On November 16, the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) announced that Professor Muqtedar Khan would no longer be delivering the Al-Faruqi Lecture at this year's American Academy of Religion annual meeting.
IIIT justified this decision by declaring a certain post from Khan's Twitter account "to be inconsistent with IIIT's policies and interests." In fact, Khan had recently criticized an article published by the Islamist Yaqeen Institute, which discussed and endorsed the reestablishment of an Islamic caliphate.
In the essay that set it all off, Yaqeen writer Ovamir Anjum presented a caliphate as the "idea of a pan-Islamic union," which is winning more converts "with every suppressed uprising in the Muslim world, every new cycle of terrorism and punitive war, every new Muslim population violated with impunity, and every new wall erected in Euro-America." Now that ISIS's caliphate has collapsed, reasoned Anjum, this was precisely the right sort of "boost for the idea of a good caliphate" over a "bad" one.
Anjum concluded that a modern day caliphate would "not only be in accordance with the divine command but also is the only long term alternative to the mutually reinforcing coterie of despots and terrorists." [The Middle East Forum] Read more
