Germany's Puppet Jihad in WWI
Gustav Bruckner
World Power, 1898-1919
Sean McMeekin
Allen Lane
Dh140
The story of how the modern Middle East was born out of the wreckage
of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War is well known. With
the British and French acting as midwives, the former provinces of
this once mighty imperium were put on a (difficult) path to modern
statehood. But there was hardly anything inevitable about the
inglorious demise of the Ottomans.
Though it had been convulsed by internal disputes, the Ottoman Empire
was still a formidable power in 1914. But, as so often happens in
history, a wrong bet had profound historical consequences. That bet
was the alliance with Germany that brought the Turks into the war on
the side of the Central Powers. It was a fateful decision. Prodded by
the Kaiser (the allure of German marks also helped) the Turkish regime
went to war against its historical enemy, Russia. This, in itself, was
not an absurd wager. However, the German end of the bargain was an
altogether different proposition: taking aim at the British empire and
its 100 million Muslim subjects, Wilhelm II cooked up a breathtaking
plan to unleash the furies of an Islamic power on the British Raj and
Egypt and harness the glories of the Near East to German imperial
interests.
The historian Sean McMeekin, in The Berlin-Baghdad Express, his
masterful history of this remarkable if preposterous undertaking,
calls it the “first ever global jihad”. Historians have tended to
downplay the role of pan-Islamic agitation in the First World War,
arguing that the Turco-German campaign was marginal to the strategy of
the Central Powers. However, McMeekin, who has consulted numerous
Turkish and German sources, convincingly puts the plan front and
centre, and gives us a fuller, more complex picture of how the Great
Powers influenced the future of the Middle East.
It is a story that takes in grotesque misapprehension, outlandish
propaganda, sordid compromise, abject failure, and comic – or tragic –
outcomes. A professor of international relations at Bilkent University
in Ankara, McMeekin has written a sophisticated, if sometimes
tendentious, account that gives us a much broader view of a story
whose echoes persist into the present day: the efforts by western
powers to exert influence in the Middle East, and the way in which
those efforts – often involving attempts to marshal the force of
religious fervour – have so reliably backfired
The Berlin-Baghdad Express is also a phenomenally entertaining
narrative. Featuring a dramatis personae that puts Indiana Jones to
shame, McMeekin’s book opens up a window on to the vanished, all-but-
forgotten world of German Orientalism and the band of scholar-
adventurers who fanned out across the Middle East to win converts to
the cause. Lawrence of Arabia has won all the glory, but these agents
were, to a man, every bit his equal. (It’s refreshing to read about a
moment in 20th-century history when Germans acted no better or worse
than their British and French adversaries.) Travelling to the most
forbidding regions of the Muslim world, where no infidel was welcome,
they carried out their briefs with élan and derring-do, though with
little success in the end.
Indeed, McMeekin offers, among other things, a brilliant exposé of a
geopolitical disaster. From the start, there was something unseemly
about the Kaiser’s embrace of Islam – “Hajji Wilhelm” was always a man
of sudden, contradictory, enthusiasms. After a visit to Jerusalem in
1898, he declared to his cousin, Tsar Nicholas II, that “My personal
feeling in leaving the holy city was that I felt profoundly ashamed
before the Moslems and that if I had come there without any Religion
at all I certainly would have turned Mahomettan!” (At the same time,
he was enthusing to Theodore Herzl about Zionism.) But the Kaiser
thought he also had found a weapon: “the Mahometans were a tremendous
card” in the game against “the certain meddlesome Power!”– Great
Britain.
Thus began Germany’s ardent courtship of the Sublime Porte and Sultan
Abdul Hamid. Building a railroad from Constantinople to Baghdad to
Basra – the eponymous express – would become one linchpin of German
strategy. The other would be exploiting the symbolic potential of the
Caliphate to stir the passions of Muslims. Under any political
circumstance, this was a risky move. And the Germans weren’t the only
ones with their eyes on the Caliphate: the British entertained notions
of detaching it from the Ottoman Sultan and moving it to Mecca. They
lavished funds on the Sherifiate and Ibn Saud’s Wahhabist legions in
an attempt to buy their support. (As one leader writer put it in a pro-
British Egyptian paper, “it is Mecca, not Constantinople, which is the
centre of the Muslim faith. It is towards the Kaabah, not towards the
St Sophia, that the Moslem turns his eyes as he prays”). About this
faintly absurd jousting amongst the Great Powers, competing to prop up
the long-expired authority of the Caliphate, McMeekin writes, “It was
like a race to the reactionary bottom, to see which ‘infidel’ power
could conjure up the purest strain of fundamentalist Islam.”
Helping to whip up passions was one of history’s most unlikely
jihadists, Baron Max von Oppenheim, who directed the Kaiser’s “jihad
bureau” for the duration of the war. The scion of a Jewish banking
family, an archaeologist, writer, and veteran Near East hand,
Oppenheim thundered that Muslims “should know that from today the Holy
War has become a sacred duty and that the blood of the infidels in the
Islamic lands may be shed with impunity”. (Germans, Austrians, and
Hungarians were granted exceptions, of course.)
Oppenheim supervised a crack team of Orientalists, among them Alois
Musil, cousin of the novelist Robert, who trekked to central Arabia in
1915 to enlist Arab tribal sheikhs, and Oskar von Niedermayer, who
made a perilous journey across the Persian desert to spur the Emir of
Afghanistan into attacking the Indian Raj. Despite the effusions of
pious rhetoric, the Turco-German plan foundered badly. McMeekin is at
his best explaining why, as a strategic adjunct to the war, the
“jihad” amounted to very little. In the two resounding Turkish
victories over British forces, at Gallipoli and Kut-El-Amara, Islamic
sentiments counted for nothing on the battlefield; tenacity and
superior tactics did.
Almost everywhere – Persia, the Shia strongholds of southern
Mesopotamia, Afghanistan and the Hejaz – German agents found
themselves contending with endless logistical traps. With the British
Navy in control of the seas, the still incomplete railway took on a
vital importance. There was simply no way for the Ottomans to ship
arms and materiel across vast distances to supply their would-be
allies. The “jihad”, in actuality, turned into a series of cash
transactions, with the Germans (and British) resorting to subventions,
financial blandishments, and outright bribery. For their support, the
Turks themselves asked for millions of marks; in Afghanistan, the Emir
“demanded from Berlin a lump sum of £10 million sterling, the
equivalent of some $5 billion today”.
The Germans – and British – both exploited and misunderstood the issue
of the Caliphate. Shia clerics were never going to fall in behind a
Sunni Caliphate, whose authority they would never recognise. And,
besides, the Caliphate was a nearly moribund institution in 1914. As
McMeekin explains, the Caliphate was not analogous to the papacy; it
was a “political-military power” backed up by superior force of arms
and Ottoman military might. And even this counted for little in the
Arab holy lands of the Hejaz, where the Ottomans were unable to put
down a revolt by the Emir of Mecca in 1916 (on which the British
lavished several billions, in 2010 dollars). The uprising by blood
relatives of the Prophet rendered null and void any remaining
authority of the Caliphate.
Though McMeekin frequently lapses into cliché (“The Syrian and
Mesopotamian stretches on the other side of the mountains were no
picnic either”), he is a vivid, confident stylist with a keen eye for
the farcical anecdote. During an attack on the Suez Canal, Bedouin
tribesmen shouting “Allahu Akhbar” give away Turkish positions to the
British; in Constantinople, it turned out that “the lead holy war
writer in the Turkish press, ‘Mehmed Zeki Bey, ’ was actually a
Romanian Jewish conman who had recently done a turn running a bordello
in Buenos Aires.” McMeekin writes equally as well on the horrors of
war in the Ottoman provinces and the grim fate of Armenians in
1915-1916.
But for all his trenchancy, McMeekin overstates his case, and, in
doing so, fails to explain what, exactly, we are to make of “Germany’s
historic role in the Middle East”. Looking back to the First World War
from the vantage point of a world obsessed with radical Islam of the
bin Ladenist variety, McMeekin argues that “the Kaiser’s promotion of
pan-Islam, while a strategic failure in the World War, threw up flames
of revolutionary jihadism as far afield as Libya, Sudan, Mesopotamia,
the Caucasus, Iran, and Afghanistan, which never entirely died down
after the war.” Yet McMeekin’s notion of “revolutionary jihadism” is
off-key, and he skips a beat in his argument. As he forcefully reminds
us in his epilogue, “Wilhelmine Germany was also the spiritual and
political home of Zionism”, which was an ethno-nationalist movement.
As the Middle East moved from protectorates and mandates to
independent nation states, nationalist movements set the terms of
political debate. The revolutionary jihadism of today, in fact,
emerged only after the collapse of Nasser’s secular pan-Arabism.
Kaiser Wilhelm’s “jihad” against Britain – foolhardy, ambitious, and
fantastically enthralling in hindsight – casts precious little light
on the problem of contemporary religious extremism.
Matthew Price is a regular contributor to The Review.
Gustav Bruckner
The story of how the modern Middle East was born out of the wreckage
of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War is well known. With
the British and French acting as midwives, the former provinces of
this once mighty imperium were put on a (difficult) path to modern
statehood. But there was hardly anything inevitable about the
inglorious demise of the Ottomans.
Though it had been convulsed by internal disputes, the Ottoman Empire
was still a formidable power in 1914. But, as so often happens in
history, a wrong bet had profound historical consequences. That bet
was the alliance with Germany that brought the Turks into the war on
the side of the Central Powers. It was a fateful decision. Prodded by
the Kaiser (the allure of German marks also helped) the Turkish regime
went to war against its historical enemy, Russia. This, in itself, was
not an absurd wager. However, the German end of the bargain was an
altogether different proposition: taking aim at the British empire and
its 100 million Muslim subjects, Wilhelm II cooked up a breathtaking
plan to unleash the furies of an Islamic power on the British Raj and
Egypt and harness the glories of the Near East to German imperial
interests.
Although it is the “first ever global jihad”, Historians have tended
to downplay the role of pan-Islamic agitation in the First World War,
arguing that the Turco-German campaign was marginal to the strategy of
the Central Powers.
This is a story whose echoes persist into the present day: the efforts
by western powers to exert influence in the Middle East, and the way
in which those efforts – often involving attempts to marshal the force
of religious fervour – have so reliably backfired.
From the start, there was something unseemly about the Kaiser’s
embrace of Islam – (At the same time, he was enthusing to Theodore
Herzl about Zionism.) But “the Mahometans were a tremendous card” in
the game against Great Britain.
Thus began Germany’s ardent courtship. Building a railroad from
Constantinople to Baghdad– would become one linchpin of German
strategy. The other would be exploiting the symbolic potential of the
Caliphate to stir the passions of Muslims. Germans weren’t the only
ones with their eyes on the Caliphate: the British entertained notions
of detaching it from the Ottoman Sultan and moving it to Mecca.
About this faintly absurd jousting amongst the Great Powers, competing
to prop up the long-expired authority of the Caliphate, McMeekin
writes, “It was like a race to the reactionary bottom, to see which
‘infidel’ power could conjure up the purest strain of fundamentalist
Islam.”
Helping to whip up passions was one of history’s most unlikely
jihadists, Baron Max von Oppenheim, who directed the Kaiser’s “jihad
bureau” for the duration of the war. The scion of a Jewish banking
family.
Oppenheim thundered that Muslims “should know that from today the Holy
War has become a sacred duty and that the blood of the infidels in the
Islamic lands may be shed with impunity”. (Germans, Austrians, and
Hungarians were granted exceptions, of course.)
As a strategic adjunct to the war, the “jihad” amounted to very
little. In the two resounding Turkish victories over British forces,
at Gallipoli and Kut-El-Amara, Islamic sentiments counted for nothing
on the battlefield; tenacity and superior tactics did.
With the British Navy in control of the seas, the still incomplete
railway took on a vital importance. There was simply no way for the
Ottomans to ship arms and materiel across vast distances to supply
their would-be allies. The “jihad”, in actuality, turned into a series
of cash transactions, with the Germans (and British) resorting to
subventions, financial blandishments, and outright bribery. For their
support, the Turks themselves asked for millions of marks; in
Afghanistan, the Emir “demanded from Berlin a lump sum of £10 million
sterling, the equivalent of some $5 billion today”.
The Germans – and British – both exploited and misunderstood the issue
of the Caliphate. Shia clerics were never going to fall in behind a
Sunni Caliphate, whose authority they would never recognise. And,
besides, the Caliphate was a nearly moribund institution in 1914. As
McMeekin explains, the Caliphate was not analogous to the papacy; it
was a “political-military power” backed up by superior force of arms
and Ottoman military might. And even this counted for little in the
Arab holy lands
The Kaiser’s promotion of pan-Islam, while a strategic failure in the
World War, threw up flames of revolutionary jihadism as far afield as
Libya, Sudan, Mesopotamia, the Caucasus, Iran, and Afghanistan, which
never entirely died down after the war.”
Yet “Wilhelmine Germany was also the spiritual and political home of
Zionism”, which was an ethno-nationalist movement. As the Middle East
moved from protectorates and mandates to independent nation states,
nationalist movements set the terms of political debate. The
revolutionary jihadism of today, in fact, emerged only after the
collapse of Nasser’s secular pan-Arabism. Kaiser Wilhelm’s “jihad”
against Britain – foolhardy, ambitious, and fantastically enthralling
in hindsight – casts precious little light on the problem of
contemporary religious extremism.
.