The Khilafat Movement

As the First World War ended in the defeat and dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, the Muslims of India launched one of the largest mass movements in their history, the Khilafat Movement, to defend the institution of the caliphate, which the Ottoman sultan held and which Indian Muslims revered as the symbol of the unity and leadership of the worldwide Muslim community. From 1919 leaders such as the brothers Muhammad Ali and Shaukat Ali, Abul Kalam Azad and others organised vast meetings, petitions, fund drives and a press campaign demanding that Britain, which ruled India and now dominated the Ottoman lands, preserve the caliph's position and the integrity of the Muslim holy places. The movement allied with Gandhi and the Indian National Congress in the non-cooperation campaign against British rule, making it for a few years a powerful engine of joint Hindu-Muslim anti-colonial politics. Its hopes were dashed from an unexpected quarter: it was not the British but the Turks themselves who, in building their secular republic, abolished the sultanate in 1922 and the caliphate in 1924, leaving the movement without an object. The Khilafat Movement faded soon after, but it had been a landmark, the moment Indian Muslims became a mobilised modern political community, and its energies fed into the politics that would later lead toward Pakistan. This scene depicts a great Khilafat rally around 1920, an enormous peaceful crowd before a speakers' platform on a north Indian maidan.