It was only when the sacred office passed from the sacred and legitimate
House that this feeling of reverence ceased, and the living voice of the
Caliph was disregarded in Islam. The Ottoman conqueror, when he took
upon him the title of Emir el Mumenin, did not venture to claim for
himself the power to teach, nor would Moslems have listened to any such
pretension. The House of Othman was from the first sunk in degrading
vices, and was too untaught to teach. The account given us by Bertrandon
de la Brocquiere in the fifteenth century of the court and habits of the
"Grand Turk" is evidently no exaggeration; and it is easy to conceive by
the light of it how impossible it must have been for the Arabian Ulema
to connect the notion of inspiration in any way with such personages as
the Sultans then were. As a fact the Saut el Hai was not claimed by
Selim, nor has it ever been accorded to his descendants.
The want of some voice of authority is, nevertheless, becoming daily
more generally felt by orthodox Mohammedans; and it seems to me certain
that, in some shape or other, it will before long be restored to general
recognition. Abd el Hamid, whose spiritual ambition I have described,
has, quite recently, caused a legal statement of his Caliphal rights to
be formally drawn up, and it includes this right of the _Saut el
Hai_;[17] and, though it is improbable that the faithful will, at the
eleventh hour of its rule, invest the House of Othman with so sublime a
prerogative, it is extremely likely that, when a more legitimate holder
of the title shall have been found, he will be conceded all the rights
of the sacred office.
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