History
After the death of Muhammad, Muslims who accepted Abu Bakr as the first Caliph became known as the Ahlus Sunnah wa`l Jamah in order to differentiate them from the sect of Shiism which emerged many years later, which said that Ali should have been Caliph.
The first four caliphs are known among Sunnis as the Four Rightly Guided Caliphs. The first was Abu Bakr Siddique, the second was Umar ibn al-Khattāb, the third was Uthman ibn Affan, and the fourth was Ali ibn Abi Talib.
After the first four caliphs, the Caliphate was upheld as a political system by dynasties such as the Umayyads, the Abbasids, and the Ottomans. It was also upheld for relatively short periods of time by other competing dynasties in al-Andalus, North Africa and Egypt.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk abolished the system of the Ottoman Caliphate after Abdülmecid II was officially deposed and expelled from Turkey, whereby the Republic of Turkey was founded in 1924 upon secular principles. To this day, the Ottoman Empire is regarded as the last major Islamic Caliphate.
Read more about this topic: Sunni Islam
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.”
—Hermann Hesse (1877–1962)
“America is, therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World’s history shall reveal itself. It is a land of desire for all those who are weary of the historical lumber-room of Old Europe.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)