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Sunni Islam has sustained, not through the action of a foreign and invading Power, but at the hands of a dictator, avowedly professing the Faith of Muhammad, a blow more grievous than that which fell, almost simultaneously, upon its sister-sect in Persia. This retributive act, directed against the archenemy of the Faith of Baha'u'llah, recalls a similar disaster precipitated through the action of a Roman emperor, during the latter part of the first century of the Christian era - a disaster that razed to its foundations the Temple of Solomon, destroyed the Holy of Holies, laid waste the city of David, uprooted the Jewish hierarchy in Jerusalem, massacred thousands of the Jewish people - the persecutors of the religion of Jesus Christ - dispersed the remainder over the surface of the earth, and reared a pagan colony on Zion. (99:1) The Caliph, the self-styled vicar of the Prophet of Islam, exercised a spiritual sovereignty, and was invested with a sacred character, which the Shah of Persia neither claimed nor possessed. Nor should it be forgotten that the sphere of his spiritual jurisdiction extended to countries far beyond the confines of his own empire, and embraced the overwhelming majority of Muslims throughout the world. He was, moreover, in his capacity as the Prophet's representative on earth, regarded as the protector of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, the defender and propagator of Islam, and the commander of its followers in any holy war they might be called upon to wage. (99:2) So potent, so august, so sacred a personage was at first by virtue of the abolition of the Sultanate in Turkey, divested of that temporal authority which the exponents of the Sunni school have regarded as a necessary concomitant to his high office. The sword, emblem of temporal sovereignty, was thus wrested out of the hands of the commander who, for a brief period, was permitted to occupy such an anomalous and precarious position. It was soon, however, trumpeted to the Sunni world, which had not previously been in the least consulted, that the Caliphate itself had been extinguished, and that the country which had accepted it as an appendage to its Sultanate, for more than four hundred years, had now permanently disowned it. The Turks who had been the militant leaders of the Muhammadan world, since the Arab decline, and who had carried the standard of Islam as far as the gates of Vienna, the seat of government of Europe's premier Power, had resigned their leadership. The ex-caliph, shorn of his royal pomp, stripped of the symbols of his vicarship, and deserted by friend and foe alike, was forced to flee from Constantinople, the proud seat of a dual sovereignty, to the land of the infidels, resigning himself to that same life of exile to which a number of his fellow-sovereigns had been and were still condemned.
(99:3)
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