The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power, 1898-1918 by Sean McMeekin

1. The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power, 1898-1918
2. by Sean McMeekin
3. 496pp,
4. Allen Lane,
5. £25.00
6. 

The National
July 22 2010
UAE

Blood on the tracks

Kaiser Wilhelm II believed he could harness the martial power of the
Caliphate in the furtherance of German imperial interests – and failed
utterly. Matthew Price on one of the boldest gambles of the great game.

Sean McMeekin Allen Lane Dh140

The story of how the modern Middle East was born out of the wreckage
of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War is well known. With
the British and French acting as midwives, the former provinces of
this once mighty imperium were put on a (difficult) path to modern
statehood. But there was hardly anything inevitable about the
inglorious demise of the Ottomans.

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

The historian Sean McMeekin, in The Berlin-Baghdad Express, his
masterful history of this remarkable if preposterous undertaking,
calls it the “first ever global jihad”. Historians have tended to
downplay the role of pan-Islamic agitation in the First World War,
arguing that the Turco-German campaign was marginal to the strategy
of the Central Powers. However, McMeekin, who has consulted numerous
Turkish and German sources, convincingly puts the plan front and
centre, and gives us a fuller, more complex picture of how the Great
Powers influenced the future of the Middle East.

It is a story that takes in grotesque misapprehension, outlandish
propaganda, sordid compromise, abject failure, and comic –
or tragic – outcomes. A professor of international relations at
Bilkent University in Ankara, McMeekin has written a sophisticated,
if sometimes tendentious, account that gives us a much broader view
of a story whose echoes persist into the present day: the efforts by
western powers to exert influence in the Middle East, and the way in
which those efforts – often involving attempts to marshal the force
of religious fervour – have so reliably backfired.

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

Indeed, McMeekin offers, among other things, a brilliant exposé of
a geopolitical disaster. From the start, there was something unseemly
about the Kaiser’s embrace of Islam – “Hajji Wilhelm” was always a man
of sudden, contradictory, enthusiasms. After a visit to Jerusalem in
1898, he declared to his cousin, Tsar Nicholas II, that “My personal
feeling in leaving the holy city was that I felt profoundly ashamed
before the Moslems and that if I had come there without any Religion
at all I certainly would have turned Mahomettan!” (At the same time, he
was enthusing to Theodore Herzl about Zionism.) But the Kaiser thought
he also had found a weapon: “the Mahometans were a tremendous card”
in the game against “the certain meddlesome Power!”- Great Britain.

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

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

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

Almost everywhere – Persia, the Shia strongholds of southern
Mesopotamia, Afghanistan and the Hejaz – German agents found themselves
contending with endless logistical traps. With the British Navy in
control of the seas, the still incomplete railway took on a vital
importance. There was simply no way for the Ottomans to ship arms and
materiel across vast distances to supply their would-be allies. The
“jihad”, in actuality, turned into a series of cash transactions,
with the Germans (and British) resorting to subventions, financial
blandishments, and outright bribery. For their support, the Turks
themselves asked for millions of marks; in Afghanistan, the Emir
“demanded from Berlin a lump sum of £10 million sterling, the
equivalent of some $5 billion today”.

The Germans – and British – both exploited and misunderstood the issue
of the Caliphate. Shia clerics were never going to fall in behind
a Sunni Caliphate, whose authority they would never recognise. And,
besides, the Caliphate was a nearly moribund institution in 1914. As
McMeekin explains, the Caliphate was not analogous to the papacy;
it was a “political-military power” backed up by superior force of
arms and Ottoman military might. And even this counted for little in
the Arab holy lands of the Hejaz, where the Ottomans were unable to
put down a revolt by the Emir of Mecca in 1916 (on which the British
lavished several billions, in 2010 dollars). The uprising by blood
relatives of the Prophet rendered null and void any remaining authority
of the Caliphate.

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

But for all his trenchancy, McMeekin overstates his case, and, in
doing so, fails to explain what, exactly, we are to make of “Germany’s
historic role in the Middle East”. Looking back to the First World War
from the vantage point of a world obsessed with radical Islam of the
bin Ladenist variety, McMeekin argues that “the Kaiser’s promotion of
pan-Islam, while a strategic failure in the World War, threw up flames
of revolutionary jihadism as far afield as Libya, Sudan, Mesopotamia,
the Caucasus, Iran, and Afghanistan, which never entirely died down
after the war.” Yet McMeekin’s notion of “revolutionary jihadism” is
off-key, and he skips a beat in his argument. As he forcefully reminds
us in his epilogue, “Wilhelmine Germany was also the spiritual and
political home of Zionism”, which was an ethno-nationalist movement.

As the Middle East moved from protectorates and mandates to independent
nation states, nationalist movements set the terms of political
debate. The revolutionary jihadism of today, in fact, emerged only
after the collapse of Nasser’s secular pan-Arabism.

Kaiser Wilhelm’s “jihad” against Britain – foolhardy, ambitious,
and fantastically enthralling in hindsight – casts precious little
light on the problem of contemporary religious extremism.

Matthew Price is a regular contributor to The Review.