Following the Ottoman defeat in World War I, the Ottoman sultan under Allied direction attempted to suppress nationalist movements, and secured an official fatwa from the Sheikh ul-Islam declaring these to be un-Islamic. But the nationalists steadily gained momentum and began to enjoy widespread support. Many sensed that the nation was ripe for revolution. In an effort to neutralize this threat, the sultan agreed to hold elections, with the hope of placating and co-opting the nationalists. To his dismay, nationalist groups swept the polls, prompting the Allied Powers to dissolve the General Assembly of the Ottoman Empire in April 1920. At the end of the Turkish War of Independence, the Turkish National Movement's Grand National Assembly voted to separate the caliphate from the sultanate and abolished the latter on 1 November 1922. Initially, the National Assembly seemed willing to allow a place for the caliphate in the new regime and Mustafa Kemal did not dare to abolish the caliphate outright, as it still commanded a considerable degree of support from the common people. The caliphate was symbolically vested in the House of Osman. On 19 November 1922, the Crown Prince Abdülmecid was elected caliph by the Turkish National Assembly at Ankara. He established himself in Istanbul on 24 November 1922. But the position had been stripped of any authority, and Abdülmecid's purely ceremonial reign would be short-lived. When Abdülmecid was declared caliph, Kemal refused to allow the traditional Ottoman ceremony to take place, bluntly declaring: In response to Abdülmecid's petition for an increase in his allowance, Kemal wrote: On 29 October 1923, the National Assembly declared Turkey a republic, and proclaimed Ankara its new capital. After over 600 years, the Ottoman Empire had officially ceased to exist.
1924 abolition
Two Indian brothers, Maulana Mohammad Ali and Maulana Shaukat Ali, leaders of the Indian-based Khilafat Movement, distributed pamphlets calling upon the Turkish people to preserve the Ottoman Caliphate for the sake of Islam. On 24 November 1923, Syed Ameer Ali and Aga Khan III sent a letter to İsmet İnönü on behalf of the movement. Under Turkey's new nationalist government, however, this was construed as foreign intervention; any form of foreign intervention was labelled an insult to Turkish sovereignty and worse, a threat to state security. Kemal promptly seized his chance. On his initiative, the National Assembly abolished the caliphate on March 3, 1924. Abdülmecid was sent into exile along with the remaining members of the Ottoman House.
Aftermath
In Egypt, debate focused on a controversial book by Ali Abdel Raziq which argued for secular government and against a caliphate. Today, two frameworks for pan-Islamic coordination exist: the Muslim World League and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, both of which were founded in the 1960s. The most active group that exists to re-establish the caliphate is Hizb ut-Tahrir, founded in 1953 as a political organization in then Jordanian-controlled Jerusalem by Taqiuddin al-Nabhani, an Islamic scholar and appeals court judge from Haifa. This organization has spread to more than 50 countries, and grown to a membership estimated to be between "tens of thousands" to "about one million".