Istanbul’s Topkapi Palace houses many precious artefacts but the holy relics of the Prophet Mohammed have always been the centre of attraction
On a recent Ramadan day, as the hot sun rays fell over Istanbul’s Topkapi Palace, a large number of local and foreign tourists flocked to the historic building where the Ottoman sultans resided from the conquest of Istanbul in 1453 until the mid-19th Century.
“[Ottoman sultans] wanted to keep the Holy Relics close to themselves because they thought that the location of the relics [in the Topkapi Palace] would have qualified Istanbul as the centre of the Islamic world,” said Mustafa Sabri Kucukasci, President of the Topkapi Palace Museum, who is also a professor of History of Middle Ages at the Marmara University.
As the Ottoman Empire spread across what is modern day Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan and the Arabian Peninsula, Sultan Selim I not only defeated the Mamluks but also claimed the caliphate from them, bringing most of the Holy Relics from Cairo to Istanbul. Since Mehmed II, the building has been restored several times. By the time Selim I brought the holy relics, the imperial house unexpectedly turned into a Muslim shrine of sorts, where sultans and their officialdom held ceremonies to kiss the Prophet’s cloak, while paying their respect to other relics to exhibit their faith in Islam.
Ahmet Cevdet Pasha, one of the most prominent Ottoman statesmen and jurists in the late 19th Century, argued that the Abbasid caliphate had lost grip of much of the Islamic world as the Mamluks used them as an instrument to gain legitimacy in the Islamic world.
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