An Office Abolished by Statute

On 3 March 1924 the Turkish Grand National Assembly passed a law abolishing the caliphate, deposing Abdulmecid II and expelling the members of the Ottoman house from the country. The sultanate had already been abolished sixteen months earlier, and Abdulmecid had been left as caliph without temporal power, an arrangement that lasted barely a year before it was judged incompatible with the new republic.

The office had been in Ottoman hands since the sixteenth century and had been of limited practical significance for most of that time. Its importance had actually grown in the nineteenth century, when Ottoman sultans emphasised the title as a claim on the loyalties of Muslims under British, Dutch and Russian rule. That is what made its abolition register as far away as India, where the Khilafat movement had campaigned for its preservation and was left without an object.

The immediate practical question was whether anyone would take it up. The sharif of Mecca declared himself caliph and was driven from the Hijaz within months. Congresses met at Cairo in 1926 and at Mecca in the same year to consider the matter and reached no agreement, because no candidate could command assent across the Muslim world and no procedure existed for choosing one. The office has not been filled since.