The O.I.C.: a proto- or neo-Caliphate

"It seems that the OIC is restoring in the 21st century the Caliphate, the supreme controlling body for all Muslims."

So writes Bat Ye'or, the Egyptian-British-Swiss-Jewish scholar, as linked at Jihad Watch to the online magazine American Thinker.

Two years ago, I anticipated this realization, in my essay A proto-Caliphate: the O.I.C.

As I conjectured then, the O.I.C. represents either

1) an anticipatory metamorphosis of a Western-style league of nations paving the way for a re-introduction of the classical Caliphate;

or

2) a functional Caliphate in its own right.

Given the fanatical obsession Muslims have with avoiding bid'a (innovation), the first description might be the more logical. The second description not only suffers from being an innovation, it also lacks the crucial feature of the classical Caliphate: a Caliph. As the vicar of a living Mohammed throughout history, the Caliph is very much an Islamic Pope (notwithstanding the mantra people keep repeating that "the problem is that Islam has no Pope": Islam has only been bereft of a Pope -- a Caliph -- for less than one century out of its 1,400 years, when the Caliphate was shut down in 1923).

The other likely alternative would be that Muslims through the O.I.C. are pursuing the second option -- a functional Caliphate now -- as a temporary measure while they hope and pray -- and plot -- to restore the Caliphate in its traditional form in the near future.

What many Westerners don't seem to realize is that the abolition of the Caliphate in the early 20th century was not just, in Muslim minds, some unfortunate event which they have grudgingly learned to accept: it was a tragic wound of cataclysmic proportions for the collective Islamic psyche (and the collective psyche in Islam is far more important and influential than any individual Muslim mind). Given the nature of its loss and the effect of that loss, and given what we know of the Muslim proclivity for laboring as assiduously and industriously as a vast colony of army ants with whatever fanatical-obsessive bee they have in their bonnet, it would be eminently reasonable to assume that Muslims have been busy since 1923 to the present in figuring out ways to revive their Caliphate.

And given the Western penchant for blithely ignoring what Muslims are doing, Muslims have not had to be all that cleverly covert about their designs, pretty much able to machinate in plain sight, with nary a naive Infidel the wiser. Let us hope the Age of the Internet brings the West up to speed on the Original Jihad That Never Went Away before it's too late to prevent a World War Three more global, and more destructive, than the previous two combined.

Toward that end, what is needed is a thorough study of Islamic law surrounding the concept of the Caliphate and the question of a process of its re-establishment in our present unprecedented context where it was never before in history a question or a problem, except perhaps at the very beginning of the development of the rule of Mohammed's immediate successors in the 7th century A.D. With such a thorough study, we could better anticipate what moves the O.I.C. plans to make.