Four Dynasties, Two Rival Claims, and Groups That Still Want It Back

After the four Rightly Guided Caliphs, the office became hereditary within ruling families rather than a matter of communal selection: the Umayyad dynasty, ruling from Damascus from 661, extended the caliphate's territory from Spain to Central Asia within a century, before the Abbasid dynasty overthrew it in 750 and moved the seat to Baghdad, presiding over the classical high point of Islamic scholarship and administration even as real political power increasingly passed to regional sultans who kept the caliph as a religious figurehead. A surviving Umayyad prince fled to Spain and founded a rival caliphate at Cordoba in 929, and the Shia Fatimid dynasty proclaimed its own rival caliphate in Cairo in 909, so for stretches of the tenth and eleventh centuries three men simultaneously claimed the title, each rejected as illegitimate by the others.

The Ottoman sultans claimed the caliphate from the early sixteenth century, a claim of uneven historical strength that nonetheless gave the office its final and most widely recognised form before Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's secularising Turkish republic abolished it outright in 1924. Restoration remains a live political goal for some Islamist movements, most of them, unlike the Islamic State, explicitly non-violent, such as Hizb ut-Tahrir, which campaigns for a restored caliphate through political and social organising rather than through armed conquest, illustrating that the aspiration to the office long outlived the office itself.