Abstract
Reviewed by Susan Gunasti, Ohio Wesleyan University, USA
DOI: 10.1177/2050303218757322
The institution of the caliphate is one that attracts both scholarly and popular interest, and most analyses have focused on it from a mainly political perspective. Such approaches neither explain why the caliphate is important to Muslims nor help us understand its socio-cultural significance. Mona Hassan’s book, which looks at the ways in which Muslims acknowledged the tragedy of the loss of the caliphate in two distinct time periods of history, moves away from such an approach and, through her exploration of how Muslims remembered and experienced this loss, she has reoriented the discussion of the institution to go beyond a narrow political analysis. An impressive piece of scholarship, this book identifies how Muslim communities grappled with the temporary absence and later reconstitution of the caliphate after 1258 and then its permanent abrogation in 1924 (the former due to the destruction of Baghdad at the hands of the Mongols and the latter due to a vote in the Turkish parliament). Hassan draws on a wide range of sources in several languages and literary genres and, through the process of showing how different the reactions were to the loss of the caliphate in the distinct time periods, she showcases the range of attitudes towards the caliphate in two significant moments of change to the political order that Muslims had known.
The book begins with an introduction to the institution of the caliphate from its early days, but it is not about the origin story of the caliphate. The book—and the people living under the Abbasid and Ottoman caliphates for that matter—takes the existence and political authority of the caliphate for granted, which serves to heighten the ensuing experience of loss. At this stage, Hassan acknowledges the vastly different contexts of her case studies and takes the opportunity to explain the appropriateness of comparing the reactions to the loss and the subsequent ways in which Muslim communities dealt with it in the two time periods, pre-modern and modern, from the understanding of the caliphate as a cultural grammar. She successfully maintains this approach over the course of the book and, in doing so, illustrates the importance that Muslims have attached to the caliphate and what it meant in different contexts.
Chapter 1 captures the profound sense of loss experienced after the destruction of Baghdad and the Abbasid caliphate in various geographic areas and literary genres. This chapter is notable for exposing the socio-cultural expressions over the destruction of the caliphate. Hassan gives readers a perspective on (mainly literate) people’s personal experiences mourning the caliphate, as expressed in the genres of poetry, history chronicles, scholarly literature, and music across a wide geographic area that spanned the Arab east, North Africa, and India. This chapter is admirable in its use of sources and its ability to capture the poignancy of the loss. In doing so, it provides information to understand the aftermath of the destruction of the caliphate in 1258 that is not from a political perspective. One hopes that a reader will similarly do an analysis of non-Arabic-language works on the loss of the caliphate.
Coping with the loss of a universal caliphate was not easy for Muslims at several levels. Among other things, the caliph was the legitimate political authority in Sunni Muslim society and, in his absence, Muslims were faced with a crisis of political leadership. Chapter 2 looks at how some strove to reconstitute the caliphate (with several candidates competing to fill the institution), while others chose to preserve the authority of the Abbasid caliphate of Baghdad through its continued invocation after its fall. After the destruction of Baghdad, a struggle soon emerged to revive the caliphate that was set against the backdrop of the struggle for regional supremacy. The Mamluks in Egypt were able to win this struggle and, in doing so, expand their regional power. Yet the Mamluks were not the Abbasids, which led them to both simultaneously emphasize the political and spiritual dimensions of the caliphate in face of internal challenges to their authority and to attach strong importance to the Abbasid caliphate in legitimizing their politics and religious institutions. Chapter 3 looks at the works of scholars from the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries who drew on the Islamic political thought and jurisprudential traditions to justify the continuation of the Abbasid caliphate in Cairo. This chapter is a rich resource for the political and judicial thought of the medieval period.
Chapter 4 leaps ahead to the twentieth century to look at the abolition of the Ottoman caliphate by the Turkish parliament in 1924, and the subsequent chapters focus on the reactions to its loss in the modern period. The Muslim community again confronted the issue of how to revive the caliphate, but their attempts were set against a different global and regional order than the one that had existed after the destruction of Baghdad. Several Muslim leaders vied to be selected caliph, but regional ambitions and doubt got in the way of the formation of any consensus. Chapter 4 provides an account of the consequences and reactions to the abolition of the caliphate in 1924 in Turkey and geographic Syria. In the former, reactions to the abolition of the caliphate were understood as an expression of opposition towards Mustafa Kemal Paṣa (later Atatürk) and were suppressed, sometimes brutally. In geographic Syria, Sharif Husayn claimed the caliphate for himself, but colonial powers worked to put this claim to rest. Chapter 5 pays close attention to the attempts to reconstitute the caliphate in the post-war period. This chapter illustrates that, even though the caliph was enmeshed in the politics of the late Ottoman Empire, his spiritual claim on Muslims resonated well beyond the empire’s borders. The efforts made to revive the caliphate led to the proposing of various models, with some endorsing the continuation of the caliphate along traditional lines and others calling for a caliphate modeled along the lines of international organizations. While conventional wisdom holds that the international Cairo conference to revive the caliphate was a failure, Hassan tantalizingly raises the question of whether or not we should view the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (est. 1969) as “an alternative international model of the caliphate in the modern era” (217). Chapter 6 looks at the debates in two post-Ottoman successor states, Turkey and Egypt, over the future of the caliphate and how scholars conceptualized the institution in the modern period. The diversity of views on the caliphate is the most striking aspect about this chapter and makes an important contribution to our understanding of modern Islamic thought with reference to the caliphate.
Hassan’s examination of Muslims’ collective memory of the caliphate and the grammar of mourning provides an understanding of the importance that Muslims attached to the caliphate that we have not had up to this point. The ways in which Muslims remembered the caliphate in terms of the past tells us about how contemporary religious communities related to their tradition in the present and held out possibilities for its future potential. It is in these terms that her epilogue should be understood; this chapter provides a quick overview of contemporary movements that seek to restore the caliphate with a comparison to movements in other religious traditions yearning to restore the past. Some may approach this chapter seeking to learn more about contemporary political movements; the point is not to catalog their ideas but rather to show the role of memory in thinking about religious communities. Hassan’s work reveals the importance of considering memory for our understanding of the development of a religious tradition and the conceptualization of religious communities; her method is to use history to locate the collective memory. In doing so, she has expanded our understanding of the caliphate beyond the political. Other categories of analysis that the field has taken for granted await a similar treatment.
Longing for the Lost Caliphate is impressive in its use of sources and geographic and temporal coverage. The work is broad in scope, which is one of its strengths in terms of providing a comprehensive overview of its topic. Such works usually fall victim to criticisms of not considering the various social and political contexts more carefully but, in this case, such criticisms would be a misunderstanding of Hassan’s project. She was not writing a history of the caliphate (a fair amount of work has been done on this topic for the medieval period but more needs to be done on it for the late Ottoman period). What Hassan is doing is showing how the collective memory in different moments of crisis and tragedy reveal about how Muslims forge links with their tradition through the grammar of the caliphate. Her work opens up possibilities for the use of other memories (such as that of lost love) in order to study Islam. This book is an excellent study that represents a significant contribution to our understanding about the caliphate, and Hassan’s use of memory in the study of religion provides a methodological model of inquiry for scholars to follow.