by NADEEM F. PARACHA
In 1924, a year after declaring Turkey a republic and becoming its president, the former commander in the army of the shrinking Ottoman Empire, and a hero of World War I, Mustafa Kemal Pasha, abolished the centuries-old office of the caliphate and drove the last Ottoman caliph into exile. With this act, not only did Kemal launch his ambitious republican and secularisation project in Turkey, but he also triggered a race between Muslim leaders and monarchs to become recognised as the new leaders of the Muslim world.
Various Muslim groups around the world had agitated against European powers who were at war with the Ottomans during World War I. But after the defeat of the Ottomans, many Muslim political leaders and intellectuals hailed Kemal’s coming into power and saw him as a modern redeemer of Islam.
The British historian E. Kedourie, in a 1963 essay for the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain, writes that Kemal was conscious of the fact that the idea of the caliphate was deeply embedded in the minds of Muslims. According to Kedourie, at one point, Kemal actually wanted to name himself as the new caliph. But since this would have contradicted and complicated his secularisation and republican project, he didn’t. However, Kedourie adds that Kemal then offered a much weakened version of the caliphate to Shaikh Ahmad al-Sanusi, an Arab head of a Sufi order, as long as he would remain outside Turkey.
This suggests that, despite launching an aggressive project to secularise Turkey, Kemal was still interested in retaining the country’s role as the ‘spiritual and political leader of the Muslim world.’ But after the abolition of the Ottoman caliphate, two contenders rushed in to claim the title. King Fuad of Egypt (that was still being ruled by the British) and the ‘Wahabi’ Arab tribal leader, Ibn Saud, who, with the help of the British, had conquered former Ottoman territories in what would become Saudi Arabia in 1932.
In 1926, Fuad organised an international Muslim conference in Cairo. It was not attended by Saud. Weeks later, Saud held a similar conference in Makkah. Turkey did not attend any of the two events and neither did the Shia-majority Iran.
In 1947, a much smaller player emerged in this race. It called itself, Pakistan. It was founded in August 1947 by Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s Muslim League. The party’s roots lay in an evolving idea which emerged in the 19th century. It took a ‘modernist’ approach to understanding Islam. This then progressed as a Muslim nationalism which was remoulded as Pakistani nationalism. According to the French political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot, this approach relegated Islamic rituals to the private sphere and brought into public space Islam as a political-cultural identity marker.
Inspired by the writings of Muslim reformers such as Sir Syed Ahmad Khan and the poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal, Jinnah and his party imagined a sovereign Muslim-majority country untainted by, what Iqbal had lamented, ‘tribalism’ inherent in Arabian polities. Iqbal pleaded for a faith understood and articulated according to the needs of modern times.
Jinnah and his colleagues needed to greatly trim the pan-Islamic aspects of Muslim nationalism to root it more in the realities of South-Asian Muslims. But this did not deter Pakistan’s first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, from declaring that Pakistan was a lot more than just another Muslim country. According to M. Razvi, in the 1981 issue of the Journal of Pakistan Institute of International Affairs, Pakistan held a World Muslim Conference in 1951 in Karachi. During the event, PM Liaquat highlighted the importance of retaining pan-Islamic ideas.
This did not please Saudi Arabia, which suspected that Pakistan was trying to undermine the kingdom’s (self-appointed) role as the leader of the post-colonial Muslim world. But this role was dramatically snatched away by Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian president who came to power through a coup in 1952. Charismatic and articulate, Nasser was hailed as a hero by Muslims around the world when, in 1956, he managed to keep at bay an attack by British and Israeli forces on Egypt.
Dawn for more