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A centennial 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. Its clout and authority waxed and waned through wars, invasions and political upheavals, but it endured. As the Ottoman Empire became a continent-straddling Muslim superpower, its sultan assumed the spiritual trappings of the Caliph.
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, as he’s widely remembered — 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 would soon be forced into exile along with his immediate family.
Contemporary observers noted how swiftly it all ended. 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, Barakatullah recounted, “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 Times of London wrote in its dispatch of his somber farewell by train, “He spoke to nobody except the Chief of Police, whose duty it was to escort him to the frontier. When, towards midnight, the Simplon-Orient Express arrived with a special reserved coach the Caliph immediately entered the train, saying a few kind words to the officials. The Caliph was very much moved, and several of those present burst into tears.”
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.” He watched Ataturk and other Turkish officials push through the bill abolishing the institution. “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.
The loss of the caliphate had an obvious impact well beyond modern Turkey’s borders. Anger over the post-World War I dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire inflamed the politics of British-ruled India, with countless Indian Muslims mobilizing in what was dubbed the Khilafat Movement. It drew the support of other non-Muslim Indian opponents to British rule, including Mahatma Gandhi.
Other attempts at reviving the institution of the caliphate elsewhere in the Muslim world flared in the 1920s. But they were short-lived, Middle East scholar Martin Kramer noted. “After the 1930s, the caliphate remained a curious slogan for eccentrics, until more recent times, when caliphate fever seized some of the more apocalyptic Islamists, those obsessed with reenacting early Islam in painstaking detail,” he wrote, gesturing to the violent delusions of the Islamic State and Islamist militants.
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. “The whole phenomenon of radical Islam emerges in this context,” Mustafa Akyol, a Turkish commentator, journalist and 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?
The persistence of some sort of Ottoman caliph would have had more immediate implications for modern Turkey. 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 — especially the “revolutions” that blatantly violated religious freedom — and develop a more religion-friendly secularism,” Akyol argued. “Then it could have avoided the revengeful religious comeback under Erdogan, too.”