Podcast review: The Caliphate

‘Who are they? Who are they really? Who is it that we are fighting?’ These are the questions that have been driving The New York Times (NYT) journalist Rukmini Callimachi’s reporting over the past several years, and they are the questions that frame The Caliphate, a standalone podcast from NYT. The series trails Callimachi’s search for the soul — and dispersed body — of IS, through on-the-ground scouring, online shadowing, and face-to-face interviewing.

Produced by Andy Mills, the show follows two main narrative threads to tell the story of IS’s rise right up to its putative defeat in Mosul in mid-2017. The first is the first-person account of a returned IS recruit, a young man from Canada named Abu Huzeyfah, elicited in conversation with Callimachi and combined with extensive background information from others involved with IS in different countries. The second is Callimachi’s own journey covering this complex and fraught landscape of terror-driven-by-faith. It’s the stuff of the best kind of drama, and it unfolds through a frame that attempts to retain curiosity without judgement, confronting all the ethical and practical conflicts that such journalism must face.

The story begins with the discovery of a cache of documents that allows one to paint an intimate portrait of the thinking that drove the Caliphate. This formed the basis of a detailed print story by Callimachi in NYT (May 4, 2018), and was also the springboard for the podcast, which began airing last month. It was producer Mills’ idea to do a podcast based on Callimachi’s reporting. “Andy was a new recruit to the Times and in his interview he said that one of his dreams was to do was to work on a podcast with me!” said Callimachi in a Skype interview. She laughs, “Of course I was very flattered!”

“We were both deeply curious about faith and religion and how these things shape modern human behaviour,” says Callimachi about how the podcast got its start. The podcast format allowed her to go outside the strict confines of traditional print reporting. “I’ve spent my entire life in text, and I’ve found there are limitations to writing in the third person format, what we call the ‘Timesian voice’.” Audio storytelling foregrounds her perspective, allowing her to describe in her own voice one of the “ethically most complex beats” in journalism. While admitting to its difficulty, she is also excited by its possibilities. “We were able to put in all the false starts, the problems we encountered in the process of reporting… without it interfering with the facts of the story,” she says.

Learning how to do audio also proved to be exciting for Callimachi . “As writers we all acquire a certain perfectionitis, a sense that this is how I want to tell the story… that can sometimes be frustrating,” she explains. “I was a blank slate when it came to podcasts, and it was fun to start something new.”

The podcast weaves in short exchanges between Mills and Callimachi, which help to work through problematic patches in dealing with such a story. She explains that one important feature of the show is that these exchanges are entirely unscripted: “Andy was very adamant that we would not read lines, that the back-and-forth between us emerge naturally.”

This becomes evident right from Chapter 1, which features a short but telling exchange about how covering the IS beat plays out in Callimachi’s personal life. Becoming a central character in the story was a new experience too: “It’s not where I’m used to being…and I wonder sometimes, am I going too far in revealing details about my personal life?”

But it is exactly such complexity, at every level, that makes The Caliphate so compelling as a story, and particularly, as an audio story. We meet and hear — in their own voices — individuals who are, in the end, just people, doing terrible things, and we, along with Callimachi and Mills, wonder — and try to understand — what drives them (and us) to cross the boundary between humanity and horror.

The Caliphate — which will feature a total of 10 episodes — drops every Thursday for NYT subscribers and is available to non-subscribers the following Saturday on the NYT website and on all popular podcast platforms.

(A fortnightly series on podcasts.)

The Hyderabad-based writer and academic is a neatnik fighting a losing battle with the clutter in her head.