*1 There exists very real and grim evidence that body parts were taken as war trophies. In 2002 the mummified head of a Turkish soldier, a war trophy that had been taken from battlefields of Gallipoli, was brought into a police station in Echuca, a small town in Victoria, Australia. It was handed over to the authorities by the grandson of an Australian soldier who had fought with the ANZACs. The Australian journalist Jeff Sparrow described this horrific relic of the war: ‘The head lay in a red velvet display case. The eyes had rotted away, as had the lips, but the ears remained and tufts of a moustache clung to the black, leathery skin. A 3-centimeter impact hole gaped in the crown, with a matching perforation punched roughly through the bone on the other side.’ See Jeff Sparrow, Killing: Misadventures in Violence (Melbourne University Press, 2009), p. 1.
Chapter 5
‘Inflame the whole Mohammedan world’
The Kaiser’s Jihad
ISTANBUL, EARLY NOVEMBER 1914. In a city that most of Christian Europe still calls Constantinople, and which many of its Greek Orthodox residents still wilfully and wistfully know as Byzantium, Ürgüplü Mustafa Hayri Efendi, the Sheikh-ul-Islam – second highest religious authority in the Ottoman Empire – presides over a ceremony at the city’s Fatih Mosque. For this auspicious event the sacred relics of Islam, held in the Topkapi Palace, have been transported across the city, and the empire’s dignitaries and power-brokers have gathered together. Under the great vaulted dome of the fifteenth-century mosque, the banner of the Prophet Mohammed is ceremoniously unfurled and the Sheikh-ul-Islam solemnly presents the sword of the Prophet to Mehmed Reshad V, the thirty-fifth Ottoman sultan.
Mehmed is not only sultan of a secular empire; he is also the Caliph of Sunni Islam, the religious title first held by the immediate followers of the Prophet after his death in AD 632, and which has been inherited by Mehmed V from his sixteenth-century forefather Sultan Selim I. It is a position reinforced by Ottoman possession of Islam’s sacred relics and by the sultan’s role as protector of the Hajj and defender of the holy places of Mecca and Medina.
The sultan – a squat, portly figure – speaks the words written for him by the leading politicians. After a few sentences elaborating on the empire’s recent grievances, he reminds his audience that ‘Russia, England and France have never for a moment ceased harbouring ill-will against our great Caliphate to which millions of Muslims suffering under their tyranny are religiously and whole-heartedly devoted.’1 Omitting to mention Britain’s role as defender of the Ottoman Empire against Russian ambitions in the nineteenth century, he continues: ‘it was always these powers that started every disaster and misfortune that came upon us’. A litany of historic injustices, Mehmed declares, has now left the empire with no choice but to declare not just war against Russia, England and France, but a Holy War – Jihad. ‘This Holy War which we are undertaking will put a definitive end to the attacks made against the glory of our Caliphate as well as against our sovereignty.’ Sultan Mehmed now addresses his army and navy, urging them ‘Never even for a single moment abstain from strenuous efforts and self-sacrifice in our cause and this holy war we have opened against enemies who dared to undermine our religion and our beloved homeland.’ But, as Jihad, this must be war waged in the name of the worldwide Muslim population: ‘Throw yourselves against the enemy,’ Mehmed declares:
…as lions for the life and existence of both our country and 300 million Muslims, whom I have summoned by sacred decree to a supreme struggle… Prayers and good wishes of the hearts of 300 million aggrieved and innocent believers, whose faces are turned in devotion to the Lord of the universe in mosques and the holy Kaaba, are with you.
To help them, he reassures his audience that in this effort they not only have ‘the divine help of God and the moral support of our glorious Prophet,’ but also that they will be ‘comrades-in-arms with the two bravest and [most] magnificent armies of the world’.2
With his speech, Mehmed V signalled the Ottoman Empire’s entry into war. Although widely dismissed as ‘the sick man of Europe’, the empire still ruled over 22 million disparate people, from the southern Balkans to the fringes of the Arabian Peninsula. Now, driven on by their German allies, and themselves groping for a rationale that might explain the purpose of the war to their own people, the leaders of Ottoman Turkey permitted Islamic Holy War to become one of the forces to spread the violence and misery of the First World War across the globe. The ruling political party, the Committee for Union and Progress (CUP), was dominated by a cabal of ambitious ‘Young Turks’, many of whom were secular modernizers of shallow faith; they were now evoking the religious authority of the sultan-caliph in order to cloak their political ambitions in religious garb, and in doing so were attempting to draw into the war the 300 million Muslims who lived beyond the crumbling frontiers of the Ottoman Empire.
What resulted was a tale of holy war and unholy alliances, espionage and counter-espionage, and global ambition on a breathtaking scale. The weaponization of religion helped cast the seeds of war, revolt and discord across parts of Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Under the shadow of the banner of the sultan-caliph, Germany dispatched U-boats loaded with arms and ammunition to the coast of North Africa and sent gifts of gold to local Islamic leaders – men to whom the sultan addressed elegant parchments calling upon them to take up the call of Jihad. German money bankrolled secret military expeditions across the Islamic world to ignite the resentments of Muslims living under British rule. Led by warrior-intellectuals – officers regarded as the German equivalents of T.E. Lawrence – and planned in Berlin and Istanbul, these expeditions involved a bizarre cast list of German propagandists and orientalists – most of them either romantic fantasists or wealthy playboys. Other parts in this global drama were played by local rabble-rousers, stateless gun-runners, devout tribal leaders, corrupt emirs and sheikhs, and soldier-defectors from British India and French North Africa.
Yet perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the whole story is that the real driving force behind this bizarre and unlikely scheme was neither the sultan, nor the Sheikh-ul-Islam, nor even the Young Turks. This was the Kaiser’s Jihad. In the words of Allied propagandists, it was a ‘Holy War made in Berlin’.3
The Jihad strategy was not a knee-jerk reaction to events of 1914; rather, it had emerged out of the strange alliance of mutual self-interest that had begun to develop in the last years of the nineteenth century, between a buoyant, unified and expansive Germany and a decrepit, humiliated and disempowered Ottoman Empire. It was a marriage of convenience, consummated by two state visits made by Kaiser Wilhelm II to the Ottoman sultan – not Mehmed V, but rather his older brother and predecessor, Sultan Abdülhamid II. As the last of the ‘Lords of the Horizons’, he was the last sultan to exercise real power over this intercontinental empire, until he was overthrown.
By November 1914, as Mehmed V declared Jihad, across the Bosphorus his older brother was being held in permanent captivity, within the baroque gaudiness of the Beylerbeyi Palace. There the former sultan worked on his memoirs and brooded. In November 1889, Sultan Abdülhamid II had been at the Yıldız Palace, another of the many royal residences, awaiting the arrival of the SMY Hohenzollern, the royal yacht that brought the German Kaiser through the Dardanelles and into the Golden Horn for his first visit to Istanbul. The Kaiser and sultan, through mutual flattery, seem to have formed a bond on their first meeting. There followed tours of the city, boat trips on the Bosphorus, the exchange of gifts and mutual declarations of friendship.
Nine years later the Kaiser returned, this time for a full tour of the Ottoman Empire. To accommodate the return of his royal friends, the sultan had ordered the construction of a new wing of the Yıldız Palace. The Kaiser’s itinerary was planned, in meticulous detail, by the British firm Thomas Cook & Son, the inventors of the package tour.4 It was during this longer, more exhaustive tour that Wilhelm seems to have become captivated by Islamic culture and to have developed real respect for the Islamic faith. So effusive was
Wilhelm in his praise of Islam that in the first years of the twentieth century a rumour swirled around the Middle East and British India that the Kaiser had secretly converted to Islam. The German intelligence services did nothing to correct that mistaken view. Perhaps the more austere aspects of Sunni Islam and the faith’s strict moral code appealed to a man brought up amid the iron discipline of the Prussian Officer Corps. Whatever the case, it seems likely that Wilhelm’s interest in Islam was not an affectation. In a private letter to the Tsar, written on his visit to Jerusalem, the Kaiser claimed that if he were an atheist, able to select a faith, he would choose Islam.
It was in October 1898 that Wilhelm travelled to Jerusalem, entering on a white horse through a breach knocked into the walls near the Jaffa Gate. His next stop was Damascus. There he visited the tomb of Saladin, the great Muslim warrior of the Crusades. After a fulsome eulogy to the greatness of Saladin, and yet more praise for his friend Sultan Abdülhamid II, Wilhelm declared that the ‘300 million Muslim subjects scattered across the earth… can be assured that the German Kaiser will be their friend for all time’.
The Kaiser was infamously prone to short-term obsessions with certain policies or issues, for which he later lost enthusiasm. Yet Wilhelm’s fascination with Islam and the Orient was not the product of naive romanticism about the East. The sheer amount of attention and interest he seems to have shown towards Ottoman Turkey and the potential power of Islam lends credence to the idea that on this issue he was more involved, and paid more attention, than with the many other schemes and issues that grabbed his attention only to later fall by the wayside. There is certainly no doubt whatsoever that the Kaiser’s declarations of friendship to Ottoman Turkey and the Muslim world garnered the full attention of the governments of France, Russia and Britain.
What was it that Germany had to gain from an alliance with the Ottoman Empire that could be worth antagonizing Russia and causing dismay and distrust in France and Britain? Militarily, the Ottoman Army was, as one British general claimed, ‘a non-entity’, although under German tutelage this was fast changing. Germany’s interest was primarily strategic. By dint of its geographic position, the Ottoman Empire was uniquely able to threaten two of Germany’s most likely enemies in a future war – Imperial Russia and the British Empire. The Ottoman state shared a border with Russia in the Caucasus and would, in some future war, be able to draw a proportion of the Tsar’s forces southwards towards that region and away from the German frontiers. Perhaps more significantly, the Ottoman Army, by marching through Syria and Palestine, could threaten Egypt and the Suez Canal, Britain’s supply line to India – critical to both British trade and military capacity. If Ottoman Turkey was able to train and field a modern army, and transport those forces to its strategic borders using a German-built rail network, the empire would become a very significant potential ally.
Yet there was something of a self-fulfilling prophecy about German diplomacy. Two years after the Kaiser’s second Ottoman visit, Germany allowed the so-called Reinsurance Treaty with Russia – the traditional enemy of the Ottoman Empire – to lapse, despite Russian interest in its renewal.*1 It was a significant factor in drawing Tsarist Russia, looking for new allies, into the diplomatic embrace of Third Republic France, which in turn would come to convince Germans that the encirclement they had long feared was now a reality.*2 When, in 1907, Britain formed the Triple Entente with France and Russia and that encirclement appeared complete, Germany’s desire for an Ottoman alliance was strengthening. Finding a way to bolster and modernize Ottoman Turkey though trade, railway construction and re-armament had already become a feature of German foreign policy. Even in 1898, one German newspaper was predicting:
The sick man will be cured, so thoroughly, that when he wakes up from his sleep of recovery he will be difficult to recognize. One would think he has got blond hair, blue eyes, and looks quite Germanic. In our loving embrace we have injected so much German essence into him that he will be hard to distinguish from a German.5
In these same years, by contrast, the British and French came to believe that their best interests were served by keeping the sick man on his deathbed and planning for his eventual demise.
German designs were not, however, focused solely on strategic military planning in advance of any war. Germany imagined an alliance with Ottoman Turkey also as a key aspect of a post-war re-ordering of the world. At their most expansive, the geo-strategic fantasies entertained by sections of the German Foreign Office (along with the far right Pan-Germanic League and pro-colonial and ultra-nationalist writers) foresaw an empire stretching across the sands of Arabia and beyond. There were those in Germany’s ruling elite who envisaged an empire funded by oil and fuelled by trade, its main artery being a railway of German steel, running from the port of Hamburg, through the heart of Europe and across Arabia and Mesopotamia to the port of Basra – a second choice after British machinations had pushed Kuwait beyond Germany’s reach. The famous Berlin–Baghdad Railway was, in the minds of some, to be a new Silk Road, an umbilical link between Europe and Asia that would reverse the long decline of Asia. The fast train to Berlin would outpace, by up to three days, the slow boats that slipped through the Suez Canal. Along the same 2,000 miles of track would pour into Germany the raw materials and oil of the Near East. Flowing the other way would be train-loads of German manufactured goods. The key concession for the Berlin–Baghdad Railway was agreed by Abdülhamid II in 1899, the year after the Kaiser’s second visit. In Whitehall the railway was regarded not just as an economic rival to the Suez Canal, but also as a direct strategic threat to India – and therefore to the empire as a whole and to Britain’s primacy in the world. The railway could – in theory at least – enable Germany to dispatch its armies to the Persian Gulf within one week.6
If German ambitions were for a re-ordered future, the rulers of Ottoman Turkey fantasized about regaining the power and influence of the past. Despite the grandeur of the setting and the solemnity of the event, the true condition of the empire was apparent to all those who witnessed the sultan’s declaration of Jihad in November 1914. The Fatih Mosque (Mosque of the Conqueror) stands on the site of the Church of the Holy Apostles, formerly the second most important place of worship of the Byzantine Empire, which had been demolished in 1461 to make way for the Islamic edifice. It was built in honour of Sultan Mehmed II, the twenty-one-year-old conqueror of Constantinople, who had brought to an end the 1,500-year-old Byzantine Empire. In 1914, the burning legend of Mehmed II could not have stood in greater contrast to the enfeebled seventy-year-old puppet Mehmed V: the perfect metaphor for the decline of Ottoman power. In the five intervening centuries since the glories of Mehmed II, the Ottoman Empire had been eclipsed in almost every regard by the Christian states of Europe, which had once lived in fear that the Ottoman fleet might appear off their shores or that the elite Janissary Corps of the sultan’s army might breach the walls of their cities. Although Ottoman decline lasted longer than the rise and fall of most other empires, it was, by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, inexorable – and seemed to be approaching its conclusion.7 Since the 1870s, the empire had experienced a string of disastrous military defeats in the Balkans as the Christian nationalities fought to create their own nation states, often with the support of Russia. Even within its contracted borders, the ‘sick man of Europe’ had, like all invalids, lost a great deal of his independence. The great powers of Europe had forced upon the Ottomans an open-door trade policy, and European traders and agents were exempt from prosecution and taxation within the empire’s borders. Moreover, in 1875 the Ottoman Empire had declared itself bankrupt, and six years later was forced to accept the Ottoman Public Debt Administration, a bureaucracy of 5,000 employees by means of which European creditors seized Ottoman tax revenues at source.
With Ottoman death looking inevitable, for some decades the great powers of Europe had all staked claims (often justified on religious grounds) to their chosen cuts of the Ottoman corpse. The Britis
h wanted control of Mesopotamia, the French Syria and Palestine. Italy had already fought a war for control of Ottoman Libya, and the Russians wanted Istanbul itself and control of the Dardanelles, through which much of their trade flowed. During the last thirty years of the nineteenth century, European treatment of the Ottoman state had not quite descended into gun-boat diplomacy; but the European warships that slipped up and down the Bosphorus and into Ottoman waters with impunity were physical reminders of Ottoman powerlessness in the face of voracious and circling enemies.
The only European power that appeared to have no imperial designs on Ottoman lands or an interest in Ottoman demise was Germany.
ISTANBUL, FRIDAY 14 NOVEMBER 1914. Ali Haydar Efendi, Custodian of the Fatwa, addresses a vast crowd from a balcony of the Fatih Mosque that is bedecked with the red pennant flags of the Ottoman Empire.8 He proclaims a series of fatwa – religious judgements – signed by twenty-nine religious authorities and approved by both the sultan and the Ottoman Chamber of Deputies. Probably drafted three days earlier, they have been written in a question-and-answer format and intended to legitimize the Jihad according to Koranic scripture. In doing so they stretch Islamic jurisprudence to its limits – and beyond.
The first asks: ‘If several enemies unite against Islam, if the countries of Islam are sacked, if the Muslim populations are massacred or made captive… is participation in this war a duty for all Muslims, old and young, cavalry and infantry?’ The answer read out is ‘Yes.’ The second asks whether the ‘Muslim subjects of Russia, of France, of England and of all the countries that side with them in their land and sea attacks… against the Caliphate for the purpose of annihilating Islam must… too take part in the Holy War against the respective governments from which they depend?’ The answer again is ‘Yes.’ A third fatwa asks: ‘Those who at a time when all Muslims are summoned to fight, avoid the struggle and refuse to join in the Holy War, are they exposed to the wrath of God, to great misfortunes, and to the deserved punishment?’ The answer again is ‘Yes.’ The fourth fatwa is also a warning, this time addressed to the Muslim soldiers and would-be soldiers of the Allied powers: ‘If the Muslim subjects of the said countries should take up arms against the government of Islam [the Ottoman Empire and its allies], would they commit an unpardonable sin, even if they had been driven to the war by threats of extermination uttered against themselves and their families’? Unsurprisingly, the answer is ‘Yes.’
The World's War Page 24
