Interview: Could the spiritual leadership of the Muslim world have shifted towards India?

When journalist Imran Mulla first encountered the last Ottoman caliph as a history student at Cambridge, he did not expect it would lead him to a scrubby stretch of land near Ellora, to the archives of London, and into the twilight world of princely Hyderabad.

His debut, Indian Caliphate: Exiled Ottomans and the Billionaire Prince, traces an improbable political and dynastic alliance between the last Ottoman caliph, Abdulmejid II, and the Asaf Jahi dynasty of Hyderabad. At its heart is a question that has long slipped from public memory: could the spiritual leadership of the Muslim world have shifted, in the early 20th century, towards India?

In conversation with Scroll over a Zoom call, Mulla was measured and precise, careful about what the archive proves and what remains conjecture. The story he reconstructs is at once intimate and geopolitical: of an exiled caliph painting on the French Riviera; of a fabulously wealthy but cautious Nizam of Hyderabad navigating the end of empire; and of Princess Durrushevar, who moved from Istanbul to Nice to Hyderabad and carved out a life that was both constrained and quietly radical.

Charting the last leg of the Ottoman Empire, the Nizam’s ambitions, and the British mechanisms, the book showcases a great diversity in Muslim...

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