One hundred years without a caliphate

A picture of the last Caliph Abdul Majeed II of the Ottoman dynasty. Source: US Library of Congress

About a month ago, the centenary of the abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate occurred, specifically on March 3, 1924, and Muslims became, for the first time in their history, without a state that would unite them, preserve their identity, and protect their rights. The Ottoman Caliphate was not the ideal and most complete model of rule, but it constituted a great political symbolism, and it expressed the political unity of the Islamic world from Tangier to Jakarta, as the Algerian thinker Malek Bennabi says.

In fact, throughout their political history, Muslims have continued to live under the shadow of the Caliphate in one form or another, since the Rightly Guided Caliphate, through the Umayyad Caliphate, then the Abbasid Caliphate in its various manifestations, and ending with the Ottoman Caliphate. For this reason, the decision to abolish the Caliphate was difficult for souls, difficult for people to understand, and the decision to abolish it sparked a devastating wave of sadness and confusion throughout the Islamic world. This painful memory is worthy of contemplation, taking lessons, and strengthening resolve, and it is shameful to pass by without contemplating it and understanding its meanings. This is what we are trying to highlight in this article.

The Islamic movement to revive the Caliphate

The Ottoman Empire provided great services to Islam and Muslims, throughout the Islamic world in its known form today, and almost no country is devoid of good influence and useful work provided by the Ottomans. They worked, for more than four centuries, to protect the foundation of religion in light of a complex internal reality and international conflict. And a frenetic colonialist, especially in the last century of the Caliphate.

The Ottoman Empire contributed greatly to the material, military and economic progress of the Islamic world, and preserved the unity and strength of Muslims, despite the enormous internal and external challenges it faced.

Despite the state of weakness that befell the Caliphate, and the beginning of the disintegration of the Islamic world; Due to the wave of Western colonialism since the mid-nineteenth century, the majority of Muslims remained loyal to the Caliphate. Therefore, the decision to abolish the Caliphate was disastrous and painful, and caused tremendous confusion throughout the Islamic world. An effective movement was organized to revive the Caliphate again, and this was a broad movement that agreed in goal, but differed in means and approach.

Senior leaders in the Islamic world made commendable efforts to revive the Caliphate, and civil society also played a pivotal role in this field. This was represented in educational institutions such as Al-Azhar, or Islamic civil gatherings, as Muslims did in India, the Balkans, Africa, Asia, and Europe, and in remote places such as Japan. And Indonesia, and efforts by Muslim civil society to revive the Caliphate continued until the outbreak of World War II.

A large number of thinkers and writers contributed to directing public opinion and deriving possible ideas and visions. To restore the Islamic Caliphate, the arenas of thought and science witnessed profound and bold contributions from writers and thinkers such as Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Muhammad Abduh, al-Kawakibi, Malik bin Nabi, and others.

All of these thinkers presented ideas that are still relevant and inspiring for generations. The Eastern thinker Jamal al-Din al-Afghani adopted the idea of ​​an Islamic university at the end of the nineteenth century AD, and in the twentieth century the thinker Malek Bennabi proposed the idea of ​​establishing an Islamic commonwealth. Among the most important Muslim thinkers who were interested in the issue of caliphate was Dr. Abd al-Razzaq al-Sanhouri, who tried to present a new practical vision. To revive the caliphate.

Dr. Al-Sanhouri devoted his doctoral dissertation at the Sorbonne University in 1926 to the subject of the caliphate, and Al-Sanhouri argued that the reality of the Islamic world at that stage, and in light of the frenzied international colonial conflict, would not allow the establishment of a new caliphate, but the Islamic world, which had begun to form into a group of national states, could It meets under the umbrella of a comprehensive political organization that is the alternative to the caliphate.

He called that organization the Eastern League of Nations. Al-Sanhouri's ideas later paved the way for the establishment of the current Organization of Islamic Cooperation, which was established in 1969 and takes the city of Jeddah as its temporary headquarters until the liberation of Jerusalem.

Despite the major political transformations that the Islamic world witnessed after World War II, the rooting of the idea of ​​the nation-state, and the establishment of independent states throughout the Islamic world, which was entirely subject to the political or spiritual authority of a single caliph, the issue of the unity of the Islamic world remained.

Countries such as Pakistan, Malaysia, Somalia, Egypt, Morocco, and Guinea played major roles and presented important ideas and initiatives in order to establish an entity that represents the unity of the Islamic world, and these efforts resulted in the establishment of civil groupings that are still operating, such as the Islamic World Congress and the Muslim World League in Mecca. However, the greatest effort in this regard was what was undertaken by King Faisal bin Abdulaziz, which ended with the holding of the first Islamic summit in modern history, which was held in the city of Rabat in the year 1969, and ended with the establishment of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, which represents the largest political collective institution in the Islamic world, which includes It has 57 countries as members.

The era of the European Caliphate

These brief historical contexts confirm that the idea of ​​the Caliphate constituted fixed convictions in the collective Muslim mind in a way similar to consensus, and the idea of ​​the Caliphate was in no way imposed from outside on the Muslim public throughout their political history. Rather, general political thinking at that stage was based on the concept of the nation. In its broad sense, and not on the concept of the state in its narrow sense, and in its modern form, which is a product of the development of Western political thought.

The decision to dissolve the Caliphate was not the result of coincidence, but rather came as a result of long intellectual work within the campaign of intellectual and military invasion launched by Western European countries against the Islamic world. The colonial powers were active in promoting the idea of ​​the nation-state, in confronting the idea of ​​the nation upon which the Caliphate was based.

The campaign to promote the European-style nation-state had the ultimate intention of tearing apart the unity of the Islamic world and weakening its power. With the fragmentation of the Islamic world into mini-states, it became easy to attack it from all sides, and thus many Islamic countries and entities were destroyed the day the Ottoman Sultanate was annihilated.

The strange thing is that the European powers that resisted the caliphate, fought the idea of ​​the unity of the Islamic world, and adorned the nation-state in the Islamic world, soon began searching for a way to unite their countries so that they could face the challenges of the post-World War II era. Thus, since the middle of the twentieth century, European countries began working to form a European caliphate.

The idea of ​​European succession began with the coal union, and ended with the formation of the European Union, which became the unifying vessel for almost all European countries. With the establishment of the European Union, Europe practically began to move from the narrowness of the nation-state with its political and economic determinants, to the broadness of the union leading to unity under the umbrella of the European Union.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.