Islamic Revival

I recently addressed a particular detractor of the Islamic obligation for Muslims be politically united under a Caliphate. ‘Mufti Abu Layth’ [or ‘MAL’ for brevity] preaches that belief in the Caliphate is a ‘cancerous ideology’, an ‘erroneous view’, and is even a form of ‘hate speech’. As part of a supposed “#CallEmOut” and “#ReclaimIslam” campaign, he urged his readers to, in effect, with-hunt anyone who holds this belief. He justified this by arguing that the belief in a Caliphate is one also held by terrorists. (I’ll come back to the fallacy of guilt-by-association fallacy below.) The obligation of a Caliphate, throughout history, has been a belief of near complete consensus in Islamic scholarship. So, describing the belief in a Caliphate as an ‘erroneous view’ raises serious red flags. MAL isn’t alone in arguing this; Secularists (or ‘reformists’) have been known to advocate a cynical view of Muslim history in an attempt to claim that the Islamic concept of a Caliphate tha