The collapse of the Almohad caliphate in the thirteenth century spelt the end of attempts to build a caliphate which would embrace the whole of the Muslim west. True, there were dynasties like the Hafsids of Tunisia (1229–1534), who appropriated the title, but their power was too local to enable them to present themselves as real caliphs beyond the borders of their own statelets. In the east, however, the idea of the caliphate was too entrenched and its history too venerable for it to disappear completely. Baghdad may have fallen and the Abbasid caliph may have died a horrible death, but attempts were still made to revive or at least continue the office in one form or another.
Abbasid Caliphs, Courtiers of the Mamluks
The tragic death of the last Abbasid caliph of Baghdad at the hand of the Mongols and the devastation of his capital city in 1258 marked the abrupt end of the caliphate which had begun more than 600 years previously with the oath of allegiance to Abū Bakr in 632, and which had continued, with ups and downs, ever since. Never again would a caliph lead the Muslims in prayer, defend them against the unbelievers or safeguard their hajj. Never again would the palace of the caliph be a centre of power, wealth and culture.
But the idea of caliphate never completely died. Four years after the catastrophe, a distant cousin of the last caliph of Baghdad made his way, aided by the Bedouin tribes of the Syrian desert, to Cairo where he made contact with the Mamluk sultan Baybars. Baybars was a formidable figure both militarily and politically, and the Mamluks (slave soldiers) who formed his army were a strong military force, the only army, in fact, which was capable of resisting the Mongols in open battle. In 1260, at the Battle of Ayn Jalut in Palestine, they had put an end to Mongol ambitions to invade Egypt. The Mamluks set up a quasi-dynastic rule in Egypt and Syria which was to last until the Ottoman conquest of 1517 and was the strongest and most stable state in the Islamic world in this period. However, in spite of his powerful position, Baybars was also vulnerable and lacking in a convincing claim to the sultanate. The Mamluks, after all, by origin were no more than Turkish slaves, newly imported from the steppes of what is now southern Russia. They had no ancient status in the Muslim world, no legitimating discourse to convince Muslims of their right to lead. Furthermore, Baybars himself had only become ruler after the murder of his Mamluk predecessor Qutuz.
The arrival of the fugitive Abbasid was therefore an opportunity not to be missed. He was appointed caliph in 1262, Baybars and his courtiers taking a bay‘a to him, and was given the caliphal title of Hākim. He in turn preached a sermon praising the sultan and exhorting Muslims to obey him and support him in the Holy War against both Crusaders and Mongols. Hākim on the Nile enjoyed very little of the pomp his predecessors had had on the Tigris. He had no court of his own, no vizier, no military guard, just a tower in the citadel to live in and tutors to improve his religious education. He became in effect a part of the Mamluk sultan’s entourage, enjoying some respect but no real power.
Hākim reigned (but did not rule) for forty years until his death in 1301, long after Baybars and his immediate successors had perished. He was succeeded by a continuous line of some seventeen Abbasid caliphs until the last one was deported to Istanbul in 1517 at the time of the Ottoman conquest.
Clearly successive Mamluk sultans felt that to have an Abbasid caliph at court was useful, but what exactly did this functionary do? His main purpose was to legitimize the accession of a new sultan. The Mamluk sultanate was never formally hereditary (unlike, of course, the Abbasid caliphate) and frequently passed from one ruler to another through violence and assassination. The caliph’s function was basically to approve a usurper. In most cases the new ruler took a bay‘a to the caliph, though sometimes, especially in the fifteenth century, it seems to have been the caliph who took a bay‘a to the sultan, a curious reversal of the traditional protocol. The caliph’s other function was to impress other Muslim leaders, as when Berke, khan of the Golden Horde (the Mongol rulers of Russia) and a new convert to Islam, sent a delegation to the court at Cairo in 1257. The caliph delivered a khutba in Berke’s name and a diploma of investiture was passed to his ambassadors.
Only on one occasion did a caliph actually acquire a political role, and that was when, in 1412, a group of Mamluk emirs bidding for power set up the Abbasid caliph Musta‘īn as sultan. Needless to say, when the caliph attempted to wield power himself, his backers hastily sent him packing back to his luxurious quarters in the citadel.
The caliph’s role was significant, but did not amount to very much. He was God’s representative on earth and divinely appointed ruler, and he alone could bring legitimacy to a sultan. However, as a fifteenth-century commentator, Khalīl al-Zāhiri, describes, his duties while in office were otherwise rather mundane:
His appointment is to concern himself with scholarship and to have a library. If the sultan travels on some business, he is to accompany him for the benefit of the Muslims [presumably to impress them with the sultan’s legitimacy as ruler]. He has numerous sources of revenue for his expenses and fine dwellings.
The conquest of Baghdad and the death of the last Abbasid caliph in 1258 also left the field open for other claimants, or rather for other Muslim rulers to use the title. The great historian and thinker Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1406) writes that the caliph is much more than a king, whose only concern is with the well-being of men on earth, whereas the caliph is divinely appointed and guides according to sharī‘a. Ibn Khaldūn also argues that the caliph should come from Quraysh because they were the most respected and influential tribe in Arabia at the time of the Prophet. He traces what he sees as the changing nature of the caliphate. Under the Orthodox caliphs the caliphate was a religious institution for the guiding of the faithful and the observance of religious laws. Under the Umayyads it became a despotic monarchy which ruled by military might. Soon after the death of Hārūn al-Rashīd it declined in power until it was little more than an empty title and the office had effectively ceased to exist.1 Ibn Khaldūn’s views probably represent those of many Muslims in the later Middle Ages for whom the great days of the caliphate were firmly in the past and the puppets in Cairo and the other pretenders had no real right to the title.
At that time a number of monarchs used the title more or less convincingly. Shah Rukh (1409–47), grandson of Tamerlane and ruler of much of Iran, claimed the title and was addressed by other rulers who sought his favour as caliph and ‘the shadow of God on earth’. Yet when he wrote to a Mamluk and an Ottoman ruler demanding that they should accept investiture from him as caliph and strike coins in his name, his pretensions were unceremoniously rejected. After the disappearance of the Almohad caliphate, the Hafsid rulers of Tunisia used the title, as did the Turkman rulers of eastern Anatolia in the fifteenth century and the Shaybani Uzbeg rulers of Bukhara in the sixteenth.
The Ottoman Caliphate
The claims of these rulers to the title of caliph were never widely acknowledged and were in any case much less important to them than the title of sultan or khan. Only the Ottoman dynasty attempted to make their caliphate a reality, though they never used the other ancient title of Commander of the Faithful. The Ottomans were a Turkish family who had risen to power in north-west Anatolia in the fourteenth century, leading Muslims against the enfeebled Byzantine Empire. From 1354 onwards they also began the conquest of south-east Europe and in 1453 they seized Constantinople, a project which had first been attempted by the Umayyad caliphs seven centuries before. By the end of the fifteenth century they were the most powerful Muslim rulers in the Middle East and when they conquered Egypt from the Mamluks in 1517 their pre-eminence was unchallenged. It is not clear how the Ottoman sultans came to claim the caliphal title, although the title of sultan was always the most important to them. Murad I (1360–89) seems to have been the first of his dynasty to assume the title after he took Edirne and Plovdiv from the Byzantines in around 1362, when he wrote to lesser emirs in more eastern parts of Turkey that God had chosen him to assume the dignity of the caliphate. He called God to witness that ‘from the date of his coming to the throne, he had not taken a moment’s rest but had devoted himself day and night to the waging of war and jihād and always had his armour on to serve the well-being of the Muslims’.2 Some of his successors used the title, though not the great Mehmet II, whose conquest of Constantinople in 1453 might have been thought to give him an excellent claim.
In 1517 Selīm the Grim (1512–20) seized Cairo, putting an end to the Mamluk sultanate and taking possession of the puppet caliph Mutawwakil III along with what was claimed to be the regalia of the caliphate: the mantle of the Prophet, his staff and his seal. A legend, which seems to have been elaborated at the end of the eighteenth century, recounts that the last Abbasid transferred the caliphate to the Ottoman sultan, but this is no more than a piece of fiction concocted to justify the Ottomans’ renewed interest in the caliphal title at that time. A contemporary notes that ‘the caliph, Commander of the Faithful Mutawwakil, has been sent by sea to Istanbul’ and three years later he is said to still be living in the capital. After the accession of Sulayman the Magnificent in 1520, Mutawwakil was allowed to return to Egypt where he died in 1543, the last and final claimant of a line which stretched back to Saffāh in 750.
Selīm assumed not the title of caliph but that of Khādim al-haramayn al-sharīfayn (Servant of the Two Noble Sanctuaries). Since the end of the Abbasid caliphate in 1258, a number of Muslim monarchs had competed for the right to guard Mecca and Medina, which was understood to include the right to have one’s name mentioned at the khutba in Mecca, and hence to have one’s status confirmed in front of the pilgrims from all over the Muslim world at the time of the hajj. Powerful rulers like Timur’s grandson Shah Rukh had coveted the honour, but the simple fact was that whoever ruled Egypt could maintain his right to the title because the Holy Cities were dependent on Egypt for the grain which kept their people alive. In the late fifteenth century an added urgency was given to this office by the appearance for the first time of Portuguese warships in the Red Sea and the Gulf. Muslims were right to fear that these new infidel invaders would attack Mecca. It was no empty honour that Selīm assumed.
From Selīm’s time until the First World War, it was the Ottomans who protected the great hajj caravans setting out from Damascus and Cairo and the Ottomans who provided the kiswa each year. This probably did more than anything else to encourage Muslims, wherever they came from, to regard the Ottomans as leaders of the Muslim world. Despite this, Selīm never seems to have called himself caliph or to have been mentioned as such on coins or in documents; he was always known as sultan. By the reign of Sulayman the Magnificent (1520–56), it was generally accepted that the Ottomans were caliphs as well as sultans. The title of caliph was only really used in relations with other Muslim powers, like the rulers of Morocco, who were not under the direct authority of the Ottomans. The Sa‘di rulers of Morocco (1510–1668) accepted the status of the Ottomans as the protectors of Islam but only as representatives of the true caliphs, who had to be members of the tribe of Quraysh, and they themselves claimed to be descendants of Alī and Fātima. Other Muslim potentates also appropriated the title, as for instance the Mogul emperor Akbar (1556–1605) in distant Delhi, but it was never more than a vague honorific.
In around 1553 the Ottoman grand vizier Lutfi Pasha wrote a pamphlet in which he tackled the issue of the sultan’s right to be caliph. He does this, he explains, in response to scholars who have maintained that only a member of Quraysh can be caliph. His argument is that a caliph is absolutely necessary, based on the ancient and widely known Tradition which states that if there is no acknowledged caliph ‘the condition of the Muslims is a matter of uncertainty when they die without having known the imam [caliph] of their time and their death is the death of the Jāhiliyya [that is, Muslims would die like those who had not known the Prophet and would therefore go to hell]’. He then cites numerous authorities, including the great historian Tabarī, to the effect that the title of sultan belongs to a ruler who holds the power, while the imam is ‘the one who maintains the Faith and governs the kingdoms of Islam with equity’. The caliph is ‘he who commands the good and prohibits the evil [that is, maintains the sharī‘a]’. If the conditions mentioned above, that is conquest, power of compulsion, maintenance of the faith with justice, commanding the good and forbidding the evil, are combined in one person then he is a sultan who can justly claim the titles of imam, caliph, wālī and emir without contradiction. He points out: ‘Our ulama have said that a man becomes sultan by two things: the first by the swearing of allegiance to him and the second is that he can effectively execute his decisions’, and then adds that not one of the legal authorities he has consulted has ruled or asserted that the caliph ‘should be of Quraysh, nor of Hashimi descent, nor appointed by the Abbasid or any other person’. For him, the statement that the imam should be of Qurashi origin applies to the beginnings of the caliphate, when the Quraysh asserted their rights over the ansār of Medina, and was not relevant in the present day.
Lutfi’s fundamental argument is that the caliphate belongs to the one who effectively leads and protects the Muslim people. The qualifications for the office are power and competence. Inheritance or kinship have no part in this. This is an argument which, in a sense, goes back to the Zaydi idea that the caliphate belongs to the man who takes action and seizes power in the name of the Family of the Prophet, except that the Zaydis insist on the Qurashi descent of the caliph. There are also echoes here of the discussions of Juwaynī and Ghazālī in the eleventh century, for whom power was the main qualification for the office of caliph. In Ottoman times it seems to have been generally accepted that the power and authority of the Ottoman sultan justified his taking of the title of caliph, but in doing so the force of the title was largely lost, subsumed in the wider rhetoric of Ottoman power. There was no authority that the sultan gained as caliph which he did not already have as sultan and the office therefore added little to his standing.
In the eighteenth century, with the Muslim world in general and the Ottoman Empire in particular increasingly threatened by European powers, there was a renewed interest in the idea of the caliphate. The first example of this seems to have been in the Treaty of Kucuk Kaynarca of 1774, in which the Ottoman sultan Abd al-Hamīd I (1774–89) was obliged, to all intents and purposes, to cede the sovereignty of the largely Muslim Crimea to Catherine the Great of Russia, and where the sultan was described as ‘the imam of the believers and the caliph of all those who profess the unity of God [that is, Muslims]’. This seems to be a face-saving formula to allow him to claim to be the spiritual leader of the Muslims of Crimea and to avoid the shame of allowing Muslims to be ruled by infidels. After this, the idea of the caliphate was increasingly developed by the Ottomans to allow them to claim a spiritual leadership of Muslims beyond their political borders. This introduced a distinction between the political and military leadership (the sultanate) and the spiritual leadership (the caliphate), which was essentially new to Muslim political thought but served useful purposes in the diplomacy of the time.
Abd al-Hamīd II, Sultan and Caliph
The role of the sultan as caliph was pursued with more consistency and determination by Sultan Abd al-Hamīd II (1876–1909). Abd al-Hamīd came to the throne on the deposition of his brother. He was immediately given the oath of allegiance as sultan and caliph. Apart from the bay‘a, he based his claim to the caliphate on three well-established principles. The first of these was God’s will; the second was hereditary succession as his ancestors were Great Caliphs; and the third was the possession of real political power to defend the Muslims. The only one of the traditional attributes of caliphate he could not claim was, of course, membership of Quraysh, but, as we have seen, this had not prevented earlier Ottomans from claiming the office.3
On his accession Abd al-Hamīd was obliged to sign a constitution modelled on western European examples – the first such constitution in the Islamic world. As compensation, perhaps, for his loss of temporal power, his role as caliph was developed. In Article 3 of the constitution it is stated that ‘The August Ottoman Sultanate, the office of the supreme Islamic Caliphate, must devolve upon the oldest of the members of the [Ottoman family]’, a clear enunciation of hereditary succession. Article 4 states that ‘the Sultan, in his capacity as Caliph, is the protector of the Muslim religion’. The constitution was soon suspended and did not come into force until 1909, but Abd al-Hamīd clung to and developed the idea that the Ottoman caliph was the leader of all Muslims, not just those under Ottoman rule.
The personality of the sultan-caliph was one of apparent contradictions. For many outside the Ottoman Empire, in western Europe and Russia, he was ‘Abdul the Damned’, a devious and bloodthirsty tyrant who mistreated and massacred his Christian subjects and about whom nothing good could be said. He was certainly an autocrat, secretive and deeply suspicious by nature. He believed strongly that it was his responsibility, laid on him by God, to rule and protect the Muslim people, both inside and beyond the borders of the Ottoman Empire. He regarded the constitutionalist movement, led by the westernizing reformer Midhat Pasha, as an attack on the divinely sanctioned political order which would undermine the Muslim world, and his opponents were sent away to exile and death. ‘The padishah’ (sultan-caliph), he wrote, is
accountable only to God and history … If we want to rejuvenate, find our previous force and reach our old greatness, we ought to remember the fountainhead of our strength. What is beneficial to us is not to imitate the so-called European civilization but to return to the sharī‘a, the source of our strength … Almighty God, I can only be Your slave and ask only Your help. Lead us on the right path.4
There was no doubt that he was a pious and believing Muslim and these sentiments would be certainly be shared by many contemporary Islamists. At the same time he was keenly interested in the technologies of modernity, which he saw as essential to the survival of the Ottoman state. He encouraged the study of western military technologies, bringing the celebrated Colmar von der Goltz and other German officers to train his armed forces, and the building of railways. Culturally too he was open-minded: he enjoyed western music, especially Italian opera, and his private library at the Yildiz Palace consisted of some 100,000 volumes, not only rare Arabic and Persian manuscripts but western works on philosophy and science. In this he was following the example of the great bibliophile caliphs of the past, the Abbasid Ma’mūn in Baghdad and the Umayyad Hakam II in Córdoba. He ordered his government to participate in the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, where there was a Turkish village with a mosque and a covered bazaar in which products of the Ottoman sultanate were sold. He encouraged the participation of his Christian subjects in the economic and social life of the empire, noting that Muslims and Christians worshipped the same God, but also that some Christians had been led astray by the fanaticism of their priests to seek outside help against his lawful government.
One of the most celebrated examples of his adoption of modern technologies to fulfil the ancient responsibilities of the caliphate was the construction of the Hijaz railway from Damascus to Medina, completed in 1900. This enabled the pilgrims from Ottoman lands to make the hajj in the (comparative) comfort of the train as opposed to going on foot or on camels. It also alienated many of the Bedouin who had been used to the protection money that the pilgrims paid them, and they were more than happy to cooperate with the British mission led by T. E. Lawrence in his attempts to destroy the track during the First World War. In doing this Abd al-Hamīd was facilitating the hajj, just as Hārūn al-Rashīd and the Abbasids had done 1,100 years before with the construction of the Darb Zubayda.
The reign of the new sultan-caliph began with a disastrous war against the Russians in 1877–8, which led to the loss of Bulgaria and other areas of the Balkans. Many in the Muslim world feared that the Ottoman Empire would completely disintegrate, but perhaps paradoxically this defeat encouraged the idea of reviving the concept of the caliphate as a way of defending Muslims against outside attack.
This was a period when many areas of the Muslim world beyond the frontiers of the Ottoman Empire were coming under increasing pressure from outside powers who sought to take over and colonize them. One of the most important of these areas was Central Asia, where Russian advances were swallowing up the independent Khanates of Khiva, Bukhara and Kokand, while the Chinese were advancing on Kashgar from the east. All these regions were Muslim and Turkish-speaking and the threatened rulers sought the support of the Ottoman caliph in resisting the invaders. Equally dangerous as far as many Muslims were concerned was the British military occupation of Egypt in 1882. Although Egypt had not been part of the Ottoman Empire since Napoleon’s invasion of 1798, many Muslims there and elsewhere hoped that the caliph would be able to take action. Even in the distant Comoro Islands, between Mozambique and Madagascar, the Muslim inhabitants, threatened by French occupation, appealed for Ottoman support. But the sultan-caliph was no political adventurer: he would offer moral support and refuge in Istanbul, but his military forces remained firmly inside the Ottoman frontiers.
His role as leader of all Muslims was acknowledged in a number of the treaties made with foreign powers during the slow disintegration of the Ottoman Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. When the Austro-Hungarian Empire annexed Bosnia in 1908, the name of Abd al-Hamīd as sultan-caliph continued to be mentioned in Muslim prayers, and after the Italian conquest of Libya, in 1912, the qādī of Tripoli continued to be appointed from Istanbul. Abd al-Hamīd also tried to use his prestige as caliph as a way to gain the loyalty of the Arab inhabitants of the sultanate, increasingly attracted by the ideas of Arab nationalism.
Another area in which the later Ottomans used and developed the idea of caliphate was their veneration and display of the holy relics. The sultans established a permanent collection of the relics of the Prophet and many of the early heroes of Islam in the Topkapi Saray in Istanbul. They are housed in a series of four smallish rooms, exquisitely decorated with sixteenth-century Iznik tiles. Originally these rooms were the sleeping quarters of the sultans themselves, but from the seventeenth century they moved their quarters to the nearby harem and the rooms seem to have been kept solely as a repository for the relics, which remain there to this day. It is clearly impossible to date these objects or to have any scientific proof that any of them are what they claim to be. We can, however, be certain that some of them, in particular the burda (mantle of the Prophet) the most precious and venerated, were already in the Topkapi collection by the sixteenth century. The relics were a visible and tangible sign of the Ottomans’ claims to be both the successors of the early caliphs and guardians of the Holy Cities.
A roughly woven garment, black on the outside and white on the inside, the burda is kept wrapped in precious fabrics in a golden chest so that only a small portion of it can be seen. It is mentioned in historical sources of the Abbasid period, most notably in the account of the death of Caliph Amīn in 815 where, along with the qadīb or sceptre and the Prophet’s ring (hātim), it is described as ‘being the caliphate’.
It is unclear what relationship, if any, there is between the mantle mentioned in the Abbasid sources and the one preserved in Istanbul. According to the traditional story, the Istanbul garment was worn by Muhammad and presented to the poet Ka‘b b. Zuhayr, previously a fierce opponent of the Prophet, when he repented and asked for his forgiveness. The poet in return composed a poem in praise of the Prophet and the mantle. Later Caliph Mu‘āwiya bought it from Ka‘b’s heirs and, it is said, it was preserved by all later caliphs. According to one story the burda was burned by Hulegu following the sack of Baghdad in 1258 and the death of the last Abbasid caliph of the city, but others said that survivors of the massacre took it to Cairo whence it was removed to Istanbul at the time of the Ottoman conquest in 1517. It was certainly in the Ottoman relic collection by the reign of Sultan Murad II (1574–95) who had a golden case made for it. It was thought to have a talismanic importance and sultans took it on campaign. When Mehmet III (1595–1603) led his armies on campaign to Eger in Hungary, he took the mantle with him. At one point in the battle it looked as if his army was about to be defeated, but one of his courtiers told the monarch, ‘My sultan! As an Ottoman sultan who is caliph on our Prophet’s path, it would be appropriate for you to put on the Holy Mantle and pray to God.’ The sultan took his advice, donned the mantle and led his soldiers to victory, and an elegant miniature illustrates the sacred garment being carried on the head of a courtier as the sultan looks on and the cannon thunder against the enemy. It is interesting in this account to see the identification of the possession of the mantle with the caliphal office, just as it was in the Abbasid period.
The seal of the Prophet was among the relics kept by the Abbasid caliphs. According to a well-known story, the original was lost in a well by the third caliph, Uthmān, and it is generally agreed that the one displayed Istanbul was a replacement made after that.
Another key exhibit to be found at Topkapi is the Qur’ān of Uthmān. Like the one in Tashkent it is said to have been the very volume he was reading when he was killed and his bloodstains are pointed out. Obviously there is no certainty that it is any such thing but, from the pictures at least, it is clearly a magnificent and very ancient volume.
Among the other relics of the Prophet is his banner, which was paraded in front of the army when military expeditions set out; in 1826 it was brought out and hung on the minbar of the mosque of Sultanahmet in Istanbul to serve as a rallying point for the people against the rebellious janissaries. Then there is the Prophet’s staff, which is recorded from Abbasid times, though it is generally accepted that the staff in the Topkapi collection was made from a tree which grew near the Prophet’s tomb.
There are numerous other relics of the Prophet which seem never to have been part of the caliphal insignia – hairs from his beard, his bow and his footprint, as well as the blouse and veil of his daughter Fātima and the shirt of his martyred grandson Husayn. Also to be found in the Topkapi collection are the cooking bowl of Abraham, the turban of Joseph and the arm of John the Baptist. Many of these items were kept in the Ka‘ba in Mecca or the Mosque of the Prophet in Medina until the First World War, when the Holy Cities became threatened by the Arab revolt and British occupation. In 1918 they were put on a train by the orders of the Ottoman governor of Medina, Fakhr al-Dīn Pasha, and taken to Istanbul, where they still remain.
The apotropaic properties of the burda and the other relics were very much in evidence at the funeral ceremony for Abd al-Hamīd II, who died in 1918 after thirty-four years as sultan-caliph and nine more as deposed sovereign. His obsequies were later described by one Ahmet Rafik Bey, who attended the ceremony, in an account full of atmosphere and melancholy. We are told that the sultan’s body was brought to the apartments of the Holy Mantle where it was washed and laid on a winding sheet in the coffin.
Sultan Abdulhamid had not lost consciousness until the last moment of his life. He requested that a testament prayer be put on his chest and a handkerchief rubbed against the Holy Mantle, as well as a piece of the black Ka‘ba cover, he used to cover his face. His request was carried out to the letter. It was a truly heartrending sight: Sultan Abdulhamid lying inside the coffin covered with winding sheets, the testament prayer on his naked chest, the black Ka‘ba cover on his face, his white beard, with his eyes forever closed … Sultan Abdulhamid was humbly going to God, leaving his sins behind.
As the coffin was taken away a respectful crowd gathered round:
Suddenly, the door to the Apartments of the Holy Mantle opened. All eyes turned to the door. It was crowded on both sides. Hearts throbbing, everyone sought a view of the coffin. Carried by hand and adorned with a diamond belt, silver-embroidered Ka’ba covers, red satin, and a red fez, it finally appeared, stately and majestic … The head preacher of the Hamidiye Mosque, dressed in a green, silver-embroidered robe with an imperial monogram on his chest, stepped forward and stood on the stone. He looked around and asked:
‘How did you know the deceased to be?’
A sad cry echoed among the cypress trees:
‘We knew him to be good.’
It was perhaps fitting that the body of the last great caliph should be washed and laid to rest surrounded by the relics which had been preserved, according to widely believed traditions, by his illustrious predecessors since the very beginnings of Islam.5
The Ottoman Caliphate in the Wider World
The sultan’s policy of reviving the idea of a pan-Islamic caliphate would not have made much impact if it had not had a wider resonance in the Muslim world. This was particularly true in British-ruled India. There Muslims saw the Ottoman Empire, with which, traditionally, they had had very little contact, as the one major Muslim power which had maintained its independence, and many embraced the idea of the caliphate as a challenge to the discourse of imperial rule and western supremacy.
Support for the Ottomans’ right to the caliphate came from some unexpected quarters. In the late 1870s there was a fierce debate in Britain about the validity of the Ottoman claims. This was largely in response to the obvious enthusiasm in India to the idea of caliphate. In 1877 two retired Indian political officers, Sir George Campbell, ex-governor of Bengal, and George Birdwood, argued that the Ottoman claim was fraudulent, and Birdwood went on to say that it would be to the British advantage to encourage looking to the Sharif of Mecca (the local ruler of the Holy City who was also a descendant of Alī and Fātima) as caliph for ‘he would be as completely in our power as the Suez Canal’. This provoked a vigorous response from the pro-Ottoman writer James Redhouse (1811–92). Redhouse had enjoyed a career which was, to say the least, unusual. As a young orphan from London, he had taken service as a cabin boy on a British ship. When the ship berthed in Istanbul in 1826, he absconded and used his education in mathematics and science to make a career in the service of the Ottomans, then battling with the insurgent Greeks and the Egyptian Muhammad Alī. Redhouse became a passionate Turkophile and wrote, among other things, the most scholarly and complete dictionary of Ottoman Turkish ever compiled. He now entered the fray and produced a pamphlet entitled ‘A Vindication of the Ottoman Sultan’s Title of “Caliph” ’, in which he dismissed challenges to the Ottoman title as ‘erroneous, futile and impolitic’, firstly because the sultan’s claim to the title was ancient and accepted by ‘the whole orthodox world of Islam’ and then because the claim that the caliph should be of Qurashi descent, always a difficulty for the Ottomans, had no Prophetic support. In this he was joined by George Badger (1815–88), part missionary, part historian of the Eastern Churches and part Arabic lexicographer, who produced a detailed defence of Ottoman claims, concluding with the clear assertion that the ‘the Ottoman Sultan is the legitimate successor to Muhammad while the Sharif of Mecca was a man of no standing, an official who could be dismissed at any time by the Ottoman government’. None of the participants in this debate represented British government policy, but in general the British were content to accept Ottoman claims.
The same period also saw the beginnings of a movement in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, especially in Syria, to separate the caliphate from the Ottoman sultanate and set up an independent Arab caliphate. The catalyst for this movement was the defeat of the Ottoman armies by the Russians in 1877–8, which seemed to be the prelude to the complete collapse of the empire. Arab notables in both Syria and the Hijaz floated the idea of an Arab caliphate, largely to resist the prospect of a European takeover. The Syrian Arabs even found a possible candidate in the person of Abd al-Qādir al-Jazā’iri, a charismatic Algerian Muslim who had been exiled to Damascus after his vigorous resistance to the French occupation of his country. In the end the movement came to nothing and Ottoman control was restored, but it shows that the idea of a caliphate was still a source of political inspiration to those Muslims who wanted change and sought to revive the ancient power and glory of the Islamic umma.
The idea of the caliphate as justification for Arab independence from the Ottoman Empire was kept alive in British political debate by the remarkable figure of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (1840–1922). Blunt was an eccentric upper-class writer who was at one and the same time a landowner connected with many important people in the political establishment of the late Victorian era and a rebel who set out to confront and oppose British imperialism. His numerous love affairs and his adventurous travels in the Arabian desert both marked him out as a man of romantic and alternative tastes. He began his career in the diplomatic service but resigned in 1868, and in 1877–8 he visited the Arab nomads of the Syrian desert. This and subsequent travels in Arabia impressed him deeply and he became convinced that Turkish rule should be ended and that the Arabs, by whom he basically meant the Bedouin of the Syrian and Arabian deserts, should be allowed to rule themselves under British protection. He turned to the idea of the caliphate, arguing that the caliphate of the Ottomans was essentially illegitimate and rested only on their political and military power rather than any legal rights. He made contact with several Arab Muslim leaders, including the respected Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905), a noted advocate of reform at the Azhar in Cairo and in wider Islamic society. He found Abduh was arguing that the caliphate should be revived as a religious institution, and explained:
On the question of the caliphate he [Abduh] looked at that time to its reconstruction on a more spiritual basis. He explained to me how a more legitimate exercise of its authority might be made to give a new impulse to intellectual progress and how little those who for centuries had held the title [that is, the Ottomans] had deserved the spiritual headship of the believers.6
The two men seem to have shared a common ideal of a revived Arab caliphate leading to a new era of greatness for the Muslim peoples. Yet the reality was, as Abduh acknowledged, that the Ottomans were ‘still the most powerful of the Muhammedan princes and able to do most for the general advantage, but unless they could be induced to take their position more seriously, a new Emir al-Mu’minin might legitimately be looked for’. Blunt may have found a kindred spirit in Abduh, but, for all his contacts and access, he failed to convince anyone of importance in the British government to follow his ideas, and as Abd al-Hamīd’s grip on the Arab provinces of the empire tightened in the 1880s and 1890s such ideas seemed fanciful and far-fetched.
Abd al-Hamīd had attempted to make his claim to the caliphate a basis for strengthening the Ottoman position, not least against his dissatisfied subjects in Istanbul. With the deposition of the sultan and the revival of the constitution in 1909, this came to seem increasingly irrelevant. The fiercely nationalist Young Turks who took control were intent on creating a Turkish rather than a Muslim empire and, while a strong sultanate was a possible way of doing this, there was no real role in this scenario for a caliph. The First World War led to a certain renewal of interest in the idea because some hoped that the appeal of the sultan as caliph would win over Arab opinion and, an even bigger prize, induce Indian Muslims to rise against their British rulers in the name of the caliph. These hopes proved unrealistic and the Ottoman claims aroused little enthusiasm in the subcontinent.
The End of the Ottoman Caliphate
The end of the war saw the final crisis of the Ottoman sultanate-caliphate. Mehmet V died in July 1918 and it fell to his successor, Mehmet VI, to negotiate an armistice with the British and French. A humiliating surrender was signed at Mudros on 30 October, less than two weeks before the 11 November armistice on the western front. The sultan seems to have believed that by appeasing the western powers he could keep his throne and what was left of the Ottoman Empire. To do so he was prepared to sign the Treaty of Sèvres in August 1920, which left only a rump of the Ottoman state in Anatolia. He also made his opposition to the nationalists gathered in Ankara obvious and, in a completely futile gesture, sentenced the nationalist leader Mustafa Kemal to death (a sentence he was, of course, unable to carry out). It was only a residual reverence for the sultan as the embodiment of the ancient greatness of the empire which allowed him to remain as ruler for the next two years. By 1922 the nationalists were triumphant; the Greeks had been driven out of Turkey and Mustafa Kemal was determined to abolish the sultanate and set up a presidential Turkish republic. On 1 November 1922 the Turkish Grand National Assembly voted to separate the caliphate from the sultanate and abolish the latter. The caliphate was to remain in the Ottoman family, but the state would decide which member of the family should hold the office. The sultan Mehmet VI was deposed and his cousin Abd al-Majīd II appointed as caliph.
The office still enjoyed some support in the new Turkey among conservatives who hoped to revive its ancient grandeur and among some nationalists who were reluctant to lose Turkey’s role as the leader of the Muslim world. The new (and last) caliph tried to rally these forces, but Mustafa Kemal was adamant in his opposition. On 24 March 1924 the office of caliph was abolished and a republic was declared with Mustafa Kemal as its first president. It was the end of an ancient tradition and never again has a claimant to the caliphate enjoyed any widespread and general acceptance in the Muslim world.