This presentation examines the convergence and divergence of competing notions of Islamic community and polity in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. For many Muslims, the fall of Baghdad to the Mongols in 1258 created a socio-cultural and legal dilemma, embodied in the disappearance of an Abbasid caliphate with universalistic claims to the allegiances of a global religious community. Yet the diversity of responses, from South Asia to North Africa, to this dramatic eradication of caliphal authority in Baghdad reveals the creative ways in which the very essence of the institution was represented and reimagined.