The caliphate that could have been
Acentennial took place this week with little commemoration. It’s been 100 years since the world had a formally recognized caliphate. That’s because, on March 3, 1924, the leaders of the then-new, secular Turkish republic moved to abolish the institution that had prevailed in various forms for centuries, stretching back to the founding of Islam.
The caliph — not wholly unlike the pontiff in Rome for Catholics — was the leading, unifying temporal authority of the Muslim world. The institution shifted across the expanding political geography of Islam, moving from Arabia to the venerable cities of Damascus, Syria, and Baghdad and later to Egypt.
The disappearance of the caliphate — that is, an anchoring spiritual authority for Muslims, especially Sunnis, around the world — left a deep imprint on 20th century politics.
Radical Islam emerged
“The whole phenomenon of radical Islam emerges in this context,” Mustafa Akyol, Turkish author of “Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty,” told me. “The origins of the problems of militant Islamism comes out of this vacuum.”
Akyol offered a beguiling counterfactual: What if the caliphate had endured as an autonomous, spiritual entity, somewhat along the lines of the Vatican in the newly invented Italian republic of the 19th century?
He pointed to an episode in 1899, when Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II used his authority as caliph to help calm a Filipino Muslim insurgency, much to the gratitude of U.S. diplomats whose government had just started their colonization of the archipelago. Could a post-World War I caliph in Istanbul have been able to play such a moderating role in the decades thereafter?
But the caliphate did not survive the Ottoman empire’s turbulent collapse and disintegration by the end of World War I. By 1924, Turkey’s new leaders — chiefly the ruthlessly modernizing Mustafa Kemal Pasha, or Ataturk — had already dismantled the Ottoman sultanate in their fashioning of a new Turkish state out of the ashes of empire.
The spiritual role of the Caliph was still occupied by Abdulmejid II, a meek Ottoman scion who liked to paint and collect butterflies and would soon be forced into exile along with his immediate family.
Mohamed Barakatullah, an Indian pan-Islamist sympathetic to the caliph’s plight, wrote how Ataturk proposed “the abolition of the institution” of the caliphate, the expulsion of the caliph’s family and the confiscation of their property. That was followed by a bill passing the republic’s national assembly with an overwhelming majority in support.
Then a delegation of officials went to Dolmabahce Palace in Istanbul, “where they ordered the [caliph] to seat himself upon the throne, whereupon the decree declaring his deposition was read. The [caliph] was then commanded to descend from the throne and make arrangements for his immediate departure.”
The secular republic
In our historical memory, the end of the caliphate is inseparable from the birth of the Turkish republic.
Sandor Lestyan, a Hungarian correspondent for a Budapest newspaper, wrote from Istanbul on March 3, 1924, that there was a “type of excitement” in the city that “one feels when a deeply desired wish is fulfilled or when an event opens new, promising paths for one’s life. What was sacred and untouchable for nine hundred years has been rendered obsolete by a simple vote,” he thrilled.
In foreign reportage, a stark narrative was already set: An Oriental anachronism was being swept away by the tide of history. The dissolution of the caliphate, noted The Economist on March 8, 1924, “marks an epoch in the expansion of Western ideas over the non- Western world, for our Western principles of national sovereignty and self-government are the real forces to which the unfortunate ‘Abdu’l Mejid Efendi has fallen a victim.”
Ataturk would go on to dramatically transform Turkey: The Arabic script was shed for the Latin one; mosques delivered sermons in Turkish, not Arabic; muscular nationalism and draconian secularism defined the state, much to the chagrin of more pious Turks and ethnic minorities like the Kurds.
No moderating force left
Could the caliph have been a moderating force in the 20th century? The Ottoman leadership had embarked on major liberalizing reforms in the late 19th century, including steps to accord Jews and Christians equal citizenship at a time when religious discrimination was rife in Europe.
But the unleashing of ethnic nationalisms amid imperial collapse and global conflict saw the genocidal massacre of Armenians and prefigured the new republic. Ataturk’s legacy sowed the seeds of the political backlash now seen in the religiously tinged nationalism of long-ruling Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
“Turkey could have avoided the excesses of the Kemalist ‘single party’ era ... and develop a more religion-friendly secularism,” Akyol argued. “Then it could have avoided the revengeful religious comeback under Erdogan, too.”