Why are new jihadists fascinated by the “Caliphate” concept?

In Nov. 2013, Al-Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahri urged Daesh leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi to focus on Iraq and leave Syria to Al-Nusra Front.

No one knew at the time that Baghdadi, the heir of former al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, would refuse to swear allegiance to Bin Laden’s successor and claim victory.

After only one year, however, Baghdadi, who once was an anonymous man who lacked the necessary experience and charisma, managed to outperform the undisputable strategic expert of the global jihad Zawahri, who remained under Bin Laden’s wing for around a quarter century before succeeding him in 2011.

For four years, since the summer of 2014 and until the spring of 2018, Daesh used to have the upper hand over the global jihad movement.

Daesh was able to attract thousands of potential candidates for the global jihad and swallowed the global jihad network, which Bin Laden’s organization started weaving quarter a century ago.

This acquisition was not by chance; as the success of Daesh was due to the decision of establishing the organization that promoted the concept of reanimating the Islamic caliphate.

Announcing the revival of the Islamic caliphate was smartly directed by Baghdadi who orchestrated the scene of bulldozing the Iraqi-Syrian border points in Al-Qa'im on Jun. 21, 2014.

This symbolic action was introduced as a cancellation of the inherited borders of the Sykes–Picot Agreement and a restoration to the virtuous caliphate through the establishment of the Islamic state of Daesh.

Before its second fall in 2017, Daesh sought to expand its influence rapidly through a vast region that consists of around 40% of Iraq (170,000km2) and 33% of Syria (More than 60,000km2.

Daesh propaganda was determined to revive a deep-rooted narcissist wound in the imagination of contemporary Islamic world through linking the destruction of the Sykes–Picot legacy to the restoration of the caliphate.

This wound is more about the Sykes–Picot Agreement more than the abolition of the Islamic caliphate by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in March 1924.

The popularity of the Ottoman Empire was plummeted until it became no longer the caliphate of Muslims outside Turkey, instead, it became observed as a regime of repression and occupation that should be toppled.

As a result, the Ottoman Empire got dismantled during the WWI as the League of Nations promised that all people have the right to self-determination. Ottoman provinces were secretly separated into areas of influence under the control of new Western forces.

Thus, the map of the Middle East was redrawn through the Sykes-Picot Agreement. However, the contemporary Islamic imagination observe the agreement as a point of failure and a recession of the imperial power of the Muslim world, which got conquered by the military, scientific and political dominance of the new European empires.

Since the Renaissance that followed the French occupation in Egypt, led by Napoleon Bonaparte (1801 – 1798), and all the revolutionary and reformist movements in the Muslim Arab world started paying dramatic attention to the issue of the advancement of the West versus the regression of Muslims.

This issue is what caused the deep narcissist wound that entrenched a weird feeling towards the advancement and progress of the West inside the Muslim community, which is a mix between fascination and repulsion.

Like the rest of people, Muslim societies get excited for the technological and scientific advancement, which emerge from the West’s modernity, but at the same time, conservative Muslim societies would see the human values and rational thoughts that founded the West’s modernity as a sort of cultural deviation and a new kind of Western occupation.

And to escape the impasse of being both fascinated and repulsed by the modernity of the west, Islamic movements claim the illusion of restoring the golden era of the Islamic caliphate, which witnessed the advancement and brilliance of the Islamic civilization across the world.

In fact, new-generation jihadists, like Daesh, represent a caricature of this imaginary vision to restore the caliphate as an alternative to the superiority of the west.

Most of the Danish militants, who are graduates of top Western colleges and some of them were born and raised in the west, are well-educated on the latest technological tools, especially the digital communication field, however, they utilize these tools against the Western societies that developed these tools, and their values.

All of this is being performed under the flag of the retrogressive Salafist ideology, which can be defined as the complete opposite of the modernity that produces the technological progress that they love.