The caliph — not wholly not like the pontiff in Rome for Catholics — was the main, unifying temporal authority of the Muslim world. The establishment shifted throughout the increasing political geography of Islam, shifting from Arabia to the venerable cities of Damascus, Syria, and Baghdad and later to Egypt. Its clout and authority waxed and waned via wars, invasions and political upheavals, however it endured. Because the Ottoman Empire turned a continent-straddling Muslim superpower, its sultan assumed the non secular trappings of the Caliph.
However the caliphate didn’t survive the Ottoman empire’s turbulent collapse and disintegration by the top of World Battle I. By 1924, Turkey’s new leaders — mainly the ruthlessly modernizing Mustafa Kemal Pasha, or Ataturk, as he’s broadly remembered — had already dismantled the Ottoman sultanate of their fashioning of a brand new Turkish state out of the ashes of empire. The non secular function of the Caliph was nonetheless occupied by Abdulmejid II, a meek Ottoman scion who would quickly be pressured into exile alongside together with his fast household.
Modern observers famous how swiftly all of it ended. Mohamed Barakatullah, an Indian pan-Islamist sympathetic to the caliph’s plight, wrote how Ataturk proposed “the abolition of the establishment” of the caliphate, the expulsion of the caliph’s household and the confiscation of their property. That was adopted by a invoice passing the republic’s nationwide meeting with an awesome majority in assist. Then a delegation of officers went to Dolmabahce Palace in Istanbul, Barakatullah recounted, “the place they ordered the [caliph] to seat himself upon the throne, whereupon the decree declaring his deposition was learn. The [caliph] was then commanded to descend from the throne and make preparations for his fast departure.”
The Occasions of London wrote in its dispatch of his somber farewell by practice, “He spoke to no one besides the Chief of Police, whose obligation it was to escort him to the frontier. When, in direction of midnight, the Simplon-Orient Specific arrived with a particular reserved coach the Caliph instantly entered the practice, saying a couple of form phrases to the officers. The Caliph was very a lot moved, and a number of other of these current burst into tears.”
In our historic reminiscence, the top of the caliphate is inseparable from the beginning of the Turkish republic. Sandor Lestyan, a Hungarian correspondent for a Budapest newspaper, wrote from Istanbul on March 3, 1924, that there was a “sort of pleasure” within the metropolis that “one feels when a deeply desired want is fulfilled or when an occasion opens new, promising paths for one’s life.” He watched Ataturk and different Turkish officers push via the invoice abolishing the establishment. “What was sacred and untouchable for 9 hundred years has been rendered out of date by a easy vote,” he thrilled.
In international reportage, a stark narrative was already set: An Oriental anachronism was being swept away by the tide of historical past. The dissolution of the caliphate, famous the Economist on March 8, 1924, “marks an epoch within the enlargement of Western concepts over the non-Western world, for our Western ideas of nationwide sovereignty and self-government are the actual forces to which the unlucky ‘Abdu’l Mejid Efendi has fallen a sufferer.”
Ataturk would go on to dramatically remodel Turkey: The Arabic script was shed for the Latin one; mosques delivered sermons in Turkish, not Arabic; muscular nationalism and draconian secularism outlined the state, a lot to the chagrin of extra pious Turks and ethnic minorities just like the Kurds.
The lack of the caliphate had an apparent impression effectively past fashionable Turkey’s borders. Anger over the post-World Battle I dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire infected the politics of British-ruled India, with numerous Indian Muslims mobilizing in what was dubbed the Khilafat Motion. It drew the assist of different non-Muslim Indian opponents to British rule, together with Mahatma Gandhi.
Different makes an attempt at reviving the establishment of the caliphate elsewhere within the Muslim world flared within the Twenties. However they had been short-lived, Center East scholar Martin Kramer famous. “After the Thirties, the caliphate remained a curious slogan for eccentrics, till more moderen occasions, when caliphate fever seized a number of the extra apocalyptic Islamists, these obsessive about reenacting early Islam in painstaking element,” he wrote, gesturing to the violent delusions of the Islamic State and Islamist militants.
The disappearance of the caliphate — that’s, an anchoring non secular authority for Muslims, particularly Sunnis, world wide — left a deep imprint on twentieth century politics. “The entire phenomenon of radical Islam emerges on this context,” Mustafa Akyol, a Turkish commentator, journalist and creator of “Islam with out Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty,” advised me. “The origins of the issues of militant Islamism comes out of this vacuum.”
Akyol supplied a beguiling counterfactual: What if the caliphate had endured as an autonomous, non secular entity, considerably alongside the traces of the Vatican within the newly invented Italian republic of the nineteenth century? He pointed to an episode in 1899, when Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II used his authority as caliph to assist calm a Filipino Muslim insurgency, a lot to the gratitude of U.S. diplomats whose authorities had simply began their colonization of the archipelago. Might a post-World Battle I Caliph in Istanbul have been capable of play such a moderating function within the many years thereafter?
The persistence of some kind of Ottoman caliph would have had extra fast implications for contemporary Turkey. Ataturk’s legacy sowed the seeds of the political backlash now seen within the religiously tinged nationalism of long-ruling Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “Turkey may have prevented the excesses of the Kemalist “single get together” period — particularly the “revolutions” that blatantly violated spiritual freedom — and develop a extra religion-friendly secularism,” Akyol argued. “Then it may have prevented the revengeful spiritual comeback underneath Erdogan, too.”