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The present Caliphal house is unconnected in blood with the old traditional line of "successors;" and even with the Turks themselves inspires little modern reverence. Moreover, the actual incumbent of the office is thought to be not even a true Ottoman, being the offspring of the Seraglio rather than of known parents; Abd el Hamid's sole title to spiritual consideration is his official name.
Thus they never sought to exercise the right appertaining to the Caliphal office of appointing Naïbs, 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.
It was asserted, 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 constitute the Imperial insignia of office, and their possession to give a title to the Caliphal succession.
Sultan Selim, as has been already said, obtained from Mutawakkel, a descendant of the Abbasides and himself titularly 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 title to an alien, which was his own only in virtue of his birth.
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first briefly to run over the Caliphal history of an earlier age and describe the state of things which Selim's act superseded.
Abd el Hamid, whose spiritual ambition I have described, has, quite recently, caused a legal statement of his Caliphal rights to be formally drawn up, and it includes this right of the Saut el Haï; and, though it is improbable that the faithful will, at the eleventh hour of its rule, invest the House of Othman with so sublime a prerogative, it is extremely likely that, when a more legitimate holder of the title shall have been found, he will be conceded all the rights of the sacred office.
We may expect, therefore, in the event of such a break-up as I have suggested to be likely of the Ottoman power either through loss of territory or by the growing impoverishment of the empire, which needs must, in a few decades, end in atrophy to see among Mussulman princes a competition for the right of protecting the Holy Places, and with it of inheriting the Caliphal title.
The Sultan would, in such an event, pass into Asia, and I have been credibly informed that his own plan is to make not Broussa, but Bagdad or Damascus his capital. This he considers would be more in conformity with Caliphal traditions, and the Caliphate would gain strength by a return to its old centres.
It is certain, too, that his first act, when delivered from the pressure of the Russian invasion, was to organize afresh the propagandism already begun, and to send out new missionaries to India and the Barbary States to preach the doctrine of his own Caliphal authority to the Moslems in partibus infidelium.
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.
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