By PHK
Fact or Fairy Tale
Caliphate: the office of the caliph; the land ruled by a caliph. (Websters’ Unabridged Deluxe Second Edition, p. 257); Caliph: title taken by Muhammad’s successors to signify the political and religious leader of the Islamic community. (Websters, p. 257)
Caliphate has become one of the Bush Administration’s favorite words this season according to New York Times reporter Elizabeth Bumiller in her December 12 White House Letter. Threat of Al Qaeda’s establishment – or reestablishment - of THE CALIPHATE is a core of the administration’s full court press to turning around souring U.S. public opinion towards the continuing U.S. occupation of Iraq.
Bin Laden’s long-term goal, according to the W administration’s talking points and depending upon who’s espousing them, is to establish - or reestablish - “The Caliphate” from the Atlantic to the Pacific. This has become the White House’s latest justification, although Cheney used it earlier - for keeping American troops as fodder for insurgents in Iraq for the foreseeable future. Or at least until shortly before the 2006 elections when the administration might yet again declare Victory – another pet word in the Oval Office’s speech writers’ lexicon – and bring troops home because winning an election at home will ultimately become more important than continuing to fight an expensive, unpopular war of choice abroad.
Rewriting Islamic History
Vice President Cheney, National Security Council Advisor Hadley, and the Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld tell us that the terrorists’ aka Al Qaeda’s goal is to take over Iraq, turn it into an Islamic state and then use it as a base to expand Islamic rule over lands that once were part of a huge, Islamic Empire that Cheney claimed, stretched from Portugal to Indonesia. This, we’re warned, is just the first step en route to Islamic world domination fifty years hence.
This latest propaganda push from a beleaguered administration is based on the contents of a letter dated July 9, 2005, intercepted and translated sometime in the summer by coalition forces and posted on the website of the Office of the Director (John Negroponte) of National Intelligence on October 11, 2005. According to the U.S. Administration, the letter was written by Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden’s right hand man, to the leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the vicious Jordanian Palestinian Islamic terrorist known for beheading foreign journalists, aid-workers and other innocents caught in the civil war’s maelstrom. Yet given the way unsubstantiated rumors swirl around the Middle East like a desert sand storm as well as the administration’s propensity for fabricating news in and about Iraq – how much credence or importance should be placed on the contents of that letter? I don’t know, but I wish I did. Do you?
General Abizaid, Comander of the Central Command to the U.S. Naval War College earlier this month simplified the administration’s caliphate-resurrection line as follows: “Al Qaeda is all over the world. Their goal is to get the US out of the region and come to power in the Islamic countries of the region. From there their goal is to establish a Caliphate (under a single Islamic ruler) that goes from the Atlantic in North Africa to Indonesia in the Pacific. Fifty years after this happens their goal is to rule the rest of the world.”
Vice President Cheney had related another, and even more ominous, version of the caliphate threat in September 2004 at a Round Table in Elmo, Wisconsin. Here’s what he said:
"but when you look at the writings and the arguments that have been made by the al Qaeda organization, Osama bin Laden and his associates and fellow travelers, they obviously are operating off a very extremist view of Islam, and the Islamic faith. They represent a very small minority of Muslims in the world, obviously. They are -- they talk about wanting to reestablish what you could refer to as the Seventh Century Caliphate. This was the world as it was organized 1,200, 1,300 years, in effect, when Islam or Islamic peoples controlled everything from Portugal and Spain in the West; all through the Mediterranean to North Africa; all of North Africa; the Middle East; up into the Balkans; the Central Asian republics; the southern tip of Russia; a good swath of India; and on around to modern day Indonesia. In one sense from Bali and Jakarta on one end, to Madrid on the other."
Only the continued presence of American troops in Iraq, administration spokespersons tell us now, will prevent this dreaded millennial event from repeating itself.
So should Americans fall in line, heed the administration’s current dire predictions and support its $6.6 billion a month prescription?
I would like to believe our government has its facts straight, but I wonder how much is fact and how much is illusion - even putting aside the question of authenticity of the Zawahiri letter.
General Abizaid’s depiction of Bin Laden’s dreams may come closer to the truth than the Vice President’s although even Abizaid’s statements are overblown at best, and founded on possibly questionable evidence, at worst.
To begin, Mr. Cheney, get out your World Atlas and you'll ss that the territory from North Africa to Indonesia is no means a single region geographically and Bali, Indonesia does not touch the Pacific Ocean. (See why below.)
And further, at least one American scholar of Islam and translator of Osama Bin Laden texts – Duke University’s Bruce Lawrence – has argued as recently as early November 2005 in The Chronicle of Higher Education that “despite references to the glories of the Ottoman Empire, bin Laden does not clamor to restore a caliphate today. He seems at some level to recognize the futility of a quest for restitution. He sets no positive political horizon for his struggle. Instead, he vows that jihad will continue until "we meet God and get his blessing!"
If Lawrence’s above summary of Bin Laden’s many missives is correct, then how does this square with the administration’s accusation that Bin Laden/Al Zawahiri intend to establish – or reestablish – a global Islamic caliphate beginning in Iraq?
Abizaid, at least, doesn’t make the fundamental factual mistakes about THE CALIPHATE as Cheney did in his earlier speech. So back to Cheney's revisionist history of Islam.
Vice President Cheney’s history and geography about a once invincible caliphate(s) is not just overblown; it is fraught with errors. No Seventh Century caliphate as extensive as the sort he described ever existed and such an entity didn’t come to pass in the following centuries either. The Muslim community – like other religious communities - has been and continues to be far too factionalized over such matters as leadership and doctrine.
A few specific examples: the first Muslims didn’t arrive in southern Spain until 711 AD (e.g. the Eighth, not the Seventh Century). Muslims did not conquer the Balkans until the 14th and 15th centuries at about the same period that the last Muslim stronghold in Spain fell to fervent Catholics Ferdinand and Isabella. And Muslims never controlled the entire Mediterranean. It just didn’t happen. If it had, the history of Roman Catholicism would have been far different. In Southeast Asia, although Muslim traders and mystics settled in the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei (still majority Muslim), and Southern Thailand as well as Indonesia - hence penetrating far further into Southeast Asia than Cheney gave Muslims credit for – only began in the 13th century.
Utopian vision vs. harsh reality
Most importantly, goals and dreams are one thing. Their successful implementation is another – particularly those based on hazy utopian visions.
Islam, like Christianity and other major religions, is fraught with divisions and feuding sects, sub-sects and counter-sub-sects. How would one ever find a single religio-political Muslim leader or devise a political structure acceptable to this factionalized religious community of about 1.2-1.3 billion members who make up the majority of the populations of 50 countries and compose a significant minority in 30 more?
Who would be caliph? How would Sunnis and Shiites, a division created as a result of a devastating split over leadership that occurred shortly after Mohammad’s death, resolve their differences enough to settle on a single ruler? How likely, for instance, are Iran’s Ayatollahs going to be willing to submit to rule by a Sunni caliph? Or what about Iraq’s Ayatollah Sistani and that country’s many Shiites? Or the secular Baathists in Syria or the Turks who want to join the EU? I don’t think very; and if Lawrence’s interpretation is correct, it is doubtful that Al Zawahiri or Bin Laden think so either. In fact, Al Zawahiri’s purported July 9 letter to Zarqawi points to the continuing animosity between Sunni and Shiite just in Iraq.
Or which of the four major Islamic legal schools would form the basis for Sharia law to govern this mythical, mystical elephantine entity – and who would make that choice?
I don’t pretend to be a scholar of Islam, but I don’t think that these and other fundamental characteristics of Islam and THE CALIPHATE have been thought about seriously, or at least portrayed accurately, by Cheney and other administration notables in their battle for “hearts and minds” of the American people.
Meanwhile, I’m convinced that Bin Laden’s global dreams – if they are indeed his dreams - will remain as such – and the Bush Administration’s fear mongering based on them – or perhaps even a fabrication or distortion of them - will remain equally as specious.