The Future of Islam

by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt

2. Election, that is the sanction of a legal body of Elders. It was argued that, as the Ahl el agde had been removed from Medina to Damascus, and from Damascus to Bagdad, and from Bagdad to Cairo, so it had been once more legally removed from Cairo to Constantinople. Selim had brought with him to St. Sophia's some of the Ulema of the Azhar mosque in Cairo, and these, in conjunction with the Turkish Ulema, had elected him or ratified his election. A form of election is to the present day observed at Constantinople in token of this right; and each new Sultan of the house of Othman, as he succeeds to the temporal sovereignty of Turkey, must wait before being recognized as Caliph till he has received the sword of office at the hands of the Ulema. This ceremony it is customary to perform in the mosque of Ayub.

3. Nomination. Sultan Selim, as has been already said, obtained from Mutawakkel, a descendant of the Abbasides and himself titularly Caliph, a full cession of all the Caliphal rights of that family. The fact, as far as it goes, is historical, and the only flaw in the argument would seem to be that Mutawakkel had no right thus to dispose of a title to an alien, which was his own only in virtue of his birth. The case, indeed, was very much as though the Emperor of Germany, having possessed himself of London, should obtain from Don Carlos a cession of the throne of Spain; or as though Napoleon should have got such a cession of the Papacy, in 1813, from Pius VII. Still it is insisted upon strongly by the Hanefite divines as giving a more permanent dynastic title than either of the previous pleas. As a precedent for nomination they cite the act of Abu Bekr, who on his death-bed recommended Omar as his successor in the Caliphate.

4. The guardianship of the two shrines, that is to say of Mecca and Jerusalem, but especially of Mecca. It has been asserted by some of the Ulema, and it is certainly a common opinion at the present day, that the sovereignty of Hejaz is in itself sufficient title to the Caliphate. It seems certainly to have been so considered in the first age of Islam, and many a bloody war was then fought for the right of protecting the Beyt Allah; but the connection of Hejaz with the Empire of the Caliphs has been too often broken to make this a very tenable argument. In the tenth century it was held by the Karmathian heretics, in the thirteenth by the Imams of Sana, and for seven years in the present century by the Wahhabis. Still the de facto sovereignty of the Harameyn, or two shrines, was one of Selim's pleas; and it is one which has reappeared in modern arguments respecting the Caliphal rights of his descendants.

5. Possession of the Amanat or sacred relics. This last was a plea addressed to the vulgar rather than to the learned; but it is one which cannot be passed by unnoticed here, for it exercises a powerful influence at the present day over the ignorant mass of Mussulmans. It was asserted, and is still a pious belief, that from the sack of Bagdad, in 1258, certain relics of the Prophet and his companions were saved and brought to Cairo, and thence transferred by Selim to Constantinople. These were represented to constitute the Imperial insignia of office, and their possession to give a title to the Caliphal succession. They consisted of the cloak of the Prophet borne by his soldiers as a standard, of some hairs from his beard, and of the sword of Omar. The vulgar believe them to be still preserved in the mosque of Ayub; and though the Ulema no longer insist on their authenticity, they are often referred to as an additional test of the Sultan's right.

Such, then, were the arguments of the Hanefite school, who defended Selim's claim, and such they are with regard to his successors of the house of Othman. By the world at large they seem to have been pretty generally accepted, the more so as the Turkish Sultans, having only a political end in view, were satisfied with their formal recognition by their own subjects, and did not bring the question to an issue with their independent neighbours. Neither the Mogul Emperors at Delhi nor the Sheriffs of Morocco were called upon to acknowledge temporal or spiritual supremacy in the Ottoman Sultans, nor did these affect an every-day use of the ancient title they had assumed.

In India the head of the house of Othman was still known to Moslems as Padishah or Sultan er Roum, the Roman Emperor, the most powerful of Mussulman princes, but not in any special manner the head of their religion, certainly not their sovereign. The Ulema, indeed, such as were Hanefites, admitted him to be legally Khalifeh; but many of the Shafite school denied this, pleading still that as an alien to the Koreysh his claim was illegal, while to the ignorant mass of the people out of his dominions his spiritual title remained almost unknown. The Sultans themselves were doubtless to blame for this, seeing that the spiritual functions of their new office were left almost entirely unperformed. For it cannot be too strongly insisted on that the assumption of the Caliphate was to the house of Othman only a means to an end, viz. the consolidation of its worldly power upon a recognized basis, and that, once that end obtained, the temporal dignity of Sultan was all that they really considered. Thus they never sought to exercise the right appertaining to the Caliphal office of appointing Naïbs, or Deputy Imams, in the lands outside their dominions, or to interfere with doctrinal matters at home, except where such might prejudice the interests of their rule. With regard to these, the theologians of Constantinople, having satisfactorily settled the Caliphal dispute, and pronounced the house of Othman for ever heirs to the dignity they had assumed, were recommended by the head of the State to busy themselves no further with doctrinal matters, and to consider the ijtahad, or development of new dogma, altogether closed for the future in their schools. Soliman the Magnificent, Selim's heir, especially insisted upon this. He had already promulgated a series of decrees affecting the civil administration of his empire, which he had declared to be immutable; and an immutability, too, in dogma he thought would still further secure the peace and stability of his rule. Nor did he meet with aught but approval here from the Hanefite divines.

The Turkish Ulema, ever since their first appearance in the Arabian schools in the eleventh century, finding themselves at a disadvantage through their ignorance of the sacred language, and being constitutionally adverse to intellectual effort, had maintained the proposition that mental repose was the true feature of orthodoxy, and in their fetwas had consistently relied on authority and rejected original argument. They therefore readily seconded the Sultan in his views. Argument on first principles was formally forbidden in the schools; and for the interpretation of existing law two offices were invented—the one for dogmatic, the other for practical decisions, those of the Sheykh el Islam and the Great Mufti. This closing of doctrinal inquiry by the Ottoman Sultans, and the removal of the seat of supreme spiritual government from the Arabian atmosphere of Cairo to the Tartar atmosphere of the Bosphorus, was the direct and immediate cause of the religious stagnation which Islam suffered from so conspicuously in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

We have now brought the history of the Caliphate down to the period described in the last chapter as one of intellectual torpor for Islam. It was a lethargy from which there seemed no awakening, and which to contemporaries, Voltaire among the rest, seemed closely approximating to the death of unbelief. In spite of Soliman's eternal arrangements, the temporal power of the house of Othman was wofully diminished, and the spiritual prestige of the Sultans was gone with Mussulmans. By the middle of the last century the title of Caliph, even in their own dominions, was all but forgotten, and the Court of Constantinople was become a byword for its vice and infidelity. It can therefore be well imagined that the awakening of religious feeling, which I also described as having been produced by the Wahhabite movement, especially menaced the Sultan in his Caliphal pretensions. By the beginning of the present century the serious world of Islam was already ripening for a change, and the title of the Caliphate seemed open to whoever should re-invent and prove himself worthy to wear it. Two men certainly then dreamed of its acquisition, both men of supreme genius, and holding the elements of success in their hands. Nor can it be doubted that either of them would have achieved his ambition but for the appearance against them of a material power greater than their own, and which then, for the first time, began to make itself felt as paramount in Asia. That power was England, and the ambitions she thwarted there were those of Bonaparte and Mehemet Ali.

It is not, I believe, sufficiently understood how vast a scheme was overthrown by the Battle of the Nile. Napoleon's mind was formed for dominion in the East, and where he failed in Europe he would have infallibly succeeded in Asia. There little policies are useless, and great ones root themselves in a congenial soil; and he was possessed with an idea which must have flourished. His English opponents, judging him only by the scale of their own thoughts, credited him with the inferior design of invading India through Persia, and called it a mad one; but India was, in fact, a small part only of his programme. When he publicly pronounced the Kelemat at Cairo, and professed the faith of Islam, he intended to be its Head, arguing rightly that what had been possible three hundred years before to Selim was possible also then to him. Nor would the Mussulman world have been much more astonished in 1799 at being asked to accept a Bonaparte for Caliph, than it was in 1519 at being asked to accept an Ottoman. With Napoleon's genius for war, and but for the disastrous sea fight on the Nile, all this might have been, and more; and it is conceivable that Europe, taken in reverse by a great Moslem multitude, might have suffered worse disasters than any the actual Napoleonic wars procured her, while a more durable empire might have been founded on the Nile or Bosphorus than the Bonapartes were able to establish on the Seine. As it was, it was an episode and no more, useful only to the few who saw it near enough to admire and understand.[11]

Among these who saw and understood was Mehemet Ali, the Albanian adventurer, who undertook the government of Egypt when England restored it to the Porte. Bonaparte from the first was his model, and he inherited from him this vision of a new Caliphate, the greatest of the Napoleonic ideas, and worked persistently to realize it. He was within an ace of succeeding. In 1839 Mehemet Ali had Mecca, Cairo, and Jerusalem in his hands, and he had defeated the Sultan at Konia, and was advancing through Asia Minor on Constantinople. There, without doubt, he would have proclaimed himself Caliph, having all the essential elements of the Sultan's admitted right on which to found a new claim.