Caliphate Redefined: The Mystical Turn in Ottoman Political Thought by Hüseyin Yılmaz, and: Caliphate: The History of an Idea by Hugh Kennedy (review)

Despite its newfound notoriety, the caliphate as a concept has not been the object of a dramatic increase in scholarly study. In a time when the caliphate as a project is being applied with the utmost rigidity and brutality, there is significant room for scholars to demonstrate the incredible flexibility that the caliphal idea has managed to demonstrate over a millennium and a half of Muslim history. Fortunately, two new books fill that scholarly void, albeit in significantly different ways. One book, Hugh Kennedy’s Caliphate: The History of an Idea, is a prolific scholar’s offering for a popular audience, whereas the other, Hüseyin Yılmaz’s Caliphate Redefined, is meant for the rarefied world of Ottoman intellectual history.

Nonetheless, the two books supplement each other in important ways. Hugh Kennedy’s book provides a broad, sweeping history of caliphs, reprising some of his previous scholarly work on the ‘Abbasids and Andalusia. Kennedy does examine the intellectual basis of the caliphate much of the time, but it is Yılmaz who really puts the caliphate concept under the microscope. Yılmaz’s offering, while less gracefully written, is the more important of the two from a scholarly perspective, so it is there that this review will begin.

The core thesis of Caliphate Redefined is that late medieval Sufism completely upended the caliphate as a concept, culminating in an early modern “mystification of rulership.” In this formulation, previous iterations of the caliphate concept were occluded by Ottoman discourses of a caliphate of God’s mercy (hilafet-i rahmani) or true caliphate (hilafet-i hakikiyye). According to these ideas, the Ottoman ruler’s Sufistic moral perfection made him God’s deputy on earth (halife-i Hak), successor to the line beginning with Adam, a figure of authority over all creation, not just Muslims.

This is a far cry from the conventional image of the caliphate as an office signifying titular headship of the global Muslim community. That image is rooted in important medieval juristic texts, notably al-Ahkam al-sultaniyya of Abu al-Hasan ‘Ali al-Mawardi (972–1058), texts that Yılmaz refers to as “contractual” in nature (p. 17). Importantly, medieval jurists referred mostly to khalifat rasul Allah, meaning “successor” to the messenger of God (i.e., the Prophet Muhammad) in Arabic, not to khalifat Allah, God’s deputy. It is central to Yılmaz’s argument that Ottoman sultans were consistently referred to, or aspired to be, the latter and not the former. Thus, the legal and contractual obligations and limitations on caliphal power developed by the jurists did not apply. The legal imamate, as it was often called, also required that its bearer be descended from the Quraysh, the Prophet’s tribe, a stipulation that the Ottomans could not fulfill.

Where did these Sufi discourses of caliphate emerge from? Here, Yılmaz relies partly on Ahmet T. Karamustafa’s work in God’s Unruly Friends: Dervish Groups in the Islamic Middle Period, 1200–1550 (University of Utah Press, 1994), which traces the rise of so-called antinomian Sufism from 1200 into the Ottoman era. These Sufi groups, such as the abdal (Arabic for “substitutes”), emerged in protest to state-sponsored institutional Sufism, including law-focused “juridical” Sufis, and these groups commanded powerful followings, especially in early Ottoman Anatolia. According to Yılmaz, the earliest Ottoman sultans could only pose as friends to the “friends of God” (e.g., the antinomian abdal that were so popular among the Turkmen rank and file). For many Sufis, there was a worldly caliphate (hilafet-i suri), but also a more important true, spiritual caliphate, possessed by Sufis. Only later were the Ottoman sultans able to appropriate Sufi concepts like the kutub (“pole” or axis mundi) and...