(The following is the introduction to a forthcoming essay to be published in a collected volume of essays on the consequences of the abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate)
By the time of the formal abolition of the caliphate in 1924, the final caliph Abdulmejid II was a mere figurehead unable to exert any power or influence to resist the turn of events. He was not even the caliph of the Ottoman sultanate; the sultanate having been abolished in 1922. The real power of the Caliph had diminished since 1908, when the caliphate was separated from executive power – leaving the last caliph of the Ottoman sultanate a symbolic figure. Though throughout the long history of Muslim states the centrality of the Caliph waxed and waned before being revived by the Ottomans, this final form of the Caliph as powerless symbol stands in stark contrast to its initial form as a centralised source of executive power for the Muslims after the death of the Prophet Muhammad.
Even the last caliph often feted by Muslims – Sultan Abdulhamid II – held office that was significantly different from that of the first caliphs. The caliphate had become a position passed down through dynasties as hereditary ruling, unaccountable to the masses. Those changes were not recent – the seeds of all of them were sowed in the first generations of Muslim leadership, but it was the aftermath of World War 1 that brought matters to a head.
After the sultanate was abolished in 1922, a number of prominent thinkers across the Muslim world protested the decision, with a series of articles addressing Turkish Muslims by Rashid Rida provoking a response from the Turkish government entitled “The Caliphate and the Sovereignty of the People”. With a nod to the imagined latent support within Turkey and across the Muslim world for the institution of the caliphate, the book agreed that a caliphate which met all its proscribed conditions was the best possible form of government, the reality was that the Ottoman caliphate merely mimicked the form of a caliphate and lacked its juristic conditions rendering it nothing more than a hereditary monarchy. The Ottoman rulers were not selected by the people or any other validly recognised method, and so the Ottoman caliphate was at best a “superficial caliphate”.
In October 1923 the Turkish government became a republic. Addressing the Turkish national assembly, Mustafa Kamal stated that “after the abolition of the monarchy, the caliphate, being only an authority of a similar description under another name, was also abolished” . For all intents and purposes, this was true, following by the formal act of abolition on March 3, 1924.
Irrespective of his ultimate motives, the conclusions of both the book issued by the Turkish government and Kemal’s own statements are difficult to dispute, and the abolition of the institution of the Caliphate has meant that the theory of the caliphate can be considered without the constraints and bias that its presence may have induced in the theorists who articulated their views while living under the system as constituted in their time. This is why when contemporary movements call for the restoration of the caliphate – they are not calling for the restoration of the Caliph of Turkey, or the Caliph bereft of the authority, or even for the best Caliphs of the Ottoman dynasty, but rather for the restoration of the institution upon what is referred to as the Prophetic model as has been conveyed in narrations attributed to the Prophet Muhammad.
This essay reviews certain key elements of the political theory of the caliphate in normative Sunni Islamic thought which adapted over time, and in this author’s view in difference to the initial practise – who should be the caliph and the role of the Muslims in how they are selected, how the caliph and those in roles of executive power should be accounted, the role and limits of rebellion and who should be involved in matters of deciding the caliph.