The Ottoman Endgame by Sean McMeekin

Author:Sean McMeekin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-09-28T16:00:00+00:00

God’s word, “A Man shall have twice a woman’s share,” and made them equal. They went further and removed one of the five corner-stones of the Faith . . . by causing the soldiers in garrison in Mecca, Medina and Damascus to break their [Ramadan] fast for new and foolish reasons . . . They made weak the person of the Sultan, and robbed him of his honour, forbidding him to choose for himself the chief of his personal Cabinet. Other like things did they to sap the foundation of the Caliphate.

As propaganda, it was well conceived. Hussein’s charges of impiety against the Young Turk regime were largely true, and they easily gave the lie to the regime’s own holy war propaganda. And yet his summons fell flat, if we are to judge by the fact that not a single Arab unit in the Ottoman armies defected to the British side intact, nor more than a small handful of officers. Like the Ottoman holy war, Hussein’s own holy war failed to ignite.19

This is not to say, however, that it was without effect. One of the first serious consequences of Hussein’s rebellion was, ironically, to disturb the repose of the British Raj. Cairo may have been flooding the Hejaz with messages promising that “not a single scrap of territory on the Arabian peninsula, which contains the holy places of Islam, will be annexed by us or by any other government,” but Britain’s own Muslim subjects were not fooled about who was really behind the revolt in Mecca. Judging by the hand-wringing reports filed from Delhi, Britain’s own holy war coup in summer 1916 seemed to galvanize more Muslim resentment in the Indian subcontinent than had Germany’s attempt to export jihad there the previous winter. Indian Muslims, having “no sympathy for the Arab,” were not simply unimpressed by the news from Mecca: many were loudly condemning Hussein for his treachery.20

Another indirect result of the revolt in Mecca, more promising to the Entente cause, was to exacerbate tensions between Turks and Germans. To begin with, there had been serious friction in the Ottoman high command about sending the Stotzingen-Neufeld military mission across the Hejaz to Yemen—the very mission that, because reputedly it was to be accompanied by a menacing escort of Turkish troops, had given Hussein the spur to rebel. Djemal had been annoyed by Neufeld’s ridiculous public conversion ceremony in Damascus, and by the drumbeat of German-sponsored holy war propaganda more generally. News had reached Enver that Major Fritz Klein, who had headed the German mission to win over the Shia grand mufti, had tried to pass himself off as a Muslim in Karbala—the upshot being that local Shia Muslims had been forced to undergo a three-step ritual cleansing of their hands once they learned that the men who had kissed them in greeting were not really Muslims. Enver had only reluctantly approved the Stotzingen mission to Yemen (one of Oppenheim’s bright ideas) after warning the German military attaché that for a

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