The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany's Bid for World Power by Sean McMeekin

Author:Sean McMeekin [McMeekin, Sean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Belknap Press
Published: 2013-03-16T16:00:00+00:00

Part IV: Boomerang

[Ottoman Muslims] treat Christians with mildness and friendliness, as long as their religious fanaticism is not urged on.

Wilhelm von Pressel, the ‘Father of the Baghdad Railway’, c. 1876

14. Trouble on the Baghdad Railway

The Sultan gave his promise to [Ambassador] Marschall von Biberstein, sworn on the Koran, that the great Baghdad railway would be built.

German Foreign Office dispatch from Berlin to Constantinople, 15 October 1915 1

In Kabul, as at Karbala and Mecca, the Germans had discovered that the price of Islamic holy war was much higher than Oppenheim had promised. A global jihad, it turned out, was not something to be conjured up with magic beans. First one needed the fetvas, which sounded inexpensive enough in theory - but turned out to be anything but. If we judge by the Porte’s diplomatic terms for entering the war, the Şeykh-ul-Islam’s holy war declaration itself had required a down-payment of some £2 million worth of gold, a loan of £5 million more, plus massive shipments of arms on credit. 2 And yet the Ottoman fetvas proved insufficient to stiffen Muslim spines in Syria or Arabia, which led to the Kress-Prüfer avalanche of gold in Damascus and the Baron’s lavish courting of Feisal in the Pera Palace. That Klein and Lührs had to shell out ‘only’ 50,000 Marks annually to win the endorsement of the leading Shia clerics to smooth the path to India was small comfort, considering how much the Afghan Emir was charging at the other end of the Persian desert. Habibullah’s particularly steep asking price came from the acute bidding war for his loyalty with Great Britain, but was in spirit not so different from what the Young Turks, Hashemites, Bedouins, and Syrian and Mesopotamian Arabs had all demanded in their turn.

What was going on? Were not holy warriors supposed to fight for Allah alone, out of religious duty? Where were the ghazi warriors of legend, storming citadels and city walls, striking fear into the hearts of infidels? Islam had always been a fighting creed, expanding through the sword from the days of the Prophet to the conquest of Constantinople and the Balkans. Had the decline of the Ottoman Empire in the modern era so dampened the fires of jihad that only pay-to-play mercenaries remained?

Considering how much blood, arms and treasure the Germans had invested in summoning up the ancient spirit of Islamic holy war to bring down the Entente empires, one can understand the creeping sense of disappointment after each successive failure of Oppenheim’s jihad to ignite. But a true scholar of Islam could have told the Germans exactly what to expect. As infidels themselves, the Germans could hardly summon up a holy war on their own. In terms of Islamic jurisprudence, the notion of selective jihad against some, but not all, Christians, as we saw in chapter 6 above, is nonsensical. On the other hand, the practice of infidels paying for protection - as the Germans, in effect, were doing each time they asked Muslims to spare them while attacking other Christians - is firmly established in Islamic law.

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