On March 3, 1924, the Turkish Parliament voted to abolish the caliphate [Abdülmecid II (1868-1944) étant le 101e calife]. It is the end of a myth, that of the Ottoman magisterium on the umma, this community of faithful Muslims with a universal vocation. But it is also the end of an illusion, since the Ottoman caliph had lost all temporal power with the abolition of the sultanate in 1922, and the proclamation of the Turkish Republic the following year, Mustapha Kemal (1881-1938) becoming its first president. It was not until 1934 that the founder of modern Turkey was conferred by Parliament the title of Atatürk, Father of the Turks.
The dignity of caliph had for more than two centuries had a minor importance for the Ottoman sultans, attached to their power (sulta) effective rather than succession (khilafah) of the prophet Muhammad (Mohammed).
Ottoman Caliphate Fiction
In 1517, Sultan Selim 1er had certainly brought back from Cairo to Istanbul the caliph Al-Mutawakkil III, a distant descendant of the Abbasids expelled from Baghdad in 1258. But, unlike the Mamluks of Egypt, who had the Friday prayer pronounced in the name of a caliph deprived of any real authority, the Ottoman sultans had long organized in their sole name this fundamental rite for their legitimation.
If there was an abolition of the caliphate, it therefore occurred during the capture of Cairo in 1517, and not during the vote of Ankara in 1924. Furthermore, the Ottomans had no right to claim a title which could be debated whether it should fall to the Prophet’s relatives or result from a consensus, but which it was certain could only fall to an Arab.
It was a laborious construction which allowed the Ottoman sultan to proclaim himself caliph in 1774… within the framework of a treaty with Russia: Sultan Abdülhamid Ier then recognized the formal independence of Crimea (soon annexed by Catherine II), but as caliph he retained spiritual authority over the Muslim population of this territory. This union, in the sole person of the Ottoman sovereign, of the temporal powers of the Sultan and the spiritual powers of the Caliph lasted until the accession to power, in 1908, of the Young Turks, a revolutionary nationalist political party.
The new masters of the Empire did not hesitate to replace Abdülhamid II in 1909 – nicknamed “the Red Sultan” because of the bloody repression which followed an Armenian rebellion in 1894 – with the more docile Mehmed V. They believed they would benefit from his prestige as caliph to launch in his name, in November 1914, jihad against France, Russia and Great Britain. But this call has no echo, neither in British India, nor in the Russian Caucasus, nor in French North Africa, proof that the moral authority of the caliph is already nothing more than a fiction.
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