Mecca might, perhaps, try to become a rival of the Sultan Mehmed Reshad as a pretender to the Caliphate.
A Caliphate, no matter who holds the dignity, is wholly incompatible with modern political conditions. And this will be as true after the present war as it was before. Only as an empty title can it be tolerated at all.
For the rest, it can be seen, from what we have already written about the history and the current condition of the Shereefate, that any lofty Aspirations would be especially ill adapted for local principalities. The idea of a Caliphate of the Shereefs of Mecca has been ventilated, more than once, by this or that European writer on Islam, but, in the Moslem world, it has never been broached, and no one of the Shereefs from the House of Katada—rulers in Mecca and in varying portions of West
