Caliphate, the political-religious state comprising the Muslim community and the lands and peoples under its dominion in the centuries following the death (632 ce) of the Prophet Muhammad. Ruled by a caliph (Arabic khalīfah, “successor”), who held temporal and sometimes a degree of spiritual authority, the empire of the Caliphate grew rapidly through conquest during its first two centuries to include most of Southwest Asia, North Africa, and Spain. Dynastic struggles later brought about the Caliphate’s decline, and it ceased to exist with the Mongol destruction of Baghdad in 1258.

The urgent need for a successor to Muhammad as political leader of the Muslim community was met by a group of Muslim elders in Medina who designated Abū Bakr, the Prophet’s father-in-law, as caliph. Several precedents were set in the selection of Abū Bakr, including that of choosing as caliph a member of the Quraysh tribe. The first four caliphs—Abū Bakr, ʿUmar I, ʿUthmān, and ʿAlī, whose reigns constituted what later generations of Muslims would often remember as a golden age of pure Islam—largely established the administrative and judicial organization of the Muslim community and forwarded the policy begun by Muhammad of expanding the Islamic religion into new territories. During the 630s, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, and Iraq were conquered; Egypt was taken from Byzantine control in 645; and frequent raids were launched into North Africa,Armenia, and Persia.

The assassination of ʿUthmān and the ineffectual caliphate of ʿAlī that followed sparked the first sectarian split in the Muslim community. By 661 ʿAlī’s rivalMuʿāwiyah I, a fellow member of ʿUthmān’s Umayyad clan, had wrested away the Caliphate, and his rule established the Umayyad Caliphate that lasted until 750. Despite the largely successful reign of Muʿāwiyah, tribal and sectarian disputes erupted after his death. There were three caliphs between 680 and 685, and only by nearly 20 years of military campaigning did the next one, ʿAbd al-Malik, succeed in reestablishing the authority of the Umayyad capital of Damascus. ʿAbd al-Malik is also remembered for building the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. Under his son al-Walīd (705–715), Muslim forces took permanent possession of North Africa, converted the native Berbers to Islam, and overran most of the Iberian Peninsula as the Visigothic kingdom there collapsed. Progress was also made in the east with settlement in the Indus River valley. Umayyad power had never been firmly seated, however, and the Caliphate disintegrated rapidly after the long reign of Hishām (724–743). A serious rebellion broke out against the Umayyads in 747, and in 750 the last Umayyad caliph, Marwān II, was defeated in the Battle of Great Zab by the followers of the ʿAbbāsid family.

The ʿAbbāsids, descendants of an uncle of Muhammad, owed the success of their revolt in large part to their appeal to various pietistic, extremist, or merely disgruntled groups and in particular to the aid of the Shīʿites, a major dissident party that held that the Caliphate belonged by right to the descendants of ʿAlī. That the ʿAbbāsids disappointed the expectations of the Shīʿites by taking the Caliphate for themselves left the Shīʿites to evolve into a sect, permanently hostile to the orthodox Sunni majority, that would periodically threaten the established government by revolt. The first ʿAbbāsid caliph, al-Saffāḥ (749–754), ordered the elimination of the entire Umayyad clan; the only Umayyad of note who escaped was ʿAbd al-Raḥman, who made his way to Spain and established anUmayyad dynasty that lasted until 1031.

The period 786–861, especially the caliphates of Hārūn (786–809) and al-Maʾmūn(813–833), is accounted the height of ʿAbbāsid rule. The eastward orientation of the dynasty was demonstrated by al-Manṣūr’s removal of the capital to Baghdad in 762–763 and by the later caliphs’ policy of marrying non-Arabs and recruitingTurks, Slavs, and other non-Arabs as palace guards. Under al-Maʾmūn, the intellectual and artistic heritage of Iran (Persia) was cultivated, and Persian administrators assumed important posts in the Caliphate’s administration. After 861, anarchy and rebellion shook the empire. Tunisia and eastern Iran came under the control of hereditary governors who made token acknowledgment of Baghdad’s suzerainty. Other provinces became less-reliable sources of revenue. Shīʿite and similar groups, including the Qarmaṭians in Syria and the Fāṭimids in North Africa, challenged ʿAbbāsid rule on religious as well as political grounds.

ʿAbbāsid power ended in 945, when the Būyids, a family of rough tribesmen from northwestern Iran, took Baghdad under their rule. They retained the ʿAbbāsid caliphs as figureheads. The Sāmānid dynasty that arose in Khorāsān and Transoxania and the Ghaznavids in Central Asia and the Ganges River basin similarly acknowledged the ʿAbbāsid caliphs as spiritual leaders of Sunni Islam. On the other hand, the Fāṭimids proclaimed a new caliphate in 920 in their capital of Al-Mahdiyyah in Tunisia and castigated the ʿAbbāsids as usurpers; the Umayyad ruler in Spain, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III, adopted the title of caliph in 928 in opposition to both the ʿAbbāsids and the Fāṭimids. Nominal ʿAbbāsid authority was restored to Egypt by Saladin in 1171. By that time the ʿAbbāsids had begun to regain some semblance of their former power, as the Seljuq dynasty of sultans in Baghdad, which had replaced the Būyids in 1055, itself began to decay. The caliph al-Nāṣir (1180–1225) achieved a certain success in dealing diplomatically with various threats from the east, but al-Mustaʿṣim (1242–58) had no such success and was murdered in the Mongol sack of Baghdad that ended the ʿAbbāsid line in that city. A scion of the family was invited a few years later to establish a puppet caliphate in Cairo that lasted until 1517, but it exercised no power whatever. From the 13th century onward a variety of rulers outside of Cairo also included caliph among their titles, although their claims to universal leadership of the Muslim community seem to have been more notional than real.

The concept of the caliphate took on new significance in the 18th century as an instrument of statecraft in the declining Ottoman Empire. Facing the erosion of their military and political power and territorial losses inflicted in a series of wars with European rivals, the Ottoman sultans, who had occasionally styled themselves as caliphs since the 14th century, began to stress their claim to leadership of the Islamic community. This served both as means of retaining some degree of influence over Muslim populations in formerly Ottoman lands and as means of bolstering Ottoman legitimacy within the empire. The caliphate was abolished in 1924, following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of the Turkish Republic.

In the 20th century the reestablishment of the caliphate, although occasionally invoked by Islamists as a symbol of global Islamic unity, was of no practical interest for mainstream Islamist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. It did, however, figure prominently in the rhetoric of violent extremist groups such as al-Qaeda. In June 2014 an insurgent group known as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL; also known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria [ISIS] and the Islamic State [IS]), which had taken control of areas of eastern Syria and western Iraq, declared the establishment of a caliphate with the group’s leader Abu Bakral-Baghdadi as caliph. Outside of extremist circles, the group’s claim was widely rejected.