Content area
Full Text
In the latter years of the nineteenth and the first years of this century, Arab nationalists began to articulate their vision of a polity that would eventually replace the Ottoman framework. By the time Sharif Husayn ibn Ali alHashimi assumed the mantle of the Sharifate in Mecca in 1908, three ideas were in circulation which would have an impact on Husayn's vision of the post-Ottoman order. These were: the idea of a spiritual Sharifian or Arabian Caliphate; the importance of the Arabs, and of the Arabs of the Arabian Peninsula in particular in an Islamic revival; and the important role the Hijaz should play in a post-Ottoman polity. While the polity that Husayn envisaged borrowed from previous formulations, it included ideas developed from his own experience as the leader of an Arabian chieftaincy. Husayn's vision was of a suzerainty, a ri'asah.
The notion of a Sharifian Caliphate in Mecca has roots that go back to at least the fifteenth century, and is not solely of European invention, as suggested or implied by several researchers. C. Snouck Hurgronje was probably the first scholar to assert so decisively that the idea had solely European roots. `The idea of a Caliphate of the Shereefs of Mecca has been ventilated, more than once, by this or that European writer on Islam, but, in the Moslem world, it has never been broached, and no one of the Shereefs from the House of Katada - rulers in Mecca and in varying portions of West Africa ever since the year 1200 AD - ever thought of such a thing."
Recent research has demonstrated, however, that this is not true. Richard Mortel has shown that at least three Muslim historians from the fifteenth century mentioned the idea quite positively. Taqi al-Din Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Fasi, for example, a fifteenth-century historian of Mecca, wrote of Sharif Abu Numayy (r.1254-1301) that, `were it not for his [Zaydi] madhhab, he would have been [a] suitable [choice] for the caliphate ...'2
The idea's trail can be picked up again in the nineteenth century, and earlier in that century than has previously been thought. Disappointed with Ottoman reforms, Muslims in northern Syria in 1858 were reported to support the establishment of a `new Arabian state under the sovereignty...