Caliphate Redefined: The Mystical Turn in Ottoman Political Thought/Caliphate: The History of an Idea

Caliphate Redefined: The Mystical Turn in Ottoman Political Thought, by Hüseyin Yılmaz. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018. 384 pages. $39.95.

Caliphate: The History of an Idea, by Hugh Kennedy. New York: Basic Books, 2016. 336 pages. $27.99.

Reviewed by Patrick Scharfe

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 alAhkam al-sultaniyya of Abu al-Hasan 'Ali al-Mawardi (972-1058), texts that Yılmaz refers...