the three empires and the islamic phoenix 287of flul≈àn Salim. When Salim’s son became the new flultan, he
released him from prison and finally allowed him to retire to Egypt.
There, al-Mùtawakkil died in 1543, and by his death the Abbasìd
caliphate, figurative as it had become, came to a final end. Sub-
sequently, the Ottoman Turkish flulňns assumed the caliphate to
themselves, arguably on the premise that the last legitimate caliph
volunteered a delegation of his position to the Ottoman flulňn. The
newly invented dualistic concept of the caliphate, one for religion
and another for government, came to an end when the Ottoman
flulňn claimed both the spiritual and political functions of the caliph
and declared himself a full-fledged caliph. The titular caliphate was
to remain with the Ottoman Turks for almost four centuries, until
1924 when it was repealed, sixteen months after the foundation of
the new Turkish Republic.
By claiming the caliphate to himself, the Ottoman flulňn put an
end to the political struggle between the Sunnis and the Shi’is over
the caliphate. The argument over whether the caliphate should rest
with the Abbasids, the descendants of the Prophet’s uncle, or the Alids,
the descendants of his cousin, came to an end, at least within the Otto-
man Empire. We recall that the issue of the kinship to the Prophet
was a main religious device that the Abbasìd movement introduced
in order to entice support and rally the masses particularly when
the Abbasìd movement was first launched. Similarly, it was the same
issue upon which the Alids based their argument for the legitimacy
to the caliphate as advocated by Shì"ah clerics and manifested mainly
in the establishment of the Fatimid caliphate in Cairo. But the Ottoman
Turks were Sunnis, with no particular inclination, much to their con-
venience, to overemphasise the factor of the Prophet’s kinship in
matters related to the effectiveness of government in the Islamic state.
On both accounts, first, the delegation of the caliphate by the last
Abbasìd caliph to the Turkish Sultan, the authenticity of which was
not clear, and second, the premise that the caliphate did not have
to rest exclusively with the Prophet’s descendents, as in the view of
the Sunnis, the Ottoman Sultan claimed the caliphate for himself.
The separation of religion and government was a distinctive diver-
sion from the political features embedded in Islam as a doctrine that
does not admit a separation between Church and state. Such diver-
sion seemed to have opened the door for a wide application in
different parts of the Islamic world particularly during the decay of
the Ottoman Empire. Muslim rulers found in the separation a prac-
tical, if not convenient, solution to the problem of the involvement