Re: The Caliphate

The Caliphate's leader is both a realigious leader as a secular leader.
There is no seperation between the sacred and the secular in islam. As
you know main stream (sunni) islam does not have a church like the
catholic church or even protestant churches. So in that way there is no
church to seperate the state from in the first place. A caliph without
an empire is like a president without a republic.
Even the pope has a state with people living there, although it's very
small (vatican city), so he still has secular power. The difference
between a pope and a caliph is that the first has authority over
believers outside his border and a caliph does not. Secondly. a pope is
needed to maintain the church but a caliphate doesn't have a church in
the first place, so nothing is lost but the empire when he leaves.
During the so called middle ages there was a time that there were two
caliphs in the muslim world. One with a capital in Cordoba (Andalucia,
Spain) and the other with capital in Bagdad. So there can be more than
one caliphates. After the 4 rightly guided caliphs (who were more or
less elected or gained the support of their people in some way), there
has always been a trivial relationship between the religious scolars
and the caliph since a form of kingship and dictatorship controlled the
muslim world. The caliph and religious scolars were for their position
dependant on eachother. The caliph was more a secular leader than a
religious one. They were in general bad examples for the people with
their excessive wealth and huge harams. The religious leaders closed
their eyes and the ones that stood up ended in jails.
After the ottoman empire fell most muslim countries were colonised by
western states and eacht nation was fighting for it's own independancy.

In short: There is no hierarchy of islamic scolars so there is no
church in (sunni) islam. Muslims are not members of a church. While
christianity emphasises on dogma's (that excludes other believers and
churches' dogma's) and thus is a religion of orthodoxy, islam
emphasises on practice and is a religion of orthopraxy.
Muslims have no trouble at all practicing their faith without a caliph.


Kamal

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