Ottoman History Podcast - Caliphate: an idea throughout history

Episode Date: April 16, 2016

with Hugh Kennedy hosted by Taylan Güngör Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | Soundcloud What is a caliphate? Who can be caliph? What is the history of the idea? How can we interpret and use it today? In this podcast we discuss with Prof Hugh Kennedy his forthcoming book The Caliphate (Pelican Books) and the long-term historical context to the idea of caliphate. Tracing the history from the choosing of the first caliph Abu Bakr in the immediate aftermath of the Prophet Muhammad’s death in 632, the Orthodox (Rashidun) caliphs (632-661), the Umayyads (661-750), the Abbasids (750-1258) and the use of the idea of caliphate by the Ottomans down to the emergence of another Abu Bakr as “caliph” of the IS in 2014. « Click for More »

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm delighted to be joined today by Professor Hugh Kennedy. Hugh Kennedy is a professor of Arabic at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He's been studying the history of the Caliphate for almost 50 years and has written numerous books including The Courts of the Caliphs, published in 2004, and The Great Arab Conquest, published in 2007. I'm very happy to say that his new book, Caliphate, an Idea Through History, is due to be published by Pelican Books in June 2016, and is also the topic of our discussion today.

Professor Hugh Kennedy, welcome. Thank you for the kind introduction. Now I'd like to start by asking you to describe to us very briefly what the premise of the book is. The current proposed title of Caliphate, an idea through history, seems to be filling a clear and important gap in dealing with this subject as a whole. What is your approach to this topic? I got interested in writing this book clearly because of current discussions about the Caliphate and particularly the revival of the idea of caliphate by ISIS, Daesh, call them what you're going to, in their new caliphate in northern Syria and Iraq.

And that, a lot of comment from journalists and others reveals that people have very little idea what the term caliphate means. It's a term that's very easy to be frightened of because it seems to come with perhaps sinister and authoritarian overtones and so on. And what I want to do in this book is to, as it were, revisit the use of the word caliphate and title caliph through the centuries of Islamic history from the time of the death of Prophet Muhammad onwards, when the term first comes into use, right through until the present day. But the purpose of the book is more than simply to give a chronological outline and sort of tap references to the different places this term has been used. It's very much to, as I think, almost to reclaim a vision of Islamic history.

The propagandists of ISIS and other similar groups have given us an idea of Islamic history recently, which is very, shall wear, it's very narrow. It's very much concerned with establishing Islamic history as a basis for orthopraxy, i.e. looking for Islamic history and telling us how orthodox Muslims and strict Muslims ought to behave at different times and so on. Muslims ought to behave at different times and so on. What has been edited out is the vast variety of califal and political experience, the different attempts that different groups of Muslims have made through the centuries to find a political system that works for them and which enables them to conduct true Muslim lives, but which also satisfies their material needs, protects them from their enemies, and so on. The idea of the caliphate has been narrowed down to a very

single-minded vision. What I want to do is talk about the different eras of the caliphate, particularly about multiculturalism, about cosmopolitan outlooks, about receptivity to new ideas that all come in different stages of different caliphates. Caliphate is a focus for display, to a focus for display of the wealth and power of the Muslim community as expressed through its leaders, and the variety of different interpretations to such important questions as what should a caliph do? What sort of powers should a caliph have? And who, and most elementary of all perhaps, who should be the caliph? How should the caliph be chosen? And to point out in the end, there are lots of people who have come to lots of

different answers about these questions. There is no one single vision. And from time to time in the recent discussions, people have said things like, what is the legal definition of a caliphate? What does Islamic law say about who should become caliph? And these are surprisingly difficult questions to answer in a very specific way. And there are no generally accepted rules and regulations. And the idea and the office of caliphate most obviously is very different in Shia Islam than it is in Sunni Islam.

But even within Sunni Islam, there is a huge variety of opinions and ideas. And again, at another level, a huge variety of opinions and ideas about what the modern relevance of it is. And these are all ideas that I'm trying to explain. The book begins by setting the scene with the emergence of the caliph after the death of the prophet in 632. And this is followed by the Orthodox Rashidun caliphs. What would you say characterise the first caliphs of Islamic history? Immediate questions are asked after the death of who should be caliph? How should the caliph be chosen? Yes, I think the idea of the office of the caliphate is an immediate response by the Muslim community

to the extraordinary position that the Muslims found themselves in at the time of the death of Prophet Muhammad in 632. Because, at least according to Sunni opinion, Prophet Muhammad left no designated successor or heir. And this meant that there were two immediate questions that confronted the Muslim community at this stage. Firstly, was there going to be a leader and what powers would that leader have? And secondly, who would that leader be? And according to the traditional accounts, and we've got no reason really to disbelieve them, all this was decided very quickly when Prophet Muhammad died. And the leadership was taken by a small group of Qurashi Muslims, that is Muslims from Mecca, who had come to settle in Medina

at the time of the great Hijra in 62. And they took the initiative here and they appointed one of them, chose one of their number Abu Bakr, who was an old man by this stage and had worked with the Prophet Muhammad for many years as their new leader. And they seem to have given him two titles, though the early evidence for these titles

is a bit slender. One of them was Khalifa, Caliph in English. Now, Caliph is an ambiguous word. It either means a deputy, somebody who substitutes for somebody else, or it means a successor. And this gave rise to a lot of uncertainty when trying to work out what the office of caliph meant. The other title was more simple and more straightforward, which was Amir al-Mu'minin, or Commander of the Faithful, as it's usually rendered in English. And that simply referred to the new leader, the caliph, if you like, leadership in warfare and so on.

The caliph's role as, as it were, army commander and chief executive, so to speak, of the new community. The term caliphah is much more fraught with ambiguity because the implications are profound. If the, is the caliph to be the deputy of God on earth or as the Arabic phrase goes

and if he is then this is a position of enormous power because in a sense God has appointed him and he is God's representative on earth.

And people who believed in the absolute power of the caliphs and so on would tend to this interpretation. And indeed, research recently has shown that this is the oldest interpretation. And it has Quranic precedence. The word caliph or caliph is used twice in the Quran to refer to individuals. The first of them is Adam, who is arguably the first of the caliphs. And the second is David, king of Israel, who is referred to as the caliphate Allah, is appointed as caliphate Allah, the caliph of God on earth.

The other viewpoint was that it means successor. The other viewpoint was that it means successor and that the real title is not Khalifatullah but Khalifatur Rasulullah which means the, well what does it mean? But it means fundamentally the successor of the Prophet Muhammad. Now Prophet Muhammad, all Muslims agree was the last of the prophets. There was

never any discussion about that. So, the new caliph to be a successor of Muhammad couldn't be another prophet. The new caliph had to be a successor of Prophet Muhammad in, as it were, the secular aspects of his work and the secular aspects of his leadership, commanding armies, organising taxation, that sort of things that a new community demanded. And that much was clear. But there's an ambiguity about, for example, should the Khalifa have the power to, or the authority to interpret

Quran, those difficult, mysterious bits of Quran that Muslims have discussed for centuries and centuries and still remain, in many cases, ambiguous. Should the Khalifa have the power to decide what Islamic law or what became known as Sharia, what Sharia was, or not? Or should this be left to other people? And so what appears to be a little sort of semantic dispute, really, almost about whether it's Khalifa of Allah or Khalifa of Rasulullah actually has profound implications for looking

at the office of caliphate. And it's really with these different opinions that the whole debate, dispute, discussion about caliphate begins. And the issues that were raised in these very early days after the death of Prophet Muhammad are still being raised today as people try to imagine what a caliphate might look like. So how did the caliphate pass into the hands of the Umayyads after these first few caliphs? Their caliphate was disputed, they were known as illegitimate, and they would be succeeded later on by the Abbasids, what you call the imperial caliphates.

What was this process? How did it happen? The first four caliphs, Abu Bakr, Omar ibn al-Khattab, Uthman ibn Affan and Ali ibn Abi Talib, are in a sense the people who in different ways define the office for future generations. Where you stand on the first four caliphs defines your position on the Sunni-Shia divide. For the majority of the Sunni community, the first four caliphs are the incomparable exemplars of what a ruler should be. For the Shia, the first

three caliphs are essentially the people who deprived Ali ibn Abi Talib of his true inheritance as a successor of Prophet Muhammad. So very different views about this. But there is, well, Abu Bakr and Umar command the respect, even among the Shia population, of most of the caliphs. The third caliph, Uthman, from 644 to 656, is a much more controversial character because Uthman was murdered by insurgents from the Muslims of Iraq and Egypt. And where you stand on the murder of Osman is a major dividing point among Muslims. Between those who argue that Osman may not have been a

perfect leader, nonetheless, he was the leader appointed by God. And nonetheless, the Muslims should follow the leader for fear of fitna, that is to say, for fear of division amongst the Muslim population. There is another point of view that Osman's sins or what he did was so wrong that he was unqualified to be a caliph. And it was only right to get rid of him and replace him by somebody, in this case, Ali ibn Abi Talib, who was more suited for the job. So the discussions about caliphate constantly look back to these traumatic events. But in reality, the power passed, not without struggles and debates and so on, into the hands of the family of the Umayyads. Now, the Umayyads were an interesting family. They came from the aristocracy of Mecca. But

the key point for understanding, I think, the Umayyad dilemma was that they were politically very powerful because they controlled Syria and the resources of Syria. But they were on weak ground because, as a family, they had opposed Prophet Muhammad and his mission through most of his life, or most of them had, not all of them. And this meant that when they seized power there were many in the Muslim community who felt that they were in a sense illegitimate. Here were the enemies of the Prophet who had taken over the Prophet's own ummah, the Prophet's own community. Nevertheless the Umayyads provided a strong and effective government for the Muslim community for the 90 years when they provided caliphs. And they provided a model of the caliphate, which was very much a ruler, very much a monarchical model of the caliphs.

the succession within the family, the rulers, the caliph's name on the coins, the caliph's name on monumental inscriptions, one of which still survives in the Dome of the Rock, but other places as well. The caliph as decider of legal cases, the caliph as, if not in person, leader of the armies, or at least the person who appointed the leader of the armies, the caliph as the leader of the Muslims against the Byzantines, the caliph who assured the safe passage of Hajj to Mecca and Medina. But the Umayyads, in a way, never got over this legitimacy deficit.

In the year 750, there was this big revolution, and the family of the Abbasids overthrow the Umayyads with support, basically, from people of Iraq and people of Muslims, that is, of Iraq and the Muslims of Iran. The Abbasids come to, as it were, restore a true Islamic rule. The great strength of the Abbasids come to, as it were, restore a true Islamic rule. The great strength of the Abbasids in ideological terms was that they could be considered as the family of the prophet.

But they too suffered a legitimacy deficit in the sense that they were of the family of the prophet, but they were descendants of the of the Prophet, but they were descendants of the Prophet's uncle, Abbas, hence the name of his paternal uncle, Abbas, but not of the Prophet himself. And the descent of the Prophet himself passed through the Prophet's two grandsons, Hassan and Hussain. And for many Muslims, still, the Abbasids were not really members of the family or not really direct descendants of Prophet Muhammad. And they constantly had to counter this. Nonetheless, the Abbasid Caliphate in its first half century or its first century really was an immensely powerful organization.

It depended, like the Umayyads had done before them, on the collection of regular taxes and the payment of a regular army. It became very much an imperial caliphate, if you like, comparable in lots of ways with the Roman Empire that had preceded it. But always there was this strand of opposition and questioning to caliphal authority. And this came to a head really in the third century of Islam. So we're talking about the ninth century of the common era, when the caliph Ma'mun, in many ways a very enlightened and cultured and cultivated monarch, decided to impose a view on the Muslim population about the contentious, but impossible to sort out,

argument about the createdness of the Quran. Now, I don't think there's perhaps time to go in details about why this was an important issue, but one of the things that was important was the caliph was attempting to decide on Muslim doctrine. And this provoked a huge amount of opposition. And it provoked opposition in the city of Baghdad amongst a group that are becoming more and more important at this time, the ulama, the learned people. And the ulama were learned, particularly in the field of Islamic law

and the traditions, the hadith of Prophet Muhammad. And they set themselves up to counter and oppose this idea of the caliph as a lawmaker and say, no, you can't do that. The caliph has no right to decide about Islamic law. It's we, the ulama, we the people who know what Prophet Muhammad said in these thousands and thousands of hadiths that are brought down to us, and the caliph's power to make decisions is illegitimate. And in the end,

they sort of won. And this was a very important moment in Islamic history because the caliph, the secular ruler, could no longer claim to be a lawmaker, could no longer claim to be an interpreter of Quran. And that is the beginning of the undermining, shall we say, of the status and power of the caliphate because a ruler who can't make laws is only half a ruler. So this is when we can observe the problems of the Abbasid caliphate leading to its later fragmentation. The problems of the Abbasids were increased because of the economic problems and the particular economic problems in Iraq, which meant that the dynasty that was able to employ the most powerful army in the world, probably, in the 8th century. By the beginning of the 10th century, it was faced by a small, usually mutinous,

and almost totally ineffective military force. And the caliphate breaks up in the 10th century. But the breakup of the caliphate is a complicated business. It's partly the misfortunes of the Abbasids, but it's partly something else that's going on that's very important. And that is the conversion of populations around the Middle East to Islam. We must remember that there is a big difference between conquest, which is the Arab Muslim military conquest of the 7th century and the beginning of the 8th and conversion

of the majority of the population of these areas to Islam. The first is a quick and violent process. The second is a much longer process, the conversion of people, the majority to Islam, is a longer process possibly taking five centuries to reach a numerical majority even in the Middle East, and it's almost entirely peaceful. There are very few records of forcible conversion to Islam. But as more and more people in different areas became Muslims, in a curious way, their allegiance to the caliphs in Baghdad weakened. You get Muslims in Egypt or Muslims in northeastern Iran, in Iran, Bukhara, and Samarkand, all the other, who are devout Muslims,

but their loyalties lie to their region. They are Iranian Muslims or Khorasan Muslims from northeast Iran. They're Egyptian Muslims primarily. Their connections, they never go to, they never see a caliph. Their connections with the central government in Baghdad are extremely tenuous. And by and by, local rulers, local Muslim rulers in all cases, come and take over the power that the Abbasids had previously had. So in a paradoxical way, the breakup of the Abbasid caliphate, which happens in the 10th century,

which led to the political disunity of Islam, was a sign, a symptom, a consequence, in fact, of the success of Islam in proselytizing and spreading amongst all sorts of varieties of populations. This is one of the, I mean, I think this is a fundamental to understand this if we are looking at the long-term question of why the caliphate was never, so to speak, put back together again. It's because the breakup of the caliphate is not just something that happened by accident because rulers were useless,

but it was a consequence of long-term social, economic and above all religious change. Müzik I took the so after the Abbasid fragmentation, perhaps surprisingly, the end of the caliphate didn't occur as a result of the invading crusader armies, but were due to the invasions of the Mongols from the east who conquered the city of Baghdad in 1258 and are vividly described as rolling up the last Abbasid caliph in a carpet and had him trampled to death under the hooves of their horses. So from 1258 to, let's say, the 1300s,

when the title of the caliph re-emerges in the Ottoman context, what happens to this title of caliph? Is it lost? Is it still used? The title of the caliphate, it becomes, it's still used. A number of Abbasids escaped from the massacre at Baghdad, which we've been talking about, to Cairo, where under the patronage of the Mamluk sultans from really from 1260 right through to the Ottoman conquest of 1517. They were maintained but strictly as figureheads with one very slight exception. They played no part in the politics.

They were revered as possibly as religious advisors. Not the Mamluks normally needed much religious advice and as symbols of continuity but their political power was negligible. religious advice, and as symbols of continuity, but their political power was negligible. And the last of these shadowy caliphs disappeared in the aftermath of the Ottoman conquest. And from then on, the main claimants to the title of caliph were the Ottoman dynasty.

And from then on, the main claimants to the title of caliph were the Ottoman dynasty. The Ottomans don't seem to really use this title, caliph. It's in 1517 when Selim the Grim or Yavuz Sultan Selim conquered Cairo, ending the Mamluk sultanate, that there seems to be a revival of the use of the title of caliph and caliphate. Why was this the case? Why didn't they use it as often before? Well, curiously, the early Ottomans weren't really interested in the title of caliph. There were sultans and there were emirs and there were ghazis, but they weren't caliphs. And indeed, immediately after 1517, they don't immediately pick up the idea of caliph or

they don't use it. What they do get in 1517 is the right to be the protectors of the holy places, the haramain. And that gives them a sort of leadership position, which they were to retain right through until 1918 in the Muslim community as patrons and guardians of the pilgrimage, which is a very important issue. But it really isn't until the 17th century, I think I'm right in saying that we first begin to get the discussion amongst the Ottomans of the use of the title caliph as well as sultan. Sultan always, throughout the Ottoman period, is the title.

Caliph is an added on thing. A discussion by one Lutfi Pasha in the 17th century about in what basis do the Ottomans have for being caliphs. Now, they could not claim, they never did claim, to be members of Quraysh, the family of the Prophet, and the tribe of the Prophet, excuse me, not the family, the tribe of the Prophet, for there was a long tradition in Sunni political thought

that the caliph should be a member of Quraysh, the tribe of the prophet, and indeed the present ISIS caliphate in northern Syria and Iraq makes a point of saying the caliph should be a member of Quraysh. And the so-called caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi claims to be and probably is a descendant of Quraysh. So they couldn't do it on that background. They couldn't really do it on the second, as it were, plank of caliphal legitimacy, which was being designated by a previous caliph. There was a story later on,

the last of the Abbasids of Cairo had handed over his power to the first of the Ottomans, but that seems to be a story that comes up in the 19th century and has no historical basis. The real reason for saying that the Ottomans should be caliph was that they were the most powerful Muslim Sunni rulers. And that it was that it was a question of power and might and leadership of the Muslim community that enabled the Ottomans to claim the title of caliph. Muslim community that enabled the Ottomans to claim the title of caliph. But even so, it was a title they used only intermittently. It was a title they sometimes used when addressing foreign

ambassadors and dignitaries. It's not really until the late 19th century, in the time of Abdulhamid II, that we begin to get Ottomans who see the potential of the office of caliphate and so on. And Abdul Hamid tries in various ways to use the office of caliphate to create, as it were, Muslim solidarity. Muslim solidarity in the Ottoman Empire, which was important at a time when Arab Muslims were increasingly restless under what they thought was Turkish rule.

But even Muslim solidarity in areas outside the Ottoman Empire, in Egypt and even in British India, there was...Abdul Hamid seems to have experimented with ideas and his successors at the time of the First World War certainly tried to exploit this idea of the Ottomans as the caliphs of all the Muslims. Not, it may be said, to any great effect. And there are other things that Abdul Hamid did. The building of the Hijaz Railway was a very caliphal thing to do in the old sense. His predecessors as caliphs through the centuries, one of their main tasks had been safeguarding and facilitating the hajj. Here, in a very interesting way,

it was the caliph facilitating the hajj, but with the technology of the early 20th century, but resuming the old role, seizing the old role of the protector of the pilgrims. So it seems that this title of caliph in the Ottoman context seems to be a bit of an add-on, an add-on to their title, the most important one, that of sultan. Would you agree with that?

Do you think that that's something that we see? It's essentially an add-on which could be useful in certain cases. And I think, talked about the Arab Muslims of the Middle East, the idea was that they could relate to the Ottoman authorities as caliphs more easily than as sultans and so on. And they made a point of collecting this rather strange group of objects in a way,

which are the regalia or the relics, if you like, of the caliphs, the sword of Prophet Muhammad and so on, that are kept in the top class of the right and can be visited to the present day. And they make a point of this. But basically, it's an add-on. It doesn't form the substance of their power. And of course, with the abolition of the sultanate, there is a curious two-year period when the last of the Ottoman rulers is no longer Sultan, but still claims to be Caliph from 1922 to 1924, before the Caliphate is finally abolished by Mustafa Kemal.

Of course, this idea of caliphate has been brought back by ISIS or Daesh. They seem to be using a lot of references to the past and to previous caliphs, quite notably Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi wearing black and using the colour as a symbol, a reflection of the past, perhaps. What observations have you made in regards to references to previous caliphates in history? One of the things that distinguishes the ISIS movement is its emphasis on caliphate. Compared with other Islamic revivalist movements, like, for example, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Ikhwan in Egypt, whose premise has always been that in an ideal world there should be a caliph, but actually moral reform of the Muslims must come first, expulsion of foreign rulers must

come first, the caliphate is a distant objective. And most Muslim reformers have in fact taken this view. The beginning of another attitude seems to come with the formation of Hisbata Hrya in Jordan, Palestine in the 1950s. And Hisbata Hrya seemed to have been the pioneers of promoting the idea of first you create a caliphate. The caliphate should be an instrument of this Muslim revival rather than a consequence of it. And so the idea of caliphate becomes front line, so to speak, in this discussion. And this is an idea that was taken up by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who is in many ways the originator of ISIS in Iraq in the first five years of the 21st century. But it's something that ISIS has really plugged into.

And you're right to draw attention to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the caliph. He looks, he dresses like an Abbasid caliph. He dresses in black. Black is very important for the symbolism of this because the Abbasids made a great fetish, really, of their black robes and so on as a symbol of caliphate. And if you read the propaganda of ISIS as you find it in their periodical, their online periodical, Darbik and so on, there are constant references to the early caliphs.

That is really where they find their legitimacy. Not in later Muslim heroes. The great Saladin, Salah ad-Din, doesn't appear in the pantheon of these people's heroes at all. It's Prophet Muhammad, obviously, and the early caliphs and the companions, the sahaba of the prophet. So they constantly look back, they use, manipulate,

and sometimes I'm sure invent records of what the earliest Muslims did and what the early caliphs did as a way of justifying what they're doing at the moment. Historicism or the investigation of history is extremely important for these people's view of themselves and the view of themselves that they try to portray for the rest of the Muslim world.

And we sort of miss this because the sort of outsiders and Westerners and so on miss it, where we think that all this propaganda is aimed at us. But a huge amount of ISIS propaganda is aimed at other Muslim groups in Syria and Iraq. Other Muslim, what we might call fundamentalist groups, Islamist groups in Syria and Iraq, explaining why they are the people with the pure and original message of caliphate. And these other people are in various ways deviating from this pure message. You've mentioned Dabuk, their online publication. From what you've said previously,

it seems that these references that they make to the previous Kedah faiths are quite obscure. They're not clear. Not everyone can pick up on these references. What's the thinking behind that? What's the aim behind that? I think ISIS is deliberately trying to claim the intellectual high ground here

that in order to understand why we're right, you have to know a lot about early Islamic history. You have to know a lot about the hadiths of Prophet Muhammad and so on. This understanding the full implications of the caliphate and so on is not for ordinary people. They should basically be accepting. For those who are part of the scholarly elite, why then you can go and look at the reasons, the examples, and above

all the Hadith traditions, the works of Ibn al-Wahhab in the 18th century, Ibn Taymiyyah in the 14th century. Those are the only two intellectuals of a later period for whom they have any respect. But it's the knowledge economy, if you like, of ISIS is a very elitist view of how you justify these things. And it goes back to all sorts of trends in Islam about interpretations of Quran and so on and the difference between the Zahir, the obvious outward meaning of Quran, which is for ordinary people, and the Batin, which is the secret meaning of Quran known only to the intellectuals. And some ways, though that's a very Shia concept, which of course ISIS would reject entirely, ISIS nonetheless picks up on this idea that there is an elite view.

And this, in a curious way, the fact that this knowledge is power means that they can say to their ordinary followers, so to speak, you have to do this because we know that that's what the Sahaba did. We know that that's what the Sahaba did. We know that that's what the first caliphs did. So you better believe us. So it clearly isn't sufficient to declare oneself caliph. It requires legitimacy. And it seems that Dabuk is doing this by making these obscure references to the past and to the first caliphs. The general message that runs through the book is that the idea of the caliphate is a rich and varied tradition that has been applied in various different ways.

Would you have any last few comments to conclude on this idea of the caliphate through history? I think the overall conclusion must be that caliphate is an idea that is unlikely to die. The idea that there can be a particularly Islamic form of leadership and so on, as expressed by the caliphate, rather than by kingdoms or sultans or something, is an idea that has existed for the last 1,500 years at least and is unlikely to disappear. But again, we have to get away from this very narrow interpretation of what a caliphate should be. And when the caliphate was first proclaimed, we got all sorts of statements from American politicians that, you know,

establishing a caliphate was the worst thing that could possibly happen, seeing it as a sort of evil fascist organization. But a caliphate can mean many, many different things. It can be a pluralist, quasi-democratic form of rulership. It could be an iron-fisted dictatorship. But all these are latent possibilities in the ideas of caliphate. There is no one model. There are lots of different models.

There is no one exclusive view. There are lots of different views which incorporate all sorts of multiculturalism, all sorts of different ideas and the play of different ideas, and so on. It's a rich and varied heritage. And if this book is intended to do one single thing, it's to rescue this rich and varied heritage from the monopoly, if you like, that people like ISIS have tried to establish over it. And on that note, I think it would be a good time to end. Professor Hugh Kennedy, thank you very much for taking part. Well, thank you for what I hope has been an interesting discussion for us all. I certainly

enjoyed it. If you'd like to find out more, you can go to our website, ottomanhistorypodcast.com, where there is a relevant bibliography on this topic. You'll also be able to find other podcasts on all things Ottoman. Do also like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter, where you can get updates on the latest podcasts. I'm Taylan Güngör. Thanks for listening. Altyazı M.K.