Was the abolition of the caliphate a good decision? Secularist Turks who adore Atatürk, along with many secularists or nationalists around the Muslim Middle East, would say of course. Many Westerners, who may associate the Caliphate with the various extremist manifestations of Islam today—perhaps even the notorious terror army, ISIS, which proclaimed a monstrous “caliphate” of its own—may readily agree.
However, there is a counter-argument made by scholars including Boston College professor Jonathan Laurence that is worth considering: The abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate, which represented a tolerant and modernizing Islam, left a vacuum that was filled by secular autocrats and reactionary Islamists whose vicious cycle of conflict explains much of the tragedy of the modern Middle East. If the Caliphate continued, as a sane religious authority to restrain extremism, the course of the Muslim world could be better for all, including non-Muslim minorities, which have suffered terribly in the past hundred years.
The Ottoman Caliphate’s much-forgotten friendship with the Jews may provide the best case study for why that argument makes sense.
A Judeo-Islamic Tradition
The story of that friendship is quite fascinating, as I cover in my new book, The Islamic Moses: How the Prophet Inspired Jews and Muslims to Flourish Together and Change the World. Friendship between Muslims and Jews actually goes back to the very genesis of Islam, which was born in 610 CE in the city of Mecca as a new proclamation of Abrahamic monotheism to polytheist Arabs. The Qur’an, as preached by the Prophet Muhammad, retold many stories of the Bible and showed great respect to all its prophets. First and foremost among them was Moses, whose stories dominate the Qur’an, and who appears as a role model for Muhammad himself.
That is also why Islam, as it quickly turned into a world empire, vowed to destroy idolatry, but tolerated Jews and Christians as fellow monotheists with divine revelation—“The People of the Book.” The legal status offered to them (dhimma, or “protection”), was far short of equal citizenship that we enjoy in the modern liberal world, but Jews found it quite tolerant for its time, especially in comparison to medieval Christendom, where anti-Judaism was rampant and religious persecution was recurrent.
That is why, for centuries, Jews often preferred living under Muslim rule. They even had remarkable moments of flourishing in the Middle East, North Africa, and especially Muslim Spain, as acknowledged by many Jewish historians. Among them was the late Eli Barnavi who wrote about the “golden age of the Jewish communities in Muslims lands,” marking “a period of brilliant economic prosperity and cultural creativity.” Another historian, Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, defined “the Golden Age of Spanish Jewry,” under Muslim rule, as the “closest parallel in Jewish history to the contemporary golden age of American-Jewish life.”
“The Best Place in the World for Jews to Live”
The latest of these Jewish golden ages under Islam was in the Ottoman Empire, which emerged at the dawn of the fourteenth century as a small Turkish principality in Western Anatolia, only to expand constantly towards East and West, the latter including Byzantium, the remnant of Rome. A little-known fact is that Ottoman conquests over Byzantium, which had harsh laws against Jews, were seen by the latter as a blessing. Indeed, only after the Ottoman conquest of Bursa in 1326, were Jews allowed to build a synagogue, engage in business, or purchase houses and land.
Good news of Ottoman tolerance soon reached Europe. Hence Ashkenazi communities expelled from Hungary in 1376, from France in 1394, and from Sicily, Bavaria, and Venetian-ruled Salonika, migrated to Ottoman lands. In 1453, the Ottomans finally conquered the Byzantine capital, Constantinople, one of the greatest cities on earth, which became their new capital. The city attracted even more Jewish immigrants from Europe, because “after 1453, Istanbul was unquestionably the best place in the world for Jews to live,” in the words of Yale historian Alan Mikhail. “Nowhere were Jews as prosperous and free.”
One of the European immigrants to Istanbul was a rabbi named Isaac Zarfati, who wrote a famous letter to his coreligionists in Germany, who suffered from “tyrannical laws, the compulsory baptisms, and the banishments.” He called on them to “arise, and leave this accursed land forever,” and to come to Turkey, where “every man may dwell at peace under his own vine and fig-tree.”
This call would resonate stronger in the tragic year of 1492, when the last Muslim stronghold in Spain was reconquered by Catholic monarchs King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, who issued the Alhambra Decree, which declared that all Jews would be driven out of their kingdom unless they converted to Christianity. By July 1492, almost the entire Jewish community, some two hundred thousand people, were expelled from Spain. Many perished on the road, others went north and south, while “the most fortunate of the expelled Jews succeeded in escaping to Turkey.” Welcomed personally by the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II, these Sephardic (Spanish) Jews would achieve “remarkable prosperity” in the Ottoman Empire, to which they would greatly contribute and prove staunchly loyal.
Blood Libels and Muslim Protectors
In the nineteenth century, the Ottoman ruling elite noticed something new in Europe that we today broadly call “modernity,” namely, the continent’s many scientific and technological advances, as well as its political, cultural, and economic progress. They also tried to catch up with it, first with military reforms, then by administrative, legal, and political ones. Beginning with the Reform Edict of 1839 and culminating in the Ottoman Constitution of 1876, this process—an example of “Islamic liberalism,” as I call it—brought many positive changes from economic liberalism to political representation and from journalism to female education. It also made the non-Muslims of the empire, including Jews, citizens with equal rights, as declared in the Ottoman Constitution of 1876, rather than merely tolerated but inferior subjects.
Yet European influence had its dark sides as well. That included certain antisemitic tropes, including the blood libel, which was largely unknown to Muslim culture, but still found credibility among Christians. No wonder the greatest blood libel incident in the Ottoman Empire, the Damascus Affair of 1840, was initiated by Capuchin friars, led by the French consulate, and even supported by British and American diplomats—until the falsely accused and tortured Jews were saved by an imperial edict by the Ottoman Sultan-Caliph Abdulmejid I. “The charges made against [Jews] and their religion are nothing but pure calumny,” the Caliph declared, only to add: “The Jewish nation shall be protected and defended.”
The Last Farewell to the Last Caliph
Eighty years after that imperial edict by Sultan-Caliph Abdulmejid I, his legacy was inherited by one of his nephews, the aforementioned Abdulmejid II—a painter, a musician, and a philanthropic supporter of the Red Crescent and the Armenian Women’s Association. This was the last caliph that walked this earth, until being deposed and expelled by secular Turkey in March 1924.
That very expulsion includes an interesting episode related in the memoirs of Abdulmejid II’s private secretary, Salih Keramet Nigar. When the last caliph and his family were put on the Oriental Express, to leave Turkey forever, people were cautious to express sympathy as it could be politically risky. But a remarkably warm farewell was offered by the Jewish manager of the train station from which the caliph embarked. When asked why, the man said:
