Longing for the Lost Caliphate: A Transregional History

Mona Hassan is a scholar of Islamic history, and this Princeton University Press book is her transregional history of Muslim mourning for and memory of the abolished caliphate, tracing responses across the Muslim world both after the Mongol destruction of the Abbasid caliphate and after its formal abolition by the Turkish Republic in 1924. Its strength is genuinely transregional research, drawing on sources from across the Muslim world rather than focusing on one country or period alone, to show how the idea of the caliphate persisted as a symbol long after its institutional end. Its limit is that it is a history of memory and mourning specifically, so a claim about the caliphate's actual medieval governing institutions and law needs a source focused on that earlier operating history rather than its later memory.