My guest this week, Dr Ovamir Anjum , although abhorring all that Isis may stand for, suggests that its brief rise to notoriety has opened up space for intelligent minded Muslim’s to reimagine a world with a just Caliphate. Dr Anjum calls for a new wave of thinking on the subject, grounded in revelation and aimed at showing both Muslim’s and non-Muslims how Islam’s thought should be considered as an alternative to the contemporary decaying world order.
Dr Anjum argues in a recent long read penned for the Yaqeen Institute that not only is there an urgent requirement for Muslim intelligentsia and civil society to debate the form a modern Caliphate would take but to seriously place it at the centre of Muslim social and political activism. He argues that Islam’s challenge has to be framed in the context of the broader tumults faced by the liberal order, namely the process of deglobalisation and the rise of populist nativism.
Dr. Ovamir Anjum is Imam Khattab Endowed Chair of Islamic Studies at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, University of Toledo. He obtained his Ph.D. in Islamic history in the Department of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Author of Politics, Law and Community in Islamic Thought: The Taymiyyan Moment (Cambridge University Press, 2012). His current projects include a multi-volume survey of Islamic history and a monograph on Islamic political thought.
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