Recently the International Caliphate Conference was held in Jakarta, Indonesia. It was organised by Hizb ut-Tahrir ('Party of Liberation') and was said to be attended by 80-100,000 people. Hizb ut-Tahrir is an international Sunni pan-Islamic organisation whose aim is to unite all the Muslim countries of the world in a unitary Islamic state or caliphate, ruled by Islamic law and headed by an elected ruler, the caliph. Hizb ut-Tahrir was founded in Jerusalem in 1953 and today has an estimated one million members worldwide.
The caliph is traditionally the leader of the worldwide Islamic community and the title (which means 'successor') goes back to the period after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632. The first four caliphs (Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, and Ali) believed themselves to be both the spiritual and political leaders of the Islamic community which had chosen them. However, in 661 the Umayyad family seized control of the Islamic state and made the office of caliph hereditary in the ruling dynasty.
In 750 the Abbasid family ousted the Umayyads and became the new line of caliphs. The Abbasid caliphate would last for centuries, but by the tenth century the unity of Islam had been shattered, new Muslim states had been created, and even rival caliphates had been set up. In North Africa the Fatimids set up a Shiite caliphate in opposition to the Sunni Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad and it lasted from 909 to 1171. One branch of the Umayyad family had fled to Spain when the Abbasids seized the caliphate. In 929 their descendants established their own caliphate in Cordoba and it endured until 1031.
In any case, during the tenth century the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad lost most of his political power and was largely preserved as a religious figurehead by competing court factions. Another rival caliphate was set up by the Almohad dynasty in North Africa and Spain, lasting from 1145 to 1269, but it received little recognition outside those areas.
The Abbasid caliphate ended in 1258 when Baghdad was destroyed by the Mongols, but a few survivors from the Abbasid family escaped to Cairo in Egypt. There the Mamluk sultans allowed them to establish a pale imitation of the old caliphate, but always under Mamluk control. This puppet caliphate was largely ignored by other Muslim states. Nevertheless Mamluk control of the three holiest Muslim cities - Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem - did much to support their claims to leadership in the Muslim world.
The conquest of the Mamluk empire by the Ottoman Turkish sultan Selim I in 1517 allowed the Ottomans to claim the title of caliph. However, it was not a title they made much use of before the late nineteenth century. Then, as Ottoman power began to wane, the sultan came to see that his position as titular leader of the world's Muslims might have political benefits.
Sultan Abdul Hamid II (reigned 1876-1909) used his position as caliph to call upon Muslims in the Russian empire to revolt during the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-78. Sultan Mehmed V (reigned 1909-1918) similarly called upon the Muslim inhabitants of the Russian, French and British empires to rise up against their Christian rulers during the early months of the First World War. In neither case did the caliph's call receive much of a response, but the Russian,French and British governments were certainly worried that there might be revolts among their Muslim subjects. By exploiting his position as caliph the Ottoman sultan could at least cause alarm among his enemies.
For this reason there was considerable fear among the world's Muslims that after 1918 the victorious allied powers would seek to strip the Ottoman sultan of his position as caliph. The concern was particularly strong in British India where the Khilafat movement arose and posed the biggest Muslim threat to British rule since the Indian Mutiny of 1857.
However, it was not to be the allies who ended the caliphate but the Turks. They deposed the Ottoman sultan in 1922 and established a Turkish republic. Its leader, Kemal Ataturk, was determined to create a secular Turkish state and in 1924 he abolished the caliphate. For over a thousand years there had always been at least a nominal leader of the world's Muslims. Now that position was gone and consternation spread throughout the Islamic world. However, attempts to save the caliphate were to prove unsuccessful.
Shortly after the Turkish abolition decree, Hussein bin Ali, ruler of the Hejaz, which contained the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina, proclaimed himself caliph, but his claim went unrecognised by the wider Muslim world. Soon afterwards the Hejaz was conquered by Abdul Aziz ibn Saud from central Arabia. The Saudi ruler made it clear that he would not claim the caliphate, while a Muslim conference held in Cairo in 1926 to discuss its revival got nowhere. Later some figures in the Muslim world thought of claiming the title of caliph, the most unlikely being the worldly King Farouk of Egypt, but as a new world order took shape after the Second World War, it seemed that the caliphate had been consigned to history.
Muslim organisations aiming to restore the caliphate, such as Hizb ut-Tahrir, have grown in strength in recent decades, but their chances of success do not seem to have increased. When the Ottoman empire was at its zenith, it was the military power of the sultan that made him the leader of the Muslim world rather than his title of caliph. When Ottoman power was declining, the sultan's attempts to use his position as caliph as a political weapon could not hide the fact that his power was disappearing and few other Muslims wanted to die for his cause. Caliph is an empty title without real power to back it up.
A number of Islamist groups, including Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda, have declared an interest in restoring the worldwide caliphate, but none has the power to achieve that aim. Although Hizb ut-Tahrir has been accused of terrorist links and is banned in some countries of the Middle East and Central Asia, its leaders claim to want a restoration of the caliphate by peaceful means. However, the Islamic world is divided into more than fifty countries and it seems unlikely that all those governments would ever surrender their powers to some Islamic super-state. For the foreseeable future it seems that the restoration of the caliphate must remain a dream.
