By
Nadeem F. Paracha
23 Aug 2020
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.
Illustration by Abro
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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.
Challenged
by Turkey’s ‘neo-Ottomanism’, Saudi Arabia is struggling to revive King
Faisal’s reformist ideas. The goal, as before, is the leadership of the Sunni
Muslim world
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.
With his
displays of ‘Arab socialism’ and a modernity suited to the needs of the
evolving Muslim polities, Nasser mocked Saudi Arabia of being retrogressive and
rigid. For a decade after 1956, Nasser’s Egypt was the undisputed leader of the
Muslim world, inspiring large numbers of Muslims in Arab and non-Arab regions
alike.
Stung by
Nasser’s status in this context, and also by his criticism of Saudi Arabia, the
Saudi monarch King Faisal (who came to the throne in 1964) unfolded a hectic
modernisation process in Saudi Arabia. However, Nasser’s mystique and influence
began to rapidly recede when Egyptian and Syrian forces were decimated by their
Israeli counterparts in 1967.
In 1970,
Nasser passed away, and Saudi Arabia once again rushed in to pick up the status
of the leader of the Muslim world. A windfall of profits made during (and
because of) the 1973 oil crisis enhanced the influence of what became known as
the ‘petro-dollar’. And Saudi Arabia had the most.
Faisal
cleverly used these to subdue (and win over) Nasser’s successor Anwar Sadat.
Faisal was also aware of the ambitions of Pakistani PM Z.A. Bhutto, who fancied
himself as a champion of the modern Muslim world. But since Pakistan had lost a
war in 1971 and its economy was weak, Faisal brought Pakistan fully into the
ever-expanding Saudi orbit.
By the
1980s, flush with petro-dollars and with a surge in the popularity of
‘political Islam’ in Muslim countries, Saudi political and religious influence
witnessed a manifold increase. It was only challenged by the radical Shia
theocracy in Iran. Both countries fought a brutal war of influence through
sectarian proxies in countries such as Pakistan and Lebanon.
However, in
the new century, events such as the Arab Spring, the fall of dictatorships in
Libya, Iraq and Tunisia, civil wars in Afghanistan, Somalia, Syria and Yemen,
the emergence of multiple violent anti-state Islamist outfits in most Muslim
countries, along with the retreat of the US and the rise of China, began to
make various Muslim countries reconsider their strategic priorities and even
reinvent their ideological character to strike new alliances.
Turkey that
had dropped out of the game of Muslim leadership decades ago, entered the fray
again and is trying to lure non-Arab Muslim regions to break away from the
Saudi orbit. It is an orbit that had already begun to decay.
This is one
reason why the new Saudi monarchs are trying to revive King Faisal’s initial
reformist ideas. Whereas the conservative aspect of Saudi ideology was
castigated by Nasser’s Egypt in the past, this time it is being challenged by
Erdogan’s ‘neo-Ottomanism’, which is critical of Saudi Arabia for squandering
the influence it had enjoyed for decades as the leader of the Muslim world.
Turkey sees itself as a more natural candidate for this role. This title once
again is up for grabs.
Original
Headline: WHO IS THE LEADER OF THE MUSLIM WORLD?
Source: The Dawn, Pakistan
URL: https://newageislam.com/islamic-society/the-title-leader-muslim-world/d/122713