Author’s note: I wrote this essay as I was trying to make sense of what actually happened to the Caliphate as an institution after 1924. During the research it became clear how much competition there was to assume the office after the Ataturk declared Turkey a republic and abolished it. This is what I came up with — an exploration of the sequence of events that led to it being disbanded, the international Muslim response to it and the competition to assume the vacated office before its eventual demise.

The mountain of Tur is there in Sinai, but there is no Musa to ask for it — Muhammad Iqbal, Jawab-e-Shikwa

On the evening of October 28th 1923 Mustafa Kemal Pasa (Ataturk), Fethi Ismet and some military commanders met at his house for dinner. Kemal would furtively confide in them his intention to declare Turkey a republic the following day. When the next day came and many of the veterans of the Turkish War of Independence such as Huseyin Rauf, Ali Fuat and Musa Kazim weren’t in Ankara, the birth of the Turkish Republic would be declared with Mustafa Kemal its first president and Ismet Inonu its very influential first prime minister cum-president. The age of multi-ethnic, multi-religious empires was over and Turkey was in lockstep with this new trend. Rauf, Fuat and Kazim among others would find out second hand about the declaration with Rauf even giving critical interviews to Istanbul’s press scene, a city which was still de facto outside the purview of the new government emerging in Ankara.

The Ankara government, led by Ataturk wasn’t very popular in Istanbul, not least because they banned alcohol, but also left thousands of civil servants technically unemployed. “What’s the rush” Rauf would ask in an interview he gave that morning.[1] Though Rauf and Kemal were initially allies the break between them was part of the wider power struggles in the independence movement, as well as growing concern in Istanbul about the power of Ataturk’s new government. Throughout the war Ataturk maintained unity through his evocative appeals to the common religion of his men, and their religious duty to defend their homeland. “As soon the Sultan-Caliph is delivered from all pressure and cohesion” Ataturk said, “he will take his place within the frame of the legislative principles which will be determined by the [Grand National] Assembly.”[2]

He even appeased members of his faction when he allowed Islam to be declared Turkey’s official religion when the republic was born on the 29th October. “The ‘Kemalist project’ was, at best, in its infant stages by 1923” writes Rueben Silverman.[3] But by March 1924 Kemal’s biggest blow fell like a death knell. The caliphal office was abolished and the Ottoman family was driven into exile. The Ottoman Empire’s de facto prestigious role as the leader of the global Muslim community already in its sunset phase, was now decisively over. The caliphate was knocked out of its shell — the state in which it rested, to employ an interesting reading of the recent blockbuster Ghost in the Shell — with its ghost haunting Muslim societies from Cairo to Calcutta. And the absence of a replacement Caliph, Kramer says “was bound to intensify the contest among Muslim regimes for primacy in Islam.”[4]

The Economist would describe the event as a “repudiation of the Caliphate by the Turks”. It “marks an epoch in the expansion of Western ideas over the non-Western world, for our Western principles of national sovereignty and self-government are the real forces to which the unfortunate ‘Abdu’l Mejid Efendi has fallen a victim.” The Caliph, the article astutely remarked is an office of leadership for all Muslims, “it is therefore almost impossible to find a place for him in a national state”. Ziya Pasa, former statesman and leader of the reformist Young Ottoman society would complain much earlier of a ubiquitous new mood that viewed Islam as a “stumbling block to the progress of the state”. “Forgetting our religious loyalty” he would write, “in all our affairs and following Frankish ideas is now the fashion”.[5] He wouldn’t be able to resist the zeitgeist.

Reconciling the concepts of popular sovereignty and legal citizenship — the basis upon which the majority of the world’s Muslim majority nation-states would be founded — with the office of a universal Caliph to whom all believers answer and have duties, would be as difficult ontologically as it would be legally for a new state. The Russians attempted to manage a similar challenge in a 1774 treaty with the Ottoman Empire following the Crimean War by firstly recognizing the Ottoman Sultan as the “Supreme Muhammedan Caliph”, with the qualification that the Muslims of Crimea were to “conduct themselves towards him as is prescribed in the rules of their religion, without, however, compromising their political and civil independence.”[6] This treaty and other similar one’s notes Haddad, legalized and normalized a seeming contradiction between the Caliph’s spiritual and temporal responsibilities.[7]

Ataturk, not a man particularly interested in mincing words when he had a goal in mind, solved the paradox by simply liquidating the office. Though he initially thought of declaring himself Caliph (and even exporting the office at one point), he remained steadfast on the new course, even exonerating himself of any wrongdoing by relying on a technical argument that the Caliphate as an institution had become moribund following the Rightly Guided Caliphs. “He [Ataturk] used his antagonism toward the wartime leadership in Istanbul”, Ryan Gingeras told Hürriyet, “as a way to underline the inability of the Young Turks to rule” and while doing so also de-legitimized Ottoman rule. This allowed him to “consolidate a far more regimented and personalized rule over the republic” as he played on the idea that “the Young Turks didn’t just rule poorly but also handled things incompetently.”

For things to remain the same, sometimes everything has to change, and Ataturk would be the catalyst driving the reforms which were viewed as essential to protect Turkey’s hard earned freedom. As a young man Ataturk told a friend he would one day be the man that “appoints prime ministers”, and that he “would introduce at a single stroke the transformation” that Turkey needed in its social life. Ataturk viewed culture as a question of national security and expressed this view in a speech to a group of German officers:

“The Turkish army will have done its duty when it defends the country from foreign aggression and frees the nation from fanaticism and intellectual slavery. The Turkish nation has fallen far behind the West. The main aim should be to lead it to modern civilization.”

Secularization then wasn’t just a viewed as a fashionable new trend to satisfy the caprice of Turkey’s new leaders, but a strategy to ensure Turkey’s survival & independence. The objective for Ataturk’s new government, as outlined in his inaugural presidential speech, was to build a “new country, a new society, a new state… respected at home and abroad.” In April 1924, Sharia courts were abolished. In September 1925 it was a criminal offense to wear traditional gowns and turbans, unless you were an official religious leader. That same month Dervish orders were outlawed. On New Years Day 1926, the Gregorian calendar replaced the Islamic lunar calendar. On February 1926, the Swiss civil code was adopted, March that year the Italian penal code was introduced, then new commercial laws based on Italian and German sources came into effect in May. Then on November 1926, Ataturk erected a firewall around Turkey’s Ottoman past when he Latinized the alphabet.[8]

Cemil Meric, a prominent Turkish philosopher would describe it as the “the misfortune of the Turkish language”.[9] Novelist Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar would describe the entire episode as the “fatality of Turkish history”.[10] Eulogizing him after his death however the Times placed him among “the leaders whom the new Europe has seen emerge from the confusion of war and revolution…” None of them it continued “has accomplished more, none has faced greater difficulty.” Akşam, a Turkish newspaper would run the headline “The big chief gives new directives to the nation and the government”. The New York Times headline story on November 11th was “Ataturk, a Military Hero, Formed a Surging Nation”.

A vox pop by TRT World surveying the views of Turks today of their country’s most influential modern leader.

Despite his military triumph over Anatolia’s occupiers, Ataturk’s Kemalist Revolution was at bottom the product of a deep defeat to the Europeans, which harmed the self-confidence of Muslim and other colonized peoples. To put an end to the Caliphate, Kemal would say, “put an end to the catastrophes into which the people had been dragged by following those who deceive themselves and misjudge our real rank and position in the world.”[11] Kemal was one of the most keen and alert observers of the reality that the Muslim world fell into “someone else’s power” as Albert Hourani would remark, an experience which induced “doubts about the ordering of the universe”.[12] Faced with this set of circumstances it shouldn’t come as a surprise that “in the choice between modernity, with its promises of tomorrow, and Islam with its memories of past glories,” Salman Sayyid writes in his book A Fundamental Fear, “the rulers of the leading Muslim state chose modernity.”[13] Ryan Gingeras, in his newly published book Eternal Dawn: Turkey in the Age of Ataturk, writes “Turkey, for all who first helped build it, was to be a country that only faced forward.”[14]

Ataturk and other powerful reform minded leaders in Asia and Africa “felt oppressed and humiliated by the power of the industrialized west and urgently sought to match it” writes Indian journalist Pankaj Mishra. And a “robust bureaucratic state” with a “suitably enlightened ruling elite” would have to forge citizens “out of a scattered mass of peasants and merchants, and endow them with a sense of national identity,” — an exotic import in the Muslim world.[15]

“The global human drama”, Mishra writes in his new book Age of Anger, “would henceforth be powered by appropriative mimicry.” These new leaders resented the traditionalist mindsets in their societies elites, as much as they resented European domination. “In their quest to give their people a fair chance at strength, equality and dignity in the white man’s palace,” Mishra continues, Ataturk, among others, “followed the Western model of mass-mobilization, state-building and industrialization.”[16] Ziya Gökalp, one of early Republican Turkey’s most prominent intellectuals, captured this mood when he wrote “European civilization will have a beneficial effect on us, not only with its science and technology, but also in matters of taste and morality.”[17]

Ataturk’s reformist program had a huge impact on other parts of the Muslim world too, due in part to the central role Turkey played among Muslims, but also because Turkey was among the first Muslim countries to free itself of foreign occupation under Ataturk’s determined leadership. Ali Jinnah, founder of Pakistan, commenting after Ataturk’s death said “in him not only the Muslims but the whole world has lost one of the greatest men that ever lived.” Reza Khan of Iran would begin his own less successful project to modernize Iran. Though Habib Bourguiba — Tunisia’s founding president — said Ataturk “had tried to do too much too quickly,” he was an avid admirer of his reforms. Pan-Arabist ideologue, Sati al-Husri, saw Kemal’s reforms as the next stage in the history of human development. Ataturk, al-Husri said, led Turks to realizing the “evils which had been concealed behind the cloak of the Islamic caliphate.”[18] Dr Soetomo, a Dutch educated Indonesian nationalist (the most populous Muslim country today) considered the emulation of Ataturk crucial if Indonesia was to emerge as an independent nation-state.

Reza Shah Pahlavi made a state visit to Turkey in June 1934. He crossed the Gurbulak border checkpoint, after which he traveled by land to Trabzon and onto Samsun by ship before taking a train to Ankara where he arrived on the 16th June. The Shah spoke with Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (L) in Azeri-Turkic (Credit: Office of the Prime Minister, Directorate General of Press and Information Archive).

Many Indonesian newspapers lionized Ataturk as a hero during the independence war, with Sarekat Islam’s bulletin Doenia Islam even featuring him in its leadership column giving him the Javanese title senopati, “a sobriquet for the first Sultan of Mataram.” Chiara Formichi says “Kemal had become the yardstick of political transformation and nationalist affirmation” in Indonesia.[19] Even prominent Muslim intellectuals like Rashid Rida and Muhammad Iqbal initially admired Ataturk. In his typical Nietzschean style Iqbal said that the Turks were “on the way to creating new values” in contrast to other Muslims who were repeating ways of old. In one of his last letters before his death Iqbal wrote “my time is up. Instead of praying for me, you should pray for the lives of Mr Jinnah and Ataturk.” They soon came to the conclusion however that Ataturk had erred due to a faulty understanding of Islam’s potential role as a life giving force, as well as its capacity to reform.

On the pulpit of the Ummayad Mosque in Damascus during Friday prayers on March 7th Shaykh Abd al-Qadir al-Khatib gave an impassioned speech recounting how the Ottoman Caliphate defended the honor of Muslims globally and that it was the prayers and efforts of Muslims which helped the Turks during their independence war. They repaid the goodwill he said by abolishing the Caliphate, and expelling the caliph which “has left a bitter impression on every Muslim believer”. In Sarajevo, similar scorn, displeasure and bewilderment was reported by the British Consulate among Bosnian scholars and intellectuals.[20] In al-Muqattam, Muhammad Shaker, who not long ago was himself asking questions about the Caliphate would write “the caliphate was never a national system, even for a day” and therefore the “leaders of the Turkish republic had no right to decide to abolish it.”[21]

By 1926, Indonesian periodicals like Medan Moeslimin would also shift their focus taking a more cynical view of Ataturk’s program. One article said “it’s not its economy or politics which is being reformed, but just its clothes, in accordance with the trend of the moment and general needs.” Penerangan Islam had accused him of “having gone crazy with power”. Fadjar Asia a different Sarekat Islam bulletin published an article with the headline “A new religion in the old capital of Islam”.[22] They may have had a point as Behcet Kemal Caglar, a Turkish poet famous for his devotion to Ataturk would describe Ataturk as “the God who landed on Samsun.” Kemalettin Kamu, another Turkish poet and politician, said Ataturk’s residence in Cankaya should be the nations new Kaa’ba.[23]

A poster from 1934. Mustafa Kemal takes the place of the sun, whose rays nourish Turkey’s reforms. Below we can see the steps taken as Turkey began to reform. It begins with the Turkish War of Independence, which is depicted by the bayoneting of a Greek, concluding with the change of alphabet and the overall position of women in society improving as can be see.

Shakib Arslan was another prominent intellectual of the period who didn’t buy into Ataturk’s reforms. Dubbed the “Prince of Eloquence” Arslan was a Lebanese Druze (who converted to Islam), a poet, writer and an Ottoman parliamentarian, who at a young age took an active part in the dynamic literary and intellectual scenes of Istanbul and Cairo. This is when he became acquainted with the various diagnoses of Islam’s malaise and the reformist thought of thinkers like al-Afghani and Abduh.

Throughout his life however Martin Kramer says, “Arslan chose as his vocation the defense of all Islam, becoming a fiercely patriotic Ottoman and a cosmopolitan pan-Islamist.”[23] Islam he believed was the last bulwark against Western domination, and his zealous commitment to this belief motivated him during his prolific career writing essays, articles, books and pamphlets. In the late twenties and early thirties the target of his polemics changed. As Ataturk’s reforms continued, Arslan would rail against “atheistic Kemalists” whose goals he said were nothing less than the “destruction of the pillars of Islam”, and the “elimination of the very foundations of Islam”. “The revolt of Ankara against the Caliphate” he later wrote, was against “Islamic principles, against eastern traditions and even Allah himself.”

He wasn’t in denial about the harsh reality that the Muslim world had fallen behind Europe, and came under its tutelage as a result. But his view differed with the more radical secular reformists as he didn’t believe it was necessary to abandon Islam to progress. Arslan warned Muslims thus:

“If you, O Islamic world, want to learn and to progress, then there is the example of the European world. For just as it achieved progress whilst remaining fundamentally Christian, so you can remain Muslim and move ahead to the degree that you exert effort. Your betterment does not depend on heresy”[24]

Although Arslan made it his mission to expose the revolt for what he thought it represented, Ataturk would eventually prevail in Turkey cementing its new trajectory when he disestablished Islam as state religion. “Whereas the Arabs, divided and ill-prepared, did not succeed” wrote historian George Lenczowski, “the Turks succeeded beyond expectations.”[25] He went on to build a homeland for the Turks and began focusing his energies on developing its institutions and economy and giving it a story which people could connect to. Rashid Rida reconciled himself with the reality that Muslims might have to live in a world without a caliph by proposing a continuation of the Caliphate without a state in which it could be embedded as a stopgap measure — something like the Pope, or a spiritual and not explicitly political caliph. Ataturk even offered Libyan Shaikh Ahmad al-Sanusi the post of a spiritual Caliph if the seat could be outside Turkey — al-Sanusi initially declined.[26] Arslan however was unwilling to accommodate himself to this solution suggested by his friend, initially favoring the idea of relocating the last Ottoman caliph — Abdulmajid — to Yemen or Basra, before looking elsewhere for a Muslim power with the capacity, will and resources to lead. He would set out for Egypt which he — rather ill-advisedly — thought could emerge as a new center of power for Islam.