le, especially in
its early days, and we have already studied its varying fortunes.
Reduced to a mere shadow after the Mongol destruction of Bagdad, it was
revived by the Turkish sultans, who assumed the title and were
recognized as caliphs by the orthodox Moslem world.[28] However, these
sultan-caliphs of Stambul[29] never succeeded in winning the religious
homage accorded their predecessors of Mecca and Bagdad. In Arab eyes,
especially, the spectacle of Turkish caliphs was an anachronism to which
they could never be truly reconciled. Sultan Abdul Hamid, to be sure,
made an ambitious attempt to revive the caliphate's pristine greatness,
but such success as he attained was due more to the general tide of
Pan-Islamic feeling than to the inherent potency of the caliphal name.
The real leaders of modern Pan-Islamism either gave Abdul Hamid a merely
qualified allegiance or were, like El Sennussi, definitely hostile. This
was not realized in Europe, which came to fear Abdul Hamid as a sort of
Mohammedan pope. Even to-day most Western observers seem to think that
Pan-Islamism centres in the caliphate, and we see European publicists
hopefully discussing whether the caliphate's retention by the
discredited Turkish sultans, its transference to the Shereef of Mecca,
or its total suppression, will best clip Pan-Islam's wings. This,
however, is a distinctly short-sighted view. The caliphal institution is
still undoubtedly venerated in Islam. But the shrewd leaders of the
modern Pan-Islamic movement have long been working on a much broader
basis. They realize that Pan-Islamism's real driving-power to-day lies
not in the caliphate but in institutions like the Hajj and the great
Pan-Islamic fraternities such as the Sennussiya, of which I shall
presently speak.[30]

Let us now trace the fortunes of modern Pan-Islamism. Its first stage
was of course the Wahabi movement. The Wahabi state founded by
Abd-el-Wahab in the Nejd was modelled on the theocratic democracy of the
Meccan caliphs, and when Abd-el-Wahab's princely disciple, Saud, loosed
his fanatic hosts upon the holy cities, he dreamed that this was but the
first step in a puritan conquest and consolidation of the whole Moslem
world. Foiled in this grandiose design, Wahabism, nevertheless, soon
produced profound political disturbances in distant regions like
northern India and Afghanistan, as I have already narrated. They were,
however, all integral parts of the Wahabi phase, being