“I WILL RETURN.”

King Country Chronicle, Volume XVIII, Issue 1857, 4 September 1923, Page 2

“I WILL RETURN.”

SAYS THE EX-SULTAN. The dissolution of the caliphate is beyond the power of a group of men with shaky beliefs and hazy nativity and national spirit, some from the army and others from some other class. Nay, it is not within the power of 5,000,000 or 6,000,000 Turks, some of whom are burdened by compulsion and others so ignorant of what is going on in the world that their deceit is an easy task, writes the ex-Sultan Mohammed Waheed Ad-deen of Turkey. The question of the caliphate is the great question that bears upon the rights of 300,000,000 people of the Islamic world. Therefore, I shall never sanction such a decision of duress and usurpation from Angora and Constantinople, and I hereby refute all their false charges, disapproving their whole action. And I shall pass my days in Alharamine Ashshariflne (sanctuaries) whose scented earth I have always craved to inhale, dwelling now near the house of Allah with a tranquil heart that the battle of truth is never lost, and a soul that hopes only for the happiness of all races and creeds of the sons of my country until my return to that beloved home.

OPPOSED WAR. The World War, which I had never approved and whose ravages and destructions I spared no pains to lessen, had just begun to show quite clearly its effects when the death of my brother took place. This found me in the throne of Caliphate and Sultanate by virtue of my right from the Othman Constitution and the general proclamation of those in authority. My acceptance of this grave responsibility brought me face to face with difficulties and tangles which can be easily appreciated if one only recalls the general conditions in those days. The war and its horrors continued in a manner that promised not the faintest hope of victory, as was later proved by the successive falls of our military forces. No bounds were known to the extremist critics of the League of Union and Progress (Young Turks) —who took the reigns of the kingdom since 1908, under the guise of the Constitution—and the state of war gave them the opportunity to rob the monetary resources of the country and hoard it for their own use at the same time, for some un-. known motive setting the torch wherever they went.

Such a state of affairs ruined the country from the capital to its remotest parts, and the signs and sustenance of life were fastly vanishing.

LAW OF THE PROPHETS. And while I spared no efforts or sacrifices to bring harmony between Angora and Constantinople I could not sanction the desires of the Kemal group to divest the Caliphate from the Sultanate and move the capital from Constantinople to Anatolia. I cannot consent to the first one because all scholars of Islam religion know that it is against the Law. There is no reason for it other than to deprive the “Pride of the Prophets’* from his right of Sultanate over the nation—a right in which lam his successor. Furthermore, such a consent is beyond my power, contrary to the dictates of my office, or a mere impossibility.

And as for the second demand, namely, to have a capital other than Constantinople, that means that the Kemalists want to appease the Bolsheviks by paving the way for a virtual surrender of Constantinople to the Russians. That, too, I cannot sanction, because it deprives the Caliphate of a city like Constantinople, which has always been its political and historical haven.