Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

148 t CHAPTER SIX
universal umma that the traditionalists invariably spoke as if there
were one sultan, the amir who executed the caliph’s will, when
actually there were many from Spain to India and beyond, and the
will they executed was invariably their own.
Was the caliph a kind of Muslim pope? Even in his purely episcopal
role, the bishop of Rome had, like the other bishops of
Christendom, far more authority than his counterpart in Baghdad
or Istanbul. Though a bishop’s jurisdiction was limited to his see,
he could speak out definitively on matters of faith and morals. But
once the claim to primacy put forward by the bishop of Rome was
accepted as such in the Western churches, the pope’s jurisdiction
became truly imperial, and from the eleventh century on, when the
caliphs were yielding to their Turkish sultans, the popes were vindicating
their claims to superiority over their own sultans, the emperors.
The Eastern churches only fitfully, and usually under
duress, accepted the papal claim to absolute primacy, but they recognized
that the pope certainly spoke for Western Christendom.
Recognition of a universal caliphate was far more nominal. It
was rejected in fact, at least in its embodiment in an Abbasid or
Ottoman claimant, by the Umayyad caliphs in Cordoba, by the
Ismailis in North Africa and Egypt, and by the Imami Safavids in
Iran. Among the regimes that were Sunni, or even claimed direct
linear descent from the Prophet—the so-called sharifs or sayyids—
recognition of the caliph often included little more than the mention
of his name in the Friday prayers. Foreign policy was not
directed by, taxes were not sent to, or instruction requested or
received from the vague eminence in Baghdad or Cairo or the caliph
who lay all but concealed behind the sultan in Istanbul.
The End of the Caliphate
By the early twentieth century Turkish rule was probably the most
long-lived and vigorous of all the political realities of Islam, ancient
and accustomed enough, at any rate, for some Sunni Muslim
theoreticians to continue to maintain the notion of Islam as a universal
and undivided theocratic community ruled by a succession