CIVIL WAR IN SYRIA : The Fall Of Aleppo – Analysis

SOURCE:
http://www.eurasiareview.com/19122016-the-fall-of-aleppo-analysis/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+eurasiareview%2FVsnE+%28Eurasia+Review%29

         

The Fall Of Aleppo – Analysis

                      By

             Aron Lund

In a rapid offensive lasting less than a month, forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad have recaptured the last opposition enclave in east Aleppo. On Monday evening, the army cleared street after street as artillery and air strikes pounded rebel positions northeast of Ramouseh district. By midnight, only a tiny speck of territory remained in opposition hands and celebratory gunfire lit the darkened skies over west Aleppo. On Tuesday evening, finally, news came of a deal brokered by Russia and Turkey that would see the remaining rebel fighters evacuate to opposition-held territory outside Aleppo, while civilians were to remain in the city under government control.

The collapse of the east Aleppo pocket marks the end of a four-and-a-half year struggle for control over northern Syria’s largest city, often referred to as the country’s industrial and economic capital.

To al-Assad loyalists, this is a great victory. In an email interview, a source close to the government in Damascus spoke of Aleppo’s “liberation from terror groups”, saying that the restoration of army control would “allow the hundreds of thousands of displaced persons to return to east Aleppo”.

There is clearly a sense of relief among government loyalists in Aleppo, who feel that their city may finally be on the path back to normality. On Monday night, the state broadcaster al-Ekhbariya ran loops of footage from street celebrations in pouring rain, where young men fired in the air and honked their car horns as television anchors handed out chocolates.

But to the Syrian opposition, the fall of east Aleppo is a political disaster that threatens to sap morale and undermine international support for the uprising. Yet opposition representatives struck a defiant tone.

“We can’t ignore the fact that the revolutionaries in Syria have been left alone to face a large group of enemies, including the regime, Hezbollah, Iran, Russia, the militias, and Iraq,” Omar Mushaweh, a Turkey-based leader of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, told IRIN in an online interview.

But, like other opposition sympathisers interviewed, Mushaweh gave no hint of wanting to surrender. Indeed, with the al-Assad government’s own weaknesses demonstrated by its recent loss of Palmyra to the self-declared Islamic State, no one is under any illusions: the war will go on.

Civilians at Risk

Beyond the political consequences, however, recent events in Aleppo mark the brutal conclusion to four years of human suffering. To Syrians with friends and family in the collapsing rebel enclave, the past weeks have been a nightmare. All through Monday and Tuesday, desperate messages and pleas for help trickled out from east Aleppo through private contacts and social media. Though many civilians had already managed to flee into government-held western Aleppo, the last days of the enclave saw tens of thousands of people thronging the streets.

“People are moving around and fleeing as they can in a very volatile situation, as front lines continue to shift on a daily basis,” Linda Tom, a spokeswoman for the UN’s emergency aid coordination body, OCHA, told IRIN in an emailed comment on Saturday. Tom estimated that more than 40,000 civilians had already been displaced at that point, with a further 100,000 still in rebel-held territory, though she stressed that all figures were uncertain.*

Médecins Sans Frontières has called the fall of east Aleppo one of the worst crises they have seen in years. For some of the displaced civilians, fleeing meant risking everything – not only their lives, but also their homes.

Though the Syrian government claims to welcome and protect civilians fleeing eastern Aleppo, many pro-regime militias are poorly organised and undisciplined, and they have a history of looting and destroying abandoned property. Even the governor of Aleppo, Brigadier-General Hussein Diab, recently complained about the waves of looting that tend to follow every successful army offensive in Aleppo.

Though the UN has reported allegations that rebel groups forcibly prevented civilians from leaving in an attempt to use them as human shields, UN officials have also received reports that military-age men are being arrested after crossing into west Aleppo. Indeed, many civilians in the rebel zone seem to have held off fleeing to government territory until they simply had no other choice. “They have been killing us for so long, why would they have mercy?” one resident told the Washington Post.

The Syrian government is eager to deny any such abuses.

“Men of military age leaving the east are being checked and having their details taken down as part of the amnesty and reconciliation process,” a Syrian colonel working for the man running military operations in Aleppo, Lieutenant-General Ziad al-Saleh, said in a statement provided to IRIN by an intermediary. The colonel stated that those guilty of “severe criminality” will be tried and judged, but insisted that “the state is open to these people returning to their normal lives”.

Indeed, as much as they may want to completely crush the opposition and avenge themselves on rebel fighters, al-Assad’s men seem to realise that a softer touch is in their interest. Aleppo will be seen as a major test case for the government’s strategy of imposing local truces and forcing the evacuation of rebel fighters to peripheral regions like Idlib, as al-Assad shores up control over central Syria and major cities elsewhere.

Nevertheless, as the rebel pocket finally collapsed on Monday and Tuesday, opposition media filled up with references to Srebrenica 1995 and Rwanda 1994, even to the Holocaust. These claims were not backed up by reporting and even overtly pro-rebel media channels had, at the time of writing, produced no evidence of anything remotely similar to these atrocities. According to a spokesperson, the UN had received reports about the killing of 82 civilians at the hands of pro-al-Assad forces on Tuesday. As horrifying as that is, it is no genocide.

That said, the fears of opposition sympathisers in the city are real. Other deaths may have gone unreported and at this point no one is quite sure whether the evacuation deal will hold or what the future will bring. With no outside monitoring of the situation or of the conduct of al-Assad’s forces, there are great and legitimate concerns about the mistreatment of prisoners and vulnerable civilian populations. This gruesome chapter in Syria’s history is still being written.

* A note on the population statistics  : Throughout the conflict, the number of civilians in rebel-held eastern Aleppo has been hotly disputed. Until the rebel stronghold finally collapsed, the United Nations had put the number of people in the east city at 250,000-275,000. After the attack began, most UN estimates seemed to add up to around 140,000 civilians. On 9 December, I was told by UN OCHA spokesperson Russell Geekie that in the absence of definite information it would be premature to conclude that the UN number had been too high, though Geekie acknowledged that preliminary figures did seem to point in that direction. During my most recent visit to Damascus in October and November, Syrian officials provided wildly varying estimates that ranged from 97,000 people (according to Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem) to 200,000 people (according to al-Assad). On December 11, a Damascus-based source close to the Syrian government insisted, in an email interview, that the UN has allowed itself to be misled by opposition activists and told me that in a final count the total number of civilians in eastern Aleppo “will not exceed 100,000.”

TOPICS:

Human RightsMiddle EastMilitaryRussiaSyriaUnited States

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

IRIN

IRIN is an independent, non-profit media organization. IRIN delivers unique, authoritative and independent reporting from the frontlines of crises to inspire and mobilise a more effective humanitarian response.

TERRORISM :Islamic State Caliphate Two Years After: A Transitional Phase?

SOURCE:
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Islamic State Caliphate Two Years After:

                     A Transitional Phase?

                                     By

                         Romain Quivooij*

Islamic State's Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Photo by Al-Furqān Media, official media arm of Islamic State terrorist group.
 

July 1, 2016

It has been two years since the self-styled Islamic State (IS) announced the establishment of a “Caliphate”. How will this construct evolve and what form would it take?


After 23 months of war the determination of the Islamic State (IS) Caliphate is being put to the test, with a significant decline of its revenues and a total combat casualties estimated to exceed 26,000 fighters since 2014. The United States reported in January 2016 that the group would have lost respectively around 20% and 40% of the populated territories it used to control in Syria and Iraq.


IS has the potential to fight back, especially as its strongholds in the Syrian provinces of Aleppo and Deir ez Zour have not been reconquered yet. However, should the erosion of the Caliphate continue over the coming months, it would be more and more difficult for IS to defend the entity it created against the assaults of its enemies and ensure governance at the same time. Retrospectively, the first two years of the Caliphate might thus be seen as a period of transition leading to the reconstitution of the “state”. It is an open question how the latter could evolve and which forces might benefit from that process.

Loss of Popular Support?

IS, also known as ISIS, based the legitimacy and the credibility of the Caliphate on the Sunni-Shia divide and the power vacuum plaguing large parts of Iraq and Syria. The IS organisation is used to present itself as the defender of Sunnis against the Shia-led regimes of Baghdad and Damascus. It remains dependent on the active or passive support of Sunnis living in areas under its influence and control.


These local populations stand at a crossroads. The Caliphate provided them with basic services, the administration of “justice” and an embryonic welfare state, but it also brought disillusionment among its “subjects” and exposed the latter to the risks associated with a state at constant war. According to political scientist Myriam Benraad, “[IS] pledged to hand power back to the Sunnis and secure their prosperity … not only did it not keep its promise but it took civilian populations hostage”.


Territorial losses are likely to lead IS to intensify its “indirect strategy” that aims at forcing enemies of the group to reconsider their military involvement in Iraq and Syria by targeting their civilian populations.


The domestic cost of this approach may nonetheless be high. Sunnis living in the Caliphate are primarily interested in ensuring their security, improving their conditions of life and increasing their political influence. Terrorist activities led or claimed by IS will not meet these expectations and could widen the gap between locals and the “state”.


IS might enforce stricter policies of coercion and repression to reassert societal control, which would further expose the dictatorial nature of its rule and make the Caliphate lose more of its appeal.

Hammer and Anvil

Such a scenario would have positive implications over the long term if a viable alternative to the Caliphate had emerged from the war. This has not been the case so far. Arab Sunni populations are caught between IS on the one hand and different actors they still consider to be hostile to their interests on the other.


In Iraq, feelings of mistrust shared by a majority of Sunnis towards the Iraqi central government as well as their fear of indiscriminate attacks from the Iraqi army and retaliation from Shia militias make a shift of power from IS to Shia forces doomed to failure.


The challenge is even greater in Syria, where a potential but unlikely reimplantation of the Assad regime in governorates it used to control before the civil war would face considerable opposition from Syria’s Sunni majority. In both countries, growing resentment between Arabs and Kurds might sow the seeds of new ethnic clashes.


The campaign against IS is over focused on the objective of military defeat, with little attention paid to post-conflict peacebuilding efforts. This is a shortsighted policy. To be sustainable, territorial gains that are made by anti-IS forces need to be followed by reconstruction, governance and inclusive political processes.


This agenda is severely jeopardised by sectarian cleavages and, in the immediate future, displacements of population who fled fighting. Political scientist Gilles Dorronsoro noted that “the cities of Tikrit, Ramadi and other Sunni bastions passed under the control of IS are falling one after the other, but they are almost depopulated. Return of inhabitants is very limited”.

From Caliphate to Emirate?

Three factors suggest that al-Qaeda (AQ) and its Syrian affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra (JN) would be likely to take advantage of a new balance of power.


First, the conflict between IS and AQ/JN has been a major bone of contention within the Jihadist community since the two organisations split in 2013. Setbacks suffered by IS would be an ideal opportunity for JN and its parent organisation to attempt to restore the leadership of AQ.


Second, any failure of the Caliphate as a “Sunni project” could entice JN to portray itself as a more authentic and effective defender of Sunni populations. The group aims at establishing an Islamic “Emirate” that would rely on a harsh interpretation of Sharia law. To this end, JN developed a dense network of rebel alliances and a genuine base of local support in the North-western Syrian governorate of Idlib where it established a low-key but influential presence.


These assets could be used to gain further traction and expand JN’s outreach, provided that the group would be able to overcome internal disagreements as well as feelings of suspicion and animosity expressed among militant factions and parts of the population that are opposed to its objectives.


Third, a protracted loss of momentum of the Caliphate might be used by AQ and JN as a decisive argument in support of the long-term methodology favoured by their respective leaderships. JN took great care in gradually entrenching itself in the opposition and the social fabric of Syrian communities, as opposed to IS who adopted a strategy for immediate action. The latter approach may well be much frailer than initially thought.


*Romain Quivooij is an Associate Research Fellow with the Centre of Excellence for National Security (CENS), a constituent unit of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

TOPICS:

Al Qaeda Iraq  Islamic State Middle East  Syria   Terrorism

ISLAMIC STATE COMES NEARER TO INDIAN SHORES

SOURCE:
http://www.msn.com/en-in/news/national/from-kerala-family-to-ex-gangster-is-pulls-maldives-men/ar-AAaXUSz


                       ISLAMIC STATE COMES NEARER

                                       TO

                           INDIAN SHORES
                                        By
                               Praveen Swami


                     

 From Kerala Family to Ex-Gangster, IS pulls Maldives Men

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

© Provided by Indian Express Shameem (red T-shirt) and Rahim (centre) at Male airport on their way to join Islamic State 

 

Late last year, Fathullah Jamil decided he’d had enough — of days that began before dawn, calling believers to prayer at the mosque; evenings spent negotiating a taxi through the sweltering streets; and nights spent in an airless one-room home. The children had moved to West Asia, and had been calling their parents to join them. Jamil sold the taxi, and caught a flight to Thiruvananthapuram to pick up his ailing Indian-born wife, Shah Bano.
 

Had intelligence officials in Kerala not intervened, the elderly couple would by now have been spending their retirement in the Islamic State — home to their three half-Indian, Thiruvananthapuram-educated sons, along with their wives and children.

The Maldives advertises its stunning island resorts as an earthly paradise, but intelligence services are increasingly concerned at the number of its citizens who are seeking the afterlife  { read  56  hoors in Jaahnaat } marketed by Islamists.

Indian and Western services estimate up to 200 Maldives citizens, out of a tiny population of 359,000, may now be in Iraq and Syria — the highest by far, in population-adjusted terms, of any country in the world.

The Maldives government says it can confirm 57 people have made the journey, while the Islamic State and its al-Qaeda affiliated rival, al-Nusra, have released at least seven obituaries for Maldivians killed in combat.

Death Threats, Attacks

Inside the Maldives, too, secular writers and activists are facing a growing tide of death threats —- sometimes backed up by lethal attacks.

Former jihadist-turned-secular writer Ahmed Rilwan, who disappeared last year, is thought to have been murdered by Islamist-linked street gangs. Hilath Rasheed, another writer and democratic rights activsts, lives in exile in Sri Lanka after his throat was slashed in a near-fatal attack.

“There’s a growing culture of violence against dissidents from the religious right-wing and the perpetrators are enjoying complete impunity,” said writer Yameen Rasheed.

Male’s powerful street gangs — in turn, linked to heroin cartels and protection rackets — are providing soldiers for the new Islamist army.

 Photographs obtained by The Indian Express show Rasheed’s alleged attacker, former gang member Ismail Rahim, travelling to Syria as part of a group organised by leading Islamist ideologue Adam Shameem. Like dozens of other former gang members, Rahim embraced neo-fundamentalist Islam in prison, seeing jihad as atonement for his past sins.

----------------------------------------------------

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Pakistan Link

Evidence also exists that Maldives’ jihadist networks are tied in with groups in Pakistan. Azlif Rauf, named as a suspect in the writer Rilwan’s disappearance, fled to Pakistan last year, where he is thought to be hiding out with contacts in the Tehreek-e-Taliban.

Through the city, as well as in some of the smaller islands, graffiti calling on young people to join the jihad in Syria is widespread — as are online Twitter handles and websites promoting the cause.

“This is the fastest-growing but least-understood security threat to the whole region. It’s just a matter of time before these people bring the killing home,” said former Maldives police intelligence chief Mohamed ‘MC’ Hameed.

For tourism-dependent Maldives, the prospect of attacks on Western tourists staying at isolated resorts scattered across the country’s more than 2,600 islands is a growing concern.

 

 

India’s Worry

Indian intelligence sources say they are also concerned at the prospect that Maldives could become a staging post for attacks against India.

In 2008, Maldives national Ali Assham — alleged to have been involved with the Lashkar-e-Taiba network attacked the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore — was deported from Sri Lanka to Maldives. Despite Indian demands, he was never prosecuted, and now lives in Male. Assham did not respond to repeated phone calls seeking comment.

Part of the problem, Hameed said, is the state’s lack of capacity to successfully investigate and prosecute jihadists. Ali Jaleel, who in 2008 became the first Maldives citizen to conduct a suicide bombing, was briefly jailed two years earlier — only to emerge within weeks.

Former President Mohamed Nasheed, similarly, pardoned the alleged perpetrators of a 2009 bombing in Male — some of whom are now believed to be fighting in Syria.

 

 

Textbook Jihad

The state’s own textbooks, human rights activists in Maldives say, also contribute to the problem. The class IX Islamic studies textbook tells students
“performing jihad against people that obstruct the religion” is an obligation.
It promises that “Islam ruling over the world is very near”. Promising a caliphate, the textbook says “this is something that the Jews and Christians do not want. It is why they collaborate against Islam even now”.

 

From Fathullah Jameel’s telling of his children’s story, it is unclear precisely what led his children to the Islamic State. Educated as a cleric at the neo-fundamentalist Jamia Salafia in Pakistan’s Faisalabad — home also to the Lashkar’s Assham — Jameel chose a secular education for his children after they finished primary school in Male. The children moved to India with their mother, living and studying near Thiruvananthapuram.

“I know it is impossible to make a living from a mosque Imam’s wages in Male, and I wanted my children to have a better life,” said Jameel.

That’s not quite how it worked out, though: only the middle son, Aatifu Jameel, found a white-collar job, at immigration security. The oldest, Samihu Jameel, worked with a fishing crew. The youngest, Aataru Jameel, remained unemployed — part of the

25 per cent of Maldivians who do not have a job, even though the country employs over 100,000 migrant workers.

 

Syria Calling

In 2013, Samihu Jameel left for Syria —- among the first Maldivians to head there. Police officials familiar with the case say he was drawn to the jihad online, and then made contact with an Islamist charity that made arrangements.

“Frankly, I don’t know. He said he was going to study in Cairo with a religious charity. Then, he disappeared,” said Jameel.
Last summer, Samihu’s wife, Nooha, along with the two brothers and their wives, Najuma and Izawa, also travelled to the Islamic State.

They aren’t the only ones:

 couple Mohammad Zakman Adam Ismail and Marim Sanah are reported to have migrated to the Islamic State late last year.
In another recent case, Maldives government sources said, a young family who travelled to Syria lost their child to pneumonia in February.

 

 

 

Jameel speculates their decision may have, at least in part, been pragmatic.

“It’s hard for young people in Male. After they married, the three boys had to take turns sharing the bedroom.”





















 

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/142379/nick-danforth/the-myth-of-the-caliphate

                                   The Myth of the Caliphate

                     The Political History of an Idea

                                         By
                               Nick Danforth  





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A caliphate (in Arabic: خلافة‎ khilāfa, meaning "succession") is a form of Islamic political-religious leadership which centers around the caliph—i.e. "successor"—to Muhammad. The succession of Muslim empires that have existed in the Muslim world are usually described as "caliphates".

Caliphate - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caliphate

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The Caliph (Arabic: خليفة‎ ḫalīfah/khalīfah) is the head of state in a Caliphate, and the title for the ruler of the Islamic Ummah, an Islamic community ruled by the Shari'ah. Wikipedia

Explore: Caliph, Ummah

In the 9th century, the Abbasids created an army loyal only to their caliphate, composed of non-Arab origin people, known as Mamluks. Wikipedia

Explore: Abbasid Caliphate

Hizb ut-Tahrir states its aim as unification of all Muslim nations over time in a unitary Islamic state or caliphate, headed by an elected caliph. Wikipedia

Explore: Hizb ut-Tahrir, Caliph

  More about Caliphate

Related topics

The Caliph (Arabic: خليفة‎ ḫalīfah/khalīfah) is the head of state in a Caliphate, and the title for the ruler of the Islamic Ummah, an Islamic community ruled by the Shari'ah. Wikipedia

Explore: Caliph, Ummah

In the 9th century, the Abbasids created an army loyal only to their caliphate, composed of non-Arab origin people, known as Mamluks. Wikipedia

Explore: Abbasid Caliphate

Hizb ut-Tahrir states its aim as unification of all Muslim nations over time in a unitary Islamic state or caliphate, headed by an elected caliph. Wikipedia

Explore: Hizb ut-Tahrir, Caliph

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November 19, 2014

                     

Abdulhamid II, who would become one of the last Ottoman sultans and caliphs, as a prince in 1867.

(W.&D. DOWNEY / Jebulon)  

           
In 1924, Turkish leader Kemal Ataturk officially abolished the Ottoman caliphate. Today, most Western discussions of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), the extremist group that has declared a caliphate across much of Iraq and Syria, begin by referencing this event as if it were a profound turning point in Islamic history. Some contemporary Islamists think of it this way, too: there’s a reason, for example, that Lion Cub, the Muslim Brotherhood’s children’s publication, once awarded the “Jewish” “traitor” Ataturk multiple first prizes in its “Know the Enemies of Your Religion” contest.



Even if today’s Islamists reference the Ottomans, though, most of them are much more focused on trying to re-create earlier caliphates: the era of the four Rightly Guided Caliphs, who ruled immediately after Muhammad’s death in the seventh century, for example, or the Abbasid caliphate, which existed in one form or another from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries (before being officially abolished by the Mongols). By conflating the nineteenth-century Ottoman royal family with these caliphs from a millennium ago or more, Western pundits and nostalgic Muslim thinkers alike have built up a narrative of the caliphate as an enduring institution, central to Islam and Islamic thought between the seventh and twentieth centuries. In fact, the caliphate is a political or religious idea whose relevance has waxed and waned according to circumstance.



The caliphate’s more recent history under the Ottomans shows why the institution might be better thought of as a political fantasy—a blank slate just as nebulous as the “dictatorship of the proletariat”—that contemporary Islamists are largely making up as they go along. (If it weren’t, ISIS could not so readily use the same term to describe their rogue and bloody statelet that Muslim British businessmen use to articulate the idea of an elected and democratic leader for the Islamic world.) What’s more, the story of the Ottoman caliphate also suggests that in trying to realize almost any version of this fantasy, contemporary Islamists may well confront the same contradictions that bedeviled the Ottomans a century ago.



OTTOMAN REBRANDING

When the Ottoman Empire conquered Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula in 1517, Sultan Selim the Grim officially claimed the title of caliph for himself and his heirs. In addition to taking control of the cities of Mecca and Medina, Selim bolstered his claim by bringing a collection of the Prophet’s garments and beard hairs back to Istanbul.


Centuries after the fact, the Ottomans decided that they needed to make the whole process look a little more respectable, so royal historians began to assert that the final heir to the Abbasid caliphate, living in exile in Cairo centuries after losing his throne, had voluntarily bestowed his title on Selim. More practically, the Ottomans buttressed their claim to Islamic leadership by serving as guardians of the hajj and sending an elaborately decorated gilt mantle to cover the Kaaba each year.


To put the title grab in perspective, when the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II conquered the Byzantine capital of Constantinople 64 years before Selim conquered Egypt, he had claimed the title Caesar of Rome for his descendants. To the extent that being caliph had any more purchase than being Caesar for the Ottomans in the late nineteenth century, it was largely the result of a political campaign on the part of Sultan Abdulhamid II to rally anticolonial sentiment around the Ottoman state and to boost his own domestic legitimacy. His techniques included seeking to have his name read out at Friday prayers and distributing Korans around the Muslim world from Africa to Indonesia.


There is no doubt that many Muslims, faced with the triumph of European colonialism in their own countries, did come to admire the idea of a pious and powerful leader like the Ottoman sultan defying Western imperialism on behalf of the entire Muslim world. Certainly, British and French officials expressed increasing fear about his potential power over Muslim colonial subjects in North Africa and India. Although he was eager to try to leverage such fears, however, even Abdulhamid had his misgivings about how much real influence his efforts won him in such far-flung locales.



One thing that particularly worried him was the fact that not everyone accepted his claims on the caliphate. Separate from those who rallied around Abdulhamid out of religious solidarity were others, motived by Arab nationalism or dissatisfaction with Abdulhamid’s tyranny, who questioned the religious foundation of his rule. Such thinkers, including at some points Rashid   Rida,  justified the creation of a different, Arab caliphate by quoting Muhammad as saying that the true caliph needed to be a descendant of the Prophet’s Quraysh tribe. (The Ottomans, it seems, accepted the validity of this quote but had their own interpretation of it, in which the Prophet actually meant that the caliph didn’t need to be a descendant of the Quraysh tribe.)




But in either case, the violent politics of the early twentieth century quickly outmatched theology. Despite his best efforts as defender of the faith, Abdulhamid kept losing territory and political power to Christian imperialist forces. That helped the secular leaders of the Young Turk movement, such as Enver Pasha, sideline the sultan and take power for themselves on the eve of World War I. When the Ottoman Empire then enjoyed some military success, belatedly holding its own in the Second Balkan War, Enver became an inspiration to the Muslim world. Indeed, the list of babies reportedly named after him at the time includes Enver Hoxha, the future leader of Albania, and Anwar al-Sadat, the future leader of Egypt.



ARAB HEIR


Of course, Enver’s own star faded, too, with the Ottoman defeat at the end of World War I. Ataturk quickly emerged as a new hero by leading a successful campaign to drive French, Italian, British, and Greek armies out of Ottoman Anatolia. Quickly, some of the same politically attuned Muslims who had supported Abdulhamid’s anti-imperial caliphate found even more to admire in Ataturk's armed defiance of European might. In Palestine, for example, Muslims who had once turned to the Ottoman caliph for protection against Zionist settlers and British occupiers began to cheer Ataturk, leading one suspicious British officer to worry that the Turkish figure had become “a new savior of Islam.”



At the same time, the decline of Ottoman power before, during, and after World War I loaned increasing credence to the idea of a new, non-Ottoman caliph in the Arab world. But it was never entirely clear just who that Arab caliph would be. The result was that when Ataturk finally abolished the institution of the caliphate in 1924, there was no clear or coherent outcry from the Muslim world as a whole. Many Muslims, particularly those in India for whom pan-Islamic symbols such as the caliph were an important part of anticolonialism, protested. Others were more interested in maneuvering to claim the title for themselves.


Most famous was Husayn ibn Ali, sherif of Mecca, who is known to Lawrence of Arabia fans for his leading role in the Arab Revolt. As the local leader with control of Mecca and Medina—and a supposedly clear line of descent from the Prophet’s tribe—Husayn believed that after driving the Ottomans out of the Middle East, he could become an Arab king, with all the religious and temporal powers of the caliph. In pursuit of this goal, when Ataturk exiled the Ottoman sultan, Husayn invited him to Mecca. (The exiled monarch soon decided he preferred the Italian Riviera.)



Several years later, Husayn’s son Abdullah—founder of the Jordanian monarchy—would declare that, in ending the caliphate, Turks had “rendered the greatest possible service to the Arabs,” for which he felt like “sending a telegram thanking Mustafa Kemal.” Of course, Husayn’s plans didn't come off exactly as expected. Despite getting British backing for his scheme early in the war, he famously fell afoul of the Sykes-Picot Agreement. The French drove his son out of Syria, and before long, the Saudis drove him out of the Arabian Peninsula. By the time Husayn officially declared himself caliph, supposedly at the insistence of a select group of Muslim leaders, his power had dwindled to the point where the declaration seemed like an act of pure desperation.



The Egyptian monarchy, meanwhile, had a claim of its own to advance. Despite being closely aligned with the British and descended from Circassian Albanian ancestors with no tie to the Prophet’s family, King Fuad covertly put forward his case to succeed the Ottomans. In the words of one Islamic scholar, Egypt was better suited to the caliphate than, say, a desert nomad like Husayn “because she took the lead in religious education and had a vast number of highly educated and intelligent Muslims.” King Idris I of Libya  also seemed to consider making a bid for the title but, like Fuad, ultimately decided he had too little support to do so officially.



Saudi Arabia’s King Saud, despite eventually seizing the Holy Land from Husayn, was one of the few leaders who never put forward a claim to the caliphate, although the idea was certainly discussed. Saud was aligned with the Wahhabi movement, which arose as a rebellion against the supposed decadence of the Ottoman government in the eighteenth century. Ironically, although his opposition to the Ottoman-style caliph was shared by other Arabs, his particular brand of religiosity was too radical for him to ever think he had much chance of becoming caliph himself.


In the end, though, the unseemliness of such political wrangling was just one of the factors that helped put the caliphate discussion to rest for the next several decades. Many Muslims had responded to its abolition by redoubling their efforts to build secular constitutional governments in their own countries. Indeed, some of the strongest opposition to the Egyptian king’s caliphal aspirations came from Egyptian liberals who opposed any moves that would increase the monarchy’s power. Egyptian scholar Ali Abd al-Raziq, in his famously controversial criticism of the very idea of a caliphate, even went so far as to claim

that the Koran contains “no reference to the caliphate that Muslims have been calling for.”


This was also the period where a number of thinkers, secularists and religious Muslims alike, began discussing the possibility that the caliph should be a purely religious figure, like an “Islamic pope,” unencumbered by any temporal power.





A HOPE AND A PRAYER

It would be a mistake to think that twenty-first-century Islamist movements trying to revive the caliphate are doing so in the name of a clear, well-defined Islamic mandate. Rather, they are just other players in a centuries-long debate about a concept that has only occasionally taken on widespread relevance in the Islamic world.


The legacy of earlier rounds of this argument can still be felt today. It is no surprise that, as a historical inspiration, the Ottoman caliphate holds most sway among Turkish Islamists, whose nostalgia owes far more to the way Turkish nationalists have glorified the empire than it does to the piety of the sultans. Conversely, the religious legacy of Abd al-Wahhab’s eighteenth-century critique of the Ottoman state, combined with the political legacy of more recent anti-Ottoman Arab nationalism, gives plenty of non-Turkish Islamists ample reason to prefer the precedent of an Arab caliphate.



By treating the Ottoman caliphate as the final historical reference point for what current Islamists aspire to, Western pundits conflate the contemporary dream of a powerful, universally respected Muslim leader with the late Ottoman sultan's failed dream of becoming such a figure himself. The circumstances uniting these dreams—and the appeal of strong religious power in the face of Western political, military, and economic power—may be the same. But so are the challenges. Contemporary claimants to the title of caliph may quickly find themselves in the same boat as Ottoman caliphs. Political or military success, rather than history or theology, can bring short-lived legitimacy, but failure in these realms will bring other contenders for power.