9 Things to Avoid When Starting a Caliphate

The history of past attempts to create Islamic states is not particularly inspiring. The Iranian revolutionaries managed to do it, but they, of course, are Shiites -- whom you don't even really consider to be Muslims. The Saudis and some of the other Gulf Arab states try to live by strict fundamentalist rules, but they're all monarchies, which you don't like, either. (Only God should rule over humankind, amiright?) The kind of system you're trying to set up now is closer to the ones established by the Afghan Taliban or Ansar Dine, the North African jihadists who imposed their version of sharia on northern Mali for a year starting in 2012 -- essentially a military dictatorship founded on a superstrict interpretation of Islamic law. In some situations, such as the civil war in Syria (or pre-Taliban Afghanistan), this form of government might actually look better than the alternative of bloody anarchy. But so far it doesn't look like a recipe for enduring stability.