History
After the death of Muhammad, Muslims who accepted Abu Bakr as the first Caliph became known as the Ahlus Sunnah wa`l Jamah in order to differentiate them from the sect of Shiism which emerged many years later, which said that Ali should have been Caliph.
The first four caliphs are known among Sunnis as the Four Rightly Guided Caliphs. The first was Abu Bakr Siddique, the second was Umar ibn al-Khattāb, the third was Uthman ibn Affan, and the fourth was Ali ibn Abi Talib.
After the first four caliphs, the Caliphate was upheld as a political system by dynasties such as the Umayyads, the Abbasids, and the Ottomans. It was also upheld for relatively short periods of time by other competing dynasties in al-Andalus, North Africa and Egypt.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk abolished the system of the Ottoman Caliphate after Abdülmecid II was officially deposed and expelled from Turkey, whereby the Republic of Turkey was founded in 1924 upon secular principles. To this day, the Ottoman Empire is regarded as the last major Islamic Caliphate.
Read more about this topic: Sunni Islam
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“All objects, all phases of culture are alive. They have voices. They speak of their history and interrelatedness. And they are all talking at once!”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“There is no history of how bad became better.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)