by Niels Lee

In 1899, the American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Oscar S. Straus, approached Sultan-Caliph Abdulhamid II for a diplomatic favor. The United States had recently annexed the Philippines from the Spanish Empire, but the transition was fraught with difficulties. The northern islands rebelled against the new imperialists and Washington was concerned the Filipino Muslims of the southern Sulu islands would join the resistance. The Americans reasoned that, because these new colonial subjects were Sunni, they would de facto recognize the Caliph as “their spiritual head” and, thus, comply with the United States government. Abdulhamid II granted the request and sent a telegram to two “Sulu chiefs” in Mecca, instructing them to cooperate with the U.S. occupation. Soon after, Sultan Jamalul Kiram II signed the Kiram–Bates Treaty (1899), prompting the governor of the southern province, Lieutenant-Colonel John P. Finley, to declare in 1915 that “this wonderful piece of diplomacy” had averted “a holy war.”

This is perhaps one of the most-referenced narratives that illustrates the Caliphate’s authority, and how the global ummah submitted to an exalted figure in Istanbul. In March of this year, The Washington Post published a piece that not only reiterated Straus’ effort over a century ago but also pondered whether the Caliphial institution could have continued as a moderating force if it had not been abolished in 1924. Citing commentator Mustafa Akyol, militant Islamism after all seemed to emerge from the power vacuum left in its wake. Moreover, the article reflects an ongoing sentiment for a united Islamic order, from contemporary academics to protestors who took to the streets of Hamburg this May to decry Germany’s ill-treatment of Muslims.

To be sure, setting aside modern obstacles in re-establishing such a religiously motivated office and the complex political theology behind it, many commentaries overemphasize the Ottoman Caliph’s global popularity. But perhaps more importantly, scholars often frame the relationship between the Sultan-Caliph and global Muslim elite as the latter submitting (or rejecting) the former’s authority only within the context of western colonialism. This framework overlooks the mixed motives of political and religious leaders as well as how local prerogatives and interests interacted with the institution’s reputation. The frequent reference to the Kiram–Bates Treaty is a case in point. Straus and Finley claimed the telegram directly influenced the signing of the Treaty, an assertion that scholars Kemal Karpat and Chiara Formichi readily accept. Yet, outside the American interpretation of events, there is little evidence the two chiefs actually returned to the Philippines to relay the message and that the Sulu Sultan was swayed by Abdulhamid II’s assurance. While Jamalul Kiram II had the year before flown the Ottoman flag during his pilgrimage to Mecca and relayed his political misfortunes to local authorities, no official contact materialized between the two polities. Furthermore, even if the Sultan was influenced by a message delivered by two unofficial envoys, it is presumptuous to assume it was the overriding factor given the layered incentives behind any diplomatic resolution. Even historians skeptical or uncertain of Straus and Finley’s argument discuss the issue only from the perspective of the joint Ottoman-American venture.  According to Timothy Marr’s recent research on the Kiram–Bates Treaty, the Sultan continuously expressed his doubts throughout the discussions, only to be persuaded after witnessing the technological prowess of the American naval ship USS Charleston.

The simple fact is that there is no evidence Ottoman Caliphs enjoyed anything close to universal Muslim recognition that naturally translated into Istanbul dictating the political affairs of Islamic polities. By the 19th century, with the majority of the 172 million Sunni Muslims under direct or indirect colonial administration, only some Muslim elites were invoking the authority of the Sultan-Caliph to combat colonial expansion. In the annexed Philippines, for example, some minor Sulu rulers later exaggerated their connection with the “Sultan of Stanboul” to increase their bargaining power with the United States. Others simply declared nobody was their superior, “not even the Sultan of Stamboul.”

Nor were Muslim adulation for or rejection of the Ottoman Caliph untethered from regional dynamics and concerns. Pro-Hamidian fin de siècle intellectuals such as Ali Ahmad Al-Jarjawi and Abdurresid Ibrahim witnessed such complexities, as they traveled through territories with sizable Islamic communities in North Africa, Central Asia, China, Indonesia, and India. In Beijing, Ibrahim reported hearing references to Abdulhamid II during Friday payers, an indication that the mosque sought communion with the Sultan-Caliph. Yet, the dedication was thanks to a Chinese reformist imam Wang Kuan who was granted an audience with Abdulhamid II, at which time he returned with two Ottoman scholars to China. These scholars established schools in Beijing to provide Islamic education but also to strengthen the region’s ties to the empire. In contrast, in Bombay an imam refused to dedicate his sermon to the reigning Sultan-Caliph not because he didn’t acknowledge the office’s authority, but rather because a local Ottoman official had been unwilling to interact with the Indian Muslim community. Al-Jarjawi, who traveled through Tunis, also noticed the Caliph was absent from local sermons, strenuously suggesting that his name was still recited by the faithful in their private prayers.  Yet, in the case of Tunisia which (then, a French protectorate), Al-Jarjawi’s observation reflected a more recent phenomenon in the colonial regime. The colony initially decided against prohibiting Muslim dedication despite the fact they saw it as a possible threat. Yaqub Beg, the much-discussed ruler of an independent Islamic state in the Kashgar region, seems to have genuinely accepted the Caliph’s authority. Yet he agreed in 1873 to acknowledge the Sultan-Caliph as his suzerain by minting coins and dedicating Friday sermons in his name in exchange for military officers and weapons in hopes of challenging the Qing Empire. Such quid pro quo transactions, in the end, often facilitated what has been called an Ottoman “soft empire.”

With regard to the rural working class, it is unclear the extent to which the Caliph was a constant presence, let alone a figure worthy of pledging their fealty. Even the Ottoman Empire that purportedly held the seat of the Caliphate for roughly four centuries had trouble enforcing Caliphal orthodoxy on its rural subjects. In Hamdian Syria and Palestine, roughly 80 to 90 percent of the population were peasants residing in communities with few to no mosques and where the veneration of saints was a focal point of their religious rituals. From the 1880s onward Abdulhamid II thus dispatched Muslim missionaries into the Ottoman hinterlands to teach “the people the rules and practices of Islam and [ensure] their obedience to the caliphate.” As Nile Green rightly notes within the context of Indian Muslims (but generally applicable), ideas regarding Pan-Islamism were “a minority discourse of the privileged and few.”

In 1909, Abdulhamid II was deposed before he could fully realize his vision. And yet, his empire managed to convince many Western intellectuals, journalists, and government officials of his influence over a ‘globalized’ Islam. According to Straus, the idea to deploy the Caliph’s spiritual authority came from William E. Curtis, a well-known Washington correspondent for the Chicago Record. Curtis met with an Ottoman government official who claimed Abdulhamid II had regained the respect of the global ummah due to his victory over the Greeks during the Greco-Turkish War (1897). Curtis passed this information to Secretary of State, John M. Hay, who promptly contacted an ambassador “fascinated by the romance of the suggestion.”

The notion of a universally acknowledged Caliphate was unduly romanticized. After all, we should not forget that Islamic polities following the death of Caliph Umar in 644 failed to achieve broad recognition. From the 7th century onward, any claimant to the mantle was tolerated, ignored, or rejected by a non-negligible segment of the faithful. When Baghdad was conquered by the Mongol Empire in 1258, effectively abolishing the Abbasid Caliphate, many Muslims expressed grief while others accommodated, if not welcomed, their new overlords as the new power dynamic improved their socio-religious status. When Sultan Selim I conquered Mecca and Medina in 1517, the Ottomans were, for the first time, able to claim the title “Protector of the Holy Cities” i.e., the Caliph of the global ummah. However, a few decades later, Emperor Humayun of the Mughal Empire in India also proclaimed himself the Caliph of the “realms of Hind and Sind,” sidestepping the Ottomans’ own assertion. In hopes of maintaining their authority over Northern and Sub-Saharan Africa, Muslim rulers of the Maghreb also protested, claiming they could trace their lineage back to the prophet unlike the House of Osman.

Here, we ought to highlight the intellectual and political innovations of the last century behind revolutionizing the received narrative of the caliphate and global Islam. While the caliphate was traditionally defined as having inherited prophetic rule, a radical intellectual shift also emerged—from Egyptian scholar Rashid Rida (d. 1935) to the contemporary Tunisian politician Rashid Ghannushi—that claimed “mankind’s status as God’s vicegerent, or caliph, on earth.” As Andrew March argues, this “Caliphate of Man” positioned the people, not a single leader, as the ultimate mediator of God’s will. Such elevation of popular sovereignty and the seemingly tumultuous democracy movements it inspired are the prevailing legacies of the post-caliphate era. After all, as contemporary Islamic scholars note, the Quran “caliph” was often used to denote universal human inheritance. This inheritance was meant to come from the collective will of the people. That is the real locus of a globalized Islamic politics.

Niels Lee received an M.A. from Yale University, with a focus on modern Ottoman intellectual and cultural history. He currently works as an editor and has recently published an article for MERIP titled “Orhan Veli’s Poetry and the Struggle to Preserve Istanbul’s Green Spaces,” which explores Istanbul’s landscape and soundscape through the lens of the Turkish poet Orhan Veli.

Edited by Jacob Saliba

Featured Image: A 1918 map of the world by Abdurrahim Hilmi Bey, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.