The abolition forced into the open a question that had rarely needed answering: whether the caliphate is a religious obligation or an accident of history. Both positions were argued immediately and by serious scholars, and both continue to be held.
The case for obligation rests on a long tradition of jurisprudence which treats the appointment of an imam or caliph as a communal duty, on the consensus of the classical jurists, and on the argument that Islamic law presupposes an authority able to apply it. Rashid Rida and others pressed this in the 1920s, while conceding that the Ottoman institution had long fallen short of the ideal.
The case against was made most sharply in 1925 by Ali Abd al-Raziq, an Egyptian scholar and judge trained at al-Azhar, who argued in a short book that the Prophet's mission was religious rather than political, that the caliphate is nowhere required by the Quran or by sound tradition, and that it had been a form of government like any other, defended by rulers who needed it. The book caused a storm; he was tried by a council of senior scholars, stripped of his credentials and removed from his post.
The atlas names both camps and does not adjudicate. It records the classical jurisprudential debate and the scholarly argument of the 1920s, and stops there.