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Updated: May 14, 2025
In the earliest days of the caliphate, after the accession of the Ommiade dynasty, the princes of Damascus were regarded as the heads of the Moslem faith; while the governors of Arabia successively obtained, as to civil rule, their independence. To this the widely-extended wars in which the caliphs were engaged no doubt contributed.
He appointed a council of six persons to determine as to the succession after his decease, all of whom he considered worthy of the caliphate; though he gave it as his opinion that the choice would be either Ali or Othman.
The West was now outwardly quiet, and between Egypt and any hope of succor from the eastern caliphate stood the ravaging armies of the Karmatis. Egypt itself was in helpless disorder. The great Kafur was dead, and its nominal ruler was a child. Ibn-Furat, the wazir, had made himself obnoxious to the people by arrests and extortions.
Lastly, the Caliphate would in Arabia be freed from the incubus of Turkish scholasticism and the stigma of Turkish immorality, and would have freer scope for what Islam most of all requires, a moral reformation.
Meanwhile the Caliphate of Cordova had reached the height of its power, while that of the Fatimites extended from the Nile to western Morocco, and the little Idrissite empire, pulverized under the weight of these expanding powers, became once more a dust of disintegrated tribes. It was only in the eleventh century that the dust again conglomerated.
The winning stroke in this campaign was the tremendous naval victory at the mouth of the Bosphorus, and this, even more emphatically than Constantine's victory in 677, deserves to be called another Salamis. Not only did it save the Christian empire but it checked the Caliphate at the summit of its power and started it on its decline.
It was not only the proud capital of the caliphate: it was, besides, the great market for the trade of the East, the meeting-place of many nations, where caravans from China and Thibet, from India, and from Ferghana in the modern Turkestan, met throngs of merchants from Armenia and Constantinople, from Egypt and Arabia.
She is trying with all the resources of political intrigue to undermine the growing power of Turkey, which she officially pretends to support, and is endeavouring to create in Arabia a new religious centre in opposition to the Caliphate. The same views are partially responsible for the policy in India, where some seventy millions of Moslems live under the English rule.
It is worthy of note that Christians were not molested at Jerusalem until after the Seljouk Turks wrested the Holy City from the moribund Arabian Caliphate in 1076: their persecution and the desecration of sacred places by the Turks brought about the first Crusade in 1096. Again it was the Ottoman Turks who stormed Constantinople and turned St. Sophia into a mosque.
The Caliphate no longer an empire, but still an independent sovereignty must be taken under British protection, and publicly guaranteed its political existence, undisturbed by further aggression from Europe. On the Bosphorus no such guarantee can now be reasonably given, because there it lies in a position militarily indefensible.
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