The survival of the Islamic caliphate

Professor Jonathan Lawrence: The survival of the Islamic caliphate would have prevented the rise of terrorism and this is the difference between Rome and Istanbul
After collecting data on eight nation-states and two transnational empires over several centuries, Coping with Defeat: Sunni Islam, Roman Catholicism, and the Modern State weaves the path of religious authorities to political disempowerment. The book shows the historical and institutional background of the Catholic and Muslim religious authorities, and how they dealt with defeat despite geographical, political, and demographic differences.

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Jonathan Lawrence, Professor of Political Science at Boston College, author of the book "Coping with Defeat: Sunni Islam, Roman Catholicism, and the Modern State" issued by the prestigious Princeton University Press this year 2021
History books are full of constant comparisons between the Catholic Church in the Vatican and the Islamic caliphate, whether in Baghdad or Istanbul.

But there are few studies that deal with the relationship of the caliphate and the papacy and their relationship to the modern state and concepts of modern politics, and in this context comes the book of Professor Jonathan Laurence, Professor of Political Science at Boston College, entitled “Coping with Defeat: Sunni Islam, Roman Catholicism, and the State” Modern” (Coping with Defeat: Sunni Islam, Roman Catholicism, and the Modern State), issued by the prestigious Princeton University Press, this year 2021.

Drawing on interviews, field visits, and archival research in Turkey, North Africa, and Western Europe, the book presents an explanation of how Sunni and Catholic authorities have been subjected to over three centuries of trauma by the rise of the nation-state.

As a result, Catholic institutions eventually accepted the dominance of the modern state, as it reveals the transformations that the Sunni Muslim world has undergone in the twenty-first century.

The book shows between it the features of the interaction of the Christian experience with the modern state, as well as the different intentions of the Western political authority towards the Vatican, in contrast to its intention towards the Caliphate in Istanbul, which it sought to bring down, instead of reforming it and making it a religious authority that embraces and unites the Islamic nation.

Coping with Defeat, Written by: Jonathan LawrenceThe book presents a historical panorama of the Islamic and Catholic empires and reveals the similarity of their relationship with the modern state (the island)
According to the book, this projection, to which the West contributed greatly as an imperial political authority in that era, led to the growth of Islamic groups that adopt violence in their theses. Now, we leave you with the dialogue:

The book sheds light on two important models that have dominated human civilization because of their religious and political status - and talking here about the institutions of the caliphate and the papacy - why this choice?
The book seeks to decipher the relationship between religious politics and the Catholic and Muslim models; The book argues that the religious reality of divided Muslim societies is due to European decisions to undermine the caliphate in the Middle East, North Africa and Southeast Asia.

Here it should be noted that the British, Dutch, French and Russian empires did everything except kidnap or assassinate the Caliph to ensure the result of ending the institution of the Caliphate, rather than reforming it internally.

As for the second idea that the book aims at, it revolves around the contradiction between the experiences of Rome and Istanbul with European governments at the beginning of the century. While European countries have gutted the church hierarchy, they have never dissolved it. When the Italian nationalists conquered the Church's territories and turned Rome into their new capital, they stopped at the gates of the Vatican.

European powers in the early twentieth century exiled the pope, but - in the end - saved the Catholic Church from dissolution and plunged Catholics into the vortex of an empty chair devoted to the absence of religious legitimacy.

We find - in the book - that the nation-states, although they tried to dry up the sources of the Vatican's power, preserved it and supported its symbolic religious status. How is that?
After the expansion of Italian nationalism, the Church came under the administrative control of European countries, where it exercised religious appointments. But the Vatican had the time and space to build up organizational resources in order to return to oversight of religious authority.

The Vatican returned a different organization; There was diplomatic isolation for the Vatican, which lasted for nearly 70 years (1861-1929) until the Lateran Accords with Italy, which revived the independent Vatican State.

The Vatican entered the new world order as a sovereign state, albeit in a purely symbolic form. The Pope has hundreds of millions of followers, but he exercises practical authority over fewer than a thousand citizens. This settlement gave life to the Catholic Church in the time of the nation-state.

The Church regained autonomy in its internal affairs, and it also began supervising the training of clergy, as well as the appointment of bishops. This embodied a soft restoration of Roman Catholicism, which made the "state" of the Vatican a face-saving solution through which "the shadow of God on earth (the Pope) can rule and enjoy sovereignty."

This result, which embodies a victory for the Church despite the restrictions it witnessed, constituted a solution that eased the pace of politicization of religion that took root in the Islamic world after the fall of the Caliphate.

How did Western countries deal with the Islamic Caliphate? And what caused the vacuum of the seat of the caliphate, according to your view?
The Islamic caliphate in Istanbul did not witness such a solution that was offered to the Catholic Church; Since the Turkish Republic denied the last caliph and abolished the institution of the caliphate in 1924, the question of religious legitimacy for a Muslim has remained, to whom was the pledge of allegiance offered? And behind whom will the nation meet?

This downfall made the religious authority in the era of the nation-state transferred to the ministries of national Islamic affairs. The religious legitimacy of each of these ministries is contested by religious groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, which believe in elections, as well as by violent religious groups such as al-Qaeda and ISIS.

The vacuum in the seat of the Caliph led to the emergence of Islamic groups that seek to acquire religious legitimacy in the Islamic region, and the popularity of Islamic parties, some of whose leaders question the legitimacy of the state for the continued politicization of religion, appears.

How should the evolution of religious authorities' attitudes toward the modern state be understood? Is the Islamic heritage in need of a new "Protestant" reform?
Many fail to see the mystery; Many point to the unity between religion and politics in Islam on the one hand, and on the other hand, insist that Christianity has always been destined to comply with contemporary norms that embody the separation of church and state; Here, I want to say that Sunni Muslims are engaging in the separation between what is religious and what is political, and governments must begin to abandon their current religious monopoly.

There are many studies on Islam and politics today that implicitly or explicitly believe that Islam needs a reform similar to the Protestant reform, while other studies see the impossibility of achieving this type of reform, and here I want to point out that the first transformation of the Christians of the fourth century which transferred Christianity from preaching to The verdict was also unexpected; We all know the principle “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.” This principle is valid only when Christians are in a minority; In this regard, theologian Shaye JD Cohen wrote that "Once Caesar becomes a Christian, everything is Caesar's."

In theory, Western Christianity was a spiritual kingdom ruled by the Pope, whose power transcended all limits. However, the expansion of the modern state made state leaders require clergy to be loyal citizens, and Catholicism relied on a "legal framework linking God and humanity."

The Catholic Church's abandonment of its political favor and its embrace of democracy seemed far away in the 1950s, and then the unthinkable began; Where the church underwent modernization (1962-1965). This prompted Samuel Huntington, for example, to describe the Pope as a leading global actor in the field of human rights and an engine for democratization.

By collecting data from eight nation-states and two transnational empires over several centuries, this book weaves a tapestry of the path of religious authorities through to their political disempowerment. The book shows the historical and institutional background of the Catholic and Muslim religious authorities and how they dealt with defeat despite geographical, political, and demographic differences.

What are the three turns that formed the course of the institution of the caliphate and the papacy?
Modern states subjugated Islam and Catholicism; Where the state assumed roles previously occupied by religious authorities, such as education, making laws and everything related to personal status, and the French sociologist Émile Durkheim was the first to realize that the modern state would assume the role of religion in structuring social cohesion, and German theorist Max Weber assumed that science would avoid religion .

Historical explanations of secularization single out the roles played by capitalism, nationalism, scientific revolution, and reform; Modernization theory assumed that the separation of religion from the state would be one of its natural outcomes.

However, the reality confirms that it is a difficult and long journey that started from religious supremacy over the state to the soft restoration of legal subjectivity, and the transition from a position of absolute power to working in civil society.

The central argument of this book is that three shocks, or defeats, eroded the political-religious ties of the last empires. The shocks differed in timing for Catholics and Sunnis, but they had the same revolutionary effect of gradually obligating religious authorities to the rule of law.

3 parts of the book are devoted to these three critical junctures; The first part deals with “the end of the empire,” the second part deals with “the era of the nation-state,” and the third part deals with “the era of cross-border believers.”

Each historical shock pushed the religious authorities into further state-religion relations that stretched from sovereignty to semi-autonomous. Each defeat established new legal boundaries between the religious leadership and the religious and put their political supremacy to the test. Surrender to state sovereignty was the cost paid by religious authorities to maintain uniformity of religious rituals in territories they did not control politically.

They have strengthened 3 aspects: infrastructure, educational institutions, and hierarchy. Catholic dioceses, colleges, and seminaries were expanded to counter the modernization of nation-states.

In contrast, the Ottoman development of a standardized formal religious education happened to be a reaction to European efforts to replace it. These institutions had always existed in some form, but the infrastructure is unevenly distributed, and their quality is subject to looser control.

Engaging in this argument requires a willingness to reinterpret the relations between state and religion since the sixteenth century to the Counter-Reformation of the nineteenth century.

Hasn't Catholicism always been centralized? Isn't power spread in Islam and not concentrated in one institution?
Compared to the well-established organizational structure of Roman Catholicism, Ottoman Islam had a lesser degree of centralized institutionalization.

The sultan's successors left space for local religious authority, and maintained more fluid control in southeastern Europe, northern Africa, and Arabia.

However, Sunni Islam was more centralized than is generally acknowledged, and the hierarchical monopoly of Roman Catholicism was less tightly held than its reputation.

The Ottomans were one of the few Islamic regimes in history to have retained guardianship over Islam's holiest sites in Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem, and the Sultan's successors inspired hundreds of millions of Muslims who lived under British, Dutch, French and Russian rule.

Although their political influence peaked in the seventeenth century, in the first quarter of the twentieth century, the Caliph became the spiritual leader of 80% of the world's 350 million Muslims.

If the religious necessity of the caliphate is hotly debated, its historical continuation is inevitable. The attempt of modern nation-states to assume this role makes the absence of the Caliphate tangible; This is what caused the emergence of terrorist movements and extremist groups.