Caliphate as Transnational Metaphor: A Decolonial Analysis of Caliphate Struggles

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/reorient.6.2.0173
• Pages: 173-201
• Published date: 01 April 2021
• Date: 01 April 2021
• Author: Sheheen Kattiparambil
• Subject Matter: Caliphate,Critical Muslim Studies,Decolonial,Khilafat movement,Mappila

ReOrient 6.2 Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals

Department of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

Email id: pt16s2k@leeds.ac.uk

CALIPHATE AS TRANSNATIONAL

METAPHOR: A DECOLONIAL ANALYSIS

OF CALIPHATE STRUGGLES

Sheheen Kattiparambil

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 caliph-

ate mobilisations and its methodological shortcomings, this essay will theorise how the

leaders of the Khilafat movement, Mappila ulema and leaders conceptualised the Caliph-

ate based on an ontological understanding and their mobilisation of its range of pos-

sible 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 nar-

ratives by framing it using a class analytic. This essay will present a reading of the Caliph-

ate mobilisations as way of decolonising the Islamicate past for ‘clearing the ground’ for

dreaming a future.

Keywords: Caliphate, Critical Muslim Studies, Decolonial, Khilafat movement, Mappila

Haunting the Future

Anywhere else in the world people would flee that sound, but here in Baghdad it

was just one theme in the symphony of celebration. The sharp chattering of a

machine gun set a high-pitched counterpoint to the deep bass booms of rockets.

A shower of golden sparks hung in the night sky and edged the needle-like spires

of minarets like a benediction. The sparks seemed to fall in slow motion. The light

from the fireworks briefly lit the faces of the crowd. Men whirled and danced.

Tears glinted on their cheeks, and their mouths stretched wide as they chanted

for their Caliph. Kamal Farag Aziz, the new president of Egypt, had come to

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Baghdad to submit himself to the Caliph and make his nation one with Syria,

Palestine, Iraq, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, under the restored caliphate. In Cairo,

Baghdad, Damascus, East Jerusalem, and Mecca, the masses celebrated. In

Lebanon, Qatar, and Kuwait, the leaders of the few remaining sovereign Arab

states were shivering. (Martin 2008: 496)

The familiarity of brandished weapons animated by depictions of emotional ela-

tion in the streets of the more traditional and historical centres of the Islamic

world, contrasted with an atmosphere of fear devouring the epicentres of relatively

modern urbanised Muslim states, provides the “Game of throne-esque” premise

for the opening salvo of George R. R. Martin’s sci-fi epic Inside Straight. Martin

constructs a post-World War II counterfactual universe in which an alien virus has

wiped out the bulk of humanity, but nevertheless anointing some survivors with

superpowers culminating in their showdown with the forces of an emergent Caliph

heading a unified Muslim world. Quite unsurprisingly, the list of adversaries and

catastrophes Martin’s superheroes have to take down or avert include a nuclear

catastrophe, zombies, and the Caliphate; the combination indicating the resurrec-

tion of a mindless dead institution culminating in mass destruction. The meaning

attributed to the institution of the Caliphate is that of a medieval remnant detri-

mental to humanity which is also captured in contemporary political narratives.

This article looks to disrupt such attributed meanings by locating an ontologi-

cal understanding of what the Caliphate means by taking the Khilafat movement

and the South Indian Caliphate formation, i.e. the Mappila rebellion, as decolo-

nial moments to disrupt the normative narratives on the Caliphate. Towards this

end, I place Salman Sayyid’s conceptualisation of the Caliphate in conversation

with that espoused by anti-colonial resistance movements in South Asia. Sayyid’s

imagining of the Caliphate distinguishes itself from traditional Islamic studies nar-

ratives 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 dis-

cussions on the future of Muslim autonomy (Sayyid 2014: 145). This is also the

reason for my employment of science fiction motifs as an introductory metaphor

to mark the futuristic anxieties of the new world order vis-à-vis the Caliphate.

While Martin’s epic is anchored in terra firma albeit in a counterfactual nar-

rative, several science fiction writers have expanded the ambit of a subversive

Caliphate to outer space and the future. The figure of the Muslim fundamen-

talist is reproduced in outer space colonies or in the Earth’s distant future in

Louise Marley’s Terrorists of Irustan, Maureen McHugh’s Nekropolis, and Katie

Waitman’s The Divided (Nuruddin 2006: 139). The Caliphate is imagined as a

transmundane and alien (non-human) institution that forms the constitutive other