The Ottoman government was established in 1300 AD and expanded rapidly. This vast empire ruled over areas that included almost the entire Middle East, western Iran, the Balkan Peninsula, parts of Central Europe, and the Caucasus. Its capital, Istanbul, became the power center of the Ottoman sultans from 1453 AD. The linguistic, cultural, and religious diversity of the people who lived under the banner of this caliphate was one of its most prominent features.
The Ottoman Caliphate was founded on pure Islamic faith, a government that based its orientation on Islamic principles from the beginning. This orientation turned the Ottoman government into a powerful force against the invasion of infidels and enemies of Islam.
This government, which was also known as the “High Ottoman Government,” remained a symbol of the power, unity, and stability of the Islamic Ummah for 600 years and acted as a strong barrier against enemy attacks on Islamic lands. The Ottoman Caliphate brought together small countries and tribal areas and played an important role in the unity of the Islamic Ummah by implementing Islamic laws, building mosques, growing religious schools, and preserving the flag of Islam. This government prevented the expansion of the influence of the Crusaders and defended the Arab-Islamic identity of the Islamic lands by resisting Western colonialists. However, the Ottoman Caliphate declined due to the intrigues and conspiracies of Westerners and their internal agents. The European colonialists tried to destroy the Ottoman government from the inside by setting up an intellectual war and promoting Western ideas.
One of the most important factors that led to the fall of the Ottoman government was the idea of nationalism. By promoting this idea, Westerners pushed Islamic nations and tribes to focus on their ethnic identity and national interests instead of paying attention to their Islamic identity. Nationalist Turkish officers, many of whom were Jews, laid the groundwork for the collapse of the caliphate in 1909 with the dismissal of Sultan Abdul Hamid II. Under the leadership of the Association of Unity and Development, they replaced the slogans of nationalism with the idea of Islamic unity and practically paved the way for the decline of the Ottoman government.
Western colonialists, including the Spanish and Portuguese, along with Jews and Crusaders, realized that the Ottoman government was the only serious obstacle to their domination of Islamic lands. Therefore, they tried to infiltrate the internal structure of the Caliphate and disintegrate it from within.
They made Muslims forget the goals of the Islamic Ummah by using nationalist slogans. These efforts, along with the internal weakness of the Ottoman government and the betrayal of some internal factors, ultimately led to the collapse of the Caliphate in 1924.
One of the tools of the colonialists’ intellectual war against the Islamic Caliphate was the projection of ethnic and nationalist ideas. The colonialists understood very well that the Islamic faith is a jihadist faith that calls Muslims to unity and resistance against any oppression and colonialism. Therefore, they tried to transform jihadist movements into limited national movements by promoting ethnic ideas.
Ethnic nationalism is a new trap that colonialism has prepared to strike at the Islamic world in order to realize the dream that it could not achieve throughout history by inciting the Crusades. The Westerners used ethnic nationalism as a means to break the unity of the Islamic Ummah and prevent the integrity of the Islamic world, which was a potential threat to colonialism, so that they could divide the Islamic world into small units and then dominate their affairs.
Western Europe, led by Britain, was intent on destroying the Ottoman Empire and dividing its lands. For this reason, it began by creating nationalist movements among intellectual and cultured Turks who had been educated in the West and received secular training. The Turkish nationalist movement was a secular movement originally based on the consciousness of the middle class, especially its cultural sector.
The destruction of the Ottoman Islamic Caliphate was one of the greatest goals of Western countries. They spared no expense or effort to achieve this goal. This fact was later openly admitted by them. George Nathaniel Curzon, the then British Foreign Secretary, admitted in a frank speech in the British House of Commons: “We have dealt Turkey such a blow that it will never be able to recover; because we have disabled its two active forces: Islam and the Islamic Caliphate.”
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