Pan Islam as an ideology evokes the name of Jamal al Din al Afghan"! (1838 1897), the peripatetic revolutionary activist who spent a life preaching the unity of all Muslims and plotting against British imperialism and Muslim despots. An Iranian, he took on the name al Afghan"! to conceal his Sh"!'I roots. Pan Islam, more importantly, was also adopted as a foreign policy by the Ottomans with the sultan brandishing the title of caliph.
Although the notion of a single ruler (caliph or imam) ruling over a single umma is a basic concept in Islamic thought and although the title had been used routinely by such imposing dynasties as the Umayyads and Abbasids the prevailing idea had been that the 'true caliphate’ was only that of the four 'rightly guided caliphs’ in succesion after the Prophet Muhammad. Thereafter there was only kingship (mulk). By modern times, the title of caliph, seldom used, was hardly more than an honorific.
An interesting refurbishing of the idea came in the 1774 Ottoman Russian treaty at Kuguk Kaynarca where as a sop to the defeated Ottomans it was stated that the Ottoman sultan, 'in his capacity as caliph’, would continue to exercise religious authority over the Muslims living in the lands the Ottomans had lost in that war. Also buttressing the Ottoman claim to the caliphate was the apocryphal story maintaining that the last Abbasid caliph living in exile in Cairo had in 1517 (at the time of the Ottoman conquest of Egypt from the Mamluks) conveyed the caliphate to Sultan Selim I (r. 1512 20) in 1517.
World History
