by Hugh Kennedy
The caliph’s role was significant, but did not amount to very much. He was God’s representative on earth and divinely appointed ruler, and he alone could bring legitimacy to a sultan. However, as a fifteenth-century commentator, Khalīl al-Zāhiri, describes, his duties while in office were otherwise rather mundane:
His appointment is to concern himself with scholarship and to have a library. If the sultan travels on some business, he is to accompany him for the benefit of the Muslims [presumably to impress them with the sultan’s legitimacy as ruler]. He has numerous sources of revenue for his expenses and fine dwellings.
The conquest of Baghdad and the death of the last Abbasid caliph in 1258 also left the field open for other claimants, or rather for other Muslim rulers to use the title. The great historian and thinker Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1406) writes that the caliph is much more than a king, whose only concern is with the well-being of men on earth, whereas the caliph is divinely appointed and guides according to sharīa. Ibn Khaldūn also argues that the caliph should come from Quraysh because they were the most respected and influential tribe in Arabia at the time of the Prophet. He traces what he sees as the changing nature of the caliphate. Under the Orthodox caliphs the caliphate was a religious institution for the guiding of the faithful and the observance of religious laws. Under the Umayyads it became a despotic monarchy which ruled by military might. Soon after the death of Hārūn al-Rashīd it declined in power until it was little more than an empty title and the office had effectively ceased to exist.1 Ibn Khaldūn’s views probably represent those of many Muslims in the later Middle Ages for whom the great days of the caliphate were firmly in the past and the puppets in Cairo and the other pretenders had no real right to the title.
At that time a number of monarchs used the title more or less convincingly. Shah Rukh (1409–47), grandson of Tamerlane and ruler of much of Iran, claimed the title and was addressed by other rulers who sought his favour as caliph and ‘the shadow of God on earth’. Yet when he wrote to a Mamluk and an Ottoman ruler demanding that they should accept investiture from him as caliph and strike coins in his name, his pretensions were unceremoniously rejected. After the disappearance of the Almohad caliphate, the Hafsid rulers of Tunisia used the title, as did the Turkman rulers of eastern Anatolia in the fifteenth century and the Shaybani Uzbeg rulers of Bukhara in the sixteenth.
THE OTTOMAN CALIPHATE
The claims of these rulers to the title of caliph were never widely acknowledged and were in any case much less important to them than the title of sultan or khan. Only the Ottoman dynasty attempted to make their caliphate a reality, though they never used the other ancient title of Commander of the Faithful. The Ottomans were a Turkish family who had risen to power in north-west Anatolia in the fourteenth century, leading Muslims against the enfeebled Byzantine Empire. From 1354 onwards they also began the conquest of south-east Europe and in 1453 they seized Constantinople, a project which had first been attempted by the Umayyad caliphs seven centuries before. By the end of the fifteenth century they were the most powerful Muslim rulers in the Middle East and when they conquered Egypt from the Mamluks in 1517 their pre-eminence was unchallenged. It is not clear how the Ottoman sultans came to claim the caliphal title, although the title of sultan was always the most important to them. Murad I (1360–89) seems to have been the first of his dynasty to assume the title after he took Edirne and Plovdiv from the Byzantines in around 1362, when he wrote to lesser emirs in more eastern parts of Turkey that God had chosen him to assume the dignity of the caliphate. He called God to witness that ‘from the date of his coming to the throne, he had not taken a moment’s rest but had devoted himself day and night to the waging of war and jihād and always had his armour on to serve the well-being of the Muslims’.2 Some of his successors used the title, though not the great Mehmet II, whose conquest of Constantinople in 1453 might have been thought to give him an excellent claim.
In 1517 Selīm the Grim (1512–20) seized Cairo, putting an end to the Mamluk sultanate and taking possession of the puppet caliph Muttawakkil III along with what was claimed to be the regalia of the caliphate: the mantle of the Prophet, his staff and his seal. A legend, which seems to have been elaborated at the end of the eighteenth century, recounts that the last Abbasid transferred the caliphate to the Ottoman sultan, but this is no more than a piece of fiction concocted to justify the Ottomans’ renewed interest in the caliphal title at that time. A contemporary notes that ‘the caliph, Commander of the Faithful Mutawakkil, has been sent by sea to Istanbul’ and three years later he is said to still be living in the capital. After the accession of Sulayman the Magnificent in 1520, Mutawakkil was allowed to return to Egypt where he died in 1543, the last and final claimant of a line which stretched back to Saffāh in 750.
Selīm assumed not the title of caliph but that of Khādim al-haramayn al-sharīfayn (Servant of the Two Noble Sanctuaries). Since the end of the Abbasid caliphate in 1258, a number of Muslim monarchs had competed for the right to guard Mecca and Medina, which was understood to include the right to have one’s name mentioned at the khutba in Mecca, and hence to have one’s status confirmed in front of the pilgrims from all over the Muslim world at the time of the hajj. Powerful rulers like Timur’s grandson Shah Rukh had coveted the honour, but the simple fact was that whoever ruled Egypt could maintain his right to the title because the Holy Cities were dependent on Egypt for the grain which kept their people alive. In the late fifteenth century an added urgency was given to this office by the appearance for the first time of Portuguese warships in the Red Sea and the Gulf. Muslims were right to fear that these new infidel invaders would attack Mecca. It was no empty honour that Selīm assumed.
From Selīm’s time until the First World War, it was the Ottomans who protected the great hajj caravans setting out from Damascus and Cairo and the Ottomans who provided the kiswa each year. This probably did more than anything else to encourage Muslims, wherever they came from, to regard the Ottomans as leaders of the Muslim world. Despite this, Selīm never seems to have called himself caliph or to have been mentioned as such on coins or in documents; he was always known as sultan. By the reign of Sulayman the Magnificent (1520–56), it was generally accepted that the Ottomans were caliphs as well as sultans. The title of caliph was only really used in relations with other Muslim powers, like the rulers of Morocco, who were not under the direct authority of the Ottomans. The Sadi rulers of Morocco (1510– 1668) accepted the status of the Ottomans as the protectors of Islam but only as representatives of the true caliphs, who had to be members of the tribe of Quraysh, and they themselves claimed to be descendants of Alī and Fātima. Other Muslim potentates also appropriated the title, as for instance the Mogul emperor Akbar (1556–1605) in distant Delhi, but it was never more than a vague honorific.
In around 1553 the Ottoman grand vizier Lutfi Pasha wrote a pamphlet in which he tackled the issue of the sultan’s right to be caliph. He does this, he explains, in response to scholars who have maintained that only a member of Quraysh can be caliph. His argument is that a caliph is absolutely necessary, based on the ancient and widely known Tradition which states that if there is no acknowledged caliph ‘the condition of the Muslims is a matter of uncertainty when they die without having known the imam [caliph] of their time and their death is the death of the Jāhiliyya [that is, Muslims would die like those who had not known the Prophet and would therefore go to hell]’. He then cites numerous authorities, including the great historian Tabarī, to the effect that the title of sultan belongs to a ruler who holds the power, while the imam is ‘the one who maintains the Faith and governs the kingdoms of Islam with equity’. The caliph is ‘he who commands the good and prohibits the evil [that is, maintains the sharīa]’. If the conditions mentioned above, that is conquest, power of compulsion, maintenance of the faith with justice, commanding the good and forbidding the evil, are combined in one person, then he is a sultan who can justly claim the titles of imam, caliph, wālī and emir without con
tradiction. He points out: ‘Our ulama have said that a man becomes sultan by two things: the first by the swearing of allegiance to him and the second is that he can effectively execute his decisions’, and then adds that not one of the legal authorities he has consulted has ruled or asserted that the caliph ‘should be of Quraysh, nor of Hashimi descent, nor appointed by the Abbasid or any other person.’ For him, the statement that the imam should be of Qurashi origin applies to the beginnings of the caliphate, when the Quraysh asserted their rights over the ansār of Medina, and was not relevant in the present day.
Lutfi’s fundamental argument is that the caliphate belongs to the one who effectively leads and protects the Muslim people. The qualifications for the office are power and competence. Inheritance or kinship have no part in this. This is an argument which, in a sense, goes back to the Zaydi idea that the caliphate belongs to the man who takes action and seizes power in the name of the Family of the Prophet, except that the Zaydis insist on the Qurashi descent of the caliph. There are also echoes here of the discussions of Juwaynī and Ghazālī in the eleventh century, for whom power was the main qualification for the office of caliph. In Ottoman times it seems to have been generally accepted that the power and authority of the Ottoman sultan justified his taking of the title of caliph, but in doing so the force of the title was largely lost, subsumed in the wider rhetoric of Ottoman power. There was no authority that the sultan gained as caliph which he did not already have as sultan and the office therefore added little to his standing.
In the eighteenth century, with the Muslim world in general and the Ottoman Empire in particular increasingly threatened by European powers, there was a renewed interest in the idea of the caliphate. The first example of this seems to have been in the Treaty of Kucuk Kaynarca of 1774, in which the Ottoman sultan Abd al-Hamīd I (1774–89) was obliged, to all intents and purposes, to cede the sovereignty of the largely Muslim Crimea to Catherine the Great of Russia, and where the sultan was described as ‘the imam of the believers and the caliph of all those who profess the unity of God [that is, Muslims]’. This seems to be a face-saving formula to allow him to claim to be the spiritual leader of the Muslims of Crimea and to avoid the shame of allowing Muslims to be ruled by infidels. After this, the idea of the caliphate was increasingly developed by the Ottomans to allow them to claim a spiritual leadership of Muslims beyond their political borders. This introduced a distinction between the political and military leadership (the sultanate) and the spiritual leadership (the caliphate), which was essentially new to Muslim political thought but served useful purposes in the diplomacy of the time.
ABD AL-HAMĪD II, SULTAN AND CALIPH
The role of the sultan as caliph was pursued with more consistency and determination by Sultan Abd al-Hamīd II (1876–1909). Abd al-Hamīd came to the throne on the deposition of his brother. He was immediately given the oath of allegiance as sultan and caliph. Apart from the baya, he based his claim to the caliphate on three well-established principles. The first of these was God’s will; the second was hereditary succession as his ancestors were Great Caliphs; and the third was the possession of real political power to defend the Muslims. The only one of the traditional attributes of caliphate he could not claim was, of course, membership of Quraysh, but, as we have seen, this had not prevented earlier Ottomans from claiming the office.3
On his accession Abd al-Hamīd was obliged to sign a constitution modelled on western European examples—the first such constitution in the Islamic world. As compensation, perhaps, for his loss of temporal power, his role as caliph was developed. In Article 3 of the constitution it is stated that ‘The August Ottoman Sultanate, the office of the supreme Islamic Caliphate, must devolve upon the oldest of the members of the [Ottoman family]’, a clear enunciation of hereditary succession. Article 4 states that ‘the Sultan, in his capacity as Caliph, is the protector of the Muslim religion’. The constitution was soon suspended and did not come into force until 1909, but Abd al-Hamīd clung to and developed the idea that the Ottoman caliph was the leader of all Muslims, not just those under Ottoman rule.
The personality of the sultan-caliph was one of apparent contradictions. For many outside the Ottoman Empire, in western Europe and Russia, he was ‘Abdul the Damned’, a devious and bloodthirsty tyrant who mistreated and massacred his Christian subjects and about whom nothing good could be said. He was certainly an autocrat, secretive and deeply suspicious by nature. He believed strongly that it was his responsibility, laid on him by God, to rule and protect the Muslim people, both inside and beyond the borders of the Ottoman Empire. He regarded the constitutionalist movement, led by the westernizing reformer Midhat Pasha, as an attack on the divinely sanctioned political order which would undermine the Muslim world, and his opponents were sent away to exile and death. ‘The padishah’ (sultan-caliph), he wrote, is
accountable only to God and history. . . . If we want to rejuvenate, find our previous force and reach our old greatness, we ought to remember the fountainhead of our strength. What is beneficial to us is not to imitate the so-called European civilization but to return the sharīa, the source of our strength. . . . Almighty God, I can only be Your slave and ask only Your help. Lead us on the right path.4
There was no doubt that he was a pious and believing Muslim and these sentiments would certainly be shared by many contemporary Islamists. At the same time he was keenly interested in the technologies of modernity, which he saw as essential to the survival of the Ottoman state. He encouraged the study of western military technologies, bringing the celebrated Colmar von der Goltz and other German officers to train his armed forces, and the building of railways. Culturally too he was open-minded: he enjoyed western music, especially Italian opera, and his private library at the Yildiz Palace consisted of some 100,000 volumes, not only rare Arabic and Persian manuscripts but western works on philosophy and science. In this he was following the example of the great bibliophile caliphs of the past, the Abbasid Ma’mūn in Baghdad and the Umayyad Hakam II in Córdoba. He ordered his government to participate in the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, where there was a Turkish village with a mosque and a covered bazaar in which products of the Ottoman sultanate were sold. He encouraged the participation of his Christian subjects in the economic and social life of the empire, noting that Muslims and Christians worshipped the same God, but also that some Christians had been led astray by the fanaticism of their priests to seek outside help against his lawful government.
One of the most celebrated examples of his adoption of modern technologies to fulfil the ancient responsibilities of the caliphate was the construction of the Hijaz railway from Damascus to Medina, completed in 1900. This enabled the pilgrims from Ottoman lands to make the hajj in the (comparative) comfort of the train as opposed to going on foot or on camels. It also alienated many of the Bedouin who had been used to the protection money that the pilgrims paid them, and they were more than happy to cooperate with the British mission led by T. E. Lawrence in his attempts to destroy the track during the First World War. In doing this Abd al-Hamīd was facilitating the hajj, just as Hārūn al-Rashīd and the Abbasids had done 1,100 years before with the construction of the Darb Zubayda.
The reign of the new sultan-caliph began with a disastrous war against the Russians in 1877–8, which led to the loss of Bulgaria and other areas of the Balkans. Many in the Muslim world feared that the Ottoman Empire would completely disintegrate, but perhaps paradoxically this defeat encouraged the idea of reviving the concept of the caliphate as a way of defending Muslims against outside attack.
This was a period when many areas of the Muslim world beyond the frontiers of the Ottoman Empire were coming under increasing pressure from outside powers who sought to take over and colonize them. One of the most important of these areas was Central Asia where Russian advances were swallowing up the independent Khanates of Khiva, Bukhara and Kokand, while the Chinese were advancing on Kashgar from the east. All these regions were Muslim and Turkish-speaki
ng and the threatened rulers sought the support of the Ottoman caliph in resisting the invaders. Equally dangerous as far as many Muslims were concerned was the British military occupation of Egypt in 1882. Although Egypt had not been part of the Ottoman Empire since Napoleon’s invasion of 1798, many Muslims there and elsewhere hoped that the caliph would be able to take action. Even in the distant Comoro Islands, between Mozambique and Madagascar, the Muslim inhabitants, threatened by French occupation, appealed for Ottoman support. But the sultan-caliph was no political adventurer: he would offer moral support and refuge in Istanbul, but his military forces remained firmly inside the Ottoman frontiers.
His role as leader of all Muslims was acknowledged in a number of the treaties made with foreign powers during the slow disintegration of the Ottoman Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. When the Austro-Hungarian Empire annexed Bosnia in 1908, the name of Abd al-Hamīd as sultan-caliph continued to be mentioned in Muslim prayers, and after the Italian conquest of Libya, in 1912, the qādī of Tripoli continued to be appointed from Istanbul. Abd al-Hamīd also tried to use his prestige as caliph as a way to gain the loyalty of the Arab inhabitants of the sultanate, increasingly attracted by the ideas of Arab nationalism.
Another area in which the later Ottomans used and developed the idea of caliphate was their veneration and display of the holy relics. The sultans established a permanent collection of the relics of the Prophet and many of the early heroes of Islam in the Topkapi Saray in Istanbul. They are housed in a series of four smallish rooms, exquisitely decorated with sixteenth-century Iznik tiles. Originally these rooms were the sleeping quarters of the sultans themselves, but from the seventeenth century they moved their quarters to the nearby harem and the rooms seem to have been kept solely as a repository for the relics, which remain there to this day. It is clearly impossible to date these objects or to have any scientific proof that any of them are what they claim to be. We can, however, be certain that some of them, in particular the burda (mantle of the Prophet) the most precious and venerated, were already in the Topkapi collection by the sixteenth century. The relics were a visible and tangible sign of the Ottomans’ claims to be both the successors of the early caliphs and guardians of the Holy Cities.
