In the ultimate analysis, no clear winner may emerge. This battle for the soul of Islam pits rival Middle Eastern and Asian powers against one another: Turkey, seat of the Islamic world’s last true caliphate Saudi Arabia, home to the faith’s holy cities the United Arab Emirates, propagator of a militantly statist interpretation of Islam Qatar with its less strict version of Wahhabism and penchant for political Islam Indonesia, promoting a humanitarian, pluralistic notion of Islam that reaches out to other faiths as well as non-Muslim centre-right forces across the globe Morocco which uses religion as a way to position itself as the face of moderate Islam and Shia Iran with its derailed revolution. Instead, they are engaged in a deepening religious soft power struggle for geopolitical influence and dominance.
Early Islamist political movements, for their part, largely declared the revival of caliphate as an aspiration rather than an immediate goal.Ī century later it is not the caliphate that the world’s Muslim powerhouses are fighting about. Arab leaders showed no interest in the return of the Caliphate even if many Muslim intellectuals and clerics across the Middle East and the Muslim World criticized Ataturk’s abolition of it. 1 “Now the Khaliphate has come back to Arabia,” he added. The Prophet was an Arab, the Koran is in Arabic, the Holy Places are in Arabia and the Khalif should be an Arab of the tribe of Khoreish,” Abdullah told The Manchester Guardian at the time, referring to the tribe of the Prophet Mohammed. They had in the Caliphate one of the greatest political forces, and have thrown it away… I feel like sending a telegram thanking Mustapha Kemal. Jordanian ruler Abdullah I bin Al-Hussein gloated in 1924 when Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the visionary who carved modern Turkey out of the ruins of the Ottoman empire, abolished the Caliphate.
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