The events of the Arab Spring, beginning in December 2010, saw renewed hope for Arab Civil Society. However, the fall of authoritarian regimes did not always seem to benefit Civil Society - whilst Political Islamic movements often took advantage. In Syria, Iraq, and beyond, groups like the Islamic State are declaring Caliphates in the territories they seize in an attempt to fulfil the Political Islam ideal of a 'global Islamic Caliphate' encompassing the Muslim world. This collection of articles aims to address common questions about Political Islam, as well as to provide an assessment of the Islamic State/ISIS/ISIL and finally challenge common understandings on the issue of Islam and democracy. Contributors include: Maximilian Lakitsch, Juan A. Macias-Amoretti, Adel Elsayed Sparr, Joseph Kaminski, Haian Dukhan, Sinan Hawat, Rana Khalaf, Mohammed Nuruzzaman, and M. A. Muqtedar Khan."

The events of the Arab Spring saw renewed hope for Arab Civil Society. However, the fall of authoritarian regimes did not always seem to benefit Civil Society - whilst Political Islamic movements often took advantage. In Syria, Iraq, and beyond, groups like the Islamic State (also known as ISIS or ISIL) are declaring Caliphates in the territories they seize in an attempt to fulfil the Political Islam ideal of a 'global Islamic Caliphate' encompassing the Muslim world. This collection of articles aims to address common questions about Political Islam, as well as to provide an assessment of the Islamic State and challenge common understandings on the issue of Islam and democracy. Contributors Maximilian Lakitsch, Juan A. MacIas-Amoretti, Adel Elsayed Sparr, Joseph Kaminski, Haian Dukhan, Sinan Hawat, Rana Khalaf, Mohammed Nuruzzaman, and M. A. Muqtedar Khan.

Tayeb El-Hibri draws on medieval Islamic chronicles to remap the origins of Islamic political and religious orthodoxy, offering an insightful critique of both early and contemporary Islam and the concerns of legitimacy shadowing various rulers. He also highlights the Islamic reinterpretation of biblical traditions.

While in the West 'the Caliphate" evokes overwhelmingly negative images, throughout Islamic history it has been regarded as the ideal Islamic polity. In the wake of the "Arab Spring" and the removal of long-standing dictators in the Middle East, in which the dominant discourse appears to be one of the compatibility of Islam and democracy, reviving the Caliphate has continued to exercise the minds of its opponents and advocates. Reza Pankhurst's book contributes to our understanding of Islam in politics, the path of Islamic revival across the last century and how the popularity of the Caliphate in Muslim discourse waned and later re-emerged. Beginning with the abolition of the Caliphate, the ideas and discourse of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizb ut-Tahrir, al-Qaeda and other smaller groups are then examined. A comparative analysis highlights the core commonalities as well as differences between the various movements and individuals, and suggests that as movements struggle to re-establish a polity which expresses the unity of the ummah (or global Islamic community), the Caliphate has alternatively been ignored, had its significance minimised or denied, reclaimed and promoted as a theory and symbol in different ways, yet still serves as a political ideal for many.

Christophe Picard recounts the adventures of Muslim sailors who competed with Greek and Latin seamen for control of the 7th-century Mediterranean. By the time Christian powers took over trade routes in the 13th century, a Muslim identity that operated within, and in opposition to, Europe had been shaped by encounters across the sea of the caliphs.

In the United States and Europe, the word "caliphate" has conjured historically romantic and increasingly pernicious associations. Yet the caliphate's significance in Islamic history and Muslim culture remains poorly understood. This book explores the myriad meanings of the caliphate for Muslims around the world through the analytical lens of two key moments of loss in the thirteenth and twentieth centuries. Through extensive primary-source research, Mona Hassan explores the rich constellation of interpretations created by religious scholars, historians, musicians, statesmen, poets, and intellectuals. Hassan fills a scholarly gap regarding Muslim reactions to the destruction of the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad in 1258 and challenges the notion that the Mongol onslaught signaled an end to the critical engagement of Muslim jurists and intellectuals with the idea of an Islamic caliphate. She also situates Muslim responses to the dramatic abolition of the Ottoman caliphate in 1924 as part of a longer trajectory of transregional cultural memory, revealing commonalities and differences in how modern Muslims have creatively interpreted and reinterpreted their heritage. Hassan examines how poignant memories of the lost caliphate have been evoked in Muslim culture, law, and politics, similar to the losses and repercussions experienced by other religious communities, including the destruction of the Second Temple for Jews and the fall of Rome for Christians. A global history, Longing for the Lost Caliphate delves into why the caliphate has been so important to Muslims in vastly different eras and places.

This book examines global and local politics and how Islam impacts on "civilizational" relations between different groups and polities. In particular he examines how Islamism (as opposed to Islam) becomes an immediate source of tension and conflict between the secular and the religious. Tibi rejects the "clash of civilizations" theory and argues for the revival of Islamic humanism to help bridge the gap.

An accessible and comprehensive account of the global dimensions of political Islam in the twenty-first century, explaining political Islam, nationalism and globalization and providing a detailed account of Al Qaeda.

In Western popular imagination, the Caliphate often conjures up an array of negative images, while rallies organised in support of resurrecting the Caliphate are treated with a mixture of apprehension and disdain, as if they were the first steps towards usurping democracy. Yet these images and perceptions have little to do with reality. While some Muslims may be nostalgic for the Caliphate, only very few today seek to make that dream come true. Yet the Caliphate can be evoked as a powerful rallying call and a symbol that draws on an imagined past and longing for reproducing or emulating it as an ideal Islamic polity. The Caliphate today is a contested concept among many actors in the Muslim world, Europe and beyond, the reinvention and imagining of which may appear puzzling to most of us. Demystifying the Caliphate sheds light on both the historical debates following the demise of the last Ottoman Caliphate and controversies surrounding recent calls to resurrect it, transcending alarmist agendas to answer fundamental questions about why the memory of the Caliphate lingers on among diverse Muslims. From London to the Caucasus, to Jakarta, Istanbul, and Baghdad, the contributors explore the concept of the Caliphate and the re-imagining of the Muslim ummah as a diverse multi-ethnic community.

A political theorist teases out the century-old ideological transformation at the heart of contemporary discourse in Muslim nations undergoing political change. The Arab Spring precipitated a crisis in political Islam. In Egypt Islamists have been crushed. In Turkey they have descended into authoritarianism. In Tunisia they govern but without the label of “political Islam.” Andrew March explores how, before this crisis, Islamists developed a unique theory of popular sovereignty, one that promised to determine the future of democracy in the Middle East. This began with the claim of divine sovereignty, the demand to restore the sharīʿa in modern societies. But prominent theorists of political Islam also advanced another principle, the Quranic notion that God’s authority on earth rests not with sultans or with scholars’ interpretation of written law but with the entirety of the Muslim people, the umma. Drawing on this argument, utopian theorists such as Abū’l-Aʿlā Mawdūdī and Sayyid Quṭb released into the intellectual bloodstream the doctrine of the caliphate of man: while God is sovereign, He has appointed the multitude of believers as His vicegerent. The Caliphate of Man argues that the doctrine of the universal human caliphate underpins a specific democratic theory, a kind of Islamic republic of virtue in which the people have authority over the government and religious leaders. But is this an ideal regime destined to survive only as theory?