Pan-Islamism §

Pan-Islamism is the doctrine that Muslims worldwide constitute a single political community (umma) whose interests should be advanced through unified action. As an instrument of state policy it is associated above all with Sultan Abdul Hamid II (r. 1876–1909), who, after suspending the Ottoman constitution in 1878, made the caliphal claim of the Ottoman Sultan a central legitimating idea of his regime, both to bind the empire's Muslim subjects against secessionist nationalisms and to project influence into British India, the Caucasus and Central Asia.

Hamidian Pan-Islamism took concrete institutional form in the Hamidiye light-cavalry regiments (founded 1891), Sunni Kurdish irregulars who would play a decisive role in the Hamidian massacres of 1894–96 against the Armenians of the eastern vilayets. As Bloxham argues, this was Pan-Islamism functioning as an internal-security doctrine: the framing of the Armenian millet as a foreign-protected fifth column legitimised pre-emptive violence against a Christian minority.

After the 1908 Young Turk revolution and the deposition of Abdul Hamid in 1909, Pan-Islamism initially remained part of the CUP's ideological repertoire, especially in the November 1914 jihad declaration that Sheikh-ul-Islam issued at German urging. But the doctrine proved unable to mobilise Arab Muslims against the British and French during the war, and it was progressively displaced by Pan-Turkism as the regime's primary ethnopolitical frame. Mustafa Kemal abolished the caliphate in 1924, formally closing the Pan-Islamist chapter of Turkish state ideology. The doctrine survives in the contemporary Muslim world primarily as a non-state idea (Islamist parties, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation), and intersects only marginally with the Armenian–Azerbaijani question, although the Azerbaijani state has at times invoked Islamic solidarity to mobilise OIC support for its Karabakh position.