ABSTRACT
The inadequacy of the political principles at the disposal of the Muslim leadership became fully apparent only after the Prophet's death, when a brief but vivid period of expansion had transformed the Dar al-Islam into a territorial empire of immense proportions. The medieval Islamic Empire did not develop comparable patterns of organization, and later generations of Muslims were consequently left without the guidance of historically tested political traditions. The Islamic idea of unity was not political in its primary connotations but religious and social. The doctrine of the caliphate was not basic to the Islamic ideology. The caliphate as the jurists imagined it has never existed in fact, and the theory of the caliphate must therefore be regarded as a fiction. The jurist-theologians in medieval Islam were members of one of the most remarkable intellectual elites in history. Islam is a monolithic system in which Allah alone legislates.
