Atatürk Abolishes the Ottoman Caliphate
When Mustafa Kemal (later Atatürk) launched his programme of radical Westernisation after the Turkish War of Independence, the Caliphate was an obvious target. The office — nominally the leadership of all Sunni Muslims worldwide, held by the Ottoman sultans since they conquered Egypt in 1517 — had already been emptied of direct political power: Kemal had separated the sultanate from the caliphate in 1922, deposing the last sultan while keeping the caliph as a purely religious figurehead. But even a symbolic caliphate was incompatible with Kemal's vision of Turkey as a secular nation-state. On 3 March 1924, the Grand National Assembly voted to abolish the caliphate and expel the Caliph Abdülmecid II from Turkey. Abdülmecid received word in the middle of the night and was escorted to the border with a small allowance. He died in Paris in 1944, the last person to hold the title. The reaction across the Muslim world was immediate and anguished. In Egypt, India, Indonesia, and across the Islamic world, scholars, politicians, and ordinary Muslims debated what the abolition meant and what should replace it. A caliphate congress held in Cairo in 1926 failed to agree on a successor institution. The question was never resolved: no individual or institution since 1924 has commanded anything approaching universal recognition as the leader of the Sunni Muslim community. This vacuum proved to be one of the most politically generative facts of the twentieth century. The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, offered one answer: restore Islamic governance from below through social organisation and political Islam. Saudi Arabia after 1932 offered another: Islamic authority vested in the guardians of the holy cities. The Islamic Republic of Iran after 1979 offered a Shia alternative: a ruling jurist (faqih) as God's representative on earth. The Islamic State (ISIS) after 2014 claimed yet another: a restored caliphate by territorial conquest. All of these projects — diverse, competing, often violently opposed to each other — were responses to the hole that Atatürk left in the political imagination of Islam on 3 March 1924. The date is arguably the most important in the history of modern Islamism.
- Year: 1924 CE
- Category: Political
