A hundred years later: Gaza calls Muslims to be "one"

Today is the 150th day of the barbaric genocide Israel is committing in Gaza. For a full five months, trampling all the values of humanity before the eyes of the world, it has been carrying out its crimes against humanity recklessly and arrogantly, doing what it does confident that no power will be able to stand against it. On this occasion, let us recall once more the power on which this new and unsurprising rampage of Israel rests, as stated by the famous Egyptian philosopher Abdelwahab Elmessiri: the unlimited support of the United States and the unlimited non-reaction of Arab-Islamic countries.

Let us leave aside the unlimited support of the United States. It, too, is doing what suits it, being a partner in Israel's genocidal crimes. But we are within an important date from which to recall and examine one side of the truth about the silence of the Arab-Islamic world.

We are confronted with the evident lack of the will and initiative necessary for the Arab and Islamic world to step in as a Muslim actor in international matters that concern Muslims. The excessive violence and genocide in Gaza are not directed only at Palestinians. The attacks take the form of an humiliation directed first at all Arabs, and then at all Muslims. Then comes the cliché question: can 300 million Arabs or 2 billion Muslims do nothing against a 6-7 million Israel?

Why they cannot is in fact very clear, and a historical process that condemns Muslims to these conditions needs to be examined on every occasion. Yes, today no Islamic country acts by taking international initiative on a matter that concerns Muslims. That is why every group and every community has to bear on its own all the calamities that befall Muslims because they are Muslims. The matter is of course connected with the abolition, exactly a hundred years ago, of the political unity of the world's Muslims, that is, the caliphate, or its being made "contained and confined in the spiritual personality of the TBMM."

Only 4 months after the founding of the Republic (3 March 1924), the Caliphate, a political institution that made Turkey the one with a say and responsibility over the whole Muslim world, and in which all the Muslims of the world were also concerned, was abolished by Turkey's unilateral decision. Although the abolition of the caliphate is treated exclusively within the new process of secularization and modernization that Turkey was entering internally, it was, first of all, a decision with consequences on behalf of all the world's Muslims. Second, although this decision was presented to Turkey as a revolution, even a triumph, in terms of its consequences it narrowed Turkey down enormously in terms of the political power it possessed, and amounted to a withdrawal from its international influence and power. Indeed, viewed from the Ottoman standpoint, this decision came not at the end of a process in which the Ottomans had been victorious, but at the end of one in which they had been defeated and dismembered.

Despite this, during our War of Independence, actual and material aid and support flowed to Turkey from the entire sphere of influence of the caliphate. The War of Independence was fought, to a large extent, with the motivation of saving the Islamic homeland and unity, and with the support of both Anatolia and the whole Islamic world. The story of the money sent by Indian Muslims to save the caliphate is known to everyone. Whatever Turkey's unilateral abolition of the caliphate may mean for Turkey itself, from the other side it brought about the dissolution of a unity of which Turkey was the center, and left the world's Muslims, who had found representation, power and security in this unity, headless, unrepresented and ownerless.

In the assessments made at the time of the abolition of the caliphate, in fact the critical accumulation made against the caliphate by Muslim intellectuals themselves was also referred to. All this critical accumulation, which included considerations such as whether the caliphate had a religious meaning, whether it was performing its function, and its bad practices in history, was unknown to no one. But the option of abolishing the caliphate never formed on the horizon of those Muslim intellectuals who made these criticisms; at most there was its revision and reform according to the conditions of the day.

What the caliphate gained and lost Turkey can of course be debated separately, but it is a fact that from that hour on there was no longer a political entity that would represent all the world's Muslims, perceive threats and attacks on their behalf and take precautions. That is, by this decision Turkey did not merely decide to go its own way individually; it also destroyed, in a way that could not be made good again for a hundred years, the conditions that secured the political unity of a great Islamic world behind it. It did not only decide its own fate; it decided the fate of all the world's Muslims, and of course it did so unilaterally.

Could Turkey, which in the conditions of that day came to this decision seeing the caliphate as a burden to itself, have sought a more democratic path and referred the caliphate to an office that would assume it with the participation and consultation of the world's Muslims?

This is of course a question that cannot be answered without taking into account the balances of world power of that day, but let us be content with saying that the abolition of the caliphate had consequences not only for Turkey but for the whole Islamic world.

Indeed, after the abolition of the caliphate, Muslims everywhere in the world, having no strong support behind them, were left to experience, each on their own, the wearing effects of occupation, exploitation, poverty, misery and wars. Although the adherents of all the great religions had a political organ of representation, Muslims alone lived an entire century deprived of this representation.

From time to time, Muslim states of course felt the need for unity in order to respond as Muslims to attacks directed at Muslims. In particular, in the face of the attack suffered by the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Islamic Conference that met in 1969 under the leadership of King Faisal bin Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia in order to secure the political unity of Muslims turned into an organization, and in fact claimed to partially fill, on behalf of all Muslims, the void resulting from the absence of the caliphate. What that conference, which today has turned into the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, has come to is plain: Muslims, with their population of 2 billion, continue to watch in shame the massacres of the occupying, genocidal Israel of 6 million in Gaza. No Islamic country takes these attacks upon itself. However much their peoples feel the pain, the agony and the shame of it, the states do not care. Because there is no Muslim political body that would feel attacks directed at Muslims in its own body. None of the 57 political bodies, each of them nationalized, can take these attacks upon itself.

Today, on the very hundredth anniversary of the abolition of the caliphate, we need to dwell a little longer on this problem. Whom does it serve that Muslims are not united, cannot be united? Whom has it served that Muslims have been deprived of a political body? How can we understand what we are living through with a mind that presents withdrawing from, giving up, an international power, a sphere of influence, the leadership of a community of nations, as a revolution, as a triumph?