The Berlin-Baghdad Express
Review by Eugene Rogan
FT
July 24 2010 00:30
The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for
World Power, 1898-1918, by Sean McMeekin, Allen Lane, RRP£25, 496
pages
At the height of the first world war, John Buchan wrote a thriller
based on a German plot to harness Islamic extremism to overturn the
British empire. What makes Greenmantle such a remarkable book is that,
already in 1916, Buchan got so much of the history right – the Germans
really were inciting Asian Muslims to rise up against British rule.
Sean McMeekin is the second historian to tell the `true story’ behind
Greenmantle. In his 1994 study, On Secret Service East of
Constantinople: The Plot to Bring Down the British empire, Peter
Hopkirk drew on British archives to recount the failed jihad made in
Germany. McMeekin adds a wealth of documentation from Russian,
Ottoman, German and Austrian archives to tell the story of German and
Ottoman wartime efforts to raise a holy war against the Entente
powers. The result is a captivating new history of the Eastern Front
in the first world war.
In 1898, the German emperor Wilhelm II made a state visit to the
Ottoman empire, declaring Germany’s perpetual friendship for the
Ottoman sultan `and his 300 million Muslim subjects scattered across
the earth’. This visit marked the beginning of a German-Turkish
special relationship based on a misconception of the sultan’s
authority in his titular role as caliph, or spiritual leader of the
world’s Muslims.
The prophet of German Islam policy was the explorer and scholar Baron
Max von Oppenheim (1860-1946). From his home in Cairo, he filed
extensive reports to the German foreign office that fused hostility to
the British empire with his growing conviction in the anti-imperial
power of pan-Islam.
A railway project linking Berlin to the Persian Gulf was devised. In
December 1899, the Ottoman government awarded a German group headed by
Deutsche Bank the concession to build a railway from the Anatolian
city of Konya to the port of Basra at the head of the Persian Gulf,
via Baghdad, within eight years. For the Ottomans, the railway
provided a means to consolidate their hold over their remote Arab
provinces in Syria and Mesopotamia. For the Germans, the
Berlin-to-Baghdad railway would create a strategic land bridge that
reduced travel time from the Mediterranean to India by as much as
three days over the Suez Canal route. It would be a pressure point on
one of the vital arteries of the British empire in India.
When Europe went to war in the summer of 1914, Germany was determined
to secure Turkey as an ally. The Ottomans drove a hard bargain and,
when they finally entered the war in November 1914, the sultan duly
proclaimed a jihad against the Entente powers, a move which, Oppenheim
claimed, would turn Muslims in British and French colonies into jihadi
insurgents. The move provoked deep concern in Britain and France but
had no effect in the Muslim world.
Undeterred, the Germans unleashed missions in Afghanistan, Persia, the
Hijaz, Mesopotamia, Central Arabia, Sudan and the Libyan desert to
provoke local jihads that, collectively, might encourage a global
movement. McMeekin traces these ill-fated missions, led by colourful
adventurers such as Oskar von Niedermayer in Afghanistan, Leo
Frobenius in the Red Sea and Wilhelm Wassmuss in Persia. Relatively
unknown today, these men and their exploits would have been as famous
as Lawrence of Arabia, had the Germans and Ottomans won the war.
Ironically, the roots of the Turco-German defeat lay in the
Berlin-Baghdad railway. Logistical problems in the Taurus and Amanus
mountains meant that whole sections of the line had not been completed
by the outbreak of war. Armenian communities along the length of the
railway line were deemed a security risk and deported to the notorious
death marches in the Syrian desert. Aside from the human tragedy, the
deportation of Armenian workers denied German railway engineers the
skilled manpower they needed to complete the line in Cilicia. Without
the railway, the Germans lacked the means to transport men and weapons
to remote parts of Asia.
McMeekin has written an engaging history peopled by larger-than-life
characters in exotic settings. There is, however, a disconcerting
tendency for the eccentric and racist views of German orientalists to
filter into his own analysis of Islam – nowhere more so than in his
epilogue, where McMeekin tries to connect Oppenheim and his acolytes
to the pathological anti-Semitism of the Third Reich, the
Palestine-Israel conflict, and the rise of Salafi jihadism today. `One
does not have to saddle Oppenheim with personal responsibility for the
actions of murderous muftis and mullahs,’ McMeekin concludes, `to see
that his idea of a worldwide holy war targeting innocent civilians set
an extremely dangerous precedent’. The lesson from the
Berlin-to-Baghdad railway should be the opposite: Muslims are no more
susceptible to single-minded fanaticism today than when they ignored
the German-Ottoman appeal to jihad in 1914.
Eugene Rogan is director of the Middle East Centre, University of
Oxford, and author of `The Arabs: A History’ (Allen Lane)
From: A. Papazian