Khilafat

Khilafat, from the Arabic khalifa meaning “successor” or “steward,” denotes the office of the caliph—the leader of the global Muslim community in traditional Islamic political theory. In Sunni Islam, the caliph is a political and religious successor to the Prophet Muhammad and a steward of the community; in Shia Islam, political leadership is viewed primarily through Imams rather than a universal caliphate.

The caliphate emerged after Muhammad’s death in 632 and passed through several dynasties, notably the Rashidun, Umayyad, Abbasid, and later regional caliphates such as the Fatimid and, from 1517, the Ottoman sultanate. The Ottoman sultans were recognized as caliphs from the 16th century until 1924, when the caliphate was abolished following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic.

The Khilafat Movement was a political campaign in British India (1919–1924) that sought to preserve the Ottoman Caliphate and defend the Ottoman monarchy after World War I. Led by Maulana Muhammad Ali and Shaukat Ali, the movement allied with the Indian National Congress and Mahatma Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement before waning after the 1924 abolition of the Caliphate by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. The movement influenced anti-colonial sentiment and the political participation of Muslim communities in India, but its objectives and methods were contested and it dissolved in the mid-1920s.

In contemporary discourse, the term khilafat is used to refer to calls for a revival of caliphal rule, or to describe movements invoking a caliphate. Modern claims and proposals vary widely and are not universally recognized within the Muslim world.