The Other Legitimate Game in Town? Understanding Public Support for the Caliphate in the Islamic World

Abstract

In recent years, essentialist claims about the incompatibility of democracy and Islam have been swept away by public opinion research revealing that democracy is widely supported in the Islamic world. However, while this literature has demonstrated the popularity of democracy over authoritarianism, we argue that it misses a key piece of the puzzle by not examining Muslim public support for an alternative model of government: the Caliphate system. After outlining three different visions of the Caliphate in Islamic political thought – an autocratic view, a democratic view, and an instrumentalist or “good governance” view – we analyze how it is conceptualized today by its supporters with existing and original surveys conducted in several Islamic countries. We first engage with an existing cross-national survey conducted in several Muslim-majority countries that include Egypt, Indonesia, and Pakistan in order to investigate the sources of public support for the Caliphate, broadly speaking. We then move on to our own original, nationally representative survey conducted in Pakistan to analyze more deeply the political institutions and dimensions most associated with the Caliphate and democracy. Our results suggest that, like democracy, the Caliphate is understood by its supporters primarily in instrumental terms, as a vehicle for effective systems of welfare and justice rather than as a specific institutional configuration or simply as a means for policing public modesty and morality.