[x-factor]

A couple of notes just off the top of my head...

- Caliph is not necessarily a hereditary position, but at times in history it has been handled that way. Also remember that there have been several different Caliphates (the Abbasid in Baghdad, the Fatimid in Egypt, the Ottoman in Turkey, etc), so its not an unbroken chain back to Mohammed. Also, the Caliph was often historically just a religious figurehead while the Sultan (a cross between governor and general, like most medieval lords) wielded the real power.

- If you're interested in understanding the philosophical cornerstone jihadist Islam then you must read Milestones by Sayyid Qutb. Trying to understand AQ's brand of jihadism without reading Milestones is like trying to understand communism without reading Marx. He's the critical link between the current jihadists and the original jihad theorists of the medieval period (chiefly Ibn Taymiyyah). Of note, one of the tenets of the jihadist brands of Islam is that jihad is "the sixth pillar," just as important as prayer, pilgrammage, charity, etc.

- I think one of the key things that one needs to realize when studying Islam is that it is not a religion of individuals like modern Christianity. Its a religion for an entire community (in that sense you might think of it as a sort of medieval twist on communism). Modern Christianity is about individual salvation and the believer's personal relationship with God. Islam (even the most moderate brands) is about building a community in this world. This doesn't mean that one can't be a Muslim in a non-Muslim land, but rather the religion is primarily concerned with the community, not the individual. From this you get the Muslim focus on the "legalization" (for lack of a better term) of religion: Shariah law, religious scholar-judges, fatwas (religious rulings on temporal matters), etc.

I'll put it like this, one of the things that really struck me when reading the Koran was the amount of legalistic detail. There's alot of what equates to "case law" in the Koran. For example, the section on divorce goes into great detail about the responsibilities of the man to his ex-wife in a variety of cases: if she brought property to the marriage, if there are children, if she remarries or not, etc etc. Now if you believe in the Koran, then as a society, you've got to construct an entire heirarchy to enforce all this detail.

During the development of Sunni Islam four respected schools of interpretation were created: Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i, and Hanbali. (The Hanbali are the school that dominates the Arabian peninsula. From them spring the Wahhabists, from whom spring the jihadists like AQ). As with any religion, the schools differ on how to interpret the texts: which verses take precedence in what situations, how to apply Islam to situations not described in the Koran (often deals with technology), how to apply cultural traditions pre-dating Islam, how to apply reason to faith, how literally to interpret verses, etc.

One of the chief issues that concerns us is the way different schools interpret of the "sword" verses of Islam. Some schools interpret the Koran and Hadith such that jihad is confined to specific contexts and bound by certain mechanisms. Other schools (the ones we're fighting) believe that the sword verses, because they came after the live-and-let-live verses supercede/replace ("nasiq" if I remember the term right) Mohammed's early teachings of tolerance, consequently you get the notion of never-ending jihad as a way of life.

- One more note, if you're interested in a more moderate, modernist interpretations of Islam, you might like No God but God by Reza Aslan.