We are being told that the Syrian rebel factions are all fighting for the establishment of Khilafah. I don’t really doubt that this is probably true on an abstract level, because most jihadis believe in this abstract concept. The enormous antagonism between the rebel factions, however, illustrates that clearly there is no cohesive vision as to how this concept can be translated from abstraction into practical reality. Herein lies one of the fundamental and stubborn fallacies that afflicts the Islamic movement: the mythic Khilafah. Everyone insists that it is obligatory to establish it, everyone thinks they know what it is, and everyone thinks they know how to do it; but nobody can actually define or explain any of this in reality. They can only offer slogans.
No one can explain this because, quite simply, there is no explanation. There is no explanation because there is no mandatory political system in Islam. There are mandatory rules, and any system through which those rules are enacted and implemented, is, by definition, an Islamic government.
Furthermore, the criteria for deeming a government to be Islamic; the mandatory rules which it must implement; according to classical scholars, are very few, and I doubt very much if the majority of Jihadis would be satisfied with this. However, none of them, to my knowledge, has produced a model which articulates precisely what they mean by Khilafah, what would satisfy them. They have not done this, and I do not expect them to do this, because by and large, they are not politically educated, nor do they possess scholarly knowledge of the issue. They have learned what they have learned primarily through Jihadi propaganda.
They will say, at most, that Khilafah means a government that implements Shari’ah in its totality. Never mind the fact that this only existed in our history for around 40 out of 1,400 years; they will be unable to tell you even what “Shari’ah in its totality” means, because they are generally not educated enough to distinguish between what is Shari’ah and what is Fiqh, and within the realm of Fiqh, they do not know upon which matters there is unanimous consensus, nor over which matters there are permissible differences of opinion.
If they succeed, and they will not, the most that they will achieve is an authoritarian government which declares that its system is Islamic, and its laws are based upon the Shari’ah. In other words, they will achieve government which is essentially identical to what prevails now throughout the Arab world. And when they determine that their ruler is not Islamic “enough” they will have ensured that they have no recourse to correct him or replace him, because “democracy is kufr”, and so we will begin the cycle all over again of bloody revolution to establish the Khilafah.
This is why I have said again and again, that any revolutionary or opposition movement, needs to focus exclusively upon specific, defined,, clearly articulated policy demands which they require the government to address, whatever government it is, and whatever title the ruler may call himself; whether Khalifah, president or king.
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