The final fatwa is addressed to Muslims already fighting on behalf of the Allies. These soldiers ‘who in the present war are under England, France, Russia, Serbia, Montenegro and those who give aid to these countries by waging war against Germany and Austria, allies of Turkey, do they deserve to be punished by the wrath of God as being the cause of harm and damage to the Caliphate and to Islam?’ The answer is ‘Yes.’9
The proclamation of the fatwa was but one of a series of remarkable and clearly choreographed public events in Istanbul that day.*3 With the Jihad declared and the fatwa issued, an official Holy War demonstration, which had been organized by the Ottoman government, assembled outside the Ministry of War. There, as the Dutch orientalist Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje recorded, ‘Prayers were said, long speeches were held, there was no end to the jubilation.’ From the Ministry of War, a ‘procession passed through the main parts of the city, waited upon the Grand Vizier, and demonstrated in front of the German and the Austrian Embassies.’10 It was when the procession reached the German Embassy that the most theatrical, ominous and telling events of the day took place. While a band played, the enormous figure of German Ambassador Baron Hans von Wangenheim appeared above the heads of the throng, on the large balcony at the front of the embassy. From this vantage point, and speaking through a member of the German diplomatic staff fluent in Turkish, Wangenheim addressed the crowds. Although not one of the more committed believers in the wisdom of the Jihad policy, Wangenheim promised the crowd German support in the Holy War and offered his salutes to the sultan. According to Hurgronje:
…the German ambassador did not only speak of Germany and Turkey, but of their common struggle for the real welfare of the Mohammedan world; of Germany’s friendship for the Empire of the Ottomans, but especially for the adherents of Islam, before all of whom, as soon as the German and Turkish arms have achieved victory, there lies a glorious future.11
Wangenheim’s address was followed by yet more speeches, by the ruling CUP party, which solicited enthusiastic cheers from the crowd.
The greatest coup de théâtre of the whole stage-managed day was yet to come. A group of Muslim PoWs was dramatically paraded on the embassy balcony – fourteen men who had been captured during various engagements in France and Belgium earlier in the war, or who had come over to the German lines as deserters. All were originally from the French colonies of North Africa – Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. They now read aloud, in Turkish and Arabic, declarations of their support for the sultan and personal affirmations of their intention to join the struggle against their former colonial masters. Behind them stood Karl Emil Schabinger von Schowingen, their translator as well as recruiting officer. He was on hand to prompt the prisoners to shout the agreed slogan ‘Long live the sultan and caliph!’12 At least one of the prisoners, a Moroccan, spoke in Arabic. He thanked Germany for ‘liberating’ him from the clutches of the French oppressors and condemned the treatment of Muslim soldiers in the French Army.13 Anna Grosser-Rilke, a German resident of Istanbul who was witness to these scenes, doubted that ‘much of what he said was understood down there. People will hardly have understood his gibberish.’14 Summing up the whole of the day’s events, Hurgronje compared them to a ‘musical comedy of Offenbach’.15
Indeed, a sense of theatre had infused the journey of the North Africans to Istanbul. They were recruited directly from PoW camps (established in occupied France) by Schowingen, who was an orientalist, a diplomat and an agent of the German Foreign Office. They were then secretly transported across Europe on the Orient Express, accompanied by Schowingen and under a cover-story of being acrobats in a travelling circus. On arrival at Istanbul’s Sirkeci Station, the prisoners had been placed in the care of the Ottoman police, who had presumably helped ready them for their big moment.16 Their appearance on the German Embassy’s balcony was the first public indication that German–Ottoman operations to inspire Jihad would be intertwined with the fate and treatment of PoWs from the British and French empires, men who – disorientated, conflicted and vulnerable though they undoubtedly were – came to play a critical propaganda role in Germany’s global Jihad.
Once the fourteen PoWs had been ushered off the balcony and the invited dignitaries had exhausted their condemnations of Britain, France and Russia, the crowds moved on to the Austrian Embassy for a similar rally. This was followed by a disorderly procession through the streets of the Beyoğlu district of European Istanbul – then known by the name Pera and regarded as the ‘Paris of the Orient’. There, in the wide French-style boulevards, the frantic crowd attacked and looted French- and British-owned businesses. Churches on the Grande Rue de Pera – the heart of the most cosmopolitan district of one of the most diverse, multi-ethnic cities on earth – were attacked and damaged. However, the only confirmed ‘Western’ casualty of the day was a grandfather clock, which stood in the lobby of the Tokatlian Hotel, a luxurious establishment owned by a family of wealthy Armenian Christians. Schowingen had ordered his escort of Ottoman policemen to storm the lobby and fire a single, symbolic shot into the old clock.17 The crime, for which this clock was symbolically executed, was that it had been manufactured in England. After this strange assassination, the mob then set to work. ‘Six men who have poles, with hooks at the end, break all the mirrors and windows, others take the marble tops of the tables and smash them to bits. In a few minutes the place has been completely gutted.’18 Very quickly Istanbul was becoming a very different city.
On the next day, the fatwas were distributed in pamphlet form. According to one account, the document that now circulated around the city concluded with a call to arms:
Oh, Moslems… Ye who are smitten with happiness and are on the verge of sacrificing your life and your goods for the cause of right, and of braving perils, gather now around the Imperial throne, obey the commands of the Almighty, who, in the Koran, promises us bliss in this and in the next world; embrace ye the foot of the Caliph’s throne and know ye that the state is at war with Russia, England, France, and their Allies, and that these are the enemies of Islam. The Chief of the believers, the Caliph, invites you all as Moslems to join in the Holy War!.19
Even before Jihad had been declared, Christian and European residents of Istanbul had begun to fear for their safety. As early as 3 November, a Hungarian newspaper was reporting pro-Jihad demonstrations in which ‘Large numbers march through the city waving large green flags, dervishes howl and wave blood-soaked pieces of cloth.’20 In the aftermath of the Jihad declaration, British, French and Russian residents suddenly found themselves enemy aliens in the city in which they had made their homes or set up their businesses. The diplomatic staffs of the various embassies were rapidly evacuated, and there was a great clamour among civilians to get out before the borders were closed, or before they were interned by the Ottoman police. The seizure and ransacking of schools and hospitals run by Allied nationals added to the growing sense of panic. The final escape for many was coordinated by American Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, who spent much of his time at Sirkeci Station pleading with the authorities to allow the trains packed with frightened Europeans to depart for neutral nations in the Balkans.
Morgenthau’s dispatches captured the febrile atmosphere that took hold of Istanbul, but also the mechanisms by which news of the Jihad spread across the Islamic world:
The religious leaders read this proclamation to their assembled congregations in the mosques; all the newspapers printed it conspicuously; it was broadcast in all the countries which had large Mohammedan populations – India, China, Persia, Egypt, Algiers, Tripoli, Morocco, and the like; in all these places it was read to the assembled multitudes and the populace was exhorted to obey the mandate. The Ikdam, the Turkish newspaper which had passed into German ownership, was constantly inciting the masses. ‘The deeds of our enemies,’ wrote this Turco-German editor, ‘have brought down the wrath of God. A gleam of hope has appeared. All Mohammedans, young and old, men, women, and children, must fulfil their duty so that the gleam may
not fade away, but give light to us forever. How many great things can be accomplished by the arms of vigorous men, by the aid of others, of women and children!… The time for action has come. We shall all have to fight with all our strength, with all our soul, with teeth and nails, with all the sinews of our bodies and of our spirits. If we do it, the deliverance of the subjected Mohammedan kingdoms is assured. Then, if God so wills, we shall march unashamed by the side of our friends who send their greetings to the Crescent. Allah is our aid and the Prophet is our support.’21
In both the tone and content of the various declarations made in Istanbul in November 1914, Morgenthau detected ‘a German hand’ exercising ‘an editorial supervision’. For one thing, the fatwas, and the accompanying religious commentaries written by Muslim jurists, had been printed and distributed with subsidies partly provided by the German government.22 The fatwas, like the Jihad, had strained Koranic jurisprudence to breaking point – and in the eyes of many Muslims beyond credulity. As Morgenthau noted, both proclamations had emphasized that ‘only those infidels are to be slain, “who rule over us”, that is, those who have Mohammedan subjects’. Rather conveniently for Germany, few in 1914 were aware that in its African colonies Germany fell into the category of an ‘infidel’ power ruling over Muslim subjects. There were around 2 million Muslims in German East Africa, while the small Muslim communities in Togoland had already been subjected to the sort of routine brutality that German colonialism had visited on Africans of all confessions. Yet, despite this record, and these hypocrisies, Germany was able to portray itself as a nation innocent of subjugating Muslims – indeed, even as an enemy of imperialism and defender of the ‘slandered peoples’ of the European empires. Things were more complex for Austria-Hungary. Ambassador Morgenthau commented that ‘The Germans, with their usual interest in their own well-being and their usual disregard of their ally, evidently overlooked the fact that Austria had many Mohammedan subjects in Bosnia and Herzegovina.’
If anything, the ambassador probably underestimated the extent to which the Jihad of 1914 was a joint German–Ottoman policy. The Ottomans had much to gain by evoking faith to justify their political war. Nevertheless, the specific ‘German hand’ at work was that of Baron Max von Oppenheim, a half-Jewish son of a Cologne banking family. To the profound disappointment of his father, the young Oppenheim had rejected the world of finance for a life of travel and intrigue in the Orient. Entranced by the cultures of the region he became another of those strange, Edwardian-era figures – in turn archaeologist, orientalist and diplomat, although long before 1914 the British had concluded that Oppenheim was more spy than diplomat. His story had begun in the 1880s when he had started to travel in the Middle East. By 1892 he had visited North Africa, Mesopotamia and Morocco, before finally establishing himself in Cairo. There he learnt Arabic and became a well-known society fixture among the small European and American community that drifted in and out of the city’s wealthier districts and hotels. Throughout his time in the Middle East, Oppenheim was in the habit of taking ‘temporary wives’, an exotic, erotic predilection that only added to his reputation as a true orientalist, a man who lived his life in the borderlands between European and Islamic culture. It was an image he sought to cultivate, and although by no means one the greats of German orientalism he had enough standing for T.E. Lawrence to cite his work. Yet, despite his regional contacts, language skills, private wealth and powerful friends in Berlin, Oppenheim was twice rejected by the German Foreign Office due to his Jewish ancestry. Throughout his life, Oppenheim was a man desperate to prove his loyalty to Germany.*4 From 1900 onwards he had become associated with Kaiser Wilhelm himself, whom he had first met when both were young men. The Kaiser became fascinated by Oppenheim’s descriptions of life and culture in the Middle East and by his reports on the growing potential of Pan-Islamism and the authority of the Ottoman sultan as the twin forces that might unify and mobilize the Islamic world. The two men met on numerous occasions, with Oppenheim being invited each year for dinner to regale the Kaiser with the latest developments in the region.
Pan-Islamism was then a minor obsession with political thinkers in Europe and a force that had attracted the attention of Sultan Abdülhamid II. It took many forms, but at its heart was a call for unity among the Ummah – the worldwide community of Muslims. Pan-Islamists saw their faith as the flag around which the peoples of the Islamic world might be marshalled against European imperialism. Abdülhamid II regarded it rather differently – as a force that would allow him, as caliph, to entrench his power, save his empire from European encroachment, and force the Christian powers to respect his status and potential global influence. While there was a great deal of justifiable scepticism about the potential power of Pan-Islamism among Europeans, Oppenheim was a vocal advocate of the idea that it, in combination with the religious authority of the sultan-caliph, could be harnessed by Germany to devastating effect in a war against the empires of either Britain, France or Russia. Oppenheim predicted (in prescient terms for the twenty-first century) that ‘the demographic strength of the Islamic lands will one day have a great significance for European states. We must not forget that everything taking place in one Mohammedan country sends waves across the entire world of Islam.’ In an article written in 1899, the German nationalist Friedrich Naumann shored up Oppenheim’s theories, warning that:
It is possible that the world war will break out before the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. Then the Caliph of Constantinople will once more uplift the Standard of the Holy War. The Sick Man will raise himself for the last time to shout to Egypt, the Sudan, East Africa, Persia, Afghanistan, and India, ‘War against England.’ It is not unimportant to know who will support him on his bed when he utters this cry.23
On 2 August 1914, the day after Germany mobilized against Russia and two days before Britain declared war, Oppenheim was summoned to the German Foreign Office. This was his moment. On the same day a secret alliance treaty was agreed between Germany and the small but powerful war faction of the leading Young Turks within the Ottoman government, led by the ‘Three Pashas’ – Enver Pasha (Minister for War), Talat Pasha (Minister of the Interior) and Djemal Pasha (Navy Minister). The treaty was kept secret, not just from the Ottoman people and the wider world, but even from most of the Ottoman Cabinet; when the rest of the government discovered the truth, there was a wave of resignations. In late October 1914, the Ottoman Empire abandoned its formal neutrality and, in a naval attack involving warships donated by Germany, attacked Russian bases in the Black Sea. There was no turning back – and Oppenheim could take centre-stage, to nurture his strategy of a Jihad that he had promoted so energetically, now with official backing and state funding.
In late October 1914 Oppenheim drafted a memorandum – Denkschrift betreffend die Revolutionierung der islamischen Gebiete unserer Feinde (‘Memorandum Concerning the Fomenting of Revolutions in the Islamic Territories of Our Enemies’). It called for the creation in Berlin of an Intelligence Bureau for the East (Nachrichtenstelle für den Orient), where Oppenheim would draw together Germany’s orientalists and regional experts. It then set out the targets for the German Jihad. Summarizing the numbers of Muslims in the various colonies of Britain, France and Russia, it explained which branches of the faith they adhered to and outlined the attitudes and concerns of their leaders. From the very start, demographics dictated that the main target was Britain and its empire, within the bounds of which one-third of the world’s 300 million Muslims lived. The British Empire was, in these terms, the greatest Muslim power in the world, and so George V ruled over more Muslim subjects than the Shah of Persia, the Khedive of Egypt or indeed the Ottoman sultan.24 (In fact, only around 30 million Muslims lived in Muslim-ruled states.) It was a statistic that reinforced a prevailing German resentment which held that Perfidious Albion had, in the nineteenth century, prevented the newly unified Germany from taking up its rightful place at the top table of imperial powers. The prospect now that, via a German–Ottom
an alliance, restive Muslims could convert the economic strength and military manpower of Britain’s colonies into a large Achilles heel was an extremely appealing one to large sectors of the German ruling elite. A German economist, Werner Sombart, captured the feverishly anti-British mood in an essay of November 1914, Unsere Feinde (‘Our Enemies’), describing how anti-British feeling had come to supplant all other antagonisms in Wilhelmine Germany.*5 While taking a moment to denounce the Japanese as ‘clever half-apes’ and the Serbs as ‘mouse-trap peddlers’, the author claimed that ‘Fundamentally we have nothing at all against the French’ (since they were ‘chivalrous opponents… dying for their fatherland’) and that the German people harboured ‘no real hatred’ towards Russia, despite its being contaminated by ‘Mongolism’. Turning to the English, however:
We perceive England to be the enemy. We wage the war against England. We will not consider the war to be finished, before England lies shattered and above all humiliated to its innermost depths at our feet. Were England to be granted an honourable peace, I almost believe that this alone would drive the peaceful German people to revolution. For I have never at any time found the German temperament more passionate as now, when the word ‘England’ is pronounced.25
The World's War Page 25
