!!The Novel
* AlternativeCharacterInterpretation: The rapists swarming across Germany in the flashback are taken as evidence that Muslims as a class need to be subjugated. From a radical feminist perspective, though, they (and pretty much all the other villains in the book) could be taken as evidence that it's men who need to be subjugated. There are Muslim and non-Muslim villains in this world, but those villains are nearly 100% male. The main counterexample, Al Khalifa, is only dangerous because she's trying to manipulate a patriarchal society.
* {{Anvilicious}}: The book is, shall we say, ''not very subtle''. Muslims bad, freedom good, m'kay? Having said that, not all Muslims are bad since Besma is a genuinely good person and Abdul being at least a NobleBigot.
* EnsembleDarkhorse: Besma due to being portrayed as a genuinely likable Muslim in a story that is otherwise very critical of Islam. She also happens to be a non-POV character that is only prominent during the first act.
* SugarWiki/FunnyMoments: For such a dark and gritty novel, ''Caliphate'' does have humorous moments. For example in the debriefing in the end of the novel, Hamilton asked Caruthers how Bernie is doing after being injured.
--->'''Hamilton''':"How is Bernie's recovery coming?"
--->'''Caruthers''':"He'll never play the piano again."*beat*"He couldn't play the piano before, either."
--->'''Hamilton''':"Asshole."
* HarsherInHindsight:
** The self-proclaimed caliphate known as ISIS was indeed established by terrorists, and a large portion of its militants were recruited in Europe. However, in real life said caliphate barely got far as they were defeated by the Syrians and the Iranians, combined with US air support.
** Petra's sexual abuse is bad enough. It becomes worse when reading about the Yazidi Genocide by ISIS and the systematic exploitation of 7,000 Yazidi women and girls by the terrorist group in part because they were non-Muslim and ISIS believing they are justified in abusing them, the same reason with Petra for being a Christian.
** Related to the above, this book came out in April 2008 but in October of the same year, the world was shocked by the execution of a [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoning_of_Aisha_Ibrahim_Duhulow 13-year old Somalian girl]] by al-Shabaab militants on charges of adultery after being raped herself. While Petra isn't killed, she is auctioned off to slavery (which isn't much better).
** Muslims being placed in internment camps in response to terrorism with Islam being declared a "dangerous political movement that is only dishonestly a religion". While this didn't happen in America like in the book, it did happen in [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_re-education_camps China]] when over one million Muslims were held in re-education camps and declared Islam a "contagious disease".
** Mecca is destroyed on September 11 in response to the nuclear attacks in the US as well as 9/11. In 2015, a crane accident happened in the Great Mosque killing over 111 people and injuring nearly 400. The really spooky part? It also happened on September 11 and the crane was owned by Bin Laden's family...
** In the book, frequent purges of Muslims by the US have become extremely common, with soldiers going as far as to kill those who are related to them, and taking joy in the deeds. With the recent surge in anti-Muslim attacks in the 2010s occurring in much of the world, with the most infamous being the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christchurch_mosque_shootings Christchurch mosque massacres in New Zealand]], where the perpetrator Brenton Tarrant killed 51 worshipers all while listening to "Serbia Strong", these passages go from disconcerting to outright prophetic and horrifying.
** Buckman's victory resonates further when a nativist, anti-establishment candidate wins the US Presidential election in 2016, the year of Buckman's victory.
* HilariousInHindsight:
** In ''Caliphate'''s dystopian future, the militaristic USA becomes the Imperial States of America, or ISA. This acronym has since also been used for [[UnitedSpaceOfAmerica a similar polity]] in [[VideoGame/{{Killzone}} another franchise]].
** The author predicts that the US would never be able to kill Bin Laden, except that exactly that happened 5 years after the book was written.
* HoYay: Since Lee controls Ling via a microchip, any interaction with Hans would be this indirectly. However, Ling does genuinely love Hans.
* MoralEventHorizon:
** President Buckman obviously crosses this with his nuclear reprisal, killing countless at once and many more in the aftermath. Even taking the anti-Muslim bias into account, the narrative doesn't side with Buckman either.
** Rashid commits it in his first scene, ''no less'' when he kills Nazarene slaves for sports.
** Fudail flies over this line after raping Petra (who is just a ''child'') and says [[SlutShaming she led him on]]. By extension, if his mother didn't cross it with her abuse of Petra earlier, she definitely did when she approved of his action.
* {{Narm}}: Buckman's election slogan is "We're gonna make those motherfuckers pay". Try to imagine taking it seriously in real life with the gratuitous profanity.
* ParanoiaFuel: [[spoiler: The Chinese have perfected mind-controlled devices to has spread moles all over the world and monitor on others very closely, and they could be anywhere...]]
* SpiritualAntithesis: It could be considered this to ''Literature/TheHandmaidsTale'': it focuses on a fundamentalist Islamic regime taking over a Western society and imposing a NoWomansLand with much of it viewed through a female perspective. Interestingly, the United States in ''Caliphate'' also turns into a fascist empire in response to an ambiguous terrorist attack, somewhat similarly to the genesis of ''Handmaid'''s Gilead. Though the Imperial States of America stands in opposition against the titular Caliphate and is not as misogynistic or fanatically religious, it still isn't all that much better due to its brutal policies against other countries that don't play along with them.
* UnintentionalPeriodPiece: The book leans on political tropes like Muslim migration into western Europe and Sharia law there which were hot in TheNew10s but are not likely to be relevant a century into the future, and which have already lost urgency in favor of [[MakeTheBearAngryAgain Russian resurgence in foreign affairs]], UsefulNotes/Covid19 and [[PaedoHunt "groomer" hysteria]] on the home front. The demographic issues of the 22nd century are unlikely to have much in common with those of the early 21st.

!!The Netflix Series
* AlasPoorScrappy: [[spoiler: Kerima. She got on some viewers nerves due to being incredibly easily manipulated and caused the BigBad to almost succeed. However, her death. But her final conversation with Sulle as she is about to be blown up due to being tricked by Ibbe is incredibly sad]].
* AssPull: [[spoiler: TheReveal that Nadir was GoodAllAlong and manages to stop all of Ibbe's planned terror-attacks had little to no foreshadowing to it, and it undoes almost all of Fatima's hard work.]]
* CompleteMonster: [[MiddleEasternTerrorists Ibrahim "Ibbe" Haddad]] poses as a CoolTeacher with a [[FauxAffablyEvil genuinely chill personality]]. In reality, he is a cold and calculating terrorist mastermind working for ISIS. [[ManipulativeBastard Manipulating]] two students at the school, Sulle and Kerima, Ibbe plans to use them later if his terrorist attacks fail. Meanwhile, Ibbe manipulates two mentally retarded brothers who he orders to start gunfire at a subway station and kill as many people as possible. His second plan is to pose as a Christian Egyptian in order to arrange a meeting full of Christians, while having an explosive planted there, with the full intent of having people killed. Ibbe's third plan is to have a terrorist blow up a plane full of people. Ibbe's final terrorist attack consists of blowing up an entire apartment building. Ibbe's terrorist attacks are discovered by the Swedish Security Service because of an informant, which leads to them vacating the apartment that Ibbe was planning on blowing up. In order to escape, Ibbe murders an older woman who lives in the apartment and then dresses up as a woman, before blowing up the apartment anyway, despite no one being inside of it. Having failed with all of his terrorist attacks, Ibbe uses Kerima to do a [[SuicideAttack suicide bombing]] at a concert full of teenagers. Ibbe promises that he will also do a suicide bombing at the same time so that they could die together, but is revealed to have [[ILied lied]].
* TheScrappy:
** Unusual for a main character in a TV-show, Fatima manages to be very unlikable and UnintentionallyUnsympathetic, mostly because of her unempathetic attitude and her irrational decisions. This is especially the case with her informant Pervin, arguably one of the few likable characters in this CrapsackWorld. Even when Pervin begs for her life Fatima nevertheless continues to outright exploit Pervin's desperation to get out from Raqqa with a very unpleasant and callous manner, even after Pervin says she was raped and almost killed on several occations, all of which are attributable to Fatima wanting to get info from her. Her actions overall does very little to actually help stop the planned terror attacks and she accomplishes nothing but getting herself and others in danger. [[spoiler: Not helping the manner is the fact that her suspicion of her former boss Nadir being TheMole was completely false and it was he, not her, who stopped the terror attacks (although in fairness, that reveal was sort of an AssPull due to the lack of foreshadowing)]]. All of these attributes makes her an incredibly hard protagonist to root for and a [[UnintentionallyUnsympathetic very unintentionally loathsome one]], causing many to see her as nothing but self-centered and incompetent.
** While Sulle is more of a BaseBreakingCharacter, the same cannot be said for her friend Kerima. Not only is she pretty easily manipulated by Ibrahim, [[spoiler: but even after being rescued from her, Sulle and Lisha's kidnapping and showing that she doesn't really care about Islam at all (as shown when she draws a caricature of a Muslim), she still helps Ibrahim escape the police and even goes along with his plan to commit a suicide bombing at an event filled with teenagers and ''only'' changes her mind when she finds out that Sulle is not with them on the plan. She might have been intended to be seen as a tragic and insecure approval-seeker, but instead comes off as a bratty, childish and annoyingly stupid teenager. Though, her death scene managed to be pitiful by some viewers]].
** Lisha for similar reasons as Kerima. [[spoiler: Apart from being just as irrational as Sulle and Kerima by happily going along with a kidnap to be forced into marriage and overall being little more than TheLoad and TooDumbToLive, most viewers will instantly hate her when she snitches on Husam and Pervin to the terrorist Omar who kills Pervin in response. All of this despite the fact that they had just risked their lives to save her from being forced into marriage with an old man, and claims to do so for the sake if Islam which she has absolutely no knowledge of.]]
* TooBleakStoppedCaring: In addition to being a show about Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism, far too many major characters are incredibly [[UnintentionallyUnsympathetic unsympathetic]], moronic or just [[TheScrappy unlikable]], as their actions often endangers both themselves and others due to plain stupidity. Because of that nothing rarely ever turns out well for any of the main characters. So why bother?
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