Although ‘Abduh tried to convince him to stay out of politics, Rashid Rida believed that the problems beleaguering Muslims required political as well as religious reform. At first, the Shaykh was a supporter of the Ottoman Empire as a bastion of Muslim strength and, recovering an old idea of "al-'Urwa al-wuthqà", proposed the creation of an Islamic Society (al-jam'iyya al-islamiyya) under the leadership of the caliph, with headquarters in Mecca and offices all over the Muslim world. Its members – Sunni, Shi‘a and Ibadi "ulema" – would produce a common doctrine and draft a modern code of law based on the shari‘ah. After Sultan ‘Abd al-Hamid rebuked the introduction of any measure of consultative government, he would briefly back – the revolution of the Young Turks and, during the Great War, the Hashemite-led Arab revolt. But after the war, the Islamic World suffered two traumatic events: western occupation of Arab lands and partitioning them as per Sykes-Pycot, which was widely regarded as a betrayal of the promises the Allies made during the World War; and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the rise to power of Kemal Atatürk who implemented forced secularization of Turkish society and abolished the caliphate in 1924. Atatürk’s actions were a shock to traditionalist Muslims for whom the caliphate represented the symbol of Islamic unity and the last line of defense against the west’s political and cultural onslaught. Rida now became an ardent defender of the caliphate as the ideal form of government for Muslims, and wrote a series of articles in volumes XXIII and XXIV of al-Manar(1922–3) that would be collected under the title “"The Caliphate or the Supreme Imamate"”.