Abdülmecid II: The Last Caliph

Abdülmecid II held the Ottoman caliphate from November 1922 until 3 March 1924, when the Turkish Grand National Assembly abolished the office by law and sent him out of the country. He was the last person to hold a title that had passed through the Ottoman house since the sixteenth century and, in the theory the office carried, had descended from the earliest Muslim community.

His sixteen months are a short reign by any measure, and the office he held for them was unlike any his predecessors had held. The Assembly that elected him had already abolished the sultanate, so for the first time in Ottoman history the caliphate stood alone, without a throne attached to it, without revenue of its own, and without the power that had made the title mean something to the dynasty that carried it. The experiment did not last. The Encyclopaedia of Islam puts the matter directly: the attempt to separate the caliphate from the sultanate proved a failure, and on 3 March 1924 the caliphate was abolished and the last caliph sent into exile.

He was, by inclination, a painter. He had spent the long decades of his life as a prince at work on canvases rather than in politics, and after 1924 he returned to that life in Switzerland and then in France, where he died in Paris in 1944 during a wartime bombardment.

Early Life

Abdülmecid Efendi was born on 29 May 1868 in Istanbul. He was the son of Sultan Abdülaziz, who reigned from 1861 to 1876, and of Hayrânıdil Kadın. He was therefore a grandson of Sultan Mahmud II and a nephew of Abdülmecid I, the sultan of the Tanzimat reforms, whose name he bore.

His father was deposed in 1876, when Abdülmecid was eight, and died shortly afterwards. The prince grew up through the long reign of his cousin Abdülhamid II and the Second Constitutional Period that followed it, in the circumstances usual for an Ottoman prince of the period: residence in the imperial establishments, an education in the palace manner, and no part in government. He gave his time to painting and to music, and the body of work he left is substantial enough that it was exhibited long after his death.

Heir Apparent

Abdülmecid became heir apparent on 4 July 1918, on the accession of his cousin Mehmed VI Vahideddin. The position carried no executive function, and the four years he held it were the years in which the Ottoman state came apart: the armistice of October 1918, the Allied occupation of Istanbul, the Treaty of Sèvres, the Greek landing at İzmir, and the war of independence fought from Ankara by a national movement that by 1922 had made the Istanbul government irrelevant.

By the autumn of 1922 the national movement had won. The Grand National Assembly in Ankara, not the Sublime Porte, was the government of Turkey in fact, and the question of what to do with the monarchy and the caliphate could no longer be deferred.

The Separation of the Caliphate from the Sultanate

The Act of 1 November 1922

On 1 November 1922 the Grand National Assembly acted to separate the two offices that the Ottoman house had held together since 1517. The arrangement, as the Encyclopaedia of Islam describes it, recognised that the caliphate belonged to the Ottoman house but reserved to the Assembly the right to choose and appoint the most suitable Ottoman prince. The sultanate, as a political office, was brought to an end.

Sultan Mehmed VI Vahideddin's position was by then untenable. His cooperation with the occupation authorities during the war of independence had destroyed whatever trust remained between the Istanbul palace and the nationalists in Ankara. He left Istanbul on 17 November 1922, departing aboard a British warship.

Election

The Assembly elected Abdülmecid caliph on 19 November 1922. The title conferred was halîfe-i müslimîn, caliph of the Muslims — a formula that described a religious office and claimed nothing territorial.

The Oath of Allegiance

The bay'a was taken on 24 November 1922 in the Chamber of the Hırka-i Şerif at the Topkapı Palace, the room that houses the mantle of the Prophet. Two features of the ceremony marked the change that had come. The prayer at the accession was offered in Turkish; and the first Friday sermon of the new caliphate was delivered in Turkish at the Fatih Mosque by Müfid Efendi, who took as his theme the saying that the community had returned from the lesser struggle to the greater.

Thomas Arnold, Professor of Arabic at the University of London, published his study of the caliphate in 1924 and described what the ceremony omitted. Abdülmecid was invested with the mantle of the Prophet, as his ancestors had been, but he was deprived of the power of the sword; and unlike them he did not proceed to the mosque of Ayyub to be girt with the sword of the founder of the Ottoman house. The omission was not accidental. The sword was the symbol of the temporal authority the Assembly had just removed.

A Caliph Without a State

The Shape of the Office

Arnold's account of what the office then consisted of is the fullest description from the period. The new dignitary, he wrote, was shorn of all real authority or concern in the political and administrative affairs of the country. His functions appeared to be mainly ornamental: he was present at the weekly Selamlık and was treated with the outward formalities of respect. What was not clear, Arnold observed, was what place he was to fill in the life of the Muslim world, or even in his own country — and that question had not been answered before the office was taken away.

Arnold also set out the reasoning he understood to lie behind the separation. The conviction had gradually gained strength, he wrote, that the historical associations of the caliphate were incompatible with a constitutional government responsible to a national assembly: the atmosphere of awe and reverence surrounding a figure to whom unquestioning obedience was due exposed his ministers to the risk of dismissal at any moment, as in the reigns of earlier autocrats. He noted that the precedent of the Abbasid caliphs in Mamluk Egypt showed a caliph could exist without temporal power, while doubting that Turkish statesmen were much influenced by the historical parallel, since they were chiefly concerned with the political situation in front of them.

Recognition Abroad

The office had an international constituency, and it responded. The Khilafat Conference in India, meeting from 21 to 27 December 1922, confirmed Abdülmecid in the caliphate. The movement in India that had campaigned since the end of the war against the dismemberment of the caliphate had been, in the words of the account at historyofislam.com, a movement whose stated goal was to press Britain not to adopt a policy that would remove the caliphate, and which had drawn support from Indian national leaders; it continued until the Turks themselves dissolved the institution.

The Republic and the Abolition

29 October 1923

The constitutional change that settled the matter came eleven months after Abdülmecid's election and had nothing directly to do with him. On 29 October 1923, after hours of debate, the Assembly passed a group of six amendments to the constitutional enactment of 1921. Their purpose, Mustafa Kemal said, was to remove ambiguities and inconsistencies in the political system of the country. The amended text declared that the form of government of the state of Turkey is a republic, that the President is elected by the Grand National Assembly from among its own members, and that the President is head of the state and appoints the Prime Minister.

With a republic declared and a president as head of state, the constitutional space that the separated caliphate had been occupying closed.

Law 431 of 3 March 1924

On 3 March 1924 the Grand National Assembly abolished the caliphate by law — law 431, which provided both for the abolition of the office and for the removal of the Ottoman dynasty from the territory of the Turkish Republic. The Encyclopaedia of Islam records the date in both of the entries that touch it, noting in one that the attempt to separate caliphate from sultanate had proved a failure, and in the other that the Assembly in Ankara definitively abolished the Ottoman caliphate, with the creation of a secular Turkish state following. The new order was confirmed in the republican constitution the Assembly adopted on 20 April 1924.

The decision drew protest across the Muslim world. It was not reversed.

Exile

The Departure

Abdülmecid left Turkey on the night of the law's passage. He was taken out by way of Çatalca with £2,000 and passports issued by the Swiss authorities that were valid for exit only. He travelled to Switzerland and settled at the Grand Alp Hotel at Territet, on Lake Geneva.

The Statement of 11 March 1924

On 11 March 1924, eight days after the abolition, he issued a statement from exile. He declared the Assembly's decision void and called for the convening of a religious council to settle the question of the caliphate. The statement had no practical effect; no such council was convened, and no successor to the office was recognised.

Nice, Paris and Hyderabad

In October 1924 he moved from Switzerland to Nice, and he later lived in Paris. He had no revenue of his own. The Nizam of Hyderabad granted him an allowance of £300 a month, paid through Seyyid Emîr Ali. The connection with Hyderabad was strengthened by marriage: his daughter Dürrüşehvar married Azam Jah, the Nizam's elder son.

Painting

Abdülmecid's painting is the part of his life that long outlasted his office. He worked in oils in a European manner, and the titles of two of his canvases indicate the subjects that interested him: Sarayda Beethoven, Beethoven in the palace, and Haremde Goethe, Goethe in the harem — both of them scenes placing a figure of European high culture inside an Ottoman interior. His work was first exhibited in 1986, forty-two years after his death.

Death and Burial

Abdülmecid II died in Paris on 23 August 1944, during a bombardment of the city, at the age of seventy-six. His burial was long delayed by the circumstances of the war and its aftermath. He was buried at Jannat al-Baqi in Medina on 30 March 1954, nearly ten years after his death.

Historiographical Note

The sequence of 1922 and 1923. Thomas Arnold's account, written in 1924 and the closest scholarly treatment to the events, compresses them. He writes that on 1 November 1922 the Grand National Assembly declared that the office of Sultan of Turkey had ceased to exist and that its government had become a republic, and that Vahideddin was deposed and the Assembly elected his cousin Abdülmecid as caliph of all the Muslims. The first half of that is right and the second conflates two distinct acts a year apart. The Encyclopaedia of Islam's treatment of the Turkish constitution separates them: the act of 1 November 1922 dealt with the caliphate and the sultanate, while the republic was declared by the constitutional amendments of 29 October 1923 and confirmed in the constitution of 20 April 1924. The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi gives the same order. This article follows that sequence; Arnold's compression is understandable in a book published within months of the events but is not followed here.

The date of Vahideddin's departure. The account at historyofislam.com places the last sultan's flight from Istanbul in October 1922. The date followed here is 17 November 1922, which accords with the Assembly's act of 1 November preceding it and with Abdülmecid's election on 19 November following it.

Arnold's judgement on the institution. Arnold closed his chapter with an assessment rather than a narration, writing that as a political reality, and as embodying the theories that had lent it importance in the past, the caliphate had long been dead, and that the Turkish National Assembly had faced the realities of the situation in decreeing its abolition. That is his view of the institution's condition in 1924 and is recorded here as his, not as a settled historical finding; the same book notes that the caliphate had survived thirteen centuries and had been, even at a low ebb of influence, the accepted hinge of Muslim political life.

What the sources do not establish. The approved sources consulted for this article carry a detailed record of Abdülmecid's offices, dates and movements, and very little about his conduct of the caliphate beyond the ceremonial. No approved source consulted gives an account of his dealings with the Ankara government during his sixteen months, or of what he attempted to make of the office. The narrative at historyofislam.com states that those opposed to the nationalists congregated around the caliph and tried to destabilise them, and that the Assembly responded by abolishing the office; that site is described in this project's source register as secondary narrative which is usually uncited, so the statement is recorded as its account rather than asserted here as established. The gap is a real one and is left as a gap.

References and Further Reading

Primary Islamic Sources

• The bay'a of 24 November 1922 in the Chamber of the Hırka-i Şerif, Topkapı Palace, and the first Turkish khutba of the caliphate delivered at the Fatih Mosque by Müfid Efendi, as recorded in the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi entry on Abdülmecid Efendi.
• Abdülmecid II's statement of 11 March 1924 declaring the Grand National Assembly's decision void and calling for a religious council, as recorded in the same entry.
• Law 431 of the Turkish Grand National Assembly, 3 March 1924, abolishing the caliphate and removing the Ottoman dynasty from the territory of the Republic.
• The resolution of the Khilafat Conference, India, 21–27 December 1922, confirming Abdülmecid in the caliphate.

Classical Islamic Sources

• The classical doctrine of the caliphate, against which the office of 1922–24 is to be measured, is treated in the juristic literature on the imama and in the discussions of deposition surveyed in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 12, under khalʿ.

Academic and Scholarly Sources

• Sir Thomas W. Arnold, The Caliphate. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924.
• Enver Konukçu, 'Abdülmecid Efendi', TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 1, Istanbul, 1988, pp. 263–264.
• 'Dustūr' (Turkey), The Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 2.
• F.-C. Muth, 'Khalʿ', The Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 12.
• Nazeer Ahmed, 'The First World War and the Dissolution of the Caliphate', historyofislam.com.

Further Reading

• Sylvia Haim's supplementary chapter on the period after 1924, in the 1965 reissue of Arnold's The Caliphate.
• G. Jäschke, Die Entwicklung des osmanischen Verfassungstaates von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart, cited in The Encyclopaedia of Islam's bibliography on the Turkish constitution.
• A. Ş. Gözübüyük and S. Kili, on the modern Turkish transcriptions of the constitutional texts, cited in the same bibliography.

Note: the works in this Further Reading list are offered to the reader for further study. Nothing in the body of this article rests on them.