The longest century of the Islamic world

On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of its abolition, let us continue to think about the Caliphate. In essence, the absence of the caliphate, and therefore the fact that Muslims have been deprived of a center of political initiative, constitutes the most fundamental determinant of the present condition of Muslims. The caliphate was abolished within the borders of Turkey, but this abolition had consequences affecting all Muslims.

It was an event that had traumatic consequences for the self-consciousness and perception of the first-generation Islamists of the Republic. The condition of the entire Islamic world after this event may fittingly be described as the "post-caliph situation." For the first time in their history, Muslims were left without a political body that could represent them, that made it its duty to put into effect Islam's ideals and plans concerning the world, to apply Islamic rulings, and to make a political presence in the name of Islam. There are two related dimensions of this that need to be addressed:

The first is that, from the standpoint of Islamic jurisprudence, this situation had not been defined under earlier conditions. There had been situations in which Muslims lived as minorities together with other nations. But they had a sense of another political body to which they still felt bound and in relation to which they could position their situation here.

The second is a fact that generally refers to the situation of the caliphate before its abolition. In its condition before abolition, the caliphate had drifted quite far from meeting the expectations and needs of the world's Muslims, and had often become open and defenseless to the manipulations of the world system. In addition, there was discomfort that the caliphate did not function sufficiently in accordance with Islam's principle of shura, and even that it was at times used as an instrument of political power calculations.

The Islamist intellectuals of the period, who later reacted strongly to the abolition of the caliphate, had criticisms in this direction. From Said Nursi to Elmalılı Hamdi Yazır, from Mehmed Akif to İskilipli Atıf Hoca, nearly all Islamist thinkers or ulama had made criticisms that tore down those who occupied the office of caliph or the manner in which the office of the caliphate was used. The content of the treatise of Ali Abdel Raziq in Egypt, which entered the literature on the caliphate, was not something that the Islamist intellectuals of the Ottoman Empire could not have shared, had the option of abolishing the caliphate not been in question. As is well known, this treatise of Abdel Raziq was translated by Ömer Rıza Doğrul, the son-in-law of Mehmed Akif Ersoy, and published in Turkish in 1927. In this treatise, Abdel Raziq emphasized that the caliphate was a political rather than a religious institution, and ruled that its having fallen into the hands of the Ottoman sultans did not give the Ottomans a religious authority, and that it was permissible for Muslims to manifest this political presence through other organizations in different circumstances. At the time this work was published, it had been announced in Turkey that the caliphate had not yet been completely abolished and that all its duties and functions were contained in the spiritual personality of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey (TBMM); so it is possible to say that, provided sufficient trust in the cadres of the Republic, such a solution was in any case present on the political horizon of the Islamist thinkers of the period.

Even the long speech that Seyyid Bey delivered in the TBMM during the debates on the abolition of the caliphate was based on this same Islamist critical accumulation. Moreover, the most important source of nourishment for the reasoned discourse that Mustafa Kemal prepared on various occasions for the abolition of the caliphate, by referring to the facts concerning the caliphate in Islamic history, was none other than this same critical accumulation against the caliphate.

Nevertheless, we clearly understand from their later stances that none of the Islamists in question had demanded the abolition of the caliphate, and that none of them was prepared for such a move. The abolition of the caliphate created, first of all, a vacuum that made the application of Islamic jurisprudence impossible. Since its formative period, Islamic jurisprudence had offered no definition of how Islam would be applied, or even of how a Muslim existence could be possible, in an environment in which there was no Muslim leadership institution in the world. The commands of the Qur'an presupposed Muslims within a political organization and addressed them as such. Otherwise, the great majority of these rulings were left without effect. Among them were a series of practices extending from the conduct of daily civil affairs to more macro-level social arrangements. In the absence of an Islamic political body, many verses of the Qur'an, which Muslims hold sacred as revealed by God, were left without an addressee, etc.

On the other hand, the etatism that can be attributed to many Muslims actually stems, at its root, from statehood being regarded as the basic condition of living a Muslim life. A state that would apply God's hudud strongly suggested, for Muslims, a body-organ relationship in which the state is integrated with oneself and obeyed for its common aims. We must not forget that this etatism, generally attributed to Sunni political doctrine, ultimately forms the political and mental background of Turkish Islamism.

Therefore this new situation that emerged with the abolition of the caliphate could be symbolized by the transformation of Muslims into organs without bodies. The old regime in which Islam breathed, the old political body, was being invalidated by the substitution of another social and political body over the same organs (the mass of subjects). The new political body that was being substituted laid claim to the human resources or institutions that had given life to the old one. One of the most important reasons for such insistence on clothing was that individual bodies that regarded themselves as belonging to the old political spirit were intended to be appropriated to the new political spirit by means of the new dress put on them.

Of course, this form of bodily appropriation also had a dimension related to modernism. It was deemed sufficient for people to sell, through the symbolism loaded onto a costume they were forced to put on, their bodies/organs, which they felt in the world of their minds and souls to belong to someone else, to a political body in which they did not believe. This makes one think that, in the first instance, modernism did not demand a unity of deed and faith. But for the people who faced the reality of caliphlessness, this unity of faith and deed, now confronted with a demand for fragmentation, was not seen as so unimportant. Above all, the fact that the dress symbolism they encountered (as in the hat revolution) contained the intimation of giving life to other political bodies as alternatives to Islam turned the first reactions to caliphlessness into a real tragedy. Considering the other religious intimations of this situation as well, it was unthinkable that it would not create tension.

Therefore the process of becoming caliphless began, for Muslims in many parts of the world in general and for Turkish Muslims in particular, with a serious trauma of consciousness. After the first effects of this trauma, the Islamist thinkers, trying to make sense of what was happening, at first did not agree to accept this situation as permanent and as one of the possible conditions of Muslims. Because in these conditions it deprived a Muslim life of every kind of relation. A literature of "temporary conditions" was among the most conspicuous elements in the first Islamist texts of the post-caliph period. But these temporary conditions, or the caliphless situation, led among Islamists to very different reactions, results or quests. Dwelling on this is very important for understanding the present condition of Muslims.

NOTE: This article is a summary of my doctoral dissertation titled "Body, Text, Identity: Islamist Discourses of Auhtenticity in Modern Turkey," which I completed in 1997 in the Sociology Department of METU.