Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

THE UMMA t 149
of single and unique “deputies” (khalifa) of the Prophet descended
from the noble clan of the Quraysh. The caliph, in the later, more
pragmatic understanding—the one still current in the opening decades
of the twentieth century—might, however, be any Muslim
ruler who ensured that the principles and law of Islam were upheld.
The Ottoman sultans certainly qualified under those conditions,
and if they arrogated to themselves some of the titles, regalia,
and perquisites of the earlier “universal” caliphate, there
was no great harm in that: it strengthened the institution by affirming
its’, and Islam’s, continuing connection with the glorious past.
But the reality was understood by most Muslims, and the sovereign
in Istanbul was invariably referred to not as “the caliph” but
as “the sultan.”
The name of caliph still had powerful associations, however—
strong enough to tempt the Ottomans to invoke it on occasion,
and in jurisdictions into which the theory did not quite stretch: to
those Muslims, for example, who were once but no longer the
political subjects of the Ottoman sultan, like the Muslims of North
Africa or Egypt, or Muslims who had never been, like the millions
of the Islamic confession on the Indian subcontinent and in East
Asia. This was the aspect of the caliphate that was clearly being
tested with the Ottoman call for a holy war in 1916. The lack of
response to the caliph’s summons illustrates the limits that most
Muslims placed on their understanding of the Ottoman caliphate.
The Ottomans’ call to holy war was never answered, and the
Muslims of North Africa and India remained truer to their colonial
masters than to their putative pope in Istanbul. In 1918 the
Ottoman Empire went down in defeat along with its German and
Austro-Hungarian allies, but out of the debacle arose the new state
that called itself the Turkish Republic. On 28 January 1920 the
deputies to the Ottoman National Assembly moved from Istanbul
to Ankara. There they signed the Turkish National Pact declaring
themselves in permanent session until the independence of the fatherland
and the caliphate should be guaranteed. Two years later,
however, the matter appeared somewhat differently. On 31 October
1922 the primary political institution of the Ottoman and
Muslim past, the sultanate, was abolished, and though the office of