For those who want to talk about a Caliphate in its traditional form applied in year 2014 should maybe rather worry about the largely pathetic state of the Muslim world today and for centuries before and solve some of those giant and numerous problems that exist and have existed for centuries and which are solvable if hard work, dedication and sanity prevails.
There is a reason why the West has controlled by far most of the world for the past 500 years and shaped nearly all of our modern age. The Muslim/Eastern world did that for millenniums before largely so it's possible to do it again. Even during Islamic history those previous Caliphates I mentioned are a living proof of it being possible.
It's pretty symbolic that all the claimants of the Caliphate have been nothing more than trash. Pretty accurate as to the overall state of the Muslim world that they claim to represent!
No need to delude oneself anymore.
I understand that Pakistan was founded upon Islamic principles and all that but sometimes one need to be realistic.
Not so sure about that part.
See, the Western World were not very advanced in the past to begin with. But they were enterprising. They went around the world, gathered knowledge from all known civilizations (including the ones in the Middle East), combined that knowledge, and created the modern world that we know today. The Industrial Revolution was the most important stage for the world, and that knowledge for that came from that enterprising spirit. People like Newton, Descartes, Beethoven, and many great individuals were truly enlightened people.
The civilizations of the Middle East went through turbulent times. The Moghuls who used to rule my part of the world were brainless barbarians. Not a great place for enlightenment.
And now, we are here. We have come very far. But I feel the Western World could have done more. The pace at which they went in the past is not so much as it is now. The space frontier for instance has made little progress.
Can an Islamic Caliphate be applied today? First off, what is a Caliphate? Is there enough evidence that it'd practically work? Theory and practice are very different things. It is not really well researched in the fields of political science. So, there isn't much of a framework there. Yes, I do believe democracy and Islam can co-exist. Nothing to learn from those ISIS thugs.
That is why most countries (including non-Muslim) implement a relatively secular framework because it is simple and easy to implement. Can religious parties exist? Yes. There are the Christian Democrats in Europe and the Tea Party in the USA. Nothing wrong with having Islamic parties in a Muslim-majority nation (though, they are often immature compared to their Western counterparts).
What Muslim-majority nations can best do right now, in my opinion is simply progress the best they can (individually), and slowly move toward matured Democracies. As for a Caliphate, it'd take more than a bunch of madmen with blazing guns to prove hypotheses.
