The jihad of the age is to invite and welcome people into Islam. This is quite different from the dialectical arguing that people do today and quite wrongly call da’wa. We repudiate utterly the ‘body count’ mentality of those preachers who go from city to city reaping ‘shahadas’ and leave in their wake a trail of confused people. Everything goes back to building people, building human beings, the activity called tarbiya that is quite different from education. And it can only be done in communities. And what else was Madina the Luminous?
Any sane desire must have a clear path to its completion. That we retain the image of a global caliphate is well and good, but without some clear steps to its attainment, it is fantasy and delusion.
If you say that you want to achieve it through elections and the democratic process, then you have not understood democracy since democracy from the beginning of time has always concealed oligarchy, and in our time that is the oligarchy of finance.
I am not even going to deal with the issue of elections being the introduction of a bid’a in the deen since even if one could justify the bid’a it nevertheless, according to my argument above, is a waste of time anyway.
All concepts of election vis-a-vis the caliph in the traditional fiqh refer to his election by power figures in Muslim society who are such through their social standing and lineage, wealth, power and knowledge and who are known as Ahl al-Hall wa’l-‘Aqd – the People of Loosing and Binding.
It goes without saying that a desire to achieve the caliphate by military means is unachievable as the world stands today since quite logically if you are allowed to flee from a force more than twice your strength, then you are not required to engage them in the first place.
And use of insurrectionary military tactics, such as suicide bombing and other things commonly called terrorism, is clearly haram by our fiqh, no matter the eminence of those ulama who condone them.
Therefore we are left with humbler goals. And we have not abandoned the caliphate or the importance of the shariah even if it is today politically incorrect to mention them let alone espouse them. Nor are we merely being deceitful until the moment when … contrary to the conspiracy theories of Islamophobes.