So what does a 21st Century Caliphate have in store for us?
So what does a 21st Century Caliphate have in store for us?
On Sunday the Shura (council) declared the new ‘caliph’ of Islam, an Islamic system of rule that ended almost 100 years ago with the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Caliph (Arabic: خليفة khalīfah means ‘succession’) is the head of state in a Caliphate, and the title for the ruler of the Ummah, a community ruled by Shari’ah.
The new leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is now seen as more powerful than Al-Qaeda’s chief.
So who is he?
He was born in Iraq in 1971 and joined the insurgency that erupted shortly after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, having earlier spent time in an American military prison.
In October 2005, American forces thought they had killed him in a strike on the Iraq-Syria border. However they were wrong, as he took the reins of what was then known as the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) in May 2010 after two of its chiefs were killed in a US-Iraqi raid. In October 2011, the US designated him a ‘terrorist’, and this year Iraq released a picture of Baghdadi depicting a balding, bearded man in a suit and tie.
ISI became ISIS/ISIL (Islamic States of Iraq & Syria/Levant), but last week the name Iraq & Syria were erased from its title. It is now known as ‘Islamic states’, or IS for short, as Baghdadi intends to follow in the footsteps of previous caliphs and carve his name into geographical history. He’s just released an electronic document which is nothing short of a rallying call/battle cry to Muslims around the globe. It is titled ‘A Message to Mujahidin and the Muslim Ummah in the month of Ramadan’, and is worth taking a look it to give you a look into his mindset.
Map of the Expansion of the Islamic Caliphate
Harun Yahya describes the Golden Age of Islam as “an Islamic state [that] stretched from Tripoli in the west to Horosan in the east and the Caucasus in the north”. And later – as the BBC2 ‘The Ottomans’ series showed – Europe’s Muslim Caliphate ruled an empire that at its peak encompassed half of Europe and most of north Africa, as well as the Jewel in the Crown, Mecca & Medina.
What happened to the Caliphate?
Within the first 50 years of the Prophet’s death, the caliphate was established – but quickly resulted in bloodshed and warfare:
1) Prophet Muhammad’s daughter Fatima was married to Muhammad’s first cousin, Ali. He was the second convert to Islam and was raised like a son by Muhammad. After becoming Caliph he ended up fighting a civil war against an army raised by Aisha, Muhammad’s favourite wife. In the famous Battle of the Camel, 10,000 Muslims were killed, just 25 years after Prophet Muhammad’s death.
2) Two out of the first four Caliphs were killed during infighting for the Caliphate. All of them were among Muhammad’s closest companions. The third Caliph was killed by allies of the son of the first Caliph. He was murdered by the fifth Caliph a few years later after being wrapped in the skin of a dead donkey and burned. The fourth Caliph Ali was stabbed to death after a bitter dispute with the fifth Caliph, who went on to poison one of Muhammad’s two favourite grandsons. The other grandson was later beheaded by the sixth Caliph.
3) Infighting and power struggles between Muhammad’s family members, closest companions and their children only intensified with time. Even the Kaaba, which had stood for centuries under pagan religions, lay in ruins from internal war. And this spelled the eventual downfall for the last Ottoman empire in 1924 too, as it had become outdated and grown too bulky to control the internal wars ravashing it from within.
What happens now?
The aim of the caliphate is to usher in the peace of ‘Dar-es-Salaam’ or ‘Islamic House of Peace’. But history only shows its constituents eventually turning in on each other. We must ask what security is offered by such a system (for non-Muslims and Muslims) when it could not even protect Muhammad’s own family from itself? Today the death toll of just Shias caused by Shia-Sunni infighting stands at over a million, and the fighting is yet to stop.
Who knows what will eventually become of Baghdadi’s caliphate. No doubt the Pied Piper will be fluting to Jihadis’ across the globe, before frogmarching them off to war. Yet provided the international community holds together, treads cautiously but acts decisively, the threat can still be contained.
As ISIS goes beyond its current borders, it will feast its eyes on Saudi Arabia. Presently Saudi Arabia has the equipment and the resources to fight this war on its own, but more likely a combative five-way alliance will be formed between Jordan, Egypt, Kuwait, UAE and the KSA. I’d rather that, then the new 21st Century Caliph of Islam have his last rites met by a US drone.
“Before I was nine I had learned the basic canon of.. life. It was me against my brother; me and my brother against our father; my family against my cousins and the clan; the clan against the tribe; and the tribe against the world and all of us against the infidel.” – Leon Uris, “The Hajj”
Saif Rahman is a strategic consultant, HCMA founder (Humanist and Cultural Muslim Assoc) and author of The Islamist Delusion
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24 Responses to “Meet Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the new Caliph of Islam”
irfan
This article has been written out of bias. Just misleading about the first four khulfha
Captain Caustic
The comic reality you live in is constructed from myth and fairy tales and you are telling me to get educated. Fabulous !
Captain Caustic
Islam will be irrelevant in a couple of centuries. A repressive system based upon magic and mumbo jumbo which does not reflect reality cannot sustain long term. Islam is just another dying religion no matter how romantically or delusionary your attachment to it and its ‘historical’ mythology of perfection is.
noobie
Islam has been at war with the non-islamic world for 1400 years
islam has been conquering, murdering, and suppressing for 1400 years
Islam teaches dishonesty, violence, murder, and sedition.
Islam destroys all others religious symbols and statues.
Islam is NOT a religion.
Islam is a SEDITIOUS IDEOLOGY !!
JC
I was hoping what I read in Dolores Cannon’s book “Conversation with Nostradamus” was bogus. I’m afraid, I believe you are right Duke X