Did Hyderabad Almost Become the Spiritual Epicentre of the Islamic World

A new book, Indian Caliphate: Exiled Ottomans and the Billionaire Princes floats the tantalising possibility that the Nizam of Hyderabad’s dynasty came close to becoming the Caliphs in the 20th century.

“With the wealth of the Asaf Jahi dynasty, Mukarram Jha, the son, the grandson of the last Ottoman caliph, and the grandson of the seventh Nizam of Hyderabad, when he became the Nizam, he could then have claimed the title”, according to the author Imran Mulla, a London-based journalist.

“it would have been more of a soft power role in the Muslim world. And it would have depended entirely on the recognition of Muslims elsewhere in the world,” Mulla said to Sidharth Bhatia in a podcast interview.

Mulla’s book explains how after the Ottoman Caliph Abdul Majid had been exiled to France by the Modernist ruler of Turkey Mustafa Kamal Ataturk, his daughter Durrushevar was married to the Nizam’s eldest son Azam Jah in Hyderabad. It was their son who would have become the Caliph.

“So Hyderabad was claiming to be the successor of the Mughal cultural legacy and the new flowering of Indo-Islamic civilization. So it had this cultural prestige within India, but also within the wider Islamic world. And that really set the stage for things,” he said. But once Hyderabad was integrated into a united India in 1948, this became impossible.