Reading the book – The Indian Caliphate – by Imran Mulla (Hurst Publishers, December 2025), transports one to a world lost to public memory. A world where at least under British suzerainty, the sub-continent, imperial India was, in the words of Sir Mohammed Iqbal, “the greatest Muslim country in the world”, a pronouncement made in 1930.Why did Iqbal make such a statement? He did so because it was his belief that India is the only country in the world where Islam as a society is almost entirely due to the working of Islamic culture inspired by a specific ethical ideal. The core of his analysis was that unlike other Muslim communities or nations, there was no common ethnicity or language, only Islam that bound them together.The sequitur of this being that seventy million Indian Muslims were, in his words, a far more valuable asset than all the other Muslim nations in Asia put together, giving the Muslims of India an extraordinary centrality in the Islamic world, a paradigm unthinkable today where they are deliberately marginalised in their own country. However, this notion of the centrality of the Indian Muslims within the Islamic world was for several centuries a fact given that the Moguls were, by far, the richest of the Gun Powder Empires, eclipsing both the Ottomans and the Persians in their wealth.The Indian Caliphate, by Imran Mulla (Hurst Publishers, December 2025). Photo: www.hurstpublishers.comThe book also deals with the notion of the Caliphate, something which had faded until recently when Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi announced from the great mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul, in July 2014, that he was the new Caliph, not on the basis of any lineage, or religious authority, but on the ground that ISIS, which is what he represented, had in effect impressed their hegemony on parts of Syria and Iraq.The term Caliphate in Western circles become coterminous with religious extremism, violence and a threat to Western hegemony. But that is far removed from its connotations in the 1920s when Turkey, surprisingly having rid themselves of a monarchy, elected a Caliph. The Khilafat movement in India was hugely popular movement against the British, led by the Ali brothers, and the Mahatma played a huge role seeking to transcend Hindu-Muslim differences.This book explores a possibility of the attempt of translating the grandeur of the Ottoman Caliphate to the Asaf Jahi dynasty of Hyderabad, in particular, the Nizam, who was the richest Muslim ruler in the world, thus potentially making Hyderabad the cynosure of Islamic world.With the fall of the Ottomans in 1920 and the unceremonious exile of the last Caliph, (bizarrely elected, the first and the last Caliph to be subject to democratic elections) to Switzerland and then to the South of France, a question appeared as to whether you could have a Caliph without an empire or even a country. This was a singular predicament as Abdulmejid had neither. He had his lineage, from the House of Osman and he was a thoroughly civilised gentleman, well read, an artist, an accomplished cellist, nominally religious, but little else.The person shrewd enough to conjure a future for the last of the Ottomans and the caliphate was the great jurist and scholar, Syed Amir Ali, who saw an opportunity to match make the princess, Abdulmejid’s daughter, Durresehvar, with the son of the Nizam of Hyderabad, Azam Jah. This was a brilliant move as it sought to project Hyderabad, which represented in the words of Mulla, “the last significant flowering in the Islamic high culture” as the most prominent Muslim monarchy now surcharged significantly by the title of Caliph, the spiritual ruler of the Sunni Islamic world.This project is taken up with great gusto by Maulana Shaukat Ali, the brother of Maulana Mohammed Ali, who were both leading political figures in the Muslim communities in India.The book describes this attempt through marriage to link these two dynasties and how this audacious project was swept away by the forces of history, of independence, of partition and of the police action in Hyderabad in which the Indian army invaded the State and forced the capitulation of the Nizam. It also describes the young Nizam, Mukarram Jah, who took over from his father in 1967 and was someone who Nehru sought to project as a prominent Muslim face, but who had no interest in public life, and ultimately through his foolish actions and fecklessness squandered his fortune on improvident investments in the Australian outback.At the heart of this book is the very possibility of such an event, the Caliphate being brought to India, and the two souvenirs of such an eventuality are in themselves intriguing. In preparation for this, a extraordinary Ottoman tomb is found in the wilderness of Aurangabad district in Western India, a tomb very much in Turkish style, with the dome on top with latticed windows and archways on four sides.This tomb was abandoned as Abdulmejid, the last Caliph, was ultimately buried in Mecca. There is also a Deed which was allegedly signed by Abdulmejid in Nice in 1931 which purports to transfer the title of Caliph to the Nizam to hold in trust on his death. This Deed was discovered by Mulla, although its authenticity remains suspect.The book is exceptionally well written with fascinating asides, a glittering cast of characters who Mulla weaves into an intriguing story, leaving one breathless. Imran Mulla is a writer and historian of substance and one looks forward to his next work.Javed Gaya is a Bombay high court lawyer who is currently writing a book on the historical, geographical and political impact of Partition on India and the wider sub-continent, particularly with reference to the Indian Muslims and other minorities. This article, originally published at 4 pm on April 10, was republished at 9 pm on the same day.