Fall of the Caliphate at Ataturk’s Hands and the Islamic World’s Struggle over the Caliphate’s Succession

The declaration of the Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk to end the Ottoman caliphate and the proclamation of the Turkish Republic in 1924 is the last chapter in a long series of attempts by the great powers, especially Russia and England, to weaken the Ottoman caliphate and then encourage their regions to separate from them and finally to divide them and weaken their armies and institutions.

This comes sometimes in the name of modernization and some other times in the name of the right of peoples and nationalities to govern themselves and not within one empire that gathers the diaspora in the name of the one religion that brings together all these peoples: Islam.

Some Ottoman ministers and high-ranking Islamic figures in the Muslim world have tried to convince Kemal Ataturk to proceed with his project of establishing a modern and secular Turkey, but with the succession left in the hands of the Osmans to preserve the religious form and spirituality of the post without any political authority. But Kemal Ataturk rejected these proposals for the following reasons:

1. That he personally believed that the time of the religious empires has passed in the east and west and that the remaining empires will gradually turn to constitutional and parliamentary kingdoms owned by the king and not ruled by him and that the Christian religious authority of the Pope, for example, was broken by the wars of Napoleon against it and it will turn following the agreement known as “Le concordat” with Napoleon into a ceremonial spiritual authority without any political cover.
2. That Kemal Ataturk believed that four centuries of the Ottoman caliphate had lasted too long and that in modern times it is no longer possible to preserve vast empires geographically except by force of arms, which was not practical in 1924, especially after the defeat of Turkey in the First World War.
3. In fact, the real reason that Ataturk refused to retain the position of the caliph was only that he wanted to get rid of the Osmans and that he was afraid that those will be able to return and restore the political authority in the country.

In 1924, Kemal Ataturk gave the green light to the leaders of the great regions of the former Ottoman Empire in order to compete for the title of the caliph until the door was finally closed on the possibility of the return of the caliphate to Istanbul. This opened the door to fierce competition between four poles in the Islamic world that are competing for the title of the caliph, namely King Ahmed Fuad I of Egypt, King Hussein bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca and King Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia, el-Sayyed el-Senoussi and Marrakesh’s sultan.

The French newspapers began from the same year “1924” to talk about the great misery reached by the princesses and princes of the house of the former Caliphate to the extent that Sultan Abdul Hamid has not had enough money for more than two months. The Egyptian Embassy in Paris reported on March 29, 1924 that the former caliph had asked the representatives of the Islamic countries in Paris and London to allocate fixed financial allocations. He even went to the Egyptian Ambassador in Paris, Mahmoud Fakhry Pasha (the husband of the king’s daughter), asking him to talk to Ahmed Fuad and save him and his family. However, the government of Kemal Ataturk instructed the press to publish that the new Turkish president is not comfortable to provide any financial assistance not only to the former caliph, but also to members of his family, out of fear of using this money to return to the rule in Turkey.

The letters of the princesses and princes of the Osman family were sent to King Fuad, including Princess Bahia, granddaughter of Sultan Mohammad Rashad, Princess Salha, daughter of Sultan Abdul Aziz and Prince Ahmed Nihad Saladin, grandson of Sultan Murad V, who was forced to sell his apartment in Nice, France as well as a sad message from Princess Munira Sultan, granddaughter of Sultan Abdul Majeed.

The same happened to the senior government men and the palace of the former caliph. The prince also reached the petitions of assistance presented by Sheikh of Tkiyya El-mulawiyya (A place for Dervishes) on December 31, 1929. King Fuad sought to save this place which was called “Galaliya Waqfs” in relation to Galal El-Din El-Rumi after the emerging Turkish republic cut off its financial allocations.

King Ahmed Fuad was able to take advantage of the resorting of the former caliphate leaders to Abdeen Palace and preaches to the newspapers in Cairo, Paris and London to publish such news so as to appear as a new sponsor of the caliph, his sons and grandsons as was always the position of Egypt with all the ousted caliphs and their children in the Abbasid and Fatimid eras. It seems that Kemal Atatürk saw Cairo as the capital, which could absorb the remaining love of Muslims for the caliphate and their tendency to have an emir.

I translated into Arabic a book by the philosopher Leibniz called “Le concilium aegyptium” and published it in the book series The Crescent in Cairo with an introduction to the late Grand Kamel Zuhairi in 1995. I also published the French text as a supplement to my studies in Sorbonne in 1992 and then as an appendix in my book titled la fascination de l’Egypte: du rêve au projet through the publisher l’Harmaattan.

In the book, the philosopher says that the Ottoman caliphs felt that the Russian threat to them would come one day and be a factor in the demise of the caliphate and that the only city that could at this time be the capital of the caliphate within the empire is the city of Cairo. He also said that the Osman family can resort to this city in case of the fall of the caliphate in Istanbul.

In his memoirs, Nubar Pasha mentioned that in his meeting with the Grand Vizier three months before his death in 1871, Istanbul rejected the project of digging the Suez Canal about 20 years ago because it knew that digging the canal would immediately bring the fleets of England to the coast of Egypt and that they would end up with the occupation of Cairo (which was what happened after 11 years only). Istanbul is considered in the philosophy of the Ottoman caliphate as a major Islamic capital and as an alternative to the caliphate in case it fell. Ataturk himself was convinced of this.

However, the Egyptian Ambassador to London Aziz Pasha Ezzat (born in 1869 and died on April 12, 1961), Egypt’s first ambassador to London, said in a confidential report to King Fuad on March 7, 1924 that the British were concerned that the new King of Egypt would present himself to the Islamic world as a caliph to the Muslims and they prefer the king of the Hijaz or even the king of the Afghans so that the Islamic Caliphate be away from Cairo, where the British saw a wide French political and cultural effect.

The Egyptian ambassador proposed to the king the need to hold an Islamic conference for allegiance in Cairo. Curiously, the French newspapers quickly demanded that Cairo be the capital of the new Caliphate.  The writer Paul Olagnier wrote in “L’Action Français” newspaper on April 23, 1928 in an article entitled “l’Egypte et le Khalifa” about the advantages that Egypt has and enables it to embrace the Caliphate. These advantages are not limited to the facts that it has Al-Azhar, or due to the physical and moral well-being of the Alawite family in Egypt, but also for the diversity and capability of the Egyptian army, the Egyptian Navy and the Egyptian police in addition to Egypt’s large population which stood at 15 million – a very large number at the time.

In the French newspaper Liberte on March 25, 1924, the Prince, Aziz Hassan, wrote an article refuting the claims of Sharif Hussein in Mecca and the Emir of the Afghans in addition to the claims of the English press that one of the reasons for the fall of the Ottoman Caliphate was the failure of Egypt from supporting the Ottoman Sultan militarily in his wars. The prince said that Egypt would never fail as it sent its armies in succession to fight the Wahhabis in the Hijaz at one time and to put down the Greek revolution in Mora at other times, in addition to its participation in the battles of Sebastopol and Nefarben in 1878.

When Sharif Hussein saw the rush of the French press to support the King of Egypt, he declared himself to be heir after his children and his tribe gave him allegiance as a caliph to the Muslims in late March 1924. This was rejected by the Muslims of India and the Arab Maghreb and rebuked by Kemal Ataturk himself. This is because Ataturk knew the role played by Sharif Hussein in defeating the Ottoman army in the First World War and since then Egypt supported “Abdul Aziz Al Saud” in Najd in expanding his kingdom and becoming king of all Hijaz.

The crisis of the Caliphate erupted in Egypt when the book “Islam and the Foundations of Government” appeared to Sheikh Ali Abdul Raziq in 1925. In the book, he said that Islam does not require that the nation have an imam, and that there is no single proof from the Qur’an and Sunnah, saying that Muslims should be imams or caliphs.

On August 28, 1925, Sheikh Muhammad Mustafa Al Maraghi, Sheikh of Al-Azhar, gave allegiance to King Fuad in a telegram following the imam’s inauguration of the Friday prayer from one of the mosques in Helwan, saying: “Today, His Majesty the King marked in the record of Islamic history the most beautiful page of his pages with being the imam of the faithful in Friday prayers.”

Archives of Abdeen Palace on 24 January 1929

Despite the various conferences of the caliphate in the city of Karachi in 1923, Mecca in 1928 and Jerusalem in 1931, the Cairo Conference held on May 13-19, 1926 attracted much spotlight not only because of the number of attendees and personalities that participated in it, but also because it revealed that the subject of the Caliphate is no longer suitable for the developments of the era and that the liberal current within Egypt, as Paul Ollonier says in L’Action Francais, derives its strength from the ideas of liberal Paris and the ideas of the parliamentary republic which were dominated by secularism thanks to the Wafd Party.

King Fuad, who did not speak Arabic, realized that it would be difficult for him to follow up on this issue. He preferred to search for a new wife to whom the crown prince would be born. King Farouk would also want in a moment to become a caliph. It seems that Kemal Ataturk was right in his view of the caliphate as an obsolete subject.

The strangest thing is that an Egyptian from the general public named Hasan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Ismailia in 1928, two years after the Cairo Conference to begin another stage in the issue of the caliphate with different persons, different ways and a different era.