The 400-year old Ottoman Caliphate and the 623-year old Ottoman Dynasty

Compiled By: Syed Ali Shahbaz
On October 29, 1923 AD, with the formal dissolving of the 400-year old Ottoman caliphate, and the 623-year old Ottoman Dynasty, Turkey was declared a laic and secular republic by the western-oriented Mustafa Kamal Pasha, who styled himself as Ata Turk (Father of the Turks).
For 15 years, Ata Turk blindly aped the West and tried to uproot the cultural, religious, and spiritual values of Turkish Muslims, to the extent that he abolished Islamic rules, forbade the recitation of the Azaan and the holy Qur'an, imposed European dress, banned women from wearing the hijab, and changed the beautiful Arabic-Persian script of the Turkish language to Latin.
After his death in 1938, Turkey started the painfully slow progress of rediscovering its Islamic religious and cultural identity, and today, thanks to the people's awakening, the country is trying to get back again into the Islamic fold. Turkey, known as Anatolia or Asia Minor to the Greeks, was an integral part of the Achaemenian Persian Empire until the invasion of Alexander of Macedonia.
Later after the advent of Islam and liberation of Anatolia from the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire, mainly by Turkic Muslim tribes from Central Asia, this land became part of the Iran-based Seljuqid and Ilkhanid Empires.
The Ottomans brought this region under their complete domination only after 1500, following their conquest of several independent fellow Turkic principalities of Anatolia, invading and occupying parts of southwestern Anatolia traditionally under the sway of the Mamluks of Egypt-Syria, and finally the narrow victory of Selim I over Shah Ismail Safavi of Iran at Chaldiran in 1514. Turkey covers an area of 780,000 sq km, and its neighbors are Iran, Iraq, Syria, Armenia, Georgia, Bulgaria, and Greece.
On October 28, 1516 AD, the Battle of Khan Yunis occurred in Gaza, resulting in the defeat of the Turkic Mamluk (Slave) Dynasty of Egypt-Syria by Sinan Pasha, the Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Sultan Selim I.
The wars between the two Turkic powers had started in 1485 in southern Anatolia, when Bayazid II instead of concentrating on European campaigns turned eastwards to annex the lands of fellow Muslims, much to the relief of Spanish Christians besieging the Emirate of Granada, the last stronghold of Muslims in Iberia or Andalus, which fell in 1492 and whose ruler had appealed to the Mamluks for help.
Thus in August 1516, Selim, two years after his narrow victory at Chaldiran in Azerbaijan over the Shah of Persia, Ismail I, invaded Syria, since he greatly feared that the Iranians might reorganize and counterattack in view of the widespread influence of the Safavids in Syria and Anatolia (modern day Turkey), and their recent sending of an embassy to the Republic of Venice, through Mamluk ports in the Levant.
The invading Ottoman forces soon swept into Egypt where in January 1517 at the decisive Battle of Ridhania near Cairo, they defeated and killed the Mamluk Sultan, Tuman Bay. As a consequence, the Ottoman state, from a realm at the margin of Islamic lands mainly located in Asia Minor and south-western Europe, was transformed into a huge empire encompassing the historical cities of Cairo, Damascus, Bayt al-Moqaddas and Aleppo, as well as the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, since the Sharif of the Hejaz, pledged allegiance to Sultan Selim.
Although this marked the end of the 267-year Mamluk sovereignty over Egypt, the Ottomans contented themselves with the appointment of a viceroy, leaving the internal Mamluk apparatus intact.