For students of the Middle East, the Islamic caliphate in the early twentieth century offers a versatile object of study. The traces of virtually all major political and cultural developments in the region can be observed in the challenges to and eventual dissolution of this religio-political institution: last-ditch attempts to save the disintegrating Ottoman Empire, the Great Powers’ policies concerning their Muslim colonies, rising Arab nationalism, and the secularization of political institutions by Turkish political elites. As a result, the implications of the abolition of the caliphate in 1924 were felt not only in the newly founded Turkish polity but also in the rest of the Muslim world and Europe. It is this central position of the institution that leads Nurullah Ardıç to study debates on the caliphate between 1908 and 1924 as a mirror of the crisis of modernization in Turkey and the Middle East.
According to Ardıç, three sets of actors participated in these debates: traditionalists who wanted to preserve the political and religious authority of the caliph, modernists who sought to limit the caliph to political leadership and divest him of his spiritual status, and secularists who ultimately eliminated the caliphate in order to fully secularize political authority in the post-Ottoman Turkish nation-state. The book follows the evolving debates through three episodes: competing visions of the nature and proper limits of the caliph's authority between traditionalists and modernists (1908–1916), discursive struggles between pro-Ottoman traditionalists and modernists on one hand and Arab nationalists calling for the return of the caliphate to Arabs on the other, and the heated struggle between modernists and secularists ending in the abolition of the caliphate in 1924.
According to Ardıç, the common “meta-strategy” of all three groups was “deriving legitimization from Islam” (96). Intellectuals and politicians involved in the debates made selective references to Qurʾanic verses, hadith, and early Islamic history to ground their positions. With close attention to the sources and careful analysis of actors’ discursive strategies, the author effectively conveys the political conflicts and intellectual atmosphere of this period.
The book does not succeed to the same extent, however, in its theoretical argumentation. In situating his study in the literature, Ardıç picks rather easy targets for criticism, opposing Huntington's and Lewis's essentialist arguments concerning Islam's incompatibility with modernity, and Tunaya's and Berkes's simplistic accounts of Turkish modernization, which pit secular modernizing actors against reactionary upholders of religious tradition. Given that these paradigms have come under extensive criticism in the last two decades, the book can hardly be said to make an original theoretical contribution at this general level.
The book also does not deliver on its promise of demonstrating that discourses “provide cognitive and social lenses through which to perceive one's social environment” (33). The empirical sections of the book suggest that the basic positions held by late-Ottoman politicians and intellectuals were largely determined by their political interests and types of cultural capital. Their discourses drawing on Islamic sources simply served to advance these predetermined positions. And this was not only true for secularists who cynically drew on early Islamic history and prophetic traditions to legitimize their secularist reforms but also for traditionalist members of the ulema who knowingly cited weak, theologically invalid hadith in order to defend the religio-political authority of the caliph.
Moreover, the empirical analysis in the book does not evince the “dialectical understanding of the relationship between discourse and social reality” (35) underlined in the introduction. Ardıç does not offer any evidence that the political outcomes in question (e.g., the dissolution of the Ottoman parliament in December 1911, the abolition of the sultanate in November 1922, or the abolition of the caliphate in March 1924) in any way depended on the discursive efficacy of one side or another. The author admits as much when he writes, “The balance of power between the traditionalists, modernists, and secularists followed a trajectory parallel to changes in political and military power relations” (96).
Despite these drawbacks, however, the book's detailed analysis of debates on the caliphate between 1908 and 1924 will make Islam and the Politics of Secularism a valuable reference point for future discussions on this important historical episode.
