The Abolition of the Caliphate

On 3 March 1924 the Turkish Grand National Assembly passed a law abolishing the caliphate, deposing Abdulmecid II and expelling the members of the Ottoman house from the country. The sultanate had already been abolished sixteen months earlier, and Abdulmecid had been left as caliph without temporal power, an arrangement that lasted barely a year before it was judged incompatible with the new republic.

The office had been in Ottoman hands since the sixteenth century and had been of limited practical significance for most of that time. Its importance had actually grown in the nineteenth century, when Ottoman sultans emphasised the title as a claim on the loyalties of Muslims under British, Dutch and Russian rule. That is what made its abolition register as far away as India, where the Khilafat movement had campaigned for its preservation and was left without an object.

The immediate practical question was whether anyone would take it up. The sharif of Mecca declared himself caliph and was driven from the Hijaz within months. Congresses met at Cairo in 1926 and at Mecca in the same year to consider the matter and reached no agreement, because no candidate could command assent across the Muslim world and no procedure existed for choosing one. The office has not been filled since.

The abolition forced into the open a question that had rarely needed answering: whether the caliphate is a religious obligation or an accident of history. Both positions were argued immediately and by serious scholars, and both continue to be held.

The case for obligation rests on a long tradition of jurisprudence which treats the appointment of an imam or caliph as a communal duty, on the consensus of the classical jurists, and on the argument that Islamic law presupposes an authority able to apply it. Rashid Rida and others pressed this in the 1920s, while conceding that the Ottoman institution had long fallen short of the ideal.

The case against was made most sharply in 1925 by Ali Abd al-Raziq, an Egyptian scholar and judge trained at al-Azhar, who argued in a short book that the Prophet's mission was religious rather than political, that the caliphate is nowhere required by the Quran or by sound tradition, and that it had been a form of government like any other, defended by rulers who needed it. The book caused a storm; he was tried by a council of senior scholars, stripped of his credentials and removed from his post.

The atlas names both camps and does not adjudicate. It records the classical jurisprudential debate and the scholarly argument of the 1920s, and stops there.