The abolition of the Ottoman sultanate

On 1 November 1922 the Grand National Assembly in Ankara resolved that sovereignty belonged to the nation and that its sole legitimate representative was the Assembly itself. It declared that the sultan’s government in Constantinople had ceased to exist on 16 March 1920, the day the Allies formally occupied the capital, and that the sultanate was abolished. The caliphate – the dignity of spiritual head of the Muslims – was separated from state power. It was to remain in the House of Osman, but the caliph would henceforth be chosen by the Assembly. The resolution, pushed through by Mustafa Kemal, ended more than six centuries of rule by a dynasty that since the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries had governed a state which at its height stretched from Hungary to the Persian Gulf. The last sultan, Mehmed VI, did not abdicate. On 17 November he secretly left his palace and took refuge on a British battleship, which carried him to Malta. The Ottoman Empire, which had lost the Great War, came to an end not through a treaty or a revolution in the capital, but through a resolution of a parliament convened in an Anatolian town that two years earlier no one had seen as a capital.

Two authorities

Mehmed VI Vahideddin had ascended the throne on 4 July 1918, four months before defeat. After the Armistice of Mudros he staked everything on cooperation with the victors, above all Britain, hoping that a lenient peace would save both throne and state. The national movement that Mustafa Kemal organised in Anatolia after the Greek landing at Smyrna in May 1919 was, for the sultan, a rebellion. In 1920 the government of his brother-in-law, the Grand Vizier Damat Ferid Pasha, obtained from the Sheikh ul-Islam a fatwa permitting nationalists to be killed as rebels, a court martial sentenced Kemal to death in absentia, and an “Army of the Caliphate” formed with British help fought the nationalist forces around Izmit and Bolu. In August 1920 the sultan’s envoys signed the Treaty of Sèvres, which partitioned the country.

The Grand National Assembly, which first met in Ankara on 23 April 1920, nevertheless refrained for a long time from attacking the throne itself. Most deputies were attached to the sultan and caliph, and the national movement officially proclaimed that it was fighting to liberate a ruler who was a prisoner of the occupiers. The Constitution of 20 January 1921 did state that sovereignty belonged unconditionally to the nation, but it said nothing about the sultan. Kemal and his closest associates had been thinking of removing the dynasty since at least the beginning of 1922. Standing in the way were the war with Greece, in which Ankara needed unity, and loyalty to the throne, which was strong among deputies, officers and clerics.

The invitation to Lausanne

Victory created the opportunity. After the Armistice of Mudanya of 11 October 1922 the powers began preparing a peace conference. On 19 October Refet Pasha arrived in Constantinople as Ankara’s representative, charged with taking over the administration of Eastern Thrace. Crowds greeted him, and he saluted the caliph, not the sultan, and said that power now belonged to the nation and not to khans and sultans. On 17 October the Grand Vizier, Ahmed Tevfik Pasha, had sent Kemal a telegram proposing that a joint delegation of the two governments attend the conference. On 27 and 28 October the Allies invited both Ankara and Constantinople to Lausanne.

For Kemal this was unacceptable. If the sultan’s government sat down at the table in Lausanne, the powers could play the two authorities off against each other. On 30 October a motion signed by more than eighty deputies, providing for the liquidation of the government in Constantinople, was put before the Assembly. On the first day the debate produced no decision. The opponents had strong arguments: the sultanate and the caliphate had been joined for centuries, and many clerics in the Assembly believed that a caliph without state power was meaningless. Even the prime minister of the Ankara government, Rauf Bey, at first opposed the abolition of the monarchy and gave way only after a conversation with Kemal on 29 October.

1 November

On 1 November 1922 the motion went before a joint sitting of three committees of the Assembly: religious law, justice and the constitution. The clerical deputies argued that Islam knew no separation of the caliph’s secular and spiritual authority. Kemal, who according to his own account in the “Speech” (Nutuk), delivered in 1927, listened in silence, finally asked to speak. He said that sovereignty and power were not handed over by anyone to anyone through academic debate, but were taken by force. The Ottomans had seized power over the Turkish nation by violence and held it for six centuries, and now the nation had taken it back from the usurpers. This was an accomplished fact. If those present accepted it naturally, all would be well. If not, the truth would still be expressed in the appropriate form, but “perhaps some heads will roll in the process”. According to the same account, one of the clerical deputies then admitted that he now saw the question in a different light.

That same day the Assembly in plenary session adopted the resolution by acclamation. Kemal recalled that when a single deputy called out “I am against”, the others drowned him out with shouts that there was nothing to discuss. Among those who remained opposed to the end was the liberal deputy for Mersin, Selahattin Köseoğlu. Rauf Bey and other opponents later wrote in their memoirs that they had not been against a republic, but had seen the sultan as a safeguard against personal dictatorship. The Assembly declared 1 and 2 November national holidays. In April 1923 the law on high treason was amended: criticising the abolition of the sultanate in speech or in print became treason punishable by death.

The flight of the last sultan

In Constantinople Ottoman authority simply disintegrated, without any act of surrender. On 4 November the government of Ahmed Tevfik Pasha held its last meeting and resigned. Tevfik was the last grand vizier. On 5 November Refet Pasha informed ministry officials that their work was at an end, and a few days later the official state gazette ceased publication. The city lived in fear of revenge against those who had collaborated with the occupiers. On 4 November Ankara’s men abducted from Constantinople the journalist and former interior minister Ali Kemal, a fierce critic of the national movement, and on 6 November in Izmit, where General Nureddin Pasha was stationed, a mob lynched him. The news caused panic at court.

On 10 November Mehmed VI went to Friday prayers for the last time. His name was not mentioned in the sermon. On 16 November he wrote to General Charles Harington, commander of the Allied forces, that his life was in danger and that he was asking the British government for refuge. On the morning of 17 November, in the rain, he left Yıldız Palace in a British ambulance with his son Ertuğrul and a small retinue, and at the port of Tophane boarded the battleship HMS Malaya. The ship took him to Malta, from where he went on to the Hejaz and then to Italy. To the end he maintained that he had renounced neither the throne nor the caliphate. He died in San Remo on 16 May 1926 and, since his body could not be returned to Turkey, was buried in Damascus.

On 19 November 1922 the Assembly elected as caliph the heir to the throne, Abdülmecid, a cousin of the fugitive sultan. For the first time in Ottoman history the caliph was not a sultan: he bore only the title of caliph and had no state power whatsoever. Mehmed VI is said to have remarked that only the Prophet could remove him.

Significance

The abolition of the sultanate was the first of the great steps by which Mustafa Kemal remade Turkey. At Lausanne, where the conference opened on 20 November, Turkey was represented only by the Ankara delegation, led by İsmet Pasha. On 29 October 1923, after peace had been signed, the Republic of Turkey was proclaimed, and on 3 March 1924 the caliphate was abolished and the entire dynasty banished from the country. Women of the House of Osman were allowed to return to Turkey only in 1952, men in 1974. On the ruins of the monarchy arose a state that was secular, nationalist and ruled by a single party, modern and authoritarian at the same time.

In terms of the road to the Second World War, the abolition of the sultanate closed the period in which the Great War swept away four imperial dynasties: the Romanovs, the Habsburgs, the Hohenzollerns and the Ottomans. In their place arose states searching for new forms of government, and in many of them parliamentary rule proved short-lived. Three days before the resolution in Ankara, Benito Mussolini had become prime minister of Italy after the March on Rome. Kemal and Mussolini were politicians of quite different kinds, and Kemal did not create a Fascist state, but both showed that a determined minority could take over a state when the old order was tottering. It was not without reason that the German right, and later the Nazis led by Adolf Hitler, named Kemal alongside Mussolini as the model of a leader who had revived a defeated nation.

The disappearance of the caliphate – first as a political institution in 1922, then completely in 1924 – also left a void in the Muslim world, most of which was then ruled by Britain, France and other colonial powers. King Hussein of the Hejaz laid claim to the title of caliph, and in India the Khilafat movement united Muslims against the British for several years. Slogans of Muslim unity against the colonial powers were used by various politicians in the decades that followed, and during the Second World War also by German and Italian propaganda, which sought the support of Muslims in the Middle East. Turkey itself, having rejected the role of leader of Islam, chose its own path and remained neutral throughout the war, declaring war on Germany only in February 1945.