In January 2014, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria took the Syrian town of Raqqa. Within a week, the Salafi-jihadist group banned smoking, ordered that photographs be removed from shop windows and prohibited residents from playing music in cars, shops or public places. ‘Songs and music’, they declared, ‘are forbidden in Islam, as they prevent one from the remembrance of God and the Koran and are a temptation and corruption of the heart.’ Six months later, ISIS announced the restoration of the caliphate, a historic institution which had fallen into abeyance since the abolition of the Ottoman caliphate in 1924. 

Yet Abdulmejid II, the last Ottoman caliph, was about as different from Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the ‘caliph’ of Islamic State, as could possibly be imagined, and the campaign to preserve and then revive the Ottoman caliphate likewise bore no resemblance to ISIS’s reign of terror. Involving leading Indian Muslim modernists like the brothers Mohamed and Shaukat Ali, the Aga Khan and the jurist Syed Ameer Ali, it culminated in a marriage alliance between the Ottomans and the Nizam of Hyderabad and an ambitious scheme to transfer the caliphate to the ruler of India’s largest Muslim princely state – a story brilliantly told in this expertly researched debut by Imran Mulla. 

Abdulmejid was born in 1868 and from the age of nine spent twenty-eight years under house arrest by order of his cousin, the autocratic Abdulhamid II. In his confinement, he developed into a painter and musician of some skill, finding himself at home in Western traditions that were themselves enamoured