by Hugh Kennedy
A roughly woven garment, black on the outside and white on the inside, the burda is kept wrapped in precious fabrics in a golden chest so that only a small portion of it can be seen. It is mentioned in historical sources of the Abbasid period, most notably in the account of the death of Caliph Amīn in 815 where, along with the qadīb or sceptre and the Prophet’s ring (hātim), it is described as ‘being the caliphate’.
It is unclear what relationship, if any, there is between the mantle mentioned in the Abbasid sources and the one preserved in Istanbul. According to the traditional story, the Istanbul garment was worn by Muhammad and presented to the poet Kab b. Zuhayr, previously a fierce opponent of the Prophet, when he repented and asked for his forgiveness. The poet in return composed a poem in praise of the Prophet and the mantle. Later Caliph Muāwiya bought it from Kab’s heirs and, it is said, it was preserved by all later caliphs. According to one story the burda was burned by Hulegu following the sack of Baghdad in 1258 and the death of the last Abbasid caliph of the city, but others said that survivors of the massacre took it to Cairo whence it was removed to Istanbul at the time of the Ottoman conquest in 1517. It was certainly in the Ottoman relic collection by the reign of Sultan Murad II (1574–95) who had a golden case made for it. It was thought to have a talismanic importance and sultans took it on campaign. When Mehmet III (1595–1603) led his armies on campaign to Eger in Hungary, he took the mantle with him. At one point in the battle it looked as if his army was about to be defeated, but one of his courtiers told the monarch, ‘My sultan! As an Ottoman sultan who is caliph on our Prophet’s path, it would be appropriate for you to put on the Holy Mantle and pray to God.’ The sultan took his advice, donned the mantle and led his soldiers to victory, and an elegant miniature illustrates the sacred garment being carried on the head of a courtier as the sultan looks on and the cannon thunder against the enemy. It is interesting in this account to see the identification of the possession of the mantle with the caliphal office, just as it was in the Abbasid period.
The seal of the Prophet was among the relics kept by the Abbasid caliphs. According to a well-known story, the original was lost in a well by the third caliph, Uthmān, and it is generally agreed that the one displayed in Istanbul was a replacement made after that.
Another key exhibit to be found at Topkapi is the Qur’ān of Uthmān. Like the one in Tashkent it is said to have been the very volume he was reading when he was killed and his bloodstains are pointed out. Obviously there is no certainty that it is any such thing but, from the pictures at least, it is clearly a magnificent and very ancient volume.
Among the other relics of the Prophet is his banner, which was paraded in front of the army when military expeditions set out; in 1826 it was brought out and hung on the minbar of the mosque of Sultanahmet in Istanbul to serve as a rallying point for the people against the rebellious janissaries. Then there is the Prophet’s staff, which is recorded from Abbasid times, though it is generally accepted that the staff in the Topkapi collection was made from a tree which grew near the Prophet’s tomb.
There are numerous other relics of the Prophet which seem never to have been part of the caliphal insignia—hairs from his beard, his bow and his footprint, as well as the blouse and veil of his daughter Fātima and the shirt of his martyred grandson Husayn. Also to be found in the Topkapi collection are the cooking bowl of Abraham, the turban of Joseph and the arm of John the Baptist. Many of these items were kept in the Kaba in Mecca or the Mosque of the Prophet in Medina until the First World War, when the Holy Cities became threatened by the Arab revolt and British occupation. In 1918 they were put on a train by the orders of the Ottoman governor of Medina, Fakhr al-Dīn Pasha, and taken to Istanbul, where they still remain.
The apotropaic properties of the burda and the other relics were very much in evidence at the funeral ceremony for Abd al-Hamīd II, who died in 1918 after thirty-four years as sultan-caliph and nine more as deposed sovereign. His obsequies were later described by one Ahmet Rafik Bey, who attended the ceremony, in an account full of atmosphere and melancholy. We are told that the sultan’s body was brought to the apartments of the Holy Mantle where it was washed and laid on a winding sheet in the coffin.
Sultan Abdulhamid had not lost consciousness until the last moment of his life. He requested that a testament prayer be put on his chest and a handkerchief rubbed against the Holy Mantle, as well as a piece of the black Kaba cover, he used to cover his face. His request was carried out to the letter. It was a truly heartrending sight: Sultan Abdulhamid lying inside the coffin covered with winding sheets, the testament prayer on his naked chest, the black Kaba cover on his face, his white beard, with his eyes forever closed . . . Sultan Abdulhamid was humbly going to God, leaving his sins behind.
As the coffin was taken away a respectful crowd gathered round:
Suddenly, the door to the Apartments of the Holy Mantle opened. All eyes turned to the door. It was crowded on both sides. Hearts throbbing, everyone sought a view of the coffin. Carried by hand and adorned with a diamond belt, silver-embroidered Ka’ba covers, red satin, and a red fez, it finally appeared, stately and majestic. . . . The head preacher of the Hamidiye Mosque, dressed in a green, silver-embroidered robe with an imperial monogram on his chest, stepped forward and stood on the stone. He looked around and asked:
‘How did you know the deceased to be?’
A sad cry echoed among the cypress trees:
‘We knew him to be good.’
It was perhaps fitting that the body of the last great caliph should be washed and laid to rest surrounded by the relics which had been preserved, according to widely believed traditions, by his illustrious predecessors since the very beginnings of Islam.5
THE OTTOMAN CALIPHATE IN THE WIDER WORLD
The sultan’s policy of reviving the idea of a pan-Islamic caliphate would not have made much impact if it had not had a wider resonance in the Muslim world. This was particularly true in British-ruled India. There Muslims saw the Ottoman Empire, with which, traditionally, they had had very little contact, as the one major Muslim power which had maintained its independence, and many embraced the idea of the caliphate as a challenge to the discourse of imperial rule and western supremacy.
Support for the Ottomans’ right to the caliphate came from some unexpected quarters. In the late 1870s there was a fierce debate in Britain about the validity of the Ottoman claims. This was largely in response to the obvious enthusiasm in India to the idea of caliphate. In 1877 two retired Indian political officers, Sir George Campbell, ex-governor of Bengal, and George Birdwood, argued that the Ottoman claim was fraudulent, and Birdwood went on to say that it would be to the British advantage to encourage looking to the Sharif of Mecca (the local ruler of the Holy City who was also a descendant of Alī and Fātima) as caliph for ‘he would be as completely in our power as the Suez Canal’. This provoked a vigorous response from the pro-Ottoman writer James Redhouse (1811–92). Redhouse had enjoyed a career which was, to say the least, unusual. As a young orphan from London, he had taken service as a cabin boy on a British ship. When the ship berthed in Istanbul in 1826, he absconded and used his education in mathematics and science to make a career in the service of the Ottomans, then battling with the insurgent Greeks and the Egyptian Muhammad Alī. Redhouse became a passionate Turko-phile and wrote, among other things, the most scholarly and complete dictionary of Ottoman Turkish ever compiled. He now entered the fray and produced a pamphlet entitled ‘A Vindication of the Ottoman Sultan’s “Title of Caliph”’, in which he dismissed challenges to the Ottoman title as ‘erroneous, futile and impolitic’, firstly because the sultan’s claim to the title was ancient and accepted by ‘the whole orthodox world of Islam’ and then because the claim that the caliph should be of Qurashi descent, always a difficulty for the Ottomans, had no Prophetic support. In this he was joined by George Badger (1815–88), part missionary, part historian of the Eastern Churches and part Arabic lexicographer, who produced a detaile
d defence of Ottoman claims, concluding with the clear assertion that ‘the Ottoman Sultan is the legitimate successor to Muhammad while the Sharif of Mecca was a man of no standing, an official who could be dismissed at any time by the Ottoman government’. None of the participants in this debate represented British government policy, but in general the British were content to accept Ottoman claims.
The same period also saw the beginnings of a movement in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, especially in Syria, to separate the caliphate from the Ottoman sultanate and set up an independent Arab caliphate. The catalyst for this movement was the defeat of the Ottoman armies by the Russians in 1877–8, which seemed to be the prelude to the complete collapse of the empire. Arab notables in both Syria and the Hijaz floated the idea of an Arab caliphate, largely to resist the prospect of a European takeover. The Syrian Arabs even found a possible candidate in the person of Abd al-Qādir al-Jazā’iri, a charismatic Algerian Muslim who had been exiled to Damascus after his vigorous resistance to the French occupation of his country. In the end the movement came to nothing and Ottoman control was restored, but it shows that the idea of a caliphate was still a source of political inspiration to those Muslims who wanted change and sought to revive the ancient power and glory of the Islamic umma.
The idea of the caliphate as justification for Arab independence from the Ottoman Empire was kept alive in British political debate by the remarkable figure of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (1840–1922). Blunt was an eccentric upper-class writer who was at one and the same time a landowner connected with many important people in the political establishment of the late Victorian era and a rebel who set out to confront and oppose British imperialism. His numerous love affairs and his adventurous travels in the Arabian desert both marked him out as a man of romantic and alternative tastes. He began his career in the diplomatic service but resigned in 1868, and in 1877–8 he visited the Arab nomads of the Syrian desert. This and subsequent travels in Arabia impressed him deeply and he became convinced that Turkish rule should be ended and that the Arabs, by whom he basically meant the Bedouin of the Syrian and Arabian deserts, should be allowed to rule themselves under British protection. He turned to the idea of the caliphate, arguing that the caliphate of the Ottomans was essentially illegitimate and rested only on their political and military power rather than any legal rights. He made contact with several Arab Muslim leaders, including the respected Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905), a noted advocate of reform at the Azhar in Cairo and in wider Islamic society. He found Abduh was arguing that the caliphate should be revived as a religious institution, and explained:
On the question of the caliphate he [Abduh] looked at that time to its reconstruction on a more spiritual basis. He explained to me how a more legitimate exercise of its authority might be made to give a new impulse to intellectual progress and how little those who for centuries had held the title [that is, the Ottomans] had deserved the spiritual headship of the believers.6
The two men seem to have shared a common ideal of a revived Arab caliphate leading to a new era of greatness for the Muslim peoples. Yet the reality was, as Abduh acknowledged, that the Ottomans were ‘still the most powerful of the Muhammedan princes and able to do most for the general advantage, but unless they could be induced to take their position more seriously, a new Emir al-Mu’minin might legitimately be looked for’. Blunt may have found a kindred spirit in Abduh, but, for all his contacts and access, he failed to convince anyone of importance in the British government to follow his ideas, and as Abd al-Hamīd’s grip on the Arab provinces of the empire tightened in the 1880s and 1890s such ideas seemed fanciful and far-fetched.
Abd al-Hamīd had attempted to make his claim to the caliphate a basis for strengthening the Ottoman position, not least against his dissatisfied subjects in Istanbul. With the deposition of the sultan and the revival of the constitution in 1909, this came to seem increasingly irrelevant. The fiercely nationalist Young Turks who took control were intent on creating a Turkish rather than a Muslim empire and, while a strong sultanate was a possible way of doing this, there was no real role in this scenario for a caliph. The First World War led to a certain renewal of interest in the idea because some hoped that the appeal of the sultan as caliph would win over Arab opinion and, an even bigger prize, induce Indian Muslims to rise against their British rulers in the name of the caliph. These hopes proved unrealistic and the Ottoman claims aroused little enthusiasm in the subcontinent.
THE END OF THE OTTOMAN CALIPHATE
The end of the war saw the final crisis of the Ottoman sultanate-caliphate. Mehmet V died in July 1918 and it fell to his successor, Mehmet VI, to negotiate an armistice with the British and French. A humiliating surrender was signed at Mudros on 30 October, less than two weeks before the 11 November armistice on the western front. The sultan seems to have believed that by appeasing the western powers he could keep his throne and what was left of the Ottoman Empire. To do so he was prepared to sign the Treaty of Sèvres in August 1920, which left only a rump of the Ottoman state in Anatolia. He also made his opposition to the nationalists gathered in Ankara obvious and, in a completely futile gesture, sentenced the nationalist leader Mustafa Kemal to death (a sentence he was, of course, unable to carry out). It was only a residual reverence for the sultan as the embodiment of the ancient greatness of the empire which allowed him to remain as ruler for the next two years. By 1922 the nationalists were triumphant; the Greeks had been driven out of Turkey and Mustafa Kemal was determined to abolish the sultanate and set up a presidential Turkish republic. On 1 November 1922 the Turkish Grand National Assembly voted to separate the caliphate from the sultanate and abolish the latter. The caliphate was to remain in the Ottoman family, but the state would decide which member of the family should hold the office. The sultan Mehmet VI was deposed and his cousin Abd al-Majīd II appointed as caliph.
The office still enjoyed some support in the new Turkey among conservatives who hoped to revive its ancient grandeur and among some nationalists who were reluctant to lose Turkey’s role as the leader of the Muslim world. The new (and last) caliph tried to rally these forces, but Mustafa Kemal was adamant in his opposition. On 24 March 1924 the office of caliph was abolished and a republic was declared with Mustafa Kemal as its first president. It was the end of an ancient tradition and never again has a claimant to the caliphate enjoyed any widespread and general acceptance in the Muslim world.
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THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AND BEYOND
THE OTTOMAN CALIPHATE disappeared in 1924, more with a whimper than a bang. But despite this humiliating end, the abolition of the caliphate was greeted with dismay in Muslim lands far beyond the borders of the Ottoman world. The 1920s saw the high-water mark of European imperialism in the Middle East, with the division of the Ottoman territories into Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine and the establishment of British and French mandates. Egypt was under British control, Libya under Italian rule, while Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco were firmly governed by the French. Many Muslims felt humiliated by these arrangements and some thought that the revival of the caliphate might provide a ray of hope in this otherwise dismal and depressing political landscape.
There was much less agreement about what sort of caliphate this should be and who should be the new caliph. A swift response came from the sheikhs of the Azhar in Cairo, long the established intellectual leaders of the Sunni world. After a meeting on 25 March 1924, they issued a notice reaffirming the traditional view that the caliphs were the representative of the Prophet in the protection of the faith and the implementation of its laws. They rejected the separation of the political and religion powers of the office implied by the 1922 abolition of the sultanate and asserted that Abd al-Majīd was not a true caliph since he had accepted this. Now the umma should set about finding a new holder for the office.
Others argued that the caliphate was a perversion of Islam, a calamity which had no basis in the Qur’ān, and that, far from being essential to the faith, i
t was in fact an impediment which confused politics with religion in an unhelpful way. Thus, in his book Islam and the Fundamentals of Ruling, Alī Abd al-Raziq (1887–1966), an Oxford-educated Egyptian intellectual, argued for a separation of religion and government along the models found in the west. While his views were supported by other secularist intellectuals, like Taha Husayn in Egypt, they were roundly denounced and passionately condemned by more orthodox figures.
Events and personalities combined to prevent any agreement on the revival of the caliphate. The divisions between those who saw the office as providing spiritual leadership for all Muslims and those who looked to a caliph who would renew the political power of the umma and unify the Muslims in opposition to their oppressors meant that there was no consensus on how to proceed. Any of the suggested candidates for the office—Sharif Husayn of Mecca, Fu’ad I, the king of Egypt, or Ibn Sa’ud, king of what was becoming known as Saudi Arabia, were all mentioned—immediately aroused fierce opposition or simple ridicule, which ruled them out. There was no widespread popular dismay about the abolition of the caliphate, nor any mass movements among Muslims to work for its restoration. By the 1930s Muslims in the Middle East were more concerned about events in Palestine and were looking to Arab nationalism rather than the caliphate as an ideology which would respond to their hopes and anxieties.