In 1516 he invaded Syria, its outlying province, and in 1517 he entered Cairo. There he made prisoner the reigning Mameluke, Kansaw el Ghouri, and had him publicly beheaded, or according to another account, received his head from a soldier, who had killed him where he lay on the ground after falling (for the Sultan was an old man) from his horse. He then, in virtue of a very doubtful cession made to him of his rights by one Motawakkel Ibn Omar el Hakim, a descendant of the house of Abbas, whom he found living as t.i.tular Caliph in Cairo, took to himself the following style and t.i.tle: Sultan es Salatin, wa Hakan el Hawakin, Malek el Bahreyn, wa Hami el Barreyn, Khalifeh Rasul Allah, Emir el Mumenin, wa Sultan, wa Khan--t.i.tles which may be thus interpreted: King of Kings and Lord of Lords, Monarch of the two seas (the Mediterranean and the Red Sea), and Protector of the two lands (Hejaz and Syria, the holy lands of Islam), Successor of the Apostle of G.o.d, Prince of the Faithful, and Emperor. It is said that he first had the satisfaction of hearing his name mentioned in the public prayers as Caliph when he visited the great mosque of Zacharias at Aleppo on his return northwards in 1519.[10]
Such, in a few words, is historically the origin of the modern Caliphate, and such are the t.i.tles now borne by Selim"s descendant, Abd el Hamid. It is difficult at this distance of time, and in the absence of detailed contemporary narratives, to do more than guess the effect on Mussulmans of his day of Selim"s religious pretensions. To all alike, friends as well as foes, he must in the first instance have appeared as an usurper, for before him no man not of the house of Koreysh, and so a kinsman of their Prophet, had ever claimed to be his spiritual heir.
Indeed, it was a maxim with all schools of theology of all ages that descent from the Koreysh was the first t.i.tle to the Caliphate; but we may reasonably suppose that within the limits of his own dominions, and even to the ma.s.s of the vulgar beyond them, the Ottoman Emperor"s sublime proceedings met with approval.
Selim was a portentous figure in Islam; and the splendour of his apparition in the north dazzled the eyes of all. Mussulmans must have seen in him and his house the restorers of their political fortunes and the champion of their religion against Christendom; and a departure from established rule in his favour may well have seemed justified to pious persons as the best hope for the future of their creed. Selim was already temporal lord of the greater part of Islam, and he might be expected thus to restore the spiritual sovereignty also. Besides, to the ears of Mussulmans of the sixteenth century, the Caliphal t.i.tle was no longer a familiar sound, and the t.i.tle of Sultan which Selim already bore was that of the highest temporal authority they knew.
The Caliphate, if it existed at all, was in the modern world a less imposing name than the Sultanate; and the two had since the destruction of Bagdad become confused, as they still remain, in men"s minds who do not any more now make common use of the older t.i.tle. Thus it was not difficult for the new Sultan of Damascus and Cairo and Medina to impose himself on the mult.i.tude--not merely as heir to the Caliphal possessions, but to the t.i.tle also of the Caliphs and their spiritual rank. Advantage, too, seems to have been taken in the first instance, as it has been subsequently, of the accidental resemblance of name between Othman, Selim"s ancestor, and Othman the third Caliph. The vulgar ear caught the sound as one familiar to it, and was satisfied, for there is all the world in a name.
With the Ulema, however, it was necessary to be more precise; and we know that the question of the Ottoman right to the spiritual succession of the Prophet was one long and hotly debated in the schools. Tradition was formal on the point of excluding aliens to the Koreysh from this its legal inheritance, for Mohammed himself had repeatedly distinguished his own tribe as being the sole heirs to his authority; nor would any doctor of the specially Arabian schools listen to a departure from ideas so absolute. The Hanefite school, however, representing those chiefly interested in accepting the Ottoman pretension, undertook its legal defence, and succeeded, in spite of the one great obstacle of birth, in making out a very tolerable case for themselves and the Beni Othman--a case which, in the absence of any rival candidate to oppose to them, has since been tacitly accepted by the majority of the Sunite Ulema.
The difficulty, however, was in practice settled by a compromise, and the dispute itself had long been forgotten by all but the learned, until within the present generation its arguments were once more dragged out publicly to serve a political purpose. The Hanefite arguments are on this account interesting, and I have been at pains to ascertain and understand them; but perhaps before I state them in detail it will be best first briefly to run over the Caliphal history of an earlier age and describe the state of things which Selim"s act superseded.
Orthodox Mussulman writers recognize four distinct phases which the office of Khalifeh has undergone, and four distinct periods of its history. The word Khalifeh, derived from the Arabic root _khalafa_, to "leave behind," signifies literally one left behind, and in the legal sense the relict or successor of the prophet and heir to his temporal and spiritual power.
The _first_ historical phase noticed is one of pure theocracy, in which the Caliph or successor of Mohammed was saint as well as priest and king, and was to a certain extent inspired. It lasted thirty years only, and is represented by the four great Caliphs--Abu Bekr, Omar, Othman, and Ali--who receive from the faithful when they speak of them the t.i.tle of Seydna, or Our Lord.
The _second_ phase, which lasted nearly six hundred years, is that of the Arabian monarchy, in which the Caliphate took the shape of hereditary temporal dominion. Its representatives are neither saints nor doctors of the law, and stand on a quite different footing from those who precede them. They begin with Mawiyeh ibn Ommiyah, founder of the Ommiad dynasty, and end with Mostasem Billah, the last Sultan of the Abbasides.
The _third_ period is a phase of temporal inter-regnum during which for nearly three hundred years the Khalifeh exercised no sovereign rights, and resided as a spiritual chief only, or as we should now say Sheykh el Islam, at Cairo. The temporal authority of Islam, which is theoretically supposed to have been continued without break even during this period, was then in delegation with the Memluk Sultans of Egypt and other Mussulman princes.
The _last_ phase is that of the Ottoman Caliphate.
As nearly all modern arguments respecting the Caliphate appeal to examples in the earliest period, it will be well to consider the origin of its inst.i.tution and the political basis of Islam itself. Mohammedan doctors affirm that the Apostle of G.o.d, Mohammed (on whose name be peace), when he fled from Mecca, did so not as a rebellious citizen but as a pretender to authority. He was by birth a prince of the princely house of the Koreysh, itself the n.o.blest tribe of Hejaz, and his grandfather had been supreme ruler in Mecca. He established himself, therefore, with his companions in exile as head of an independent political community, following in this the ancient custom of Arabia where sections constantly cut themselves off from the parent tribe and form new nations under the separate leadership of one or another member of their princely families. Islam, therefore, was from its commencement a political as well as a religious body, and while Mohammed preached to his disciples as a prophet, he also gave laws to them as their king and governor. He was their Imam, the leader of their prayer, and he was their Emir and Kadi, prince and magistrate. Thus the supreme temporal and spiritual authority became linked, and Islam was from its beginning a nation no less than a church.
As long as Mohammed lived, this state of things remained unquestioned, and difficulties began only at his death. It is a point which has been much disputed what were the prophet"s intentions regarding this event.
In early times the sect of Ali maintained that he had appointed his son-in-law his heir, and others have held that Abu Bekr had the nomination; but Sunites are now mostly agreed that no individual appointment was made, and that the choice of a successor was left to be decided by election. In any case the procedure followed by Mohammed"s bereaved followers was elective, and its details were in strict accordance with that Arabian custom on which the Koranic law is mainly built.
Now, in an Arab tribe, when the Sheykh dies, the elders of the tribe, heads of its great houses and sections, a.s.semble in one of their number"s tent and, sitting in a circle, discuss the subject of his succession. Theoretically, the choice of a successor is open to any one of them, for the tribe, however large, is all one great family, descended from a common ancestor, and though no one from without could be admitted to the supreme rule, any one from within the tribe can hold office. But in practice the choice is limited to a few persons. The reverence of the Arabs for blood, and for selected strains of blood, prevent them, except in very exceptional cases, from changing the dynasty of their rulers. If the dead man has left behind him a son of full age and respectable qualities, he will, without dispute, be acknowledged Sheykh. If not, an uncle, a nephew, or a cousin will be chosen. Only in extreme circ.u.mstances of general danger, or of failure of heirs male, can the member of a new family reasonably aspire to power. Moreover, there is no uniform law of election. The meeting does not pretend to give a right, only to confirm one; for the right lies not with the electors but with him who can maintain his election. There is, therefore, no formal system of voting, but the elders having ascertained who among the dead man"s relations commands the strongest following, proceed to acknowledge him by the ceremony of giving him their hands. He then becomes their Sheykh. It sometimes happens, however, that parties are so evenly divided between rival leaders that the tribe divides, one section going this way and the other that, until one of the leaders gives in his submission; otherwise the quarrel is decided by the sword.
All these features of the Arabian tribal system of succession may be noticed in the first elections to the Caliphate. As soon as it was known that Mohammed was indeed dead, a conclave composed of the elders and chief men of Islam, self-const.i.tuted and recognizing no special popular mandate, a.s.sembled in the house of Omar ibn el Khattub. This conclave is known to jurists as the _Ahl el h.e.l.li wa el agde_, the people of the loosing and the knotting, because they a.s.sumed the duty of solving the knotty question of succession. A nice point had to be decided, just such a one as has in all ages been the cause of civil war in Arabia. The Prophet had left no son, but more than one near relation. Moreover, at that moment the new nation of Islam was in danger of internal disruption, and the religious and the civil elements in it were on the point of taking up arms against each other. The two chief candidates were Ali ibn Abutaleb and Abu Bekr, the one son-in-law and cousin and the other father-in-law of Mohammed--Ali represented the civil, Abu Bekr the religious party; and as it happened that the latter party was predominant at Medina, it was on Abu Bekr that the choice fell. He was recognized as head of the more powerful faction, and the chiefs gave him their hands; while civil war was only prevented by the magnanimous submission of Ali.
This form of succession is held by most Sunite doctors to be the authentic form intended by the Prophet, nor did the three following elections differ from it in any essential point. It is only noticed that Abu Bekr designated Omar as the most fitting person to succeed him, and so in a measure directed the choice of the Ahl el agde. The Caliph was in each instance elected by the elders at Medina, and the choice confirmed by its general acknowledgment elsewhere.
In the time of Ali, however, a new principle began to make its appearance, which foreshadowed a change in the nature of the Caliphate.
The election of Abu Bekr, as I have said, was determined by the predominant religious feeling of the day. He was the holiest man in Islam, and his government was throughout strictly theocratic. He not only administered the religious law, but was its interpreter and architect. He sat every day in the _mejlis_, or open court of justice, and decided there questions of divinity as well as of jurisprudence. He publicly led the prayer in the Mosque, expounded the Koran, and preached every Friday from the pulpit. He combined in his person all the functions now divided between the Sheykh el Islam, the grand Mufti, and the executive authorities. He was king and priest and magistrate, doctor of civil and religious law, and supreme referee on all matters whether of opinion or practice; he was, in a word, the Pope of Islam. Nor did his three successors abate anything of Abu Bekr"s pretensions. The only power they delegated was the command of the Mussulman armies, which were then overrunning the world, and the government of the provinces these had conquered.
Ali, however, when he at last succeeded to the Caliphate, found himself opposed by the very party whose candidate he had once been, and this party had gathered strength in the interval. With the conquest of the world worldly ideas had filled the hearts of Mussulmans, and a strong reaction also had set in in favour of those specially national ideas of Arabia which religious fervour had hitherto held in check. It was natural, indeed inevitable, that this should be the case, for many conquered nations had embraced the faith of Islam, and, as Mussulmans, had become the equals of their conquerors, so that what elements of pride existed in these found their gratification in ideas of race and birth rather than of religion, ideas which the conquered races could not share, and which were the special inheritance of Arabia.
The national party, then, had been reinforced, at the expense of the religious, among the Koreysh, who were still at the head of all the affairs of State. Their leader was Mawiyeh Ibn Ommiyeh, a man of distinguished ability and of that charm of manner which high-born Arabs know so well how to use to their political ends. He had for some years been Governor of Syria, and was more popular there than the pious Ali; and Syria, though not yet the nominal, was already the real seat of the Mussulman Government. Mawiyeh therefore refused to accept Ali"s election at Medina as valid, and finding himself supported by a rival Ahl el agde at Damascus, made that appeal to the sword which Arabian usage sanctions as the ultimate right of all pretenders.
Religious writers agree in condemning Mawiyeh for his revolt; and while his succession to Ali is accepted as legal, they place him on quite a different level from the four Caliphs who preceded him. In Mawiyeh they see fulfilled that prediction of their Prophet which announced that Islam should be ruled for thirty years by an Imam, and ever after by a King. Mawiyeh is, indeed, the type of all the later Mohammedan Emperors.
According to canon law, the head of the State is also head of the religion; but Mawiyeh ceased to exercise religious functions in person.
These, unlike his predecessors, he delegated to others, and neither led the prayer nor preached; nor was he held to be either the best or the most learned man in Islam, as Abu Bekr and the rest had been.
Moreover--and this is the chief point noticed regarding him--he introduced the system of dynastic heredity into the Caliphate, nominating his son Yezid his successor in his own lifetime. The change, advantageous as it was politically, is regarded as a religious falling off. Henceforth the Caliphs, whether of the Ommiad or afterwards of the Abbaside families, were not in reality elected, though the form of confirmation by the Ulema was gone through; and they affected to succeed by right of birth, not by the voice of the people.
During the whole period of the Arabian Caliphate we only notice one Prince of the Faithful who busied himself much with religious learning, and few who personally exercised the magisterial functions. Only once we read of an Abbaside Caliph insisting on his right of leading the prayer, and this was probably the effect of an accidental jealousy. As a rule the temporal government of Islam was intrusted to a _Sadrazzam_, or Grand Vizier, the spiritual duty of prayer to a _Nab_, or deputy Imam, and the elaboration or interpretation of law and doctrine to such Ulema or Mujtaheddin as could command a following. The character of the Khalifeh, however, was still essentially sacred. He was of the Koreysh and of the blood of the Prophet, and so was distinct from the other princes of the world. As their political power decayed, the Abbasides fell indeed into the hands of adventurers who even occasionally used them as puppets for their own ambitious ends; but the office was respected, and neither the Kurdish Saladdin, nor Togral Bey, nor Malek Shah, nor any of the Seljukian Emirs el Amara dared meddle personally with the t.i.tle of Caliph.
The Ommiad dynasty, founded by Mawiyeh, reigned at Damascus eighty-five years, and was then succeeded on a new appeal to the sword in A.D. 750 by the descendants of another branch of the Koreysh--the Beni Abbas--who transferred the capital of Islam to Bagdad, and survived as temporal sovereigns there for five hundred years.
This second period of Islam, though containing her greatest glories and her highest worldly prosperity, is held to be less complete by divines than the first thirty years which had preceded it. Islam was no longer one. To say nothing of the Persian and Arabian schisms, the orthodox world itself was divided, and rival Caliphs had established themselves independently in Spain and Egypt. Moreover, during the last two centuries the temporal power of the Caliphs was practically in delegation to the Seljuk Turks, who acted as mayors of the palace, and their spiritual power was unsupported by any show of sanct.i.ty or learning. It was terminated forcibly by the pagan Holagu, who at the head of the Mongols sacked Bagdad in 1258.
The third period of Caliphal history saw all temporal power wrested from the Caliphs. Islam, on the destruction of the Arabian monarchy, resolved itself into a number of separate States, each governed by its own Bey or Sultan, who in his quality of temporal prince was head also of religion within his own dominions. The Mongols, converted to the Faith of Mecca, founded a Mohammedan empire in the east; the Seljuk Turks, replaced by the Ottoman, reigned in Asia Minor; the Barbary States had their own rulers; and Egypt was governed by that strange dynasty of slaves, the Mameluke Sultans. Nowhere was a supreme temporal head of Islam to be seen, and the name of Khalifeh as that of a reigning sovereign ceased any longer to be heard of in the world. Only the nominal succession of the Prophet was obscurely preserved at Cairo, whither the survivors of the family of Abbas had betaken themselves on the ma.s.sacre of their house at Bagdad.
It is difficult to ascertain the precise position of these t.i.tular Caliphs under the Mameluke monarchy in Egypt. That they were little known to the world in general is certain; and one is sometimes tempted to suspect the complete authenticity of the succession preserved through them. Contemporary Christian writers do not mention them, and it is evident from Sir John Mandeville and others that in Egypt the Egyptian Sultan himself was talked of as head of the Mussulman religion. I have heard their position compared with that of the present Sheykhs el Islam at Constantinople--that is to say, they were appointed by the Sultan, and were made use of by him as a means of securing Mussulman allegiance--and I believe this to have been all their real status. They are cited, however, as in some sense sovereigns by Hanefite teachers, whose argument it is that the succession of the Prophet has never lapsed, or Islam been without a recognized temporal head. The Sultans, neither of Egypt nor of India, nor till Selim"s time of the Turkish Empire, ever claimed for themselves the t.i.tle of Khalifeh, nor did the Sherifal family of Mecca, who alone of them might have claimed it legally as Koreysh. Neither did Tamerlane nor any of the Mussulman Mongols who reigned at Bagdad. The fact is, we may a.s.sume the Caliphate was clean forgotten at the time Selim bethought him of it as an instrument of power.
It must, then, have been an interesting and startling novelty with Mussulmans to hear of this new pretender to the ancient dignity--interesting, because the name Khalifeh was connected with so many of the bygone glories of Islam; startling, because he who claimed it seemed by birth incapable of doing so. The Hanefite Ulema, however, as I have said, undertook Selim"s defence, or rather that of his successors, for Selim himself died not a year afterwards, and succeeded in proving, to the satisfaction of the majority of Sunites, that the house of Othman had a good and valid t.i.tle to the rank they had a.s.sumed.
Their chief arguments were as follows. The house of Othman, they a.s.serted, ruled spiritually by--
1. _The right of the sword_, that is to say, the _de facto_ possession of the sovereign t.i.tle. It was argued that, the Caliphate being a necessity (and this all orthodox Mussulmans admit), it was also necessary that the _de facto_ holder of the t.i.tle should be recognized as legally the Caliph, _until a claimant with a better t.i.tle should appear_. Now the first qualification of a claimant was that he should claim, and the second that he should be supported by a party; and Selim had both claimed the Caliphate and supported his pretensions at the head of an army. He had challenged the world to produce a rival, and no rival had been found--none, at least, which the Hanefite school acknowledged, for the Sultan of Morocco they had never accepted, and the last descendant of the Abbasides had waived his rights. In support of the proposition that the sword could give a t.i.tle they cited the examples of Mawiyeh, who thus established his right against the family of Ali, and of Abu el Abbas, who had thus established his against that of Mawiyeh.
2. _Election_, that is the sanction of a legal body of Elders. It was argued that, as the Ahl el agde had been removed from Medina to Damascus, and from Damascus to Bagdad, and from Bagdad to Cairo, so it had been once more legally removed from Cairo to Constantinople. Selim had brought with him to St. Sophia"s some of the Ulema of the Azhar mosque in Cairo, and these, in conjunction with the Turkish Ulema, had elected him or ratified his election. A form of election is to the present day observed at Constantinople in token of this right; and each new Sultan of the house of Othman, as he succeeds to the temporal sovereignty of Turkey, must wait before being recognized as Caliph till he has received the sword of office at the hands of the Ulema. This ceremony it is customary to perform in the mosque of Ayub.
3. _Nomination._ Sultan Selim, as has been already said, obtained from Mutawakkel, a descendant of the Abbasides and himself t.i.tularly Caliph, a full cession of all the Caliphal rights of that family. The fact, as far as it goes, is historical, and the only flaw in the argument would seem to be that Mutawakkel had no right thus to dispose of a t.i.tle to an alien, which was his own only in virtue of his birth. The case, indeed, was very much as though the Emperor of Germany, having possessed himself of London, should obtain from Don Carlos a cession of the throne of Spain; or as though Napoleon should have got such a cession of the Papacy, in 1813, from Pius VII. Still it is insisted upon strongly by the Hanefite divines as giving a more permanent dynastic t.i.tle than either of the previous pleas. As a precedent for nomination they cite the act of Abu Bekr, who on his death-bed recommended Omar as his successor in the Caliphate.
4. _The guardianship of the two shrines_, that is to say of Mecca and Jerusalem, but especially of Mecca. It has been a.s.serted by some of the Ulema, and it is certainly a common opinion at the present day, that the sovereignty of Hejaz is in itself sufficient t.i.tle to the Caliphate. It seems certainly to have been so considered in the first age of Islam, and many a b.l.o.o.d.y war was then fought for the right of protecting the Beyt Allah; but the connection of Hejaz with the Empire of the Caliphs has been too often broken to make this a very tenable argument. In the tenth century it was held by the Karmathian heretics, in the thirteenth by the Imams of Sana, and for seven years in the present century by the Wahhabis. Still the _de facto_ sovereignty of the Harameyn, or two shrines, was one of Selim"s pleas; and it is one which has reappeared in modern arguments respecting the Caliphal rights of his descendants.
5. _Possession of the Amanat_ or sacred relics. This last was a plea addressed to the vulgar rather than to the learned; but it is one which cannot be pa.s.sed by unnoticed here, for it exercises a powerful influence at the present day over the ignorant ma.s.s of Mussulmans. It was a.s.serted, and is still a pious belief, that from the sack of Bagdad, in 1258, certain relics of the Prophet and his companions were saved and brought to Cairo, and thence transferred by Selim to Constantinople.
These were represented to const.i.tute the Imperial insignia of office, and their possession to give a t.i.tle to the Caliphal succession. They consisted of the cloak of the Prophet borne by his soldiers as a standard, of some hairs from his beard, and of the sword of Omar. The vulgar believe them to be still preserved in the mosque of Ayub; and though the Ulema no longer insist on their authenticity, they are often referred to as an additional test of the Sultan"s right.
Such, then, were the arguments of the Hanefite school, who defended Selim"s claim, and such they are with regard to his successors of the house of Othman. By the world at large they seem to have been pretty generally accepted, the more so as the Turkish Sultans, having only a political end in view, were satisfied with their formal recognition by their own subjects, and did not bring the question to an issue with their independent neighbours. Neither the Mogul Emperors at Delhi nor the Sheriffs of Morocco were called upon to acknowledge temporal or spiritual supremacy in the Ottoman Sultans, nor did these affect an every-day use of the ancient t.i.tle they had a.s.sumed.
In India the head of the house of Othman was still known to Moslems as Padishah or Sultan er Roum, the Roman Emperor, the most powerful of Mussulman princes, but not in any special manner the head of their religion, certainly not their sovereign. The Ulema, indeed, such as were Hanefites, admitted him to be legally Khalifeh; but many of the Shafite school denied this, pleading still that as an alien to the Koreysh his claim was illegal, while to the ignorant ma.s.s of the people out of his dominions his spiritual t.i.tle remained almost unknown. The Sultans themselves were doubtless to blame for this, seeing that the spiritual functions of their new office were left almost entirely unperformed. For it cannot be too strongly insisted on that the a.s.sumption of the Caliphate was to the house of Othman only a means to an end, viz. the consolidation of its worldly power upon a recognized basis, and that, once that end obtained, the temporal dignity of Sultan was all that they really considered. Thus they never sought to exercise the right appertaining to the Caliphal office of appointing Nabs, or Deputy Imams, in the lands outside their dominions, or to interfere with doctrinal matters at home, except where such might prejudice the interests of their rule. With regard to these, the theologians of Constantinople, having satisfactorily settled the Caliphal dispute, and p.r.o.nounced the house of Othman for ever heirs to the dignity they had a.s.sumed, were recommended by the head of the State to busy themselves no further with doctrinal matters, and to consider the _ijtahad_, or development of new dogma, altogether closed for the future in their schools. Soliman the Magnificent, Selim"s heir, especially insisted upon this. He had already promulgated a series of decrees affecting the civil administration of his empire, which he had declared to be immutable; and an immutability, too, in dogma he thought would still further secure the peace and stability of his rule. Nor did he meet with aught but approval here from the Hanefite divines.
The Turkish Ulema, ever since their first appearance in the Arabian schools in the eleventh century, finding themselves at a disadvantage through their ignorance of the sacred language, and being const.i.tutionally adverse to intellectual effort, had maintained the proposition that mental repose was the true feature of orthodoxy, and in their _fetwas_ had consistently relied on authority and rejected original argument. They therefore readily seconded the Sultan in his views. Argument on first principles was formally forbidden in the schools; and for the interpretation of existing law two offices were invented--the one for dogmatic, the other for practical decisions, those of the Sheykh el Islam and the Great Mufti. This closing of doctrinal inquiry by the Ottoman Sultans, and the removal of the seat of supreme spiritual government from the Arabian atmosphere of Cairo to the Tartar atmosphere of the Bosphorus, was the direct and immediate cause of the religious stagnation which Islam suffered from so conspicuously in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
We have now brought the history of the Caliphate down to the period described in the last chapter as one of intellectual torpor for Islam.
It was a lethargy from which there seemed no awakening, and which to contemporaries, Voltaire among the rest, seemed closely approximating to the death of unbelief. In spite of Soliman"s eternal arrangements, the temporal power of the house of Othman was wofully diminished, and the spiritual prestige of the Sultans was gone with Mussulmans. By the middle of the last century the t.i.tle of Caliph, even in their own dominions, was all but forgotten, and the Court of Constantinople was become a byword for its vice and infidelity. It can therefore be well imagined that the awakening of religious feeling, which I also described as having been produced by the Wahhabite movement, especially menaced the Sultan in his Caliphal pretensions. By the beginning of the present century the serious world of Islam was already ripening for a change, and the t.i.tle of the Caliphate seemed open to whoever should re-invent and prove himself worthy to wear it. Two men certainly then dreamed of its acquisition, both men of supreme genius, and holding the elements of success in their hands. Nor can it be doubted that either of them would have achieved his ambition but for the appearance against them of a material power greater than their own, and which then, for the first time, began to make itself felt as paramount in Asia. That power was England, and the ambitions she thwarted there were those of Bonaparte and Mehemet Ali.
It is not, I believe, sufficiently understood how vast a scheme was overthrown by the Battle of the Nile. Napoleon"s mind was formed for dominion in the East, and where he failed in Europe he would have infallibly succeeded in Asia. There little policies are useless, and great ones root themselves in a congenial soil; and he was possessed with an idea which must have flourished. His English opponents, judging him only by the scale of their own thoughts, credited him with the inferior design of invading India through Persia, and called it a mad one; but India was, in fact, a small part only of his programme. When he publicly p.r.o.nounced the Kelemat at Cairo, and professed the faith of Islam, he intended to be its Head, arguing rightly that what had been possible three hundred years before to Selim was possible also then to him. Nor would the Mussulman world have been much more astonished in 1799 at being asked to accept a Bonaparte for Caliph, than it was in 1519 at being asked to accept an Ottoman. With Napoleon"s genius for war, and but for the disastrous sea fight on the Nile, all this might have been, and more; and it is conceivable that Europe, taken in reverse by a great Moslem mult.i.tude, might have suffered worse disasters than any the actual Napoleonic wars procured her, while a more durable empire might have been founded on the Nile or Bosphorus than the Bonapartes were able to establish on the Seine. As it was, it was an episode and no more, useful only to the few who saw it near enough to admire and understand.[11]
Among these who saw and understood was Mehemet Ali, the Albanian adventurer, who undertook the government of Egypt when England restored it to the Porte. Bonaparte from the first was his model, and he inherited from him this vision of a new Caliphate, the greatest of the Napoleonic ideas, and worked persistently to realize it. He was within an ace of succeeding. In 1839 Mehemet Ali had Mecca, Cairo, and Jerusalem in his hands, and he had defeated the Sultan at Konia, and was advancing through Asia Minor on Constantinople. There, without doubt, he would have proclaimed himself Caliph, having all the essential elements of the Sultan"s admitted right on which to found a new claim.
Nor is it probable that he would have found much religious opposition to the realization of his scheme from the Turkish Ulema. These, already alarmed by Sultan Murad"s administrative reforms, would hardly have espoused the Sultan"s defence with any vigour; and though Mehemet Ali himself was open to a charge of lat.i.tudinarianism, he had the one great claim upon orthodox Islam of having delivered the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina from the Wahhabis. The house of Othman, indeed, at this time had begun to stink--not only in the nostrils of the outside world, but in that of the Hanefite school itself; and as these had formerly accepted Selim, so they might very well, in 1839, have accepted Mehemet Ali. But this attempt, too, was stopped by England in pursuance of a policy which it is difficult now not to regret. The too venturous Arnaout was sent back to his vice-royalty in Egypt, and the House of Othman was entrusted with a new lease of spiritual sovereignty, if not yet of spiritual power.
The reigns of Abd el Mejid and of Abd el Aziz are remarkable with Mussulmans as having witnessed a complete dissociation of interests between the Imperial Government and the Old Hanefite school of Ulema. I have no s.p.a.ce here to discuss the nature of the reforms attempted and partly effected in the Ottoman Empire between the years 1839 and 1869 as a concession to the clamour of Europe. They were inst.i.tuted not by and through religion, as they should have been, but in defiance of it, and so failed to find acceptance anywhere with religious people. All changes so attempted must fail in Islam because they have in them the inevitable vice of illegality, and I hope to have an opportunity of explaining later the manner in which alone a true reform can hope to find acceptance. For the present I only note the promulgation of the Hatti Humayoum and its kindred decrees as points in the history of the Ottoman Caliphate"s decline, and as direct reasons for the reactionary change of front which we now witness in the policy of Constantinople.
Abd el Mejid for his ill-judged attempts gained with Mussulmans the name of an unbeliever, and his son was deposed in the way we all know as a breaker of the religious law. For a moment, however, Abd el Aziz seems to have seen the true nature of his position and to have had some idea of the _role_ required of him, as the following incident will show. It marks at any rate the epoch pretty exactly when a revival of the Sultan"s spiritual pretensions, as a settled policy, was first resolved on in Turkey. The circ.u.mstances have been narrated to me as follows:--
Quite in the early days of Abd el Aziz"s reign a certain statesman, a man of original genius and profoundly versed in the knowledge both of Europe and of the East, and especially of the religious history of Islam, came to Constantinople. He was a friend of Rushdi Pasha, then the Grand Vizier, and of others of the party of Young Turkey, men who were seeking by every means, fair and foul, to reorganize and strengthen the central authority of the Empire. To these, and subsequently, in an interview, to the Sultan himself, he urged the advantage which might accrue to the Ottoman Government both as a means of controlling the provinces and as a weapon against European diplomacy if the spiritual authority of the Sultan as Caliph were put more prominently forward. He suggested especially to Abd el Aziz that his real strength lay in the reorganization not of his temporal but of his spiritual forces; and he expressed his wonder that so evident a source of strength had been so little drawn on. He pointed out the importance of the Mussulman populations outside the Empire to the Sultan, and urged that these should be brought as much as possible within the sphere of Constantinople influence. The Barbary States, Mussulman India, and Central Asia might thus become to all intents and purposes, save that of tribute, subjects of the Porte.
In early times it had been a duty of the Caliphs to appoint in all the provinces of Islam Imams or deputies to represent their spiritual authority, and it was suggested that these should once more be appointed. An Imam, or leader of their public prayer, is a necessity with orthodox Mussulmans, and in default of legal appointment from the Caliph, who is himself the supreme Imam, the faithful had been constrained to apply either to the local governments for such appointment or to elect the functionary themselves. This they acknowledged to be illegal, and would willingly revert to the more legitimate system; while the re-establishment of such a hierarchy would bring an enormous accession of spiritual power to Constantinople. It was also shown to Abd el Aziz how all-important Arabia was to his position, and how greatly the means of influence there had been neglected.
I am informed by one present at this interview that Abd el Aziz was not only delighted at the idea, but profoundly astonished. He seems to have had no notion previously either of the historical dignity of the spiritual office he held nor of its prerogatives, and for a while his thoughts were turned in the direction pointed out to him. He sent for the chief Ulema and asked them if all he heard was true; and, when he found their ideas to be entirely in unison with the advice just given him, he commissioned the Sheykh el Islam to push forward the doctrine of his spiritual leadership by all the means in his power. Missionaries were consequently despatched to every part of the Mussulman world, and especially to India and the Barbary States, to explain the Hanefite dogma of the Caliphate; and though at first these met with little success they eventually gained their object in those countries where believers were obliged to live under infidel rule, so much so that in a few years the Ottoman Caliphate became once more a recognized "question"
in the schools. They were aided in this by a powerful instrument, then first employed in Turkey, the press.[12] A newspaper in Arabic called the _Jawaib_ was subsidized at Constantinople under the direction of one Achmet Faris, a convert to Islam and a man of great literary ability and knowledge of Arabic, who already had views on the subject of the Caliphate; and this organ henceforth consistently advocated the new policy of the Ulema.
The official clique in Stamboul were, however, at that time still intent on other projects, and only half understood the part to be played by religion in their scheme of administrative reform for the Empire.
Besides--and this was the chief hindrance to the Ulema--Abd el Aziz was not a man capable of seriously carrying out a great political idea, being little else than a man of pleasure. He and his government consequently soon drifted back into the groove of his predecessors"
material policy, which relied for its strength on the physical force of arms, foreign loans, and the intrigues of officials. The only practical action taken by Ottoman ministers in the line indicated were the twin crusades proclaimed against the Wahhabis of Hasa and the heretical Imams of Sana. But the Hanefite Ulema were not thus to be satisfied. They had determined on carrying out the idea they had adopted, and on forcing the Sultan to put himself openly at the head of a religious and reactionary movement; and when they found that Abd el Aziz could not be made to act consistently as Caliph, they deposed him, and thus opened a way for the true hero of their idea, the present Sultan, Abd el Hamid.