One of the most explosive stories we’ve read appears in The Middle East Eye. It begins with the search for a remote mausoleum in Aurangabad by Imran Mulla. Why would anyone do that? Because they were looking for the resting place of the exiled Caliph Abdulmecid II. It is possible he settled down in India and was biding time to make his moves from Hyderabad. Turns out, he was. And there’s one heck of a story that follows.
“In this bombshell dispatch, Lothian disclosed to his superiors in Delhi that he had discovered the nizam was withholding information from the British about the late caliph’s will. He reported that the president of the nizam’s executive council had told him that Abdulmecid, as one of his final wishes, had asked to be buried in Hyderabad.
There was more: Lothian also wrote that the nizam had omitted to mention that, in the will, Abdulmecid named his grandson Mukarram Jah as successor to the caliphate.
This was incredible: it suggested that the deposed caliph had privately planned to resurrect the Ottoman caliphate in the Indian subcontinent through his grandson — and that the nizam, the world’s richest man, was in agreement.
The British government took no action, which is not surprising: London expected to pull out of India imminently and did so less than three years later. On 15 August 1947, Hyderabad declared its independence on the same day as the rest of India. The new republic refused to accept the nizam controlling a giant state in the middle of its territory and eventually invaded.
But what if Partition had not occurred, and India instead became a federation — an option that was on the table as late as 1946? Hyderabad could plausibly have become an autonomous and modernising princely state.
Prince Mukarram Jah, as nizam, could have claimed the caliphate as his birthright, with a huge impact on global politics, including the potential to transform the Islamic world.
A caliphate in the Indian subcontinent might have risked religious conflict. But the nizam would not rule outside Hyderabad, and Asaf Jahi rule usually amounted to tolerant pluralism.
An Indian caliphate could have made Hyderabad a focal point of the Islamic world, enhancing the Indian subcontinent’s importance to Muslims. But all that never happened.
By now I was keen for any detail, however small, about the events of decades ago. And then in January 2024, I saw it in the Hyderabadi press: a report about Imam ul-Mulk IV, Nawab Syed Ahmed Khan (the word "nawab" indicates a hereditary lord), who said he possessed a deed signed by Caliph Abdulmecid.
I contacted Syed Ahmed Khan: he had read one of my previous articles, which referenced the British Library letter and told some of the story. Did I want to come to India, at the invitation of his family, to research further?”