What is the Caliphate? Were Early Dynasties Caliphates? Or Kingdoms? -Mufti Abu Layth

on the of bani where they stand from an Islamic perspective uh were they are they a kingship or AAA a caliphate historically um is the monarchy system is that compatible with Islam or un Islamic Etc right okay I mean it's quite a bit really crumbed into a question but um okay let me let me explain it in my from my perspective in my understanding you see

that this whole like first of all B um or the umya dynasty they are exactly that they are a dynasty um an Empire basically and one could say an Islamic empire as in its part of the Islamic Heritage if we mean by that Islamic um and they were obviously Muslim they were obvously um you know imperialist in that sense as as all Empires are I'm not currently I mean I mean I'm saying that as of this moment in a neutral sense just speaking objectively and they were Muslims and

obviously where they went they furthered the cause I'm not so sure that they were any of those Empires were so um religiously driven I think they were more driven by opportunity as opposed to by some kind of evangelic Mission to I don't know further the message of God or something like I don't think in any way they were they saw themselves as Apostles in that sense like we are out there to do some kind of or um I don't think at all and and in

fact historic evidence contradicts that so you will see uh in many cases they withdrew from expansionism whenever uh they felt that they were either politically compromised or they were politics in the equations that were problematic so a good example is alandus when uh the Iberian Peninsula was liberated by Muslims and they began to advance and rapidly Advanced under the uh governance or under the leadership of M and under his sub leadership you had T bad now now the as soon as they started

to see the amount of ground that M was uh conquering and how the power that he was uh consequently kind of wielding all of a sudden and the rapid expansion so just so quickly they moved through the uh Iberian Peninsula through what would have been is today Portugal through Spain um and the way they were moving forward uh there was a great chance that a huge portion of southern Europe would have just folded quite easily with the momentum they had but the Kai in the OM

kff commands them to stop and no more expansion and to withdraw and to come back and this was just because of uh what he was being told that you know oh the M he's wielding way too much power he could become way too powerful he could become a threat and then he consequently has him executed but the whole project there stops he even brings the kff or thead kff bring Tarik bad into an inquisition as well and stuff like but that putting putting all of that aside so my point is that they were just driven like all Empires but you can

call them Islamic in the sense that they are part of the Islamic civilization if we can say Islamic like that like we have Islamic poetry part of the you know we have Islamic Art we have Islamic uh architecture we have Islamic none of these things are the Islamic in so much as they are part and parcel of the Islamic civilization so absolutely I mean and and they were Muslim I'm not denying that and I and I'm sure to them Faith was also valuable I'm not saying that I don't think it was valuable to them but

they were not by any measure some some kind of monks or some kind of uh evangelic Ori kind of Apostles set out to take the word of God far and that by any standard that was not what they were trying to do neither were they trying to establish some kind of theocracy um anything that was religious was just coincidental or just something that they believed in in fact if anything they were very bani umya were very um um forthright about

being of of Arab descent and of being uh not just of Arab descent but then being being of qur and bani umya this was something this kind of tribalism and this Arab Supremacy uh was very evident so they really looked down upon I mean when I say look down upon I'm they wouldn't proactively I don't know attack non-arabs like the if you were a Muslim a Persian Muslim it's not that they're going to purposely now Target you uh it wasn't that kind of racism like that in

my understanding they would they would just leave you alone they weren't interested but they would never allow you an opportunity either so you were never open to you know um opportunities of grandeur like you could never escalate in a great scale you could never unless you were of pure Arab descent and that too from qur and that too really from bani um or somehow associated with them so this kind of Arab Supremacy and looking down on maali and looking down on and calling all you know non-arabs generally maali slaves and stuff like this this you can

see this once again I'm not saying everybody but you can see this through many of them the abids were a bit more removed from that because they kind of embraced the whole Persian aristocracy and if anything the history of the Persian Empire the assassinates and even before them the whole the the Persian Empire was an Empire of grur and everybody knew that in the past if any Empire you know if you were somebody who wanted to be somebody you had to really try and take it up against the Persian Empire because it was something so you

know the the abits took that in they tried to appropriate a certain amount of it they tried to adopt their their kind of administrative structures they uh and and even before them the Arabs did as well but I mean the other um you could see right from the Sala arguably one could say some of the methods adopted by the sahaba were even taken from either the Persian or the bantine uh Dynasty but but definitely by the time it reaches the abids a lot of the whole um the the whole Administration the whole not just the

administration but the whole uh opulence the style the the Imperial kind of that it became Regal and Royal and because theads the the surprising thing about them is that they kept a even though they became Kings in in their right and might which they did but they kept a kind of um Simplicity to them because in essence they were just Nomad they weren't nomadic but they were kind of Arabs of that very desert kind of

background now you do see some of the later ones start to you know decades and decades later start to embrace some of the opulence that they see in rivaling kind of dynasties and kingdoms but really this manifests itself under the abits and not the early I mean definitely by harun Rashid and uh that kind of time and so you're seeing this let's let's take from these other things let's rival them let's architecture needs to be promoted so you start to see a civilization emerges with its hallm

marks so that's um definitely the abids but my point of saying this is that these all were just simply kingdoms because with the abids you're going to see shortly after the main um you're going to have people obviously going after harun Rashid and his sons um when it reaches uh you've got a m you're going to then have um it's going to go to now when it reaches mut mut you see

at this stage those few years that he has is is really just the beginning of the end after him the the Cali fate is no longer if I can call it this for a moment the califate it's no longer representative in any sense the scholars completely I mean people just then it's just a Monumental kind of figure that's all it is but prior to that that these people tried to hold a position which was known as commander of the Believers that they tried to at least present themselves somewhat in some ways

parallel to a pope except a pope that was powerful in many ways like one could say like Constantine that's how they saw themselves like harun Rashid um people like Amin mm they would have seen themselves like that but but within decades after them it's no longer like that it's just simple nominal Kings but that's as far as this is concerned it's not Theocratic in any sense it's not about the um that's just all secondary it is there Islam is there and they do

obviously oversee certain Islamic matters because they are Muslim and they the civilization is Islamic but it's not that it's not some kind of propagation movement that's what I'm trying to distinguish here in my understanding that I don't think Islam ever came with a strict governance system neither did it come with an objective to govern governing and these things were simply secondary tertiary aspects that emerged along the way hence the prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam even in his final moments never clarified and chose

not to clarify how people should proceed after him and think about it it led to some of the greatest tragedies in this uh that this umah has seen in The Civil Wars you know the whole sahaba fighting each other the whole even against the household of the Prophet against his wives uh you're going to see thousands and tens of school you know just tens and tens of thousands of companions losing their lives all of this happens Civil War you have just um just a lack of law all of this as a

consequence sects emerging the Shia the all of these things are consequences direct consequences of the political atmosphere at the time so so the prophet not to address that shows that it was never really such an like it could never have been such a fundamental factor and you see some of the great Maliki Scholars as well um they will uh highlight these right so you you do get uh some of the scholars like uh I mean you you you will

have uh a Dai For example uh the great uh Maliki scholar who had a commentary on bukari and things like this now he will write and does write that how the way the companions the reaction of the companions at the time and when the prophet had passed away they did not have a kif and the fact that they thought of it and the opinions they gave like saying how about you have a leader amongst you these things demonstrate that there was no mandate there was no obligation for there to be a kff and he writes that

this Dudi writes that this whole being a kaleth is simply a kind of Sunnah he says that if anything it's not an obligation with the in this umah okay and he's a great Maliki great Maliki scholar of his time so this is um in my understanding and I don't believe that the I think that this whole thing was retrospectively recreated and it was reverse engineered so I feel that any Hadith that mentions is actually either

fabricated or it is a misation or is a something that people later on um they've relayed from their memories but having been impacted by the the the kind of politics of their time so it is definitely either I believe that they're all weak um but at best one could say that they're definitely not the words of the Prophet maybe this is an interpretation from an interpretation resulting from reab because most of the come people just what they understood they are just transmitting and then the person they're

transmitting it to is transmitting what he understood not word by word verbatim oral Transmissions why this is important because the Arabs never used to use the word kff like this khif in Arabic simply means somebody that comes after it does not mean a deputy [Music] this Deputy understanding is an Islamic born understanding so it's an understanding born out of the Islamic civilization okay so it's not um it's

something that the Muslims came up with because the Arabs had Kings I mean they never had many kings but some of the tribes had Kings you know the Kings from for example bnar and some of these other the famous Arab Kings of the past they had Kings they hadaba they had like Chieftain of tribes they had uh am like people who I mean they might translate it as Prince today but like the one who the commander who commanded the kind of um his tribe or his people they had they had these kind of

titles the Arabs did not have a title of Khalifa So for the prophet to be speaking about it doesn't make any sense because nobody people wouldn't have understood what he was talking about because this was not a phenomenon in existence so anytime the word is being used you know that this is a later um reversed projection so people are projecting this back onto history so hence you see when they have a debate in that way they're having a debate after after the prophet has passed away

about who should be a leader they don't use the word kff where they ought to be if everybody knows that oh is a religious institution that the prophet has spoken about we didn't used to know what this was it was introduced to us by the prophet but now that he has passed how should we have a Khalifa also why are they making suggestions contrary to what the prophet has taught they're saying why don't we have multiple amids why don't you have an Amir from the muhajirin we have an Amir from the ansar why don't we do it like this why don't we so it doesn't make any sense the other thing is that Abu Bakr he said

once he is has been appointed they said to him we will call you the person who came after the messenger of Allah and when it came to um's time they were saying some people were calling him and then that just became too lengthy so they said look let's just resort to Amir the commander of the faithful now this is interesting because they are inventing this terminology as they're going along this terminology is a direct reaction of the

sociopolitical environment in which they living it hasn't come to them from the Quran or Sunnah now that is really important just like many other Islamic words that emerge merged so they didn't exist like like let's just say this several like like this is a group of Muslims called aah doesn't exist in the time of the Prophet doesn't come from the Quran ornah the term Shia doesn't come from the Quran or Sunnah like that I understand that these are groups and they've got their beliefs but you that there's many terms that have emerged in

Islam okay the mus mus is a compl of the Quran the Quran today is called a mus but the prophet couldn't have called it a mus because there was no mus in his time so if you were to find a Hadith that the prophet is speaking about mus you know that Hadith has got to be problematic because there was no mus in his time so he how could have you been talking about a mus you know it's very interesting like when the alleged Hadith that the Messiah that Jesus Christ will descend upon the minoret the white

minoret in Damascus yet minettes did not exist in the prophet's Lifetime and interestingly the white minet did not exist in Damascus at that point I mean it was arguably either built by the Oma Dynasty or it's the one built centuries later by Nadin zingi but the point is that this now some people could say well this is a prophecy from the prop Prophet now you could say that but that's one way of looking at it but it's a weak way why because then the companions ought to be questioning what it is and then they ought to be using it they're not they shouldn't be

introducing it so when the prophet has passed they ought to say yes the prophet told us about this we know exactly what we're doing this is uh we need a kff we need aif why would they never use these words and when they do use them they use them as though they're introducing them like hey I know why don't we call youif they ought to be saying we know exactly what to call you you are Theif of but so any careful look goes you know examination of our history goes to show that these things they seem to have been they seem to have been improvised along

the way so the early uh leaders be Muslims began to call them KFA then you start to see that there's this tradition obviously the very early KFA like the four they were from the core Companions of the Prophet you know he's kind of Apostles in that way they were never in this for that kind of opulence or Dynasty or that kind of Empire and they'd never really seen that either they came from you know they were very pure pure just they came from very humble

Origins and and remember they were of age of of of senior age seniority by the time they have leadership so it's not like young men aspiring to something they've seen or heard of from different dynasties after them things change but these people because of their special position they and the way history emerged they given a special light which they deserve and people say well that's a these people were they were called KF by Muslims in their day and age and this is the and then all of a sudden it's interesting Hadith start to emerge

about which is very interesting which perfectly coincide with dates I mean that's just convenient all too convenient you know that the kingship will begin after 30 years and this will begin and that will begin I mean none of these that there will be 12 from uh after me the Prophet saying this you know and which is nothing but a Hadith in bukari which is a perfect just Hadith fabricated by bani umya to just support and you know just justify their

existence the 12 kaiths uh leading into I mean from the prophet's time leading into the eight of bani umya but this this whole thing it's it in my understanding it's in time people have reinforced it so much that we seem to have what we think is oh it's perfect of course the prophet passed away he had he had taught us that there was going to be a hence after him there were four then he had told us after him it was going to be Kings and then there were Kings and then these dynasties went on like this and and we've had this kind of drummed into us so much that it seems so

picturesque in its detail yet upon examination everything just Falls to pieces you realize that wait a minute this word didn't even exist like this the word existed but not with this meaning so it's like saying you know the word mobile did exist before we had mobile phones but if you used the word mobile you know in the early I don't know in the mid 1900s you would never have been referring to a mobile phone so if somebody starts saying oh no this person was using it back then well you need to that's just common sense he couldn't have been using it like this because nobody used this

word like this so these are some um um some some very interesting points to reflect over and to understand that look well Islam never really came to spread governance to kind of spread control over the world that it was never liked but yes the prophet said the message will spread over the world and the prophets were never sent as kings in fact the Quran says something interesting

that that you know when kings enter a town or city they spread corruption and indeed that is what they do so prophets were sent simply as Messengers and Prophets their whole purpose was to connect people mankind to its creator to have that connection that's what's important these other matters are secondary and matters of governance and things like that are tertiary that yes if Muslims live together they will have rules um rules are you know there's there's laws there's methods to uh Implement them there's structures

there's administrations and these are all worldly matters that Muslims can just get along with whatever how whatever they adopt if they choose to adopt the tribal kind of systems that the early Arabs and the early s did then that's fine if they choose to adopt the administrative structures and the bureaucracy of the Persian assassinate uh Empire then that's fine if they choose to later on adopt from other from the Turks and whether it's going to be from the Mongols or the sujuk or then that's fine it's not really these things were never they're just simply a a means to an end I hope that's of some help and

it sheds some clarity on the matter inallah with that take care stay blessed over and now