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
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