In times of crisis, societies often look back upon the past in search of models and examples of a time when life was less confused, complicated and difficult. It is quite understandable that those who are no longer able to cope with the problems of the present long for an uncluttered and problem-free past where life was, they believe, easier and rosier.
This is true of practically every society in the world as human nature is universal in its failings and frailties. During the crisis-ridden era of the 1980s in Britain for example, the British media and entertainment industry occupied itself with what Salman Rushdie termed 'the Raj revival'.
While life under Margaret Thatcher's rule was proving hard for many, simple ordinary Britons could revel in the past while watching films like "A Passage to India", "Jewel in the Crown" and others.
Britain's industrial base may have been eroded, its financial sector over inflated and its dependency on the US blatantly clear to all, but ordinary British folk could still live in their private fantasy world where they saw themselves as the inheritors of an Empire that stretched across the globe and which ruled over other races and nations.
The spectacle of a nation in a state of collective denial may have been pathetic to outsiders, but among the believers the fantasy was kept intact.
Such fantasies, however, remain fantasies. They cannot translate themselves into reality no matter how much we may want them to. All the magic that was worked at the Merchant Ivory studios could not alter the fact that Britain in the 1980s was no longer the land of milk and honey.
While films like "A Passage to India" presented an image of another imperial past where "superior" Britons and subjugated Indians did not meet, the reality in the streets of London, Manchester and Liverpool was that Britain was already a heterogeneous society that was mixed. And the reality was that in the contemporary Britain of the 1980s, life was confusing, difficult and often harsh.
The same can be said for the state of the contemporary Muslim world, where life is no less harsher and confusing for many.
The Muslim world remains firmly entrenched in the developing South. Muslim states, despite the oil boom of the 1970s and the volume of aid that they have received in the past, remain chronically poor, underdeveloped and many of them are now on the verge of structural and economic crisis.
The power differentials between the Muslim world and the dominant Liberal-capitalist powers of the West are painfully evident for all to see. The recent botched hijacking-turned-asylum seeking bid by a band of Afghans who wanted to seek refuge in Britain shows precisely how desperate Muslims are now. (One has to be really desperate if one needs to seek refuge in Britain of all places these days).
But what has made matters worse for Muslims is the way that so many of us have come to embrace empty slogans and false promises of a "golden age" of the past, as poor consolation for our plight in the present.
All over the Muslim world there have appeared numerous Islamist movements and splinter groups that preach a host of millenarian, apocalyptic, confrontational or xenophobic messages to ordinary Muslims around them.
Some of these groups have declared that the Muslim world can only redeem itself through a total confrontation with the West; others claim that the only solution lies in a return to the fundamentals of Islam in the most dogmatic and narrow sense, such as the Taliban in Afghanistan.
There is also another tendency which is growing ever stronger by the day, and this refers to those who increasingly call for the re-establishment of the Muslim Caliphate and the Islamic state. Groups like al-Muhajiroun, the Global Kalifah movement and others have been calling for the restoration of the Caliphate for some time now, and their influence has spread from Morocco to Malaysia.
In London, as recently as March 3, 2000, these groups organised a seminar and march to commemorate the fateful event of the abolition of the Caliphate by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk on the same day in 1924, billed by them as "the day the Caliphate of Islam was destroyed".
The abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate in Turkey in 1924 was, for them, an act of betrayal against Islam itself. Kemal Ataturk was, for many of his critics, a traitor to Islam and an agent of the West. His decision to abolish the Caliphate was seen as "a catastrophic day when the light of Islam was dimmed and its implementation removed from our lives, leaving the Ummah bare and defenceless against the onslaught of the Kuffar (unbelievers)".
This has been used to explain the manifold crises and problems that have befallen Muslims since then. Following the somewhat simplistic logic of the argument, movements like al-Muhajiroun now claim that the solution lies in the restoration of the Caliphate - not only in Turkey but in every Muslim country in the world.
Those who question the premises of this argument are in turn branded as either "secular Muslims" who are fundamentally hypocrites (munafikin) or anti-Muslim agents of the West. To question the concept of the Caliphate itself has been declared a sin by these self-appointed defenders of Islam.
"We should realise that attacking Khilafah system means no less than attacking Islam. We should know that undermining the Khilafah is no less than undermining Islam. We should know that ridiculing the Khilafah is no less than ridiculing Islam," they argue.
But putting aside the rhetorical pyrotechnics of groups like al-Muhajiroun, we need to ask some serious questions about what the Ottoman Caliphate actually was. Was it really an Islamic concept and entity? Did it really fulfil the needs of Muslims? Was it actually Islam realised on a political level?
Without trying to offend or provoke the fans of the Caliphate too much, one needs to point out some simple historical facts which will show quite clearly that the Ottoman Caliphate was just as much a secular political arrangement in the profane world of realpolitik like anything else.
Long before present-day Islamist demagogues began to condemn the West blindly, it was the Ottoman Caliphate that embarked on a number of diplomatic ventures to reach out to the West and to work with European powers.
One of the closest allies to the Ottoman Porte was France, which worked with the Ottomans in their joint struggle against the Austro-Hungarian empire. For decades, the French and the Ottomans were engaged in a mutual struggle against a common foe sandwiched between their respective territories.
Here was a case of a Christian power (France) working with a Muslim power (Ottoman Turkey) against another Christian power (Austro-Hungary). It was clear that religion had nothing to do with the politics of the time and the pact between France and the Ottoman Caliphate eventually came to be called the "Alliance of the Lilly and the Crescent".
The Ottoman Caliphs were not only pragmatic in their outlook: they could also be ruthless in their political ambitions and strategies towards fellow Muslims. Sultan Selim I, for instance, is now regarded as one of the greatest of Ottoman Sultans for his efforts in expanding the territory of the Caliphate and he is often depicted as a man of piety and honour.
Yet this man of piety came to power after killing his own father, brothers, cousins and nephews- leaving only his son, Sulaiman, to take over his throne. When Sulaiman came to power as Sulaiman Qanuni (or Sulaiman the Magnificent as he is commonly known), he too practised the same tactic of divide and rule among his successors.
Sulaiman killed all of his own sons except one, who came to power as the weak and ineffective Selim II. One can only wonder aloud about what kind "Islamic values" were being paraded by these grand leaders of the Caliphate?
The origins of the Ottoman Caliphate itself are questionable by any standards. It formally came into existence when Selim I invaded Egypt in 1517 and took for himself the sword and mantle of the Prophet Muhammad.
Egypt was then ruled by the Mamelukes, who were themselves a foreign power that was regarded as corrupt and parasitic. But decadent though the Mamelukes may have been, they did at least obey the norms and protocols of Islamic warfare.
The same scruples did not hinder the Ottomans, who were quite happy to accept new innovations (bidah) in their mode of fighting such as the use of muskets, artillery and other modern weapons. This was the decisive factor in their victory over the Safavid Iranians at Chaldiran in 1514 and the Mamelukes in Radaniyyah in 1517.
It was thus through non-conventional warfare that the Ottomans installed themselves as the defenders of the Caliphate in Turkey.
Having installed themselves as the Caliphs and defenders of Islam, the Ottomans then went about racialising Islam by promoting Turkish hegemony over other Muslim subjects. By centralising power in the Porte and focusing all authority in the person of the Tukish Caliph, they had effectively created two classes of Muslims: the Turkish Muslims who were citizens and subjects of the Caliphate, and non-Turkish Muslim subjects (Arabs, Berbers, Bosnians, Slavs, Africans, Indians, Malays) who were secondary subjects.
It goes without saying that there could hardly have been an Arab, African, Indian or much less a Malay Caliph throughout the Ottoman era.
It was only when the Turks found themselves on the brink of defeat at the end of the First World War that they suddenly embraced the cause of pan-Islamism. Suddenly the Turkish dynasty had become a global pan-Islamic one where race and nationality did not matter.
Thousands of Muslims the world over were taken in by the Porte's appeal, for the simple reason that the Caliphate still had an enormous psychological importance in their eyes. In India, groups like the Caliphate movement were started to lend help to the Ottomans. Even the Malays of the archipelago sent funds and donations to keep it alive.
But in the end, the Ottoman Caliphs behaved as they always did: They placed themselves and their own needs above others. Rather than accept the help of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and his Society of Unitarians (Muvahhidin) who wanted to modernise the office of the Caliphate, The Caliph, Sultan Mehmet VI chose instead to work with the victorious Western powers.
It was the Sultan who made all the concessions to the British and French, and allowed them to divide the Ottoman empire into pieces. Furious at this act of betrayal, Ataturk and the Unitarians abolished the Caliphate when they took over in 1924.
Today, the Muslim world is still living in the shadow of the crisis left in the wake of the Caliphate's demise. Many Islamist movements still blame Kemal Ataturk for his decision to abolish the Caliphate, but fail to look at the underlying causes that led him to make that fateful decision.
Fewer still have even bothered to consider the real facts of Ottoman history, or to ask the embarrassing (though necessary) question: Was it really an Islamic Caliphate in the first place? Instead Muslims continue to delude themselves with empty slogans and false promises. The belief in the sanctity of the Caliphate and the "golden age" of the Ottomans glosses over many of the less palatable aspects of Turkish rule and hegemony over many parts of the Islamic world then.
Till today, there are many Arab historians who argue that the Ottoman era was not as rosy as its proponents might think: Life under the Ottomans was quite hard for many of its colonised Muslim subjects as well.
Of even more relevance and importance is the enduring image of the Ottoman Caliphate as a great dynasty of a by-gone age where Islam was triumphant. Muslims need to ask themselves the question: Can Muslims have self-respect and confidence in themselves only when they imagine themselves as being the rulers of others?
Is our self-esteem so low that we need to stand on the shoulders of others to we consider ourselves tall? Have we come to the point where we can no longer endure life in the present without having one foot (or both feet) in some imagined fantasy realm of the past?
And will Islam evolve as a religion of slogan and fables only, unable to address the harsh realities of an unequal world where Islam is not always on top?
Those who call for the restoration of the Caliphate are not that many. They have yet to overwhelm the mainstream of Muslims all over the world and their hysterical cries of "Islam in danger" have yet to resound in every corner of the Muslim world.
But the fact that these factions exist points to the fact that the Muslim world itself is in a state of acute crisis. The emergence of such extremist groups are symptomatic of a greater problem within the Muslim Ummah itself.
Muslims in this respect are no different from other communities in the world today. Many other communities have faced and endured crises of belief and confidence in themselves, aggravated by variables that are often out of their control. In many other parts of the world - from Europe to Latin America to Africa - we witness how societies have tried to cope with change and crisis in their own ways.
But one thing is clear when we consider all these other examples. Those communities that cannot come to grips with real problems in a real way and opt instead for fantasies and illusions will invariably decline.
When the Japanese learnt that they had stagnated so far in the race for development in the nineteenth century, their response was not to go back to the era of the Shogun or the samurais. They picked up the pen and the book, and they educated themselves instead.
Today they lead the world in many areas of technology and science. The Japanese still have time for fantasies and fables, as we see in the numerous cartoons and comic characters like Pokemon and Doraemon that we in Malaysia love as well. But they are smart enough to know that such fantasies are for children, and not for adults who have a world to build.
Perhaps Muslims will learn that too one day, and leave their world of fantasies for good.
DR FARISH A NOOR is a Malaysian political scientist and human rights activist. He is the Secretary-General of the International Movement for a Just World, and is currently researching the topic of political Islam in the Malay world. The views expressed here are his own.