A year in a word: Caliphate

Δημοσιεύθηκε: 26 Δεκεμβρίου 2014 - 13:36

Caliphate

noun - English for 'Khilafa', or succession, to the Prophet Mohammed, founder of Islam. In Ramadan this year, the jihadis of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or Isis, declared one, under Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

The Caliph Ibrahim, as Mr Baghdadi styles himself at the head of the Islamic State, sounded preposterously presumptuous. While the black banners and marauding lumpen millenarians of Isis were hideously real, the caliphate rigmarole reeked of antiquarian surrealism; some even found it Monty Python-like.

That was until the mass executions started, followed by the crucifixions and enslavement of women, and the drive to extinguish the Shia, decimate Sunni rivals and crush minorities, from the region's ancient Christians to the older tradition of Yazidi Kurds.

Isis is not seeking to restore the Ottoman caliphate abolished by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk 90 years ago. Nor does it seek to emulate the Umayyad or Abbasid caliphates of Islam's golden age. It harks back instead to the first four successors to the Prophet from the era of the al-Salaf al-Salih, the "pious forerunners" from whom Salafi fundamentalists derive their name. Mr Baghdadi's sulphurous cult is unyieldingly totalitarian.

The Islamic State is really a cross-border "jihadistan" in the Euphrates valley, opening corridors to the Mediterranean and the Gulf, and branches in peninsular Arabia and failing north African states such as Libya. In the struggle for power bespattering the Middle East, in which rival Islamic identities have supplanted nationalism as the mobilising agent, Isis presents itself as the Sunni supremacist force able to break the Shia Arab axis built by the Persian and Shia Islamic Republic of Iran from Baghdad to Beirut.

The would-be caliphate has leeched power from collapsing states that have thrown citizens back into the arms of sect and militia, clan and tribe. Its warriors conjure from the sense of betrayal in Syria and dispossession in Iraq the fanciful idea that more than 1bn Sunni worldwide are a threatened minority. Not least, in precise Koranic Arabic, it purports to herald an Islamic end of days. An apocalyptic cocktail.

David Gardner

Read "Northern powerhouse" and past articles in the series at FT.com/words

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