult to explain the presence of something so out of place in the modern world. It’s 2015, not 1915, the narrative goes. How has this become an issue?
Fear of a Black Flag
Exasperation isn’t the only feeling conjured up by the word — an all-too-palpable sense of fear also predominates. In 2005, the New York Times ran an article about the term, nearly a full decade before ISIS dominated headlines. In it, senior Bush administration officials, such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, in the midst of leading America to war in Iraq under false pretenses, (ab)use the word to build their case in the same way a child might try and scare his parents by throwing on a white sheet with cutout eyeholes. Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, quoted in the article, notes that the word has an “almost instinctive fearful impact” among Western audiences. Even back then, the word was code-speak, stirring up images of rabid Muslim hoards overrunning the countryside, curved scimitars in tow. Bush himself described it in 2006 as, “a totalitarian Islamic empire, encompassing all former and Muslim lands.”
Why does this word have such power? The answer is complicated, and a good part of it has to do with the West getting used to its new place in a non-polar world, one in which there is a felt loss of control over geopolitical interests. Spooky maps of a reconfigured Muslim world falling under the black flag of the caliphate and Arabic letters activate a real sense of insecurity by showing glimpses of a future whereoutsiders will have little say.
To demonize the word “caliphate” is to run the risk of causing cognitive dissonance in the minds of everyday folks who are doing their best to be both good citizens and observant Muslims.
But how and why do Muslim extremists use the word? There are many reasons. Firstly, they use it precisely because they’re PR savvy, and revel in the fact that the word invariably elicits fear and overreactions from policymakers and the media. Secondly, “caliphate” channels Utopian hopes for a reclaimed, dignified, and unapologetic future, a sentiment shared by many everyday Muslims. Such an attitude comes out of a frustration with the sorry state of the Muslim world, a civilization which, for most of its illustrious history, was sitting pretty on top of the global pecking order, yet today has little to boast about on the world stage. Feeling themselves beholden to Western power, millions of Muslims worldwide look with fondness upon this history, and see what Mir Tamim Ansary has termed a “destiny disrupted”.
Lust for Days Gone By
Yet, there is a further dimension to such nostalgia which sustains the appeal of “caliphate” amongst practicing Muslims, namely the very real and undeniable influence of Islamic theology that sees the Prophetic community of Muhammad as the pinnacle of moral and spiritual perfection, the foremost members of which went on to head the Rightly Guided Caliphates (for Sunnis), or as Imams (this term is primarily used by Shias for the reigning head of the Prophetic bloodline, but has also been used interchangeably with “caliph” in Sunni