Khalifat Day
October 17, 2024
After World War One ended in 1918, Gandhi stepped forward as a national leader of the Indian independence movement. The British kindly cooperated by offering a number of provocations that unified the subcontinent against their rule.
The first of these was the Rowlatt Act, a piece of legislation that stripped away civil liberties in the name of fighting terrorism. Two weeks after its passage, Gandhi led the first nationwide hartal, a one-day general strike marked by a day of fasting, demanding its repeal. The British responded with the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.
Another concern was the division of the Ottoman Empire. The Sykes–Picot Agreement had been made in secret, but when the plan to carve up the world’s leading Islamic state among the Allied Powers was revealed, Indian Muslims lost interest in fighting for the British. This prompted the Prime Minister to make a public pledge that the Allies’ war aims did not include “depriv[ing] Turkey … of the rich and renowned lands of Asia Minor.”
Of course, once the war was over, the colonizers began moving ahead with their plans anyway, operating under “the basic axiom that the future of the Middle East belonged, not to the people who actually lived there, but to the victorious Allies.”1 Muslims in India raised objections in what became known as the Khilafat (an alternate spelling of Caliphate) Movement.
Since Hindu-Muslim unity was one of Gandhi’s primary goals, he saw this as an opportunity to demonstrate solidarity by taking up their demand—don’t dismantle the Ottoman Empire! “As you are my neighbors and my countrymen,” he explained to a conference of Muslims, “it is my duty to share your sorrows. I cannot talk about Hindu-Mahomedan unity and fail in giving effect to the idea when the test has come.” In return for his support, Muslim leaders agreed to endorse nonviolence as the only mechanism for change.
Throughout 1919 Gandhi spoke in favor of the Khilafat satyagraha, and endorsed Friday, October 17 as a day of fasting and prayer. Muslims would observe a 24-hour fast starting the evening of the 16th, and spend all of Friday (the holiest day of the week) in prayer. For Hindus, he suggested that they read through the 700 verses of the Bhagavad Gita during their fast, and contemplate its meanings. In addition, a full hartal should be observed.
The Khilafat effort ultimately failed, and the artificial divisions—Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, and Saudi Arabia, to name a few—imposed by European cartographers continue to keep the region unstable today.
For India, independence was another quarter century away. By that point, Hindu-Muslim unity had sunk to such depths that the partitioned nation was left soaked in blood. Still, striving for unity was an experiment worth trying.
What is a demand made by someone outside your traditional circles that you are willing to support?
Gandhi & Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age (Arthur Herman, 2008) p. 263n