The Caliph Who Chose Hyderabad

A Tomb Near the Ellora Caves

Near Khuldabad, a pilgrimage town outside Aurangabad crowded with Sufi tombs and the grave of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, historian Imran Mulla went looking for something almost nobody in India knows exists: the mausoleum of the last Ottoman caliph. There is no road to it; Mulla and a friend hiked to the site in 40-degree heat, off the beaten track near the Ellora caves, before finding a grey, battered, partly vandalised structure that nonetheless — in Mulla's words — "exudes this sort of Ottoman majesty" in the middle of the Deccan plateau.

The tomb was built for Abdul Majid II, caliph from 1922 until the office was abolished in 1924, on the orders of the Nizam of Hyderabad. Yet the caliph was never buried in it; his body spent a decade in Paris before it was interred in the Jannat al-Baqi cemetery in Medina. The empty tomb, Mulla argues, is the physical residue of a largely forgotten scheme: an alliance between the deposed House of Osman and the fabulously wealthy princely state of Hyderabad that briefly tried to relocate the caliphate to the Indian subcontinent.

The Caliph Who Painted Mosques

Mulla's route into this history began, he explains, not with politics but with art. In 2023 he came across the paintings of Abdul Majid — some in a European Orientalist style, others depicting mosques and harems — and became fascinated by a man who was simultaneously a calligrapher, poet, musician and, eventually, spiritual head of the world's Sunni Muslims. "He embodied all the complexity and contradictions of the late Ottoman experience," Mulla says, describing someone who saw himself as Ottoman, European and Muslim all at once.

Abdul Majid became caliph in 1922, the first elected to the office by Turkey's Grand National Assembly after the empire's collapse and the abolition of the sultanate. It did not last. Atatürk came to see a caliph resident in Istanbul as an obstacle to his nation-building project, and on 3 March 1924 the office was abolished outright. Abdul Majid and his family were put on the Orient Express to Switzerland and faded into an obscurity most scholarship has never looked past. He settled at a villa in Nice — and it is what he did there, not his time on the throne, that occupies most of Mulla's research.

Why the Khilafat Movement Took Root in India

It is a matter of record, but still counter-intuitive, that a mass Indian political movement organised itself around the fate of a Turkish office few Indian Muslims had thought much about a generation earlier. Mulla's explanation: Indian Muslims under Mughal rule had little reason to look to Istanbul. Only after the final collapse of Mughal authority in 1857, and full British control thereafter, did Indian Muslims turn to the Ottomans as the last major independent Islamic power standing — even as the Ottomans were themselves recasting their caliphate in pan-Islamic terms, partly to offset territorial losses in successive wars and partly to unsettle rival European empires.

The result, Mulla argues, was a fertile period in Indian Muslim political thought, in which figures such as the London-based modernist Syed Ameer Ali advised the Young Turks and built ties to Abdul Majid himself. The Khilafat Movement that emerged after the First World War brought together, among others, Mahatma Gandhi, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, the brothers Maulana Mohammad Ali and Maulana Shaukat Ali, and Aga Khan III. Mulla is emphatic it was never a narrowly religious cause: it was an anti-colonial protest against European occupation of Ottoman Anatolia, complete with delegations to London and mass protest in India. British correspondence from the time shows genuine anxiety about it — evidence, Mulla says, that Indian Muslim mobilisation actually restrained British policy in the Middle East.

Because the movement rested on a close Hindu-Muslim bond, it produced gestures of solidarity — Maulana Abdul Bari declared, of Muslims, "we won't slaughter cows" — alongside real communal tension when religious passions ran ahead of political calculation. V.D. Savarkar, later remembered as the founding ideologue of Hindutva, argued in a direct debate with Shaukat Ali that Khilafat activism proved Muslims' primary loyalty lay with Mecca and Istanbul, not India. The Ali brothers' rebuttal, put most memorably by Mohammad Ali in 1930, was that no contradiction existed: "We are part of two circles," one Indian and one a wider Muslim world.

The Movement's Collapse

The Khilafat Movement's disintegration had several causes converging at once: violence against British officers forced Gandhi to call a halt to non-cooperation; Mustafa Kemal's movement succeeded in Anatolia, draining the campaign's original urgency; and Indian Muslim leaders split over the caliphate itself, Azad accepting that the Grand National Assembly could inherit its authority while the Ali brothers wanted the office revived. The final rupture, though, was constitutional: Congress and the Muslim League fell out over safeguards such as separate electorates, and as the Hindu Mahasabha's influence grew within Congress-aligned politics, the personal alliance between the Ali brothers and Gandhi broke down too, even as Azad stayed within Congress.

What a Caliphate Actually Was

For an audience unfamiliar with the term, Mulla lays out the underlying concept: the caliphate was the office of succession to the Prophet Muhammad, and the Sunni-Shia split originated as a dispute over how that succession should work. The Ottomans laid claim to the title after conquering Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem and, crucially, Baghdad, former capital of the Abbasid caliphate. Medieval jurists had held that a caliph needed to descend from the Prophet's tribe, the Quraysh — a requirement the non-Arab Ottomans could not meet, so they sidelined the jurists, elevating instead the Sufi philosophers who tutored Ottoman princes and reframed the sultan-caliph as the shadow of God on earth, in an idiom shared across the Persianate world, including the Mughal court.

That framework shifted again in the modern era. Sultan Abdulhamid II, an absolutist ruler who dissolved parliament and confined his royal cousins, nonetheless stressed the caliphate's authority over Muslims inside rival European empires, useful both for projecting influence abroad and compensating, at home, for the empire's dwindling non-Muslim population. The 1908 constitutional revolution, led by the Young Turks, reframed the caliph as accountable to a parliament, before the Young Turks themselves turned authoritarian. By 1922, with the sultanate abolished and the empire gone, Abdul Majid's caliphate was unprecedented: an office with no throne, army or state behind it, expected to sit quietly in his Istanbul palace.

He refused, holding public Friday processions, growing a beard, meeting political leaders and issuing statements, all on the basis that his legitimacy rested on "the recognition of the world's Muslims," not the assembly that had created the office. It was that assertion of independent authority, Mulla argues, that convinced Atatürk to eliminate the caliphate altogether in March 1924 — the abolition that begins what he calls "the scramble for the caliphate."

The Architects of a Revival

From his Swiss hotel, immediately after his exile, Abdul Majid issued a statement declaring the abolition illegitimate, and that it was for the Muslim world — "in complete liberty" — to decide the question for itself. Several rulers reportedly weighed claiming the vacant title but concluded they could never secure broad enough recognition; even the Nizam of Hyderabad briefly considered it before dropping the idea.

What gave the vision institutional shape, in Mulla's account, was a partnership between Maulana Shaukat Ali, the former Khilafat leader, and Marmaduke Pickthall, a British convert to Islam remembered for his English translation of the Quran, produced under the Nizam's patronage. Together they built a two-part plan: convene a World Islamic Congress in Jerusalem, allied with the Mufti, Amin al-Husseini, to muster recognition for Abdul Majid; and bind the deposed Ottoman dynasty to Hyderabad's Asaf Jahi wealth through marriage, giving a revived caliphate a treasury and territorial home it otherwise lacked.

A Wedding With a Political Clause

In 1931, Princess Durru Shehvar, Abdul Majid's daughter, married Prince Azam Jah, eldest son of the Nizam of Hyderabad, Mir Osman Ali Khan — reputed the richest man in the world, ruling a state roughly the size of Italy. That same year her cousin, Princess Niloufer, a junior Ottoman royal, married the Nizam's younger son, Prince Moazzam Jah. Both princesses travelled to India together by ship, a voyage on which Gandhi was also a passenger and, correspondence shows, asked to meet them.

The marriage was never simply personal. Abdul Majid made it a condition of the negotiations that the firstborn son of Durru Shehvar's marriage would stand in line to rule Hyderabad, securing his own dynastic future through his grandson, Prince Mukarram Jah, born in 1933. A statement issued after the wedding declared the union "cannot fail to have very happy repercussion for the Muslim world," language that fed the very speculation Shaukat Ali's press briefings had encouraged and infuriated the Nizam, who accused him not of inaccuracy, Mulla notes, but of "indiscretion."

Mulla pushes back on the standard British-era assumption that the Nizam had simply been manipulated by Shaukat Ali and Pickthall. Mir Osman Ali Khan, he argues, was a shrewd ruler who had himself weighed claiming the caliphate years earlier, and understood precisely what a populist organiser like Shaukat Ali was after; his discomfort was with the plan being aired publicly, not with its substance.

Jerusalem, 1931: The Congress That Failed and Still Mattered

The Jerusalem congress unfolded against a tense backdrop: British-mandate Palestine in the years following the Balfour Declaration, when the Palestinian cause had not yet become the unifying pan-Arab and pan-Islamic symbol it is today. The proposal came, Mulla explains, after Mohammad Ali died in 1930 and was buried in Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa precinct; it was at his brother's funeral that Shaukat Ali suggested to Mufti Amin al-Husseini they convene a World Islamic Congress there, with Abdul Majid present to gather support for a revived caliphate. Husseini agreed, but Turkish officials learned of the plan and lobbied Britain to intervene; mandate authorities settled on barring Abdul Majid personally from entering Jerusalem, sinking the congress's central purpose.

Even so, Mulla argues the gathering mattered: it marked the moment the Palestinian cause became both a pan-Arab and a pan-Islamic one, with an early version of the Palestinian flag presented as a gift to Shaukat Ali, and future leaders of several Muslim-majority states in attendance — "a sort of high point" of interwar pan-Islamic politics, and close to its last one, since the campaign to revive the caliphate largely petered out after 1931.

Mulla also distinguishes between phases of Husseini's career. In 1931 he was a pragmatic operator willing to work inside mandate institutions, at one point accepting a proposed parliament with proportional representation for Palestine's communities, including its Jewish population — a plan Zionist leaders themselves rejected. He radicalised only later, after the 1936 Arab Revolt forced him into exile, and during the war sought Axis support on an "enemy of my enemy" logic. Asked to place that trajectory alongside Subhas Chandra Bose and Savarkar's own contacts with fascist Italy, Mulla declines a verdict: "As a historian, I'm not in the business of pronouncing moral judgment."

An Elite Cosmopolitanism, and Why Hyderabad

Pressed on whether this amounts to a network of well-connected elites rather than evidence of a broader interconnected Muslim world, Mulla accepts the premise only partly. Elites, he notes, have always had disproportionate mobility, and the archive itself over-represents literate, powerful voices. But the Khilafat Movement, he argues, was different in kind: a genuine mass mobilisation that drew ordinary, often illiterate Indians into anti-colonial and international politics for the first time, at a moment when news from the Balkans or Anatolia could reach Bombay or Delhi in a way unthinkable decades earlier.

Hyderabad's suitability as a prospective "Muslim capital" — Pickthall's own term, as relayed by Mulla — rested on more than the Nizam's wealth. The state, roughly the size of Italy, had vast mineral resources and a cosmopolitanism predating the 1931 marriages: tens of thousands of Yemeni Arabs lived there, many serving as a soldier class in the Nizam's service, and a Yemeni dynasty, the Kathiri Sultanate, was founded partly with Hyderabad funds and intermarried with the Asaf Jahis. Mir Osman Ali Khan, the seventh Nizam, styled himself an heir to Mughal culture, and Hyderabad drew poets and musicians who might once have sought patronage in Delhi. Mulla is candid Hyderabad barely registered in mainstream Indian Muslim politics, run through Congress and the Muslim League — but culturally and internationally it carried enough weight that a plan to relocate the caliphate there was not, in context, outlandish.

1944 and the Second Scramble

Abdul Majid died of a heart attack in Paris in 1944, mid-war. His death revived the question inside Hyderabad's palace circles — discussions Mulla traces through a British letter to the Viceroy disclosing that Abdul Majid had nominated his grandson, Mukarram Jah, as his successor. What the Nizam himself wanted is harder to pin down; Mulla treats the record as probabilistic, since so much that mattered was said in private and left no trace. Still, two independent British witnesses — Philip Mason, Mukarram Jah's childhood tutor, and travel writer Rosita Forbes, who toured Hyderabad with its prime minister, Sir Akbar Hydari — separately concluded the Nizam had aspired to the caliphate.

After 1948: A Caliph Who Chose to Drive a Tractor

Hyderabad's 1948 annexation into independent India closed off any realistic dynastic path to the caliphate for good. Mukarram Jah was educated at Harrow and Cambridge, returned to India, and became titular Nizam in 1967 — with immense wealth, palaces and land, but no state to govern. Indira Gandhi's abolition of the princely order's privy purses and titles stripped away what symbolic standing remained. He eventually relocated to Australia, where he took up driving a tractor, reportedly remarking that Abu Bakr, Islam's first caliph, had been a shepherd, so "why shouldn't I be a shepherd."

Shahid Hussain Zuberi, who worked for Mukarram Jah for years and became a close confidant, and whom Mulla interviewed for the book, recalled that Mukarram Jah acknowledged, without dwelling on it, that his grandfather had nominated him as the next caliph, though he showed little interest in the idea and none in becoming a figurehead for India's Muslims. He settled quietly in Turkey, dying there in January 2023; his neighbours did not know who he was, and his body was returned to Hyderabad for burial. Independent India itself later tried, more than once, to join the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, arguing — as the British Empire once had — that its Muslim population exceeded even Pakistan's; Pakistan blocked the bid each time, an echo of the same pan-Islamic logic the Khilafat generation had pioneered decades earlier.

The Princesses Who Broke the Purdah

Durru Shehvar and Niloufer, raised between Istanbul and the French Riviera and educated in poetry, music and painting, arrived in a Hyderabad court still organised around female seclusion — and quietly reshaped it. Both appeared regularly in public, built philanthropic institutions, and became noted fashion figures for adopting the sari; Hyderabad's airport still has a Cafe Niloufer named for the younger princess. After Hyderabad's fall, Durru Shehvar moved to London for her children's education and lived out her life there; Niloufer's marriage to Moazzam Jah ended in separation, after which she resettled happily in France.

Among the discoveries Mulla is most struck by is the story of Princess Kenizé Murad, an Ottoman princess he interviewed for the book. Her mother, Princess Selma, was exiled from Istanbul in 1924 and later married the Raja of Kotwara, an Indian prince, a marriage broken up through Shaukat Ali's intervention. Selma moved to Paris to give birth as the Second World War broke out, was cut off from her husband's support, and died in poverty; her infant daughter was raised in a French convent, the nuns hiding her from the Raja's search parties rather than hand her to a Muslim prince. "My life was defined by prejudice from very early on," Kenizé Murad later told Mulla, before she traced her father at twenty and travelled to India to meet him.

What the Book Argues

Mulla resists the idea that his book leaves behind any grand political lesson; he frames it more modestly, as an act of retrieval. What interests him is less the scheme's failure than what it reveals: a genuinely interconnected early twentieth-century Islamic world, organised through marriage, money and ideas across London, the French Riviera, Jerusalem, Bombay and Hyderabad, that resists being filed under any single national history. "It's all of our heritage," he says, arguing the period deserves remembering on its own cosmopolitan terms, not through the lens of nation-states that did not yet exist when it unfolded.

Central to that retrieval is a fact Mulla thinks modern readers have simply forgotten: undivided India's Muslim population was, in this period, larger than the entire Muslim population of the Arab world combined, making the subcontinent close to the demographic centre of the Islamic world even as it remained politically marginal within it. The abandoned tomb outside Khuldabad, built for a caliph who never lay in it, stands as the most literal trace of that erased centrality.