Recalling the Caliphate: Decolonization and World Order

Research output

Complete citation

Poljarevic, Emin. Review of Recalling the Caliphate: Decolonization and World Order, by Salman Sayyid. Religious Studies Review 42, no. 2 (2016): 129. https://doi.org/10.1111/rsr.12485.

Status

Published (2016)

Publication type

Scholarly book review

Overview

This review considers Salman Sayyid’s argument that the caliphate possesses a far wider symbolic and political repertoire than conventional institutional histories acknowledge. The book treats the caliphate as a vocabulary through which Muslim political subjectivity, decolonisation, sovereignty, and world order can be reconsidered beyond the assumptions of the nation-state. The review highlights Sayyid’s use of political concepts, historical references, cultural ideas, and ideological claims to expose the limits of approaches that reduce the caliphate either to a defunct institution or an extremist project. It assesses the book as an intervention in debates about Eurocentrism and the conditions under which Muslims can articulate political futures. Its contribution is to clarify the caliphate’s continuing conceptual significance without equating that significance with one institutional programme.

Research question or central concern

What political and decolonial work does the idea of the caliphate perform when it is understood as a symbolic repertoire rather than a fixed institution?

Main argument, approach, and contribution

The review evaluates Sayyid’s conceptual and decolonial reframing of the caliphate. It argues that the book expands political analysis by treating Muslim claims as challenges to Eurocentric assumptions about sovereignty and world order. The contribution is to distinguish the concept’s intellectual significance from narrow institutional or security-centred readings.

Keywords

caliphate; decolonisation; Salman Sayyid; Muslim political subjectivity; sovereignty; world order; Eurocentrism