The Jihad Continues
That involves the re-establishment of full Islamic law in Muslim countries
and above all, the restoration of the caliphate.
As we have seen, the caliph was (in Sunni Islam) the successor to
Muhammad and the leader of the Muslim community: Kemal Ataturk's
secular Turkish government abolished the caliphate in 1924. Islamic
theology makes no distinction between the sacred and the secular, and for
Sunni Muslims the caliph was something like acombinedgeneralissimo
and pope, although he never wielded anything comparable to the pope's
spiritual authority. Michelangelo's patron, Pope Julius II, earned the dubi-
ous honor of going down in histo ry as the "warr ior pope; " bycontras t,
theoverwhelming majority of the Prophet's successors were warrior
caliphs.
Man y mode m jih ad grou psdat e all the woe softhe Islam ic:worl d to
theloss of Muslim unity that resulted, in their view, from the loss of the
caliphate,
Th at wa s wh en our he ar ta ch es be ga n
This exhor tati on from the inter nati onal Musli m grou p Hizb ut-Tahr ir
indicates the depth of angui sh jihad ists feel at the loss of the
calip hate, which they attribute to Kemal Ataturk, an "English agent":
It wasaday like this79 years ago,arid more specifically on the
3rd of March 1924 that the kuffa r [unbe liever s] were able to
reap the fruitsoftheir tireless efforts of plotting and planning,
which they had expended for more than a hundred years. This
happened when the criminal Englishagent, Mustafa Kemal(so-
called Ataturk , the `Father of the Turks'! ) announ ced that the
Grand Natio nal Assemb ly had agree d to destr oy the Khilafah
[cali phate ]; and annou nced the estab lishme nt of a secular,
irreligious, Turkish republic after washing hishands from