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They are politically hostile to the Sultan, and though they have no design as yet of repudiating his Caliphal title, they are unlikely to be faithful to his broken fortunes, and on the downfall of Constantinople will doubtless proclaim a Caliph of their own.
What is far more likely to happen is that, in such an event, Abd el Hamid and his house would disappear, and an entirely new order of Caliphal succession take their place. Even without supposing any such convulsion to the empire as a loss of the Bosphorus, his reign will hardly be a long one.
In the last chapter the position of the Ottoman Sultans towards the mass of Orthodox Islam was sketched, and the foundations were shown on which their tenure of the Caliphal title rested.
Arabia, he perceives, is the main point of the Caliphal problem; and whether or not the future holder of the office reside in Hejaz, it is certain that by its tenure alone the Mohammedan world will judge of his right to be their leader.
In Arab eyes, especially, the spectacle of Turkish caliphs was an anachronism to which they could never be truly reconciled. Sultan Abdul Hamid, to be sure, made an ambitious attempt to revive the caliphate's pristine greatness, but such success as he attained was due more to the general tide of Pan-Islamic feeling than to the inherent potency of the caliphal name.
Thus it was not difficult for the new Sultan of Damascus and Cairo and Medina to impose himself on the multitude not merely as heir to the Caliphal possessions, but to the title also of the Caliphs and their spiritual rank.
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.
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. Possession of the Amanat or sacred relics.
His political power is the only thing that reconciles Islam with an Ottoman Caliph, and without sovereignty he would be discarded. In whatever way, therefore, that we look at it, there seems justification in probability for the conviction already cited that after Abd el Hamid a new order of Caliphal succession will be seen.
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 title was no longer a familiar sound, and the title of Sultan which Selim already bore was that of the highest temporal authority they knew.
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