The Caliphate of Man

Sovereignty, in European political theory, is conventionally identified as the legitimate right of the state to exercise the hegemony of power, a function that, today, is usually legitimized by the democratic political structure of the state itself. In the Islamic world, however, that process of legitimization is traditionally embodied in the fact that sovereignty is a divine attribute, articulated within Muslim society initially by the Prophet and subsequently by the institution of the caliphate. However, in this, his latest book, Andrew March, suggests that this classic view has, since colonialist intervention in the Muslim world from the nineteenth century onwards, undergone significant and progressive modification, especially since the caliphate itself—in its Ottoman version at least—was abolished in 1924. This modification, in essence, has been the gradual subordination of the caliphal institution to the Muslim umma as the essential intermediary translating the divine essence of sovereignty into the reality of temporal

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