Return of the Caliphate

If white is the colour
of mourning in Andalusia,
it is a proper custom.

Look at me, I dress myself in the white
of white hair in mourning for youth.

Abu l-Hasan al-Husri

An abiding dream for many Muslims is the return of the Caliphate, a united Islam as a world center of power and culture. Setting aside the fevered fundamentalist fantasies of the deranged and dispossessed, it certainly appears that a united Middle East is the only way that Moslems can stand up to the powerful West. A fragmented and backwards Middle East, trust fund oil states of money but no influence, do not represent or value their subject peoples and as a result those peoples are held in little worth by the rest of the world.

Models for the twenty-first century Caliphate are not hard to find, such as the neighbouring European Union, with its loose federalist structure and its freedom or thought and association. Or perhaps the tighter political structure of the Great Satan itself. Or a look back to the enlightened poet-princes of Al Andalus, whose benign Islamic rule in Spain served as a lonely beacon of light in the Europe of the Dark Ages.