This piece is the second in a series of contentions making the case of Muslim unity. See series introduction here.

Précis. Muslim political unity is both a Quranic imperative and a historical necessity for the survival and advancement of the Umma. Historical divisions and conflicts do not render unity futile or dangerous. Past Islamic societies maintained unity through shared beliefs, legal systems, and trade networks, despite political fragmentation. Technological limitations and world-historical factors constrained more thorough unification efforts, but these constraints no longer apply. The benefits of unity outweigh the challenges, and Muslims should strive for a unified future while learning from the past.

“Would that my mother had never borne me, and I had died and been forgotten before witnessing this calamity, the like of which this world has never seen,” wailed the great historian Ibn al-Athīr (d. 630/1233) as he observed the Mongol destruction of the great Islamic cities of the east. The worst was yet to come. Books about the signs of the Day of Judgment filled the bookshops in the highly literate Muslim cities that had not yet been run over. The story of Islam was over, and along with it, the world, it was claimed. The world seemed to be rapidly nearing its end. The bloody hordes of Mongols surely were the Yājūj and Mājūj, many had concluded. In 1258, Baghdad, the greatest city of Islam, was sacked, never to recover again.

Only two centuries later, however, Islam had not only survived but reached a new zenith in the conquest of Constantinople in the year 1453. The Mughal Sultanate was soon to consolidate its rule over India. From West Africa to Southeast Asia, Islam had taken root everywhere. Had a Martian descended on the planet earth in the fifteenth century and projected its future, American historian Marshall Hodgson speculated, he would have concluded that Muslims would soon take over the entire planet. Islam seemed unstoppable.

For Muslims, the conquest of Constantinople had a cosmic meaning. The Prophet z had foretold it and blessed the army that would first raid or conquer it, and Muslims since the first century of Islam had tried to conquer it. These armies had once included the greatest companions, including the Prophet’s own grandsons—al-Ḥusayn, ʿAbdallah b. al-Zubayr, ʿAbdallah b. ʿUmar h to name a few. And yet, they were not successful.

More than 800 years later, the young Ottoman Sultan Muḥammad the Conqueror (d. 886/1481) insisted on trying what even the Companions of the Prophet z had not been able to achieve, and succeeded. History, to him, had been a source of inspiration, not a glass ceiling. It should be the same for us.

Islamic lands have never been all unified under one political unit in the past, and hence proposing a unified Muslim future is not only futile, but naive and dangerous, argue some critics. Certain visions of our past have such a stranglehold on our imagination that to satisfy our dissonance we feel compelled to contort doctrines held by the Muslim scholars by consensus as well as facts screaming in our face. True, some romanticize history by denying that our heroes were fallible, but far more troubling are others who, in a diametrically opposed vein, concede too soon that the achievements of the past put a hard limit on our own aspirations.

My particular concern in this contention is the widespread cynicism of the half-learned, the jaded activist, or the closet orientalist. Fashionable and sophisticated as it may sound, pessimism is a luxury of the precious few, who enjoy the benefits of the existing order for the time-being, and who might vicariously suffer for the Umma but are too comfortable to rock the boat. We owe more to the millions of Muslims faced with erasure at every level, who face not only genocide of their bodies, but also castration of their souls, morality, and humanity.

The Qur’an rejects this pessimism. The Almighty reminds us that the opponents of prophets have always denied and opposed the truth, that humans are often flawed, ignorant, and transgressive. But rather than using this observation to encourage throwing down the towel and dismissing humanity as hopeless—being “realistic” and hence giving up—Muslims are urged to take up their mission with renewed vigor and not be discouraged by the naysayers. The result of this message was the greatest success story ever. History is constantly surprising itself; it should never be taken as a ceiling, or rather, as an excuse for our own lack of courage or imagination.

If it is granted that Muslim political unity is an obligation, as our interlocutors with regard for orthodox Sunni doctrine must, to point to history for its absence would either mean that the divine law is absurd for mandating an impossibility, or that Muslims should embrace indifference to divine command. Or perhaps the reasoning is that it is no longer an obligation for Muslims to meaningfully unite precisely because it is impossible. But is it?

Since the future is unknown and constantly surprising us, skeptics inevitably turn to a version of history to support their conclusions. A single ruler over lands stretched from Morocco to Indonesia split into over fifty-some nation-states, they contend, would require dissolution if not violent destruction of all intermediate national institutions, erasure of all history and local specificity, and pulverization of all kinds of intellectual and cultural diversity, all of which can only be achieved through enormous and continued violence. These assumptions are mistaken. The caliphates of the past took many different forms suitable to the available resources and institutions. The image of the caliph as an absolutist autocrat is a red herring that fails to do justice to the complex history of the institution.

Perhaps it is pessimism disguised as pious realism which convinces us that an unthinkable quantum of tyranny, violence, and destruction is the only path to unification. Some imagine, in turn, that the current impoverished state of Muslims is in fact still better than the feared destruction. This apprehension recalls the medieval adage repeated by many traditional Muslim authors that sixty years of tyranny is better than one day of anarchy. Meant as a caution against disorder, if applied literally, this pessimism effectively makes disorder and chaos the absolute evil, to be avoided at all costs, no matter how diabolical the status quo. To those who believe in Allah, the darkness is always temporary. While the struggle against tyranny and corruption may seem futile in the short term, resisting it is the only right course of action. If, on the contrary impulse, inaction against tyranny were taken seriously as the Islamic political grundnorm, it would disqualify not only Ḥusayn f vis-à-vis Yazid, but also Musā S against Firʿawn.

What underpins this pessimism is a particular, secularized vision of history that forecloses the possibility of divine help and the kind of incredible turning of tables that we witness every so often in our lives but are caught unawares every time.

It would indeed be worrisome if attaining Muslim unity requires an absolutist state, erasure of local Muslim cultures and ways of being, or destruction and dissolution of beneficial institutions, or a religious tyranny that might even turn people against faith. It is true that for some Muslims this is what the vision of a caliphate represents: a single mighty ruler who would by dint of his irresistible military power, immaculate piety, and/or possession of the correct theological creed or strict adherence to the law sweep away all differences, overcome all problems, and restore a utopian golden age. Utopianism can be harmful, even though it is not always so. In a world rife with presentist hopelessness, nostalgia has both moral and practical uses.

Far more objectionable is the opposite dogma that Muslim history has been one of intractable division and conflict. Not only is this dogma weaponized to embrace and legitimize a horrifying status quo, but also of a thousand immoral compromises. Disguised in a cloak of wisdom, academic distance, or hard-nosed defense of the status quo, it is grounded in the foolish idea that evil (bāṭil) is permanent. The exact opposite of the Qur’anic declaration, inna al-bāṭil kāna zahūqā: falsehood is bound to vanish!

Some tradition-minded Muslims combine utopianism and cynicism through a creative reinterpretation of end-times hadith reports of a savior, the mahdī, deployed to justify shirking of responsibility and collective struggle. Thus in one fell swoop they explain away religious and moral obligations, the Qur’anic imperatives, the prophetic role-model, and the suffering of fellow Muslims and human beings.

Each caricature, in turn, summons its opposite extreme. An attentive reading of history, including the days of the Prophet z and the Rāshidūn h disabuses one of many such simplistic notions.

Let us return to the claim that Muslim history is rife with internal division and conflict, tyrannical, bloodthirsty rulers, and bloody wars. The ubiquity of perpetual division in Muslim history, it is argued, implies that any attempt to unify the Muslims is not only futile but also, by implication, dangerous and harmful. I will show that these claims, even if true in a qualified sense, are misleading, anachronistic, and conceptually sloppy.

Let us begin by breaking down the problem of history into two distinct questions.

1. Did Muslims believe in political unity as a divine imperative?
2. Did they try to achieve it, and if so, did they succeed?

1. Did Muslims believe in political unity?

The answer to this first question is in the affirmative beyond any doubt. At the theoretical level, the ʿulamāʾ of Islam, even under the most severe conditions of attack by the Mongols and the Crusaders, never relented on this consensus.¹ In order to give this obligation its full texture and how it was advocated throughout the times and centuries and various schools, the Ummatics Institute continues to publish a series of annotated translations from a range of leading Muslim classical authorities.²

Notwithstanding the clarity of the consensus, there is a lot to fact-check, in this field of half-doctors and misinformation. There is no disagreement about the obligation of installing an imām in any historical Muslim tradition, Sunnī, Shīʿa, or even ʾIbāḍī. Just because scholars disagreed philosophically on whether the obligation of appointing an imām was based in reason (as the Muʿṭazila held) or revelation (as the Sunnīs held), or on which particular individuals ought to have succeeded the Prophet z does not mean they disagreed on the obligation.

Confusion about particular authorities abound too, calling for correction. Al-Māwardī did not compromise on this, but rather accepted under emergency conditions the legitimacy of a Sunnī caliph who was overpowered by another Muslim military power so long as the latter accepted the former’s legitimacy. Al-Ghazālī did not accept kingship or multiplicity of kings as normal; in fact, he held that all legitimate Muslim life depended on there being a legitimate caliph, and repeatedly likened the kings of his time to eating a dead animal, prohibited but necessary to sustain life. Ibn Taymiyya did not deny the obligation of the caliphate; he too considered kingship to be impermissible and the caliphate an obligation but permitted for there to be one or more Muslim kings as a last resort, in the same way as al-Ghazālī and other Sunnī scholars did.

These Sunnī authorities did not question the creedal relevance of Muslim unity under an imām, but rather differed from Shīʿa authorities in affirming that one can still be a believer without knowing an imām, and that the imamate is an obligation like any other, and thus a matter of jurisprudence, rather than an article of faith. I could go on with these FAQs that many, including Muslim and non-Muslim authors, get wrong about the rudiments of this issue. But in this essay, I wish to focus on history.

2. Did Muslims try to achieve unity?

Historical knowledge allows us to go beyond the texts of creed and law and witness how this belief was lived, felt, institutionalized, fought for, and yes, at times betrayed. Lest a secular observer dismiss it as a mythical belief necessary to justify certain pious sentiments about the past, we can show that notwithstanding the hostile geopolitical circumstances during the five centuries between the fall of Abbasid power and the rise of the Ottomans, it remained an effective belief that informed Muslim law, politics, and day-to-day life.

No matter how far-flung Muslim communities were from each other, the idea of being tied together by the caliphate was never far. Illustrative examples abound. The Chinese Emperor once ordered all Muslims in China to read the khutba in the name of the Ottoman Sultan, thus preventing religious disputes from spreading across his territory.³ When the Sultan of Aceh Ali Mughayat Syah sought to evict the Portuguese colonizers from the post of Malacca in 1511, he turned to the Ottoman Sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent, to whom he appealed as the Caliph of Islam.⁴

Muslim India offers perhaps the clearest example. In the words of one historian,

Throughout its existence the Delhi Sultanate (1205-1526) remained a legal part of the worldwide Muslim empire functioning under the de jure suzerainty of the Abbasid caliphs. Sultans considered themselves the deputies of the caliph and derived the validity of their administrative and legal authority only on the basis of delegation. Since the supreme authority of the community legally remained with the caliph, every king and potentate claimed to exercise governmental power for, and on behalf of, the Imam of Islam.⁵

Examples of such connections can be multiplied, but it is also the case that Muslims rulers did not always do what was needed to attain optimal conditions. Often greed, impiety, or realpolitik got in the way. But if and when they indeed were neglectful, their example is as much an excuse for us to neglect political unity as their neglect of prayers or widespread consumption of wine, for instance, is for us to alter Islamic law on wine or justify neglect of worship.

In fact, the question of whether Muslims of the past sufficiently tried to fulfill the obligation they in some sense believed is not straightforward, as it requires confronting our presentist biases, and the limited historical knowledge available to the general Muslim consciousness. Even though our historical knowledge has come a long way, and certainly has much to contribute to the general Muslim discourse, it too is inevitably limited by deficient evidence and contested interpretation. In the following, I offer a few points to correct some of these biases.

For one, the very idea of what we today call the “Muslim world,” or in the Islamic parlance, Dār al-Islām, was constantly expanding, and had complex and dynamic borders. After the fragmentation of Abbasid power in the fourth/tenth century, the lands of Islam were confronted by a series of enormously disruptive nomadic invasions, as were other civilizations from Europe to China (an area historians label ‘Eurasia’ due to the similarity of these world-historical developments). The political fragmentation combined with the blessing of Islam’s expansion beyond its traditional lands from the Nile to the Oxus also meant that a simple understanding of political unity could not apply.

The heartlands became the home of newly converted nomadic Turkic tribes from the north, even as Islam was expanding in non-linear and complex ways elsewhere. In some places, Muslims were present only along the major trade routes (as in West Africa), or as scholars and soldiers engaged in existential struggle for centuries before conquering it (Anatolia), or administrators under non-Muslim rulers (as in Mongol China). In other places, the ruling families were Muslim but not the majority of the populace (as in India), and in yet others, numerous other arrangements existed. There was a time when India, let alone Southeast Asia, would have been seen as foreign as the West today.

Additionally, not only was the Abode constantly expanding across an area far greater than the antebellum US, it was also far more heterogeneous, since unlike the white Europeans’ homogenizing, ethnocentric, violent settler-colonialism, the Islamic Abode expanded in a variety of ways, mostly absorbing the widely diverse populations with their cultural and political specificities.

Second, the kind of modern governance that counts as a single political unit today would have been inconceivable for large political systems in the premodern world. During the thousand years prior to the 19th century, large parts of the Abode of Islam were integrated in ways not too different from, say, the antebellum United States. It was unified by a shared legal order of the sharīʿa, scholarly, spiritual, and trade networks, shared beliefs and interconnected cultures, and, notwithstanding periods of anti-caliphal rebellion, formal allegiance to a caliph. The post-Abbasid political fragmentation had a deleterious impact, for sure. However, its effects were limited as Muslim societies still formed part of a powerful civilization and their unity was not challenged by a great rival.

This is not to deny the sometimes devastating effects of division and political fragmentation, such as became evident when a rag-tag army of crusaders was able to pass through the breadth of the Muslim world and occupy Jerusalem. The remedy required political unification under the Zangids and then the Ayyubids, but that too was short-lived.

Third, the technology of government was different: what we understand as modern political administrative unity, for good or ill, was not possible. This was the case not only during the thousand years after the Abbasid fragmentation of the fourth/tenth century, but even before that, including during the Rightly Guided Caliphate. The limits on the form of Muslim rule were world-historical, that is, similar limits applied to all other great powers of the past.

Fourth, Muslim polities faced the reality of constant negotiation with world-historic factors. Notwithstanding early Islamic teachings favoring egalitarianism and meritocracy, soon after Islam conquered the lands of ancient civilizations, Islamic governance did not remain radically different from its counterparts with respect to its material and institutional arrangements. This was driven by political and economic factors as well as the need to compete and survive. The fragmented centuries intervening the Abbasid and Ottoman caliphates, punctuated by horse-warrior invasions such as those of the Saljuq Turks followed by the Mongols, affected the entirety of Eurasia in similar ways.

In a similar vein, on the eve of Western modernity, the Ottoman and Egyptian governments tried to rapidly modernize, not in a rush to abandon Islam, but to try to save it. To do so was not mere capitulation to reality, but a historical Muslim response to the divine imperative to “make ready against [your enemy] what you can of force and steeds of war” (8:60). By resuming this task and aspiration, even as we try to do it in better ways, is the most natural impulse of Islamic civilization. In short, the world-historical moment today both permits and demands regional and civilizational unification.

Conclusion

We have argued so far that Muslims believed in the religious and practical necessity of effective unity and tried to achieve it. Success in this pursuit, as in any moral and religious endeavor worth striving for, was partial, and varied in different times and places. Far more importantly, we have noted that the deleterious effects of political disunity were relatively limited as were the means of unification. Today, the means of communication and unified governance are ubiquitous, and the harms of disunity are far greater than ever before.

If the great and increasing expanse and diversity of the Islamic lands in the premodern age had made unified governance extremely unlikely, it invariably remained an aspiration and the only orthodox ideal inscribed in books of Islamic creed and jurisprudence. The key limitations on the size and diversity of the governed lands and peoples no longer apply, having been long overcome, as evident in cases like India, China, Russia, and the United States. Apart from the centralized large state model, the widespread aspiration towards transnational political formations is evident in the proliferation of supranational unions like the European Union, the African Union, and ASEAN. If anything, were Muslims to unite into a great power today, we would be among the last to the party.

Unification, in other words, is not only a Qur’anic imperative, but a historical necessity. And if non-Muslims can do it, Muslims, with the tawfīq of Allah, ought to be able to do it better. Contemporary experience shows that survival and honor are for those who can crack the code of unity in diversity and master the problem of collective action. For those who fail to do so, there is but humiliation, if not annihilation.

To be sure, the problem is not that we are too weak and backward, but that the lack of a worthy civilizational mission has rendered us small-minded and fissiparous. Political disunity exacerbates internal sectarian, ethnic, and other divisions and creates room for opportunists to accede to power. Since the divine imperative of unity based in monotheism that once catapulted us to the leadership of humankind is once again within reach, any excuse to skirt it is all the more perilous.

The consequences of neglecting this essential Islamic obligation are incomparably greater in the modern period, as has become abundantly evident over the last two centuries. This is no different from certain Muslim communities’ neglect of women’s scholarship or tolerance of ethnic, racial, and colorist discrimination: the harm certain practices caused in the past may have been local and limited, but have now become enormous, global, and unbearably costly, threatening the very foundations of Islam. Neglecting the duty of political unity is no less harmful or sinful.

Defeatist critics of Muslim unity often claim the mantle of realism but fail to follow through with their reading of Muslim history. If Islamic unity is impossible now because a hard-nosed reading of history shows that it did not obtain in medieval Islam, neither, a similar scan of history would show, did widespread adherence to the law, learning, or literacy. Just as efficient and large-scale political institutions are modern, so too are mass literacy, effective government, and scientific and technological revolutions that define our lives today. Perhaps our defeated romantics do want us to embrace the past in its fullness; they are on to something in supporting the Muslim status quo today: as the current autocrats ensure that Muslims remain the least educated, least free, and least capable populace in the world, medieval levels of illiteracy and disease infestation are not an unlikely result.

We, in contrast, propose that Muslims ought to transcend the limitations of the past  while embracing the virtues of our predecessors, and dare to live by all of Islam. This requires also excelling in the fields of knowledge and organization by seizing the best of opportunities available to us.

In sum, the Islamic imperative of unity is not a nostalgic relic, but a timeless principle demanding renewed vigor in our modern context. The past, with its triumphs and limitations, serves as a guide, not a constraint. Our present reality, marked by disunity and its attendant vulnerabilities, underscores the urgency of this pursuit. By embracing the richness of our diverse traditions and harnessing the tools of our age, we can forge a future where the Umma stands united, resilient, and empowered. The path to this future requires courage, vision, and unwavering faith in the Divine promise. It is a path we must tread, not just for ourselves, but for generations to come.

1. Consensus (ijmāʿ) is the strongest kind of proof in Islamic legal architecture (uṣūl al-fiqh). One might ask how this could be given that in uṣūl consensus is the third source, after the Qur’an and the Sunna. This is correct, but consensus performs another function, which is to end debate on particular questions on how to interpret the Qur’an and the Sunna. For instance, that there are five regular prayer times in a day is known through the Sunna, but it is consensus that precludes the possibility of reopening any debate on this issue. For more on this, see my article on al-Juwayni’s argument for a definitive consensus on the issue of an imām in Ghiyāth al-Umam: “Political Metaphors and Concepts in the Writings of an Eleventh-Century Sunni Scholar, Abū al-Ma‛ālī al-Juwaynī (419 – 478/1028 – 1085),” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 26, no. 1–2 (2016): 7–18.
2. Uthman Badar, ed., Classical Texts Series, Ummatics, https://ummatics.org/classical-texts-series/. The series currently comprises five papers, with more forthcoming.
3. For fifteenth- and sixteenth-century links between the Ottomans and Muslim rulers in India and communities in China, see Giancarlo Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
4. The Caliph obliged, but the Ottoman fleet arrived in 1539, a full 28 years later: “[S]ince it was so difficult to carry military supplies all the way from Anatolia to Sumatra, they set up what must have been one of the world’s first military assistance training programs: they taught the Acehis how to forge cannon for themselves.” William Polk, Crusade and Jihad: The Thousand-Year War between the Muslim World and the Global North (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 147.
5. Shashi S. Sharma, Caliphs and Sultans – Religious Ideology and Political Praxis (New Delhi: Rupa & Co., 2004), 247.