Abstract
Framed in a Critical Muslim Studies approach, this essay will present a decolonial reconceptualisation of the concept of the Caliphate by analysing the narratives on the Khilafat movement and the Mappila rebellion (1921-1922) in India and presenting them as decolonial disruptive movements. Traditional formulations of the Caliphate privilege a view from the centre (Arab world) and contemporary discussions focus on the ontic manifestations such as structure and the requirements for the office of the Caliph rather than the what the Caliphate means. By looking at contemporary framings of the caliphate mobilisations and its methodological shortcomings, this essay will theorise how the leaders of the Khilafat movement, Mappilaulemaand leaders conceptualised the Caliphate based on an ontological understanding and their mobilisation of its range of possible meanings. The essay will also look at the appropriation of such meanings by Marxist ideologues and historians to lend legitimacy to the Marxist trajectory of violence and martyrdom, and the subsequent erasure of Muslim political subjectivity from these narratives by framing it using a class analytic. This essay will present a reading of the Caliphate mobilisations as way of decolonising the Islamicate past for ‘clearing the ground’ for dreaming a future.
Highlights
Framed in a Critical Muslim Studies approach, this essay will present a decolonial reconceptualisation of the concept of the Caliphate by analysing the narratives on the Khilafat movement and the Mappila rebellion (1921–1922) in India and presenting them as decolonial disruptive movements
The meaning attributed to the institution of the Caliphate is that of a medieval remnant detrimental to humanity which is captured in contemporary political narratives
This article looks to disrupt such attributed meanings by locating an ontological understanding of what the Caliphate means by taking the Khilafat movement and the South Indian Caliphate formation, i.e. the Mappila rebellion, as decolonial moments to disrupt the normative narratives on the Caliphate
Summary
Baghdad to submit himself to the Caliph and make his nation one with Syria, Palestine, Iraq, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, under the restored caliphate. Sayyid’s imagining of the Caliphate distinguishes itself from traditional Islamic studies narratives and contemporary discourse on Muslim politics which see in the Caliphate an institutional office Sayyid locates this ontological nature of the Caliphate and how its recalling helps in a process of “ground clearing” and is necessary for discussions on the future of Muslim autonomy (Sayyid 2014: 145). Unsurprisingly despite its presumed medieval temporality, in sci-fi, the Caliphate is a clear and present danger that continues to haunt future civilisations and threatens the very existence of humanity at an interstellar level This is akin to the war on terror rhetoric where the restoration of the Caliphate follows a trajectory from the founding leaders of Islamism to Al-Qaeda and IS; the actors change but the Caliphate as an idea will remain the preferred vehicle of destabilising the western enterprise.. We can comprehend the concerns of pre-modern scholars by focusing on the office of the Caliph and method rather than the meaning of the Caliphate itself, as they were actors encompassed within the very system, whereas the same focus at the cost of conceptualising what the Caliphate means by centring it on either a historical narrative or legalistic aspects by contemporary Islamist scholars betrays a conceptual crisis
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