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Musa Jarullah Bigiyev (1875-1949) was born in Rostov city of Kazan. He studied in Bukhara, Egypt, Hijaz, and India. He is a scholar that devoted his life to Islamic sciences and various religious, political, social, and cultural issues of Muslims. He wrote works in many fields such as Qur'anic sciences, Tafsīr, Ḥadīth, Kalām, Fiqh, Usūl al-Fiqh, Sīrah, Islamic History, and Arabic language, and literature. He participated in several national and international meetings on various intellectual and political problems of the society that he lived in and the Islamic world.
The first of these congresses, which took place between May 13-19.1926 following the Turkish Grand National Assembly abolished the caliphate with the Law No. 431 dated March 3, 1340 (1924), was the Caliphate Congress convened in Cairo (al-Muʿtamar al-İslāmī al-ʿĀmm li al-Khilāfa). It was proposed by the representatives of Egyptian religious education institutions -especially the administrators of al-Azhar- in response to this decision. Musa Jarullah was invited to this meeting by the Egyptian congress organization committee, but he was not able to attend the meeting, as he was not given an entry visa, again, by the Egyptian authorities. Some people claimed that Musa Jarullah was an opponent of the Bolshevik administration in Russia and giving him an entry visa to Egypt could have potentially put Egypt in a collision course with Russia. In an effort to avoid such a situation, the Egyptian authorities, it is further claimed, did not issue a visa to Musa Jarullah. In this article, we demostrate that the claim in question does not fully reflect the truth, and that the primary reason why Musa Jarullah was not given a visa was not because Egypt was afraid of Russia; but rather, the primary reason behind this should be sought, we argue, in his opposition to the Egyptian administration under the British shadow, the possibility of the election of the Egyptian King Fuad (1868-1936) as the "New Islamic Caliph", and the general approach of the scholars of al-Azhar to the caliphate. We tried to analyze Musa Jarullah Bigiyef's views on the Islamic caliphate in general and the Ottoman caliphate in particular as well as the approaches the scholars of al-Azhar and Egyptian officials who organized this meeting adopted towards the caliphate.
The second congress discussed here is the World Muslim Congress (al-Muʿtamar al-ʿālam al-Islamī), which was held in Mecca between June 7 - July 5, 1926. Considering the transportation possibilities of the time period, this congress, which was organized in a way that conflicted with the Caliphate Congress held in Egypt in terms of time, was a meeting held by ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Ibn Saʿūd (1880-1953), who declared himself as the King of Hejaz, in an effort to consolidate his legitimacy in the Islamic world. In this congress, some practical and domestic issues related to public order such as the reconstruction of the Hejaz region, especially Mecca and Medina, and the improvement of the pilgrimage organization were discussed. Musa Jarullah Bigiyef attended this congress, albeit somewhat late due to visa problems, he and expressed his views on some issues by taking the floor several times.
The last congress to be examined in the article is the General Islamic Congress ((al-Muʿtamar al-ʿālam al-Islamī al-ʿĀmm), which was held in Jerusalem between December 7-17, 1931. The Mufti of Jerusalem, al-Ḥājj Amīn al-Ḥusaynī (1897-1974) organized this congress in an effort to discuss some of the political and economic issues the Islamic world was facing such as developing the feelings of unity and brotherhood among Muslims, defending the Palestinian lands against the Jews, whose numbers were increasing day by day through emigration, establishing an Islamic university in Jerusalem and repairing the Hejaz railway. Musa Jarullah attended this congress as the representative of Chinese Turkistan and Finnish Muslims.
The present work provides with a detailed analysis of Musa Jarullah Bigiyef's participation in the aforementioned congresses, his negotiations in these congresses, and his evaluations about them, and it also makes an effort to correct some of the misconceptions regarding these issues.