No Caliphate but What We Make

AMMAN, JORDAN – The three middle-aged men sitting in an Indian restaurant in Jordan’s capital scarcely look like Islamic revolutionaries. They are smartly dressed in Western-style suits and sip thoughtfully from cans of Pepsi as they share their plan to reshape the Muslim world.

“[President] Bush says that we want to enslave people and oppress their freedom of speech,” says Abu Abdullah, a senior member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, the Party of Liberation. “But we want to free all people from being slaves of men and make them slaves of Allah.” [oh, in that case, sign me up! -ed]

Hizb ut-Tahrir says that Muslims should abolish national boundaries within the Islamic world and return to a single Islamic state, known as “the Caliphate,” that would stretch from Indonesia to Morocco and contain more than 1.5 billion people.

It’s a simple and seductive idea that analysts believe may someday allow the group to rival existing Islamic movements, topple the rulers of Middle Eastern nations, and undermine those seeking to reconcile democracy and Islam and build bridges between East and West.

“A few years ago people laughed at them,” says Zeyno Baran, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and the leading expert on Hizb ut-Tahrir. “But now that [Osama] bin Laden, [Abu Musab al-] Zarqawi, and other Islamic groups are saying they want to recreate the Caliphate, people are taking them seriously.”

…

“The Caliphate is a rallying point between the radicals and the more moderate Islamists,” says Stephen Ulph, a senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation. “The idea of a government based on the Caliphate has a historical pedigree and Islamic legitimacy that Western systems of government by their very nature do not have.”

Can this idea really be pulled off? I would say no, primarily because it is not in the best interests of the governments, the entrenched elites, and the businessmen, across the Arab and Muslim world. The idea of Pan-Arabism has been tried numerous times before, and leaders have risen riding the ideological tides of it, only to be broken by the cold realities of how the rest of the world operates. Pulling together a caliphate isn’t like uniting the colonies in the American Revolution. Unlike America’s oppressor King George, the Arab/Muslim world does not have a single despot who, if his influence could simply be shrugged off by strength of arms and faith, solely stands in the way of the establishment of a utopian Islamic paradise on Earth.

For these guys in the article, who hang out at coffee shops during their busy days of unemployment sipping (Western) beverages and waxing philosophical about the governmental structure of the caliphate, the real world revolution required to accomplish their goals is being waged just across their border. (insert Chicken-Hawk joke here).

What these big-thinkers don’t get is how difficult it is to re-make the world order. Bin Laden has been trying it since Afghanistan, where America drove out the Soviets with the help of useful idiots using our Stinger missiles. Dictators, Armies, Governments and industries don’t simply go quietly into the night when faced with the threat of annihilation, which is what a religious, Taliban-like government under Sharia law, across the entire Mideast would mean. I don’t see the Turkish or Egyptian armies furling up their flags and signing on to be “holy warriors” of the Caliphate. I don’t see the dictatorships of Algeria, Libya, Pakistan, and Syria simply saying “hey, we got it wrong, let’s all come together and join hands.” I don’t see the monarchies of Jordan and Morocco, whose monarchs have bloodlines traceable to the Prophet Mohammed, relinquishing their historic roles and pledging allegiance to a new “caliph”. I don’t see the oil-rich Saudis signing up for this, either.

The only real effort to establish a pan-Arab caliphate is the one being pushed by the terrorists, via Al Qaeda, in Iraq, and they are losing. Bad. The caliphate holds no territory, has no army, holds sway over no international power, and has no leader.

Bin Laden obviously wanted the job of caliph, but grossly misinterpreted the response to his terror attacks –and by his actions, America is now deeply committed to the Middle East militarily for the foreseeable future. Who, now, could proclaim himself caliph and be accepted by the entirety of the Muslim world? Al Sadr, the Iranian agent? Ahmadenijad, the Persian? Certainly not Iraqi leaders like Sistani, Talibani, and Jafari, who would all be derided as American puppets by the “true” Muslims of the world.

Who would rule in this new caliphate? Shias or Sunnis? What about the Alawites, Sufis, Moros, Berbers, and other minorities? Which nations would hold the seats of power? Who controls the oil? What about the threats from America, China, Russia, and Europe to this “rising power”? Everyone could probably agree on a capitol: Mecca, but that’s probably all they could agree on.

The Third World, Africa, and Southwest Asia, is simply too corrupt, too fractured along ethnic and religious lines, too broke (or in some circles too rich), and too disorganized to pull off a great re-casting of the global dice of power.

Until I am convinced otherwise, I would advise these Arab gentlemen quoted in the article to stop their inane ranting about a caliphate, and either work to make their own community and country better, or pick up an RPG and join the revolution.