by virtue of the
abolition of the Sultanate in Turkey, divested of that temporal authority
which the exponents of the Sunni school have regarded as a necessary
concomitant to his high office. The sword, emblem of temporal sovereignty,
was thus wrested out of the hands of the commander who, for a brief
period, was permitted to occupy such an anomalous and precarious position.
It was soon, however, trumpeted to the Sunni world, which had not
previously been in the least consulted, that the Caliphate itself had been
extinguished, and that the country which had accepted it as an appanage to
its Sultanate, for more than four hundred years, had now permanently
disowned it. The Turks who had been the militant leaders of the Muhammadan
world, since the Arab decline, and who had carried the standard of Islam
as far as the gates of Vienna, the seat of government of Europe's premier
Power, had resigned their leadership. The ex-caliph, shorn of his royal
pomp, stripped of the symbols of his vicarship, and deserted by friend and
foe alike, was forced to flee from Constantinople, the proud seat of a
dual sovereignty, to the land of the infidels, resigning himself to that
same life of exile to which a number of his fellow-sovereigns had been and
were still condemned.

Nor has the Sunni world, despite determined efforts, succeeded in
designating anyone in his stead who, though deprived of the sword of a
commander, would still act as the custodian of the cloak and standard of
the Apostle of God--the twin holy symbols of the Caliphate. Conferences
were held, discussions ensued, a Congress of the Caliphate was convened in
the Egyptian capital, the City of the Fatimites, only to result in the
widely advertised and public confession of its failure: "They have agreed
to disagree!"

Strange, incredibly strange, must appear the position of this most
powerful branch of the Islamic Faith, with no outward and visible head to
voice its sentiments and convictions, its unity irretrievably shattered,
its radiance obscured, its law undermined, its institutions thrown into
hopeless confusion. This institution that had challenged the inalienable,
divinely appointed rights of the Imams of the Faith of Muhammad, had,
after the revolution of thirteen centuries, vanished like a smoke, an
institution which had dealt such merciless blows to a Faith Whose Herald
was Himself a descendant of the Imams, the lawful successors of the
Apostle of God.

To what els