Every Candidate Is a Nation-State
A century of contenders have failed in the same shape, and the shape is not moral. You cannot ask a nation-state to act against sovereignty; that is what the form is for.
Two billion people. Fifty-seven states. A quarter of the world's landmass and most of its accessible energy. Several capable armies.
And no leader. Not a weak one, not a contested one. None.
It is worth pausing on how unusual that is. Every other bloc of comparable size has a centre of gravity, however grudgingly acknowledged. The Ummah is the largest identifiable community on earth and the only one with nobody who can speak for it, convene it, or commit it to anything.
The interesting question is not who should fill the gap. It is why a century of candidates have all failed in the same shape.
Take them in turn, because the pattern only shows up in the aggregate.
Turkey has the strongest claim on paper: real industry, a growing defence sector, an ambitious foreign policy, and six centuries of institutional memory. But the project is Turkish. It defines leadership in terms of Turkish interests, Turkish manufacturing and Turkish power, which means it has not transcended the nation-state so much as built a more ambitious one. And it remains inside NATO, which is the part Erbakan named before he died: you cannot lead an alternative order from within the alliance structure of the existing one.