Part 4: Toward Renaissance15

Chapter 15: Contention and the Caliphate Project: Between History and the Future

There is a word in our heritage whose weight exceeds its letters: “caliphate”. For some it summons a lost golden age; for others, fears drawn from the past or from its uses today. The chapter proposes a third eye: that of critical history, which asks questions, rather than the eye of nostalgia that dreams or the eye of rejection that closes the file. It distinguishes the prophetic model from human interpretation, reads the Great Strife as a time when sincere people contended with one another, follows the shift from consultation to kingship and the centuries of the Ottoman state, and reads 1924 as the dissolution of a centre rather than merely the fall of a capital. It then asks what conditions any future unifying project would have to meet.

The book is being prepared for publication, in Arabic. These pages offer glimpses of it, not its text.

Cases in this chapter

This chapter does not open with one of the numbered cases.

The Cases