The Forgotten Plan to Revive the Ottoman Caliphate — in India

How Abdülmecid II tried to rewrite Islamic history with a new caliphate in the Nizamate of Hyderabad.

“I am not a traitor. Under no circumstance will I go” responded Caliph Abdülmecid II. He was found in his library, studying the Qur’an, clinging to whatever claim he had left to the house of Osman. The expulsion order was delivered to him by Haydar Bey, the governor of Istanbul, along with the city’s Chief of Police, Sadeddin Bey. On the 3rd of March in 1924, Abdülmecid, the last Ottoman caliph left the Dolmabahçe palace for the final time.

The Osmanlı Caliphate had endured since the time of Yavuz Sultan Selim II, when he conquered the lands of Sham, Egypt and the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. From 1512 until 1924, the Ottoman caliphate had stood, in one way or another, as the representative of Muslims from the northwestern corner of Bosnia to the remote Islands of Indonesia. But its end was a bleak one.

The Caliph’s daughter, Princess Dürrüşehvar – who will feature prominently in the story to unfold – said, “My father, whose family had been ruling for the past seven centuries, had sacrificed his life and his happiness for the people who no longer appreciated him.” ¹

Though by now the caliphate was more a symbolic representative than one with any legal or political power, its demise still shocked the Muslim world.² Indian Muslim intellectual Ameer Ali proclaimed it as a disaster, both for Islam and wider civilisation, claiming it would “cause the disintegration of Islam as a moral force.”³

What happened to the Ottomans after this disintegration however, seems to have been largely ignored. Did they simply cease to exist? Did the final caliph accept the defeat? Some may have difficulty believing that a man who descended from a long line of caliphs and sultans, with the weight of history and tradition behind him, would go quietly into the night – and they’re not wrong. 

The lesser-read side of history will tell you that Abdülmecid II didn’t simply accept a crushing defeat. The aftermath of the final Ottoman caliph’s exile is a story of opulence – with secret treaties, dynastic marriages, and ultimately, an attempt to revive the caliphate – with a plan that would rely on a distant part of the Islamic world that was never even part of the Ottoman realms – India. 

The Francophile Caliph

Abdülmecid II, known as the last figurehead of the Ummah, the final Ottoman Caliph, was also a rather extravagant one. He was a man inclined towards Western arts; a lover of French culture, language, and literature and deeply infatuated by classical music, he was, in every sense of the word, a product of Istanbul’s modernising landscape.⁴

The French magazine L’illustration said in December of 1922 that “Abdülmecid would have been a Turkish Francois I, and the court of the caliph of Constantinople, like that of the caliphs of Cordoba, would have become a new centre of Islamic art.”⁵

Abdülmecid’s exile (literally) marked the end of an era. His family had established what went on to become an empire in 1299, beginning as a Turkic nomad warrior clan to the bridge between the East and West, ultimately creating a fusion culture of Persian, Turkic, Islamic and Roman elements. The Ottomans were as much European as they were Turkish or “eastern”.

Upon his departure, Abdülmecid prayed for Turkey’s people, proclaiming, “And be sure, even dead in my grave, my bones will carry on praying.” 

Revival of the Caliphate?

In the early 18th century, the Mughal Empire’s steady decline led to the governor of Deccan, Nizam-ul-Mulk (meaning “administrator of kingdom” in Persian), to establish an independent Islamic Emirate. This became known as the Nizamate of Hyderabad.

Hyderabad became a cultural and intellectual hub of the Islamic world, with strong connections to the Middle East.⁶ Mir Osman Ali Khan was the seventh Nizam (leader) of Hyderabad at the time of Abdülmecid II’s exile.

In the 1930s, Mir Osman Ali Khan was the world’s richest man according to TIME Magazine, and was spearheading the largest and most prosperous princely state under British rule. He was also known for being in possession of the world’s largest diamond, the Koh-i-Noor, worth an estimated £50 million. The diamond was, of course, stolen by the British and can today be found set in the crown of the British monarch, an act, until recently, strongly condemned by India.

The Nizami-Ottoman Alliance

Abdülmecid’s family moved from Switzerland to Nice in France in 1924, where they lived in a 19th-century villa for the last 20 years of the caliph’s life. The rent was entirely paid for by the Nizam, who wanted to portray an image to the Muslim world of a strong ruler through his support of the exiled Ottomans – and the connection was soon to be further strengthened.   

Confidential letters between key figures from the period, now housed in the British Library of London, reveal a secret marriage union between the Hyderabad dynasty and the Ottomans.

Caliph Abdülmecid II’s daughter, Princess Dürrüşehvar, then 17, had married Prince Azam Jah, the Nizam’s eldest son and heir apparent, in a move that tied the exiled Ottomans to the world’s richest family. 

Princess Dürrüşehvar was born at the Camlica Palace in Istanbul in 1914. Aside from Turkish, she was raised from an early age to speak English, French, Persian and Arabic. During her exile on the French Riviera, she was known for her essays published in various French literary magazines.

Her marriage to Azam Jah was, of course, more than a simple union between two individuals; countless documents and publications from the period speak of the political weight that would result from the joining of these two great dynasties.

Before the marriage had even taken place, TIME Magazine had speculated on the potential consequences of such a union: “Should these young people wed and have a man-child, temporal and spiritual strains would richly blend in him. He could be proclaimed ‘the True Caliph’.”

In Delhi, British official Sir Charles Watson noted, “There are obvious inconveniences in the existence at the Hyderabad court of a princess of the former Imperial Ottoman family… inconvenience certainly social and possibly political.”

The Plan That Never Was

In 1933, Princess Dürrüşehvar journeyed back to India from Nice to give birth to her firstborn son, Prince Mukarram Jah, the maternal grandson of the last Ottoman Caliph and the paternal grandson of the richest man in the world. 

In spite of the speculation and the expectations placed upon the head of the young child who had merged two political dynasties, Prince Jah was not to be proclaimed as the ‘True Caliph’. As the political tides shifted disastrously and decisively around him before he had even reached adulthood, he was destined to live a quiet life away from the public eye. He moved first to Australia and then to Turkey in 1996, where he lived in a small Istanbul apartment. He died in 2023, and was buried at Mecca Masjid in his paternal home of Hyderabad. 

But two decades ago, a discovery made within the archives of the British Library by Australian author John Zubrzycki⁷ left historians pondering the question of what could have been. 

Brandished as “confidential”, Zubrzycki came across a letter written in November 1944 by Sir Arthur Lothian, a Hyderabad-based British official. It revealed details of the last caliph’s unfulfilled will. According to Lothian, unexpectedly, Abdülmecid had requested that upon his death, he be buried in Hyderabad. But more notably, he had named his youngest grandson as the successor to the caliphate, a detail it seems, that the Nizam had chosen to conceal. 

This raises intriguing questions; what would a new caliphate, for the first time based in the Indian Subcontinent, have meant for Muslims around the world who were by and large gripped by the stranglehold of colonialism? What would it have meant for the Subcontinent itself? 

And why would the Nizam not disclose nor enact the Caliph’s significant request?  

While we may never be able to provide satisfactory answers, the claim made by Sir Arthur Lothian regarding the caliph’s final wish has since been further corroborated by the existence of another text written by Abdülmecid himself. 

In a deed written on the 19th November, 1931 in his French mansion overlooking the riviera, Abdülmecid addresses the Nizam one week after his daughter’s marriage created a familial bond between the two men. He wrote, 

I trust that the firstborn son of this new kinship after you [the nizam] be suitable to the position of the caliphate and the rulership of Hyderabad Deccan.” 

Translation of Abdülmecid II’s deed in full

The End of the Caliphate

In 1931, a few weeks after the joint marriage union between the Nizams and the Ottomans, Maulana Shaukat Ali, a prominent Islamic scholar from the Indian Khilafat movement, travelled to Palestine for the World Islamic Congress. 

Abdülmecid had hoped to use Ali’s presence to rally support for the plan to re-establish the caliphate at the conference organised by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. But this failed. The focus of the congress was on Palestine and transforming the Palestinian cause into a mechanism to politically unite the Islamic world.

The caliphate, which had existed in one form or another continuously from 632 AD (11 AH) when Abu Bakr had first taken the title of Khalifa after the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ had left this world, had ceased to exist. The year 1924 marked the last time that Muslims had a nominal ruler. 

Abdülmecid died in 1944 on the outskirts of Paris, while the battle for the liberation of the city from the Nazis was underway. He was never buried in Hyderabad. Instead, following a ten-year row with the Turkish government, who prohibited his burial in Istanbul, he was eventually laid to rest in Madina. 

The Nizam’s rule too, was soon to come to an end; the Nizamate of Hyderabad was dissolved in 1948, after an invasion by the Indian army that resulted in the massacre of 40,000 Muslims. The Nizam’s family, with both Ottoman and Indian blood, shifted their base to the United Kingdom.

***

History is usually told as an inevitable series of happenings; we often forget the underside of history, the countless stories of what nearly came to be. The Indian-Ottoman Caliphate is one such story, a fascinating series of “what ifs?” that could have changed the trajectory of the Muslim world. Alas, it was never meant to be.   

Much of this article is indebted to the research and findings of journalist, Imran Mulla, whose forthcoming book ‘The Indian Caliphate: Exiled Ottomans and the Billionaire Prince’ is due to be released at the end of 2025.

Footnotes

1. Durrushehvar Sultan, Dogan, (Matbaa-i Amire, 1947), p.79  ↩︎
2. Ahmed, Yakoob. The role of the Ottoman Sunni Ulema during the constitutional revolution of 1908-1909/1326-1327 and the Ottoman constitutional debates. (Thesis). SOAS University of London ↩︎
3. Ameer Ali, ‘Letter to the Times on the Abolition of the Caliphate’ (London), 5 March 1924 ↩︎
4. Mansel, Philip. “Painting His Way into History: At Home with the Last Caliph.” Cornucopia Magazine 34 (2005) ↩︎
5. L’Illustration no.4162 (9 Dec 1922) pages ~593–594 ↩︎
6. Nayeem, M. A. The Splendour of Hyderabad: The Last Phase of an Oriental Culture (1591-1948 A.D.). Hyderabad: Hyderabad Publishers, 2011. ↩︎
7. John Zubrzycki, The Last Nizam: The Rise and Fall of India’s Greatest Princely State (London: I.B. Tauris, 2018). ↩︎