of which are bound to be religious. So, for example, in Bosnia during the 1990s, a major thrust of Serb policy was to obliterate as completely as possible all visible signs of Muslim presence, destroying especially ancient mosques and libraries and leaving paved parking lots in their place. Numerous contemporary examples of significant conflict in predominantly Muslim lands feature Muslim-on-Muslim violence, even if the aggressors “dress up” their rhetoric to gather “religious” sympathy by insisting that the people they kill are in fact not “true” Muslims at all.
If Muslims all believe that Islam is not “just a religion” but a “total way of life,” doesn’t that imply perfect consonance of religious and civil/political spheres?
Americans often criticize Islam as inherently flawed because it allegedly refuses to distinguish between religious and civil spheres. On the contrary, there have historically been at least as many Islamically related regimes with separate administrative structures to deal with religious affairs as those that made no policy distinction between religious and civil spheres. This view also conveniently ignores centuries of European and American history. The critique might have some credibility except that those who voice it most loudly are the very people who increasingly insist that their own religious convictions are a legitimate standard of political action. A fine example of the melding of religious and civil spheres in America is the rhetoric of more than a few recent State of the Union addresses, in which a president hints that because of divine guidance, America is virtually infallible. But there are, and always have been, other far more spectacular examples of political ideology cloaked in the garb of religion.
How can one sum up the various models of administration and governance in Islamic history?
At various times in Islamic history different models of leadership have predominated. By far the single most important has been that of the caliphate. In that model, the successor to the Prophet, the caliph, has ideally served as both political and spiritual leader, Commander of the Army and of the Faithful. After its beginning in Medina and reestablishment for some eighty-nine years in Damascus, Baghdad was the caliphate’s center for some five centuries; but the caliphate’s authority did not go uncontested. Several rival caliphates laid claims, most notably in Cordoba and Cairo (under an Ismaili Shi’i dynasty called the Fatimids). In the mid-tenth century the caliphate suffered a severe abridgment when a Turkic dynasty overcame Baghdad and vested the caliph’s temporal power in a new parallel institution called the sultanate. After the Mongols sacked Baghdad in 1258, various dynasties made largely symbolic attempts to prop up or otherwise revive the moribund institution. Nowadays the caliphate is a memory, though some still dream of its resurgence.
Why do religious beliefs so often seem to be associated with intolerance?
Human beings dislike shades of gray. They prefer to convince themselves that they can keep truth and falsehood neatly separated. There is “us” and there is “them,” and they know who has the truth. Stereotyping and demonizing are natural next steps. Not only are “they” wrong religiously, they are somehow not quite up to most people’s standards of humanity and thus are to be pitied if not simply dismissed as irrelevant. Intolerance of religious diversity is a serious historical evil, a force that can easily be exploited by people of ill intent. And yet it costs so little to approach the massive fact of religious pluralism with an open mind.
Have there been other movements based on other models?
Claimants to leadership of the imamate type arose from time to time. Mahdist movements (Sunni groups that focus on the return of a divinely “guided” person called the Mahdi) have been attempted with varying degrees of success until modern times. One abortive attempt at such a movement occurred as recently as 1979, around the beginning of the Iranian revolution and the storming of the American embassy in Tehran. At that time Sunni and Shi’i Muslims alike were observing the beginning of the fourteenth Islamic century. In Tehran Twelver Shi’ites relived the suffering of Husayn against the evil tyrant in their struggle against the evil Shah and the United States in regular observances that mark the beginning of every year, but take on renewed importance at the turn of a century. In Mecca a small Mahdist group, recalling the tradition that with each new century God would raise up for Islam a “renewer,” took over the sanctuary of the Kaba and proclaimed a short-lived new age and paid with their lives for daring to violate the holy place.
There’s been much talk concerning the fear of Islamic “invasion” of the West. Is the Muslim goal to restore the caliphate?
A small minority of extremists cherish the notion of a restored caliphate. But such a scenario presupposes several conditions that one looks for in vain in the history of Is-lamic political regimes. First, the caliphate of nostalgia is supposed to have been a truly global centralized rule in which the “commander of the faithful” exacted the fealty of Muslims everywhere. In fact, at no time during the history of the caliphate did it extend across the full expanse of territories in which Islam would eventually become a dominant presence or majority faith community. At its broadest extent, the caliphate, by any account a vast project, stretched from Spain to Northwest India. However, it never became established firmly in Iberia, and within half a century after the Abbasid dynasty had founded its new capital of Baghdad in 762, the fabric of the caliphate began to unravel from the edges. By the early ninth century, restive provinces broke off as practically independent amirates; by the mid-tenth century, a Shi’i faction had become the power behind the throne in Baghdad; a century later, the Seljuk Turks had virtually neutered the caliphate by establishing the sultanate as the de facto parallel institution with all the real power.
Were there “rival caliphates” elsewhere in Islamdom?
By the tenth and eleventh centuries, rival caliphates were well established in Spain and Egypt. In other words, the political map of Islamdom quickly took on the look of a crazy quilt, and the notion of a resurrected global Muslim rule is in reality a dream that has never come true as the people who fantasize about it might imagine. By the time the Ottoman dynasty incorporated the great middle swath of what had been the Byzantine Empire, even that great power included only part of North Africa and went no further east than Iraq. In addition, the kind of caliphate whose resurrection radical/puritanic/extremist groups envision, is not the extended dominion represented for several generations by the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties. They look back instead to the pristine days of the Prophet and his four immediate successors in Medina, the Rightly Guided caliphs. They typically regard the subsequent dynastic regimes with their pretensions to royalty as betrayals of the Prophetic age. The problem here is that the Rightly Guided caliphs ruled a much reduced realm even at its greatest extent.
What other factors militate against a revived caliphate?
The idea of the caliphate presupposes the seamless integration—indeed, the simple identity of political and religious institutions. The historical reality is that the majority of the many political regimes under Islamic auspices across the globe over the course of more than a millennium actually represent a wide variety of blends and interrelationships of political and religious institutions. Take early modern Iran, for example. In 1500, Shi’i Islam was proclaimed the “state” creed by the ascendant Safavid dynasty. For most of the subsequent five hundred years, the royal and religious establishments each remained distinct. Religious officialdom played the role of a loyal opposition for the most part, and at no time did religious scholars mount a serious campaign to exercise actual political rule. Not until the Iranian Islamic Revolution in 1979 did Khomeini’s radical reinterpretation of Iranian Shi’i traditions of political theology call for direct religious establishment control over political institutions.
Have rulers in states/regions with predominantly Muslim populations engaged or expressed overtly religious values to galvanize popular support?
No ruler wants to risk loss of authority by undercutting the religious legitimation upon which rule depends. But powerful religious figures and movements have often
