The declaration of a “caliphate” by Islamist militants in Iraq lacks legitimacy and their death threats to Christians are a danger to civilisation, Turkey’s top cleric, the successor to the last caliph’s most senior imam, said.
Islamic State, an armed group formerly allied to al Qaeda that has captured swathes of territory across Iraq, last month declared its leader, Ibrahim al-Baghdadi, “caliph” – the historical title last held by the Turkish Ottoman sultan who ruled much of the Muslim world.
“Such declarations have no legitimacy whatsoever,” Mehmet Gormez, head of the Religious Affairs Directorate, the highest religious authority in Turkey, which, although a majority Muslim country, has been a secular state since the 1920s.
“Since the caliphate was abolished ... there have been movements that think they can pull together the Muslim world by re-establishing a caliphate, but they have nothing to do with reality, whether from a political or legal perspective.”
Gormez said death threats against non-Muslims made by the group, formerly known as Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isil), were hugely damaging.
“The statement made against Christians is truly awful. Islamic scholars need to focus on this (because) an inability to peacefully sustain other faiths and cultures heralds the collapse of a civilisation,” he told Reuters in an interview.
Since ISIL’s advance across northern Iraq in June, Christians have fled the city of Mosul, where the militants are based, after they were given the choice to convert, pay a religious tax or be executed.
Mosul’s Christian community is one of the world’s oldest, tracing its roots back two millennia.
Gormez is in a unique position to question Baghdadi’s claim to the caliph’s seat. His office was created in 1924 to replace the Ottoman Sheikh al-Islam, the mufti with authority to confirm new sultans and who also served as chief legal adviser.