On March 3, 1924, the Turkish Parliament voted to abolish the caliphate, of which Abdülmecid II (1868-1944) was the 101st caliph. It was the end of a myth: that of the Ottoman magistracy over the ummah, the community of faithful Muslims with a universal vocation. But it was also the end of an illusion, since the Ottoman caliph had lost all worldly power with the abolition of the sultanate in 1922, and the proclamation of the Turkish Republic the following year, with Mustapha Kemal (1881-1938) as its first president. It was not until 1934 that the founder of modern Turkey was conferred the title Atatürk, Father of the Turks, by Parliament.
For more than two centuries, the dignity of caliph had been of minor importance to the Ottoman sultans, who were more attached to their effective power (sulta) than to the succession (khilafa) of the prophet Muhammad.
In 1517, Sultan Selim I brought the Caliph Al-Mutawakkil III, a distant descendant of the Abbasids who were expelled from Baghdad in 1258, from Cairo to Istanbul. But unlike the Mamluks of Egypt, who had Friday prayers performed in the name of a caliph who had no real authority, the Ottoman sultans had long since organized this rite, which was fundamental to their legitimacy, in their own name.
It is more accurate to say that the caliphate was abolished when Cairo was taken in 1517, not when Ankara was voted into power in 1924. What's more, the Ottomans had no right to claim a title which could certainly only go to an Arab, although there was some debate as to whether it should fall to the Prophet's kin or be the result of a consensus.
It was this laborious construction that enabled the Ottoman Sultan to proclaim himself caliph in 1774. As part of a treaty with Russia: Sultan Abdulhamid I recognized the formal independence of Crimea (which was soon annexed by Catherine II), but as caliph he retained spiritual authority over the territory's Muslim population. This union, in the single person of the Ottoman sovereign, of the worldly powers of the sultan and the spiritual powers of the caliph lasted until the 1908 accession to power of the Young Turks, a revolutionary nationalist political party.
In 1909, the new masters of the empire did not hesitate to replace Abdulhamid II – nicknamed "the Red Sultan" because of the bloody repression that followed an Armenian rebellion in 1894 – with the more docile Mehmed V. They thought they could take advantage of his prestige as caliph to unleash a jihad against France, Russia and Great Britain in his name in November 1914. But this call had no echo in British India, the Russian Caucasus or French North Africa, proving that the Caliph's moral authority was already no more than a fiction.
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