The caliph was the head of the Islamic com-
munity in Sunni Islam. Although some believe
the office ended with the capture of baghdad by
the Mongols in 1258, throughout Islamic history
there have been numerous attempts to revital-
ize the office, or at least to claim the caliph as a
title. The Khilafat Movement represents a modern
attempt to regenerate the ancient office in a time
when Muslims were being threatened both by the
downfall of the Ottomans, the last great Islamicate
empire, and by Western colonialism. By the end
of World War I the British Empire stretched from
Canada to Hong Kong, with most of the world’s
Muslims ruled by a European power. This had
been the case for Indian Muslims since 1857,
when the British brought the 300-year-old Mughal
Empire to its final end. Thus, the Khilafat Move-
ment was guided by Muslim elites whose immedi-
ate ancestors had ruled India for centuries.
Led by the brothers Muhammad Ali (d. 1931),
his brother Shaukat Ali (d. 1938), Abul Kalam
Azad (d. 1956), and Mukhtar Ahmad Ansari (d.
1936), among others, the movement success-
fully, albeit briefly, mobilized Indian Muslims,
communities long separated from each other by
sect, language, and region. It aimed to preserve
the caliphate as the center of the Muslim world
and to keep Arab lands and holy sites free from
non-Muslim control. To this end, Khilafatists led
delegations to Europe several times to press their
demands; a number were imprisoned by the Brit-
ish on charges of conspiracy.
The movement received a major boost when
Mohandas K. gandhi (d. 1948), the leader of the
Indian National Congress, took up the Khilafat
cause in 1919 as part of the noncooperation
movement against British rule. Noncooperation
involved boycotting British goods, giving up
political posts in the Anglo-Indian government,
and, generally speaking, not cooperating with the
mechanisms of British rule. Since Hindus domi-
nated the Congress, adoption of the Khilafat cause
did much to further Muslim-Hindu cooperation
on an all-India scale and led to the belief that
Indian self-government was in the best interest of
India’s Muslims.
Muslim-Hindu unity was not to last. Gandhi’s
suspension of noncooperation and factionalism,
based on personal, religious, and ideological dif-
ferences, ended the delicate Khilafat-Congress alli-
ance in 1922. The final blow came when Mustafa
Kemal atatUrk (d. 1938), the leader of the newly
secular nation of tUrkey, abolished the caliph-
ate in 1924. It is ironic that Indian Khilafatists
were stressing Pan-Islamism at a time when most
nations with Muslim majorities, Turkey included,
sought to base their legitimacy along cultural and
linguistic and not religious lines. Such “ethnolin-
guistic nationalism” characterized much of the
Muslim world until the 1960s, perhaps dooming
the Khilafat Movement to failure.
Kerry San ChericoFurther reading: Ali Abd Al-Raziq, “The Caliphate and
the Bases of Power.” In Islam in Transition: Muslim Per-
spectives, 2d ed., edited by John J. Donohue and John
L. Esposito, 24–31 (New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007); L. Carl Brown, Religion and
the State: The Muslim Approach to Politics (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2000); Hamid Enayat,
Modern Islamic Political Thought (1982. Reprint, Lon-
don and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2005); Gail Minault,
The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Politi-
cal Mobilization in India (New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 1982).Khoja See aga khan; ismaili shiism.
Khomeini, Ruhollah (Ayatollah Khomeini,
Khumayni, Khomeyni) (1902–1989) the most
important Shii leader and jurist of the 20th century,
founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979
Ruhollah Khomeini was born in the central Ira-
nian town of Khomein. He came from a family
of Twelve-Imam Shii jurists that claimed to be
sayyids, descendants of the prophet mUhammadKhomeini, Ruhollah 433 J