{"id":20887,"date":"2010-07-25T08:44:01","date_gmt":"2010-07-25T06:44:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turkishforum.com.tr\/en\/content\/?p=20887"},"modified":"2012-09-18T14:14:11","modified_gmt":"2012-09-18T11:14:11","slug":"the-berlin-baghdad-express-the-ottoman-empire-and-germanys-bid-for-world-power-1898-1918-by-sean-mcmeekin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/2010\/07\/25\/the-berlin-baghdad-express-the-ottoman-empire-and-germanys-bid-for-world-power-1898-1918-by-sean-mcmeekin\/","title":{"rendered":"The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power, 1898-1918 by Sean McMeekin"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n

The roots of conflict in the Middle East go back to the ‘half-mad imperial enterprise’ of Germany’s last Kaiser Wilhelm II, finds George Walden<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

In 2002, a commentator in the Cairo newspaper Al-Akhbar<\/em> wrote of Hitler and the Holocaust in terms that Iran’s President Ahmadinejad might envy: “If only you had done it, brother, if only it had really happened, so that the world could sigh in relief!” Sean McMeekin’s book helps us understand how such a pearl of murderous mendacity could ever have been uttered. Islamic ties to National Socialism can be traced back as far as Kaiser “Hajji” Wilhelm II (German emperor from 1888-1918) who, for not especially religious reasons, became infatuated with the Muslim world.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
    \n
  1. The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power, 1898-1918<\/strong><\/li>\n
  2. by \t\t \t\t\tSean McMeekin<\/li>\n
  3. 496pp,<\/li>\n
  4. Allen Lane,<\/li>\n
  5. \u00a325.00<\/li>\n
  6. \"\"<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The National
    \nJuly 22 2010
    \nUAE<\/p>\n

    Blood on the tracks<\/p>\n

    Kaiser Wilhelm II believed he could harness the martial power of the
    \nCaliphate in the furtherance of German imperial interests – and failed
    \nutterly. Matthew Price on one of the boldest gambles of the great game.<\/p>\n

    Sean McMeekin Allen Lane Dh140<\/p>\n

    The story of how the modern Middle East was born out of the wreckage
    \nof the Ottoman Empire after the First World War is well known. With
    \nthe British and French acting as midwives, the former provinces of
    \nthis once mighty imperium were put on a (difficult) path to modern
    \nstatehood. But there was hardly anything inevitable about the
    \ninglorious demise of the Ottomans.<\/p>\n

    Though it had been convulsed by internal disputes, the Ottoman Empire
    \nwas still a formidable power in 1914. But, as so often happens in
    \nhistory, a wrong bet had profound historical consequences. That bet
    \nwas the alliance with Germany that brought the Turks into the war on
    \nthe side of the Central Powers. It was a fateful decision. Prodded by
    \nthe Kaiser (the allure of German marks also helped) the Turkish regime
    \nwent to war against its historical enemy, Russia. This, in itself,
    \nwas not an absurd wager. However, the German end of the bargain
    \nwas an altogether different proposition: taking aim at the British
    \nempire and its 100 million Muslim subjects, Wilhelm II cooked up a
    \nbreathtaking plan to unleash the furies of an Islamic power on the
    \nBritish Raj and Egypt and harness the glories of the Near East to
    \nGerman imperial interests.<\/p>\n

    The historian Sean McMeekin, in The Berlin-Baghdad Express, his
    \nmasterful history of this remarkable if preposterous undertaking,
    \ncalls it the “first ever global jihad”. Historians have tended to
    \ndownplay the role of pan-Islamic agitation in the First World War,
    \narguing that the Turco-German campaign was marginal to the strategy
    \nof the Central Powers. However, McMeekin, who has consulted numerous
    \nTurkish and German sources, convincingly puts the plan front and
    \ncentre, and gives us a fuller, more complex picture of how the Great
    \nPowers influenced the future of the Middle East.<\/p>\n

    It is a story that takes in grotesque misapprehension, outlandish
    \npropaganda, sordid compromise, abject failure, and comic –
    \nor tragic – outcomes. A professor of international relations at
    \nBilkent University in Ankara, McMeekin has written a sophisticated,
    \nif sometimes tendentious, account that gives us a much broader view
    \nof a story whose echoes persist into the present day: the efforts by
    \nwestern powers to exert influence in the Middle East, and the way in
    \nwhich those efforts – often involving attempts to marshal the force
    \nof religious fervour – have so reliably backfired.<\/p>\n

    The Berlin-Baghdad Express is also a phenomenally entertaining
    \nnarrative. Featuring a dramatis personae that puts Indiana Jones
    \nto shame, McMeekin’s book opens up a window on to the vanished,
    \nall-but-forgotten world of German Orientalism and the band of
    \nscholar-adventurers who fanned out across the Middle East to win
    \nconverts to the cause. Lawrence of Arabia has won all the glory, but
    \nthese agents were, to a man, every bit his equal. (It’s refreshing
    \nto read about a moment in 20th-century history when Germans acted no
    \nbetter or worse than their British and French adversaries.) Travelling
    \nto the most forbidding regions of the Muslim world, where no infidel
    \nwas welcome, they carried out their briefs with \u00e9lan and derring-do,
    \nthough with little success in the end.<\/p>\n

    Indeed, McMeekin offers, among other things, a brilliant expos\u00e9 of
    \na geopolitical disaster. From the start, there was something unseemly
    \nabout the Kaiser’s embrace of Islam – “Hajji Wilhelm” was always a man
    \nof sudden, contradictory, enthusiasms. After a visit to Jerusalem in
    \n1898, he declared to his cousin, Tsar Nicholas II, that “My personal
    \nfeeling in leaving the holy city was that I felt profoundly ashamed
    \nbefore the Moslems and that if I had come there without any Religion
    \nat all I certainly would have turned Mahomettan!” (At the same time, he
    \nwas enthusing to Theodore Herzl about Zionism.) But the Kaiser thought
    \nhe also had found a weapon: “the Mahometans were a tremendous card”
    \nin the game against “the certain meddlesome Power!”- Great Britain.<\/p>\n

    Thus began Germany’s ardent courtship of the Sublime Porte and Sultan
    \nAbdul Hamid. Building a railroad from Constantinople to Baghdad to
    \nBasra – the eponymous express – would become one linchpin of German
    \nstrategy. The other would be exploiting the symbolic potential of
    \nthe Caliphate to stir the passions of Muslims. Under any political
    \ncircumstance, this was a risky move. And the Germans weren’t the only
    \nones with their eyes on the Caliphate: the British entertained notions
    \nof detaching it from the Ottoman Sultan and moving it to Mecca. They
    \nlavished funds on the Sherifiate and Ibn Saud’s Wahhabist legions in
    \nan attempt to buy their support. (As one leader writer put it in a
    \npro-British Egyptian paper, “it is Mecca, not Constantinople, which is
    \nthe centre of the Muslim faith. It is towards the Kaabah, not towards
    \nthe St Sophia, that the Moslem turns his eyes as he prays”). About
    \nthis faintly absurd jousting amongst the Great Powers, competing to
    \nprop up the long-expired authority of the Caliphate, McMeekin writes,
    \n“It was like a race to the reactionary bottom, to see which ‘infidel’
    \npower could conjure up the purest strain of fundamentalist Islam.”<\/p>\n

    Helping to whip up passions was one of history’s most unlikely
    \njihadists, Baron Max von Oppenheim, who directed the Kaiser’s
    \n“jihad bureau” for the duration of the war. The scion of a Jewish
    \nbanking family, an archaeologist, writer, and veteran Near East hand,
    \nOppenheim thundered that Muslims “should know that from today the
    \nHoly War has become a sacred duty and that the blood of the infidels
    \nin the Islamic lands may be shed with impunity”. (Germans, Austrians,
    \nand Hungarians were granted exceptions, of course.)<\/p>\n

    Oppenheim supervised a crack team of Orientalists, among them Alois
    \nMusil, cousin of the novelist Robert, who trekked to central Arabia
    \nin 1915 to enlist Arab tribal sheikhs, and Oscar von Niedermayer, who
    \nmade a perilous journey across the Persian desert to spur the Emir
    \nof Afghanistan into attacking the Indian Raj. Despite the effusions
    \nof pious rhetoric, the Turco-German plan foundered badly. McMeekin
    \nis at his best explaining why, as a strategic adjunct to the war,
    \nthe “jihad” amounted to very little. In the two resounding Turkish
    \nvictories over British forces, at Gallipoli and Kut-El-Amara,
    \nIslamic sentiments counted for nothing on the battlefield; tenacity
    \nand superior tactics did.<\/p>\n

    Almost everywhere – Persia, the Shia strongholds of southern
    \nMesopotamia, Afghanistan and the Hejaz – German agents found themselves
    \ncontending with endless logistical traps. With the British Navy in
    \ncontrol of the seas, the still incomplete railway took on a vital
    \nimportance. There was simply no way for the Ottomans to ship arms and
    \nmateriel across vast distances to supply their would-be allies. The
    \n“jihad”, in actuality, turned into a series of cash transactions,
    \nwith the Germans (and British) resorting to subventions, financial
    \nblandishments, and outright bribery. For their support, the Turks
    \nthemselves asked for millions of marks; in Afghanistan, the Emir
    \n“demanded from Berlin a lump sum of \u00a310 million sterling, the
    \nequivalent of some $5 billion today”.<\/p>\n

    The Germans – and British – both exploited and misunderstood the issue
    \nof the Caliphate. Shia clerics were never going to fall in behind
    \na Sunni Caliphate, whose authority they would never recognise. And,
    \nbesides, the Caliphate was a nearly moribund institution in 1914. As
    \nMcMeekin explains, the Caliphate was not analogous to the papacy;
    \nit was a “political-military power” backed up by superior force of
    \narms and Ottoman military might. And even this counted for little in
    \nthe Arab holy lands of the Hejaz, where the Ottomans were unable to
    \nput down a revolt by the Emir of Mecca in 1916 (on which the British
    \nlavished several billions, in 2010 dollars). The uprising by blood
    \nrelatives of the Prophet rendered null and void any remaining authority
    \nof the Caliphate.<\/p>\n

    Though McMeekin frequently lapses into clich\u00e9 (“The Syrian and
    \nMesopotamian stretches on the other side of the mountains were no
    \npicnic either”), he is a vivid, confident stylist with a keen eye for
    \nthe farcical anecdote. During an attack on the Suez Canal, Bedouin
    \ntribesmen shouting “Allahu Akhbar” give away Turkish positions to
    \nthe British; in Constantinople, it turned out that “the lead holy
    \nwar writer in the Turkish press, ‘Mehmed Zeki Bey, ‘ was actually a
    \nRomanian Jewish conman who had recently done a turn running a bordello
    \nin Buenos Aires.” McMeekin writes equally as well on the horrors of war
    \nin the Ottoman provinces and the grim fate of Armenians in 1915-1916.<\/p>\n

    But for all his trenchancy, McMeekin overstates his case, and, in
    \ndoing so, fails to explain what, exactly, we are to make of “Germany’s
    \nhistoric role in the Middle East”. Looking back to the First World War
    \nfrom the vantage point of a world obsessed with radical Islam of the
    \nbin Ladenist variety, McMeekin argues that “the Kaiser’s promotion of
    \npan-Islam, while a strategic failure in the World War, threw up flames
    \nof revolutionary jihadism as far afield as Libya, Sudan, Mesopotamia,
    \nthe Caucasus, Iran, and Afghanistan, which never entirely died down
    \nafter the war.” Yet McMeekin’s notion of “revolutionary jihadism” is
    \noff-key, and he skips a beat in his argument. As he forcefully reminds
    \nus in his epilogue, “Wilhelmine Germany was also the spiritual and
    \npolitical home of Zionism”, which was an ethno-nationalist movement.<\/p>\n

    As the Middle East moved from protectorates and mandates to independent
    \nnation states, nationalist movements set the terms of political
    \ndebate. The revolutionary jihadism of today, in fact, emerged only
    \nafter the collapse of Nasser’s secular pan-Arabism.<\/p>\n

    Kaiser Wilhelm’s “jihad” against Britain – foolhardy, ambitious,
    \nand fantastically enthralling in hindsight – casts precious little
    \nlight on the problem of contemporary religious extremism.<\/p>\n

    Matthew Price is a regular contributor to The Review.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

    <\/p>\n

    <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    The roots of conflict in the Middle East go back to the ‘half-mad imperial enterprise’ of Germany’s last Kaiser Wilhelm II, finds George Walden In 2002, a commentator in the Cairo newspaper Al-Akhbar wrote of Hitler and the Holocaust in terms that Iran’s President Ahmadinejad might envy: “If only you had done it, brother, if […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":783510,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[89],"tags":[232],"class_list":["post-20887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-turkey","tag-history-english"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20887"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20887\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/783510"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}