A Critical Reading of Prof. Ovamir Anjum’s “Who Wants The Caliphate?”
Reviewed by Bulbul-e-Bangal
Professor Anjum’s seminal essay “Who Wants the Caliphate?” presents a comprehensive case for reconsidering Islamic political unity in the contemporary world, meriting serious scholarly engagement despite its ambitious claims. Having had the honour of meeting Professor Anjum during my time at Cambridge when he was visiting for a day and praying Maghrib behind him, I hold both him and his Ummatics Institute in the highest regard; what follows are merely constructive criticisms offered in the spirit of the very ummatic discourse. This analysis will proceed in two parts: first, I shall endeavour to summarise his core argument to the best of my ability, acknowledging the usual caution about the thin line between summarisation and essentialisation that inevitably accompanies such condensation. Subsequently, I will offer sequential commentary on various components of his argument, examining both the theoretical framework he constructs and the practical implications of his proposed neo-caliphate model. The desideratum is not to dismiss Professor Anjum’s valuable contribution to contemporary Islamic political thought, but rather to examine the fundamental redundancy inherent in repackaging universal political aspirations under Islamic theological frameworks.
Professor Anjum’s argument operates across four interconnected dimensions that merit individual examination. First, his crisis diagnosis: he contends that “the nation-state model has been unravelling since the promulgation of the neoliberal policies of the 1980s by global powers” and that contemporary Muslim societies face “further spiralling degradation into terrorist fiefdoms and, God forbid, a third world war.” Second, his theological foundation: drawing upon extensive classical Islamic scholarship, he argues that “all surviving Muslim schools and sects agreed on the obligation of appointing one leader for the Muslim community,” citing authorities like al-Juwayni who established consensus that “installing an imam is an obligation” based on “the consensus of the Companions, the highest imaginable authority for a religious obligation.” Third, his structural incompatibility thesis: he asserts that “the modern nation-state, precisely defined, is an institution foreign to Islam in any of its recognisable forms,” necessitating an alternative framework altogether. Fourth, his proposed solution: rejecting both “romanticisation of the caliphate as an institution that can magically guarantee Muslims’ independence” and extremist models, he envisions “a confederation of governments in the core regions of Islam that protects a range of human rights for all, provides political and economic stability to these regions, and allows Muslims to develop a variety of local political arrangements while embracing the larger religious and cultural unity.” This synthesis leads him to conclude that governance “based on a just, accountable, human-rights-conscious, and decentralised union of the various Muslim regional governments with a unified economy and defence” represents “the only long term alternative to the mutually reinforcing coterie of despots and terrorists.”
Professor Anjum’s proposed caliphate reveals a fundamental tension between theological necessity and political pragmatism that ultimately undermines his central thesis. Consider the specific features he deems essential: “a just, accountable, human-rights-conscious, and decentralised union of the various Muslim regional governments with a unified economy and defence.” Each element here: accountability, human rights protection, decentralisation, economic integration, collective security, represents a universal political desideratum with no essential connection to Islamic theology. When he invokes al-Sanhūrī’s vision requiring “separation of powers,” “legal reform,” and “decentralisation and localism,” or when he approvingly cites the American constitutional architecture as “one of the best cases of political envisioning the modern world has seen,” he inadvertently concedes that his ideal caliphate succeeds precisely insofar as it embodies principles developed independently of Islamic jurisprudence. The theological apparatus, the extensive citations from al-Ghazali, al-Juwayni, Ibn Taymiyya, and the elaborate proofs of consensus, becomes ornamental rather than foundational. If the system functions through shura (consultation), constitutional limits on executive power, and popular accountability mechanisms, then what analytical work does labelling it a “caliphate” perform beyond providing Islamic legitimation for what is functionally a federal democratic confederation? Professor Anjum himself acknowledges that “the ideal caliphate is no different from the ideal of a perfect democracy,” yet this equivalence fatally weakens his claim that Islam structurally requires this specific institutional form. The irony deepens when we observe that his five historical models of the caliphate, from the egalitarian Medinan primus inter pares to the absolutist Abbasid symbolism to the Ottoman amalgamation, demonstrate such institutional plasticity that no particular political architecture can claim Islamic exclusivity. If these radically divergent systems all satisfied the supposed obligation of the caliphate, then the obligation cannot inhere in any specific institutional arrangement but rather in broader commitments to justice and communal welfare, commitments that secular constitutional frameworks can equally well serve.
Professor Anjum’s structural incompatibility thesis suffers from a critical conflation between the nation-state’s contemporary pathologies and its essential nature, leading him to reject a political form for contingent failures that could equally afflict his proposed alternative. His deployment of Hallaq’s argument, that the modern state embodies “secularised theological concepts” making it an “impossible” home for Islam, applies with equal force to any sovereign political entity, including the caliphate he envisions. When he writes that “the state is, by definition as well as structurally, supreme” and that “religious opinions and institutions are authorised by the state, not the other way around,” he describes not a unique feature of the nation-state but an inherent characteristic of political sovereignty itself. His proposed caliphate, requiring “unified economy and defence” with authority over “far-flung lands,” must necessarily claim supreme jurisdiction within its territory and monopolise legitimate violence, precisely the features that make Hallaq’s “secular theology” critique applicable. The definitional manoeuvre becomes especially problematic when Anjum insists we distinguish “the state, an abstract and sovereign entity, from government, the name for the administrative and legal apparatus in a region,” yet in his very own articulation, the caliphate requires territorial boundaries (membership criteria), centralised institutions (unified defence and economy), and mechanisms for resolving conflicts between local and confederal authority. These are not incidental features but structural necessities of any political order governing multiple communities. Moreover, his historical argument paradoxically undermines his theoretical claim: if classical Islamic governance accommodated legal pluralism, and maintained “organic, socially, and communally grounded limits on the sultan’s power” within imperial frameworks, then these same principles could equally constrain reformed nation-states. The Ottoman Empire he praises operated with clear territorial sovereignty, monopolised military force, and made ultimate legal determinations, yet he celebrates its “large measure of freedom to communities under their rule.” Why then does the nation-state form inherently preclude such arrangements? His critique of territorial sovereignty as incompatible with pan-Islamic solidarity, “Islam brooks no differentiation of rights and duties of Muslims based on regional or territorial affiliation”, proves too much, for it would equally condemn the administrative boundaries his decentralised confederation necessarily requires. The classical distinction between dār al-Islām and dār al-ḥarb already recognised political boundaries; the Abbasid caliph’s authority did not extend to Andalusian Muslims or Delhi Sultanate subjects in any practical sense. If the obligation Anjum identifies is genuinely to political unity and mutual aid among Muslims, this can manifest through robust transnational institutions, economic cooperation frameworks, and collective security arrangements, none of which require abandoning the nation-state form, merely reforming its practice. His argument ultimately mistakes the failures of specific authoritarian regimes for inherent defects of the institutional framework itself, when the actual problem lies not in the modern state’s structure.
The pursuit of distinctively Islamic political institutions exacts a severe opportunity cost that Professor Anjum’s framework obscures, as it diverts Muslim intellectual and political energy away from the concrete struggles for justice towards abstract institutional design that reinvents wheels already available. Consider the parallel he himself draws with Islamic finance, a sector that has consumed decades of scholarly effort and billions in capital to create “Sharīʿah-compliant” instruments that functionally replicate conventional financial products through elaborate legal fictions. The murābaḥah contract that structures most “Islamic” home financing is economically identical to an interest-bearing mortgage; the substantive difference lies not in the financial reality but in the theological performance. What has this project achieved beyond creating employment for Sharīʿah boards and premium pricing for rebranded products? The actual riba-based exploitation of the poor continues unabated; indeed, Islamic financial institutions have proven just as capable of predatory lending and wealth concentration as their conventional counterparts. The rebranding succeeds commercially while failing ethically, substituting nominal compliance for substantive justice. Professor Anjum’s caliphate project risks reproducing this pattern at the civilisational scale, with enormous intellectual resources devoted to articulating why Muslims need a specifically Islamic confederation, when those same resources could address the actual deficits he diagnoses: autocracy, economic exploitation, legal arbitrariness, sectarian violence. Muslims in Egypt need freedom from military dictatorship; Rohingya need protection from genocide; Yemenis need an end to civil war; Palestinians need liberation from genocidal-occupation. None of these crises awaits a caliphal solution; they require sustained political action, alliance-building across religious and national lines, economic development, constitutional reform, and international solidarity and military action. The caliphate discourse functions as what we might term the ostrich effect in Muslim political thought: when confronted with the overwhelming complexity and frequent failures of actual politics, we bury our heads in grand institutional designs that promise to resolve everything once properly implemented. The rebranding game offers the seductive comfort of theoretical clarity—we know what we need, it is the caliphate!—while evading the messy reality that no institutional form guarantees justice, and justice requires no particular institutional form. This is intellectual evasion dressed as theological rigour, and its cost is measured not in academic arguments but in continued Muslim political marginalisation while we await the institutional deus ex machina.
The question is not, as Professor Anjum frames it, “Who wants the caliphate?”, but rather: why should Muslims invest scarce intellectual and political capital in theological rebranding when the substance of what they seek justice and dignity requires no such labelling to pursue? His proposed caliphate succeeds only insofar as it embodies universal political principles such as accountability, rights protection, federalism, and the rule of law, which require no caliphal structure to implement, and fails insofar as it violates them, with Islamic nomenclature providing no immunity against despotism. If a nation-state satisfies these criteria, on what grounds is it inadequate for Muslims? If a caliphate violates them, on what grounds is it adequate? When his own historical analysis reveals such institutional plasticity across fourteen centuries, from Medinan consultation to Abbasid absolutism to Ottoman imperialism, no particular architecture can claim theological exclusivity. What we witness is theological nostalgia masquerading as political necessity: imagined past unity projected onto an uncertain future, bypassing the difficult present entirely. The way forward lies not in grand confederal designs awaiting ideal conditions, but in immediate engagement with concrete injustices using whatever tools prove effective. Professor Anjum inadvertently reveals that his “Islamic” polity’s requirements are simply justice’s requirements, accessible to reason and implementable through diverse forms. The theological framework adds nothing but a label, and labels, however historically resonant, cannot substitute for the practical work of building just and accountable governance. The new fixation with the caliphate (or neo-caliphate) represents not a solution, but a conceptual detour from the pursuit of a working-just governance. That work, the unglamorous, incremental labour of actual politics, awaits no caliphal inauguration to begin.
