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This was not all, however. The disappearance of the Caliph, the spiritual head of above two hundred million Muhammadans, brought in its wake, in the land that had dealt Islam such a heavy blow, the annulment of the shari'ah canonical Law, the disendowment of Sunni institutions, the promulgation of a civil Code, the suppression of religious orders, the abrogation of ceremonials and traditions inculcated by the religion of Muhammad. The Shaykhu'l-Islam and his satellites, including muftis, qadis, hujahs, shaykhs, sufis, hajis, mawlavis, dervishes, and others, vanished at a stroke more determined, more open, and drastic than the one dealt the Shi'ihs by the Shah and his government. The mosques of the capital, the pride and glory of the Islamic world, were deserted, and the fairest and most famous of them all, the peerless Saint Sophia, "the Second Firmament," "the Vehicle of the Cherubim," converted by the blatant creators of a secular regime into a museum. The Arabic tongue, the language of the Prophet of God, was banished from the land, its alphabet was superseded by Latin characters, and the Qur'an itself translated into Turkish for the few who still cared to read it. The constitution of the new Turkey not only proclaimed formally the disestablishment and disendowment of Islam, with all its attendant and, in the view of some, atheistic enactments, but also heralded various measures that aimed at its further humiliation and weakening. Even the city of Constantinople, "the Dome of Islam," apostrophized in such condemnatory terms by Baha'u'llah, which, after the fall of Byzantium, had been hailed by the great Constantine as "the New Rome," and exalted to the rank of the metropolis of both the Roman Empire and of Christendom, and subsequently revered as the seat of the Caliphs, was relegated to the position of a provincial city and stripped of all its pomp and glory, its soaring and slender minarets standing sentinel at the grave of so much vanished splendor and power.
(101:1)
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