The Caliphate or the Supreme Imamate; Arabic: الخلافة أو الإمامة العظمى) is an Islamic political treatise published by Syro-Egyptian Salafi Islamist theologian Rashid Rida in 1923.
The book initially had appeared as a series of articles in Rida's Al-Manar Islamic magazine throughout the winter of 1922–23 during the tumultuous events of the abolition of Ottoman Sultanate.
The book became the first substantial Islamic scholarly treatise of the 20th century which elucidated the theological basis of a Khilafah and advocated the religious obligation of establishing a pan-Islamic supra-state.
Inspired by the programme of the treatise, Islamists all across the world began totally rejecting all Western political theories and emphasise beliefs in the inherent superiority of Islamic system.
Rida's Caliphate doctrine would directly influence ideologues of the Muslim Brotherhood, South Asian Jamaat e-Islami and Saudi Arabian Sahwa movement.
Rida penned the book during the tumultuous events of the Turkish War of Independence in the 1920s with the aim of rebutting Kemalists and enjoining Turks to uphold the Caliphal system.
He urged the Turkish people to wage Jihad against the colonial powers to rejuvenate the Islamic Caliphate and thereby maintain brotherly ties with Arabs; by virtue of allegiance to the Khalifa.
[8] Rashid Rida condemned the decision of Kemalist-led Turkish National Assembly to abolish the Sultanate in November 1922 as part of the ideological assault by "Westernised apostates" against Islam and its symbols.
Hence, justifying through historical precedents and invoking the juristic principles to avoid harm; they argued for separating temporal powers from the current tyrannical and false Caliphates.
Bringing citations from hadith literature and works of Sunni Fuqaha like Al-Mawardi and to back up his premise, Rida asserted that the absence of Caliphate and Islamic rule was equivalent to the state of Jahiliyya (pre-Islamic pagan ignorance).
Its members not only consisted of revered Islamic scholars, clerics, theologians and jurisconsultants, but also successful Muslim individuals in fields as diverse as literature, academia, engineering, business, industries, military, science and technology, etc.
To guard against corruptions from undermining the shura system; Rida argued for the dominant role of upright, qualified ulema in the Ahl al-hal wal Aqd, who act as "the natural and genuine representatives of Muslims.
In the absence of clear textual sources from the Scriptures (i.e Qur'an and authentic hadith), the ulema should exercise Ijtihad based on the principles of Islamic jurisprudence to determine legislative rulings.
Rida identified two major internal enemies to his revolutionary project of Islamic Renaissance: "hizb al-mutafarnijin (the Europeanized party)", the modernists who borrowed heavily from Western ideological discourse, and "hizb hashawiyyat al-fuqaha' al-jdmidin (the party of the "reactionary jurists)", represented by the old-school Sufi clergy who clung onto the outdated works of the four mad'habs and refused to research the Scriptures or participate in Ijtihad.
Whenever there appears within it a reformer who castigates the people of whim, the corruptors rush to confront him and cast aspersions upon his religion and his knowledge; there is no cure for these corrupting factors and deviations except the revival of the position of the imamah, and the establishing the rightful imam…'"Al-Khilafa Aw al-Imama al-‘Uzma" became one of the most significant scholarly references for the ensuant ideologues of Islamism and Jihadism in their quest for rejuvenating the Khilafah system.
The book ushered in a “conceptual revolution” which rejected all religious arguments for accepting the nascent nation-state paradigm and advocated the continuity of the traditional Islamic political order.
[23] Rida's modernist detractors have accused him of shutting down the historical evolution of Islamic political discourse and taking it back to the narrow confines of creedal rigidity and close-mindedness.