nt with a better title should
appear_. Now the first qualification of a claimant was that he should
claim, and the second that he should be supported by a party; and Selim
had both claimed the Caliphate and supported his pretensions at the head
of an army. He had challenged the world to produce a rival, and no rival
had been found--none, at least, which the Hanefite school acknowledged,
for the Sultan of Morocco they had never accepted, and the last
descendant of the Abbasides had waived his rights. In support of the
proposition that the sword could give a title they cited the examples of
Mawiyeh, who thus established his right against the family of Ali, and
of Abu el Abbas, who had thus established his against that of Mawiyeh.

2. _Election_, that is the sanction of a legal body of Elders. It was
argued that, as the Ahl el agde had been removed from Medina to
Damascus, and from Damascus to Bagdad, and from Bagdad to Cairo, so it
had been once more legally removed from Cairo to Constantinople. Selim
had brought with him to St. Sophia's some of the Ulema of the Azhar
mosque in Cairo, and these, in conjunction with the Turkish Ulema, had
elected him or ratified his election. A form of election is to the
present day observed at Constantinople in token of this right; and each
new Sultan of the house of Othman, as he succeeds to the temporal
sovereignty of Turkey, must wait before being recognized as Caliph till
he has received the sword of office at the hands of the Ulema. This
ceremony it is customary to perform in the mosque of Ayub.

3. _Nomination._ Sultan Selim, as has been already said, obtained from
Mutawakkel, a descendant of the Abbasides and himself titularly Caliph,
a full cession of all the Caliphal rights of that family. The fact, as
far as it goes, is historical, and the only flaw in the argument would
seem to be that Mutawakkel had no right thus to dispose of a title to an
alien, which was his own only in virtue of his birth. The case, indeed,
was very much as though the Emperor of Germany, having possessed himself
of London, should obtain from Don Carlos a cession of the throne of
Spain; or as though Napoleon should have got such a cession of the
Papacy, in 1813, from Pius VII. Still it is insisted upon strongly by
the Hanefite divines as giving a more permanent dynastic title than
either of the previous pleas. As a precedent for nomination they cite
the act of Abu Bekr, who on his death-bed recommended Omar