Jihad and Counter-Jihad in the Great War

A German Magazine Supporting Jihad

 By Eugene Rogan

The Ottoman Empire, under pressure from its ally Germany, declared a jihad shortly after entering the First World War. The move was calculated to rouse Muslims in the British, French, and Russian empires to rebellion. Dismissed at the time and since as a "jihad made in Germany," the Ottoman attempt to turn the Great War into a holy war failed to provoke mass revolt in any part of the Muslim world. Yet, as German Orientalists [and Kaiser Wilhelm II] predicted, the mere threat of such a rebellion, particularly in British India, was enough to force Britain and its allies to divert scarce manpower and materiel away from the main theatre of operations in the Western Front to the Ottoman front. The deepening of Britain’s engagement in the Middle Eastern theatre of war across the four years of World War I can be attributed in large part to combating the threat of jihad. . .

Once the theological basis for a targeted jihad had been established, Sultan Mehmed V saw fit to make his own exhortation. It was not the Quran-thumping, sword-waving declaration of jihad that the Kaiser and his Orientalists had hoped for. The sultan’s declaration stressed national over theological concerns in rallying the Ottoman people behind the war. Yet he did work a brief reference to the jihad into his speech:

Russia, England, and France never for a moment ceased harbouring ill-will against our Caliphate, to which millions of Moslems, suffering under the tyranny of foreign dominations, are religiously and whole-heartedly devoted. . . Throw yourselves against the enemy as lions, bearing in mind that the very existence of our empire, and of 300 million Moslems whom I have summoned by sacred Fetva to a supreme struggle, depend on your victory.

Sultan Mehmed V

 

And with that, the sultan discharged his duty to raise Muslims in the Ottoman Empire and the world at large in holy war against the Entente Powers Most modern scholars are dismissive of Ottoman jihad efforts on the grounds that they failed to incite a single major uprising among colonial Muslims. Yet this analysis overlooks the many instances of localised rebellion and isolated mutiny that kept the Allies alert to the threat of jihad for the duration of the war. . . German hopes were realised in early 1915 when Indian Muslim soldiers rose in  rebellion against the British in Singapore.  The Singapore Mutiny involved some 500 sepoys and took a full week to suppress. 

[Meanwhile] Ottoman defeats in the Caucasus and the canal zone emboldened Britain and its allies to launch an attack on the Dardanelles in a bid to force the straits and seize the Ottoman capital. The result was the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign. . .  By the end of 1915, British war planners decided to evacuate their positions, dealing the Ottomans their first major victory of the war. One of the Allies’ overriding concerns was to prevent the Ottomans from capitalising on their victory at Gallipoli by reviving their call for jihad. In this way, the retreat from Gallipoli paradoxically drew the British ever deeper into the sideshow of the Ottoman front. For with each setback they experienced, the British redoubled their efforts to secure a decisive defeat over the Turks that would put to rest the threat of jihad once and for all. 

Already before the evacuation of Gallipoli, the British had faced a number of crises on the Ottoman front, each heightening their jihad anxieties. In Yemen, when Ottoman troops allied with Imam Yahya, the ruler of Sana`a, laid siege to the British colony of Aden in July 1915, British officials feared the loss of prestige would encourage the proponents of jihad in the Arabian Peninsula. When Sayyid Ahmad, leader of the Sanussi mystical religious order in Eastern Libya, invaded the Western Desert of Egypt and drove British forces to retreat to Marsa Matruh in November and December 1915, the British feared the movement, led by Ottoman officers, might inspire Egyptians to rise in response to the jihad.

These setbacks, combined with defeat in Gallipoli, placed ever more pressure on British forces in Mesopotamia to secure the victory over the Ottomans that had eluded the British in the first year of the war. In October 1915, General Townshend’s forces crowned a series of victories in southern Mesopotamia, achieved with relatively light casualties, with the conquest of Kut al-Amara. From Kut, British forces were within striking distance of Baghdad. The British Cabinet, fearing their failure in the Dardanelles had dealt their enemies a propaganda victory for their jihad politics, began to press for the occupation of Baghdad to compensate for the evacuation of Gallipoli. The Baghdad option had powerful advocates in Whitehall: the Foreign Secretary Lord Grey, Arthur Balfour, and Winston Churchill all called for the occupation of Baghdad. The politicians saw in Baghdad an opportunity "for a great success such as we had not yet achieved in any quarter and the political (and even military) advantages which would follow from it throughout the East could not easily be overrated," the British official historian of the Mesopotamia campaign noted. 

The result was a catastrophic British failure. Townshend’s forces, depleted by months of campaigning and over-extended, faced recently reinforced and strongly entrenched Ottoman troops blocking the road to Baghdad. The retreat of Townshend’s army back to the secure position of Kut al-Amara marked but the start of Britain’s worst defeat on the Ottoman front. The Ottomans were quick to capitalise on the propaganda victory proffered by the British surrender at Kut. In August 1916, the local press in Iraq noted that the sultan had received a group of seventy Indian Muslim officers taken prisoner at Kut.

Claiming that the officers were unwilling warriors in "the campaign against the Empire of the Caliph," the sultan returned their swords as a mark of his personal respect. "This imperial favour so affected them," the newspaper reported, "that they all expressed their wish to serve the Empire." If this story was true, it meant that the Ottomans had succeeded in recruiting nearly all Indian Muslim officers taken prisoner at Kut for the Ottoman jihad effort.

German Prison Camp for Muslims Only with
a Mosque Paid for by the Kaiser

It is against the background of the Ottoman threat of jihad, and the string of British defeats on the Ottoman front, that we should view the ultimate rival jihad: the British wartime alliance with Sharif Husayn of Mecca. While the Young Turks pressed Sharif Husayn to support the Ottoman jihad, the British were determined to "rob the call to Holy War of its principal thunderbolt" by striking an agreement with the Amir of Mecca. In November 1914,  Oriental Secretary Ronald Storrs wrote to  Sharif Abdullah in Kitchener’s name to secure a tacit alliance: If the Sharif and the Arab peoples would give their support to the British war effort, Kitchener pledged Britain’s guarantee of Arab independence and protection from external aggression.

Sharif Husayn instructed his son to respond that the Hashemites would adopt no policies hostile to Great Britain, but that he was constrained by his position not to break with the Ottomans for the moment.

In subsequent correspondence exchanged between 5 November 1915, and 10 March 1916, Sir Henry McMahon concluded a wartime alliance with Sharif Husayn of Mecca. The weeks that passed between their letters were punctuated by British defeats in both the Dardanelles and in Mesopotamia. . . Arguably, the alliance survived because the Hashemites and the British needed each other more in the summer of 1916 than ever. Sharif Husayn had strained relations with the Young Turks to the breaking point; he knew they would seize the first opportunity to dismiss—even murder—him and his sons. The British needed the sharif’s religious authority to undermine the Ottoman jihad, which officials in Cairo and Whitehall feared had been strengthened by recent Turkish victories.

The Arab Revolt did serve to neutralise jihad politics on the Ottoman front. In retrospect, the Hashemites seldom played on their religious credentials, preferring to cast their movement in national terms—an Arab revolt against Ottoman rule rather than an Islamic revolt against a discredited caliph. Yet the religious authority of the sharif of Mecca was indisputable, and he justified the Arab Revolt in terms that put into question the Ottoman sultan’s legitimacy as a spiritual leader of the global Muslim community. And, crucially, 1917 saw a major reversal of British fortunes in the Middle East. In March 1917, General Maude led a British campaign force to victory over the Ottomans in Iraq and occupied Baghdad. General Allenby took over the faltering Palestine campaign, where the Ottomans had twice defeated British forces at the gates of Gaza, to deliver on Prime Minister David Lloyd George’s request to occupy Jerusalem as a Christmas gift to the war-weary British public. And in October 1918, the occupation of Damascus heralded the fall of the Ottomans, by which point neither side made reference to a jihad rendered irrelevant in defeat. 

The Great War in the Middle East had been fought under the shadow of jihad. Though it had failed to produce the global Islamic uprising that some of the German advocates of Islampolitik might have hoped for, the Ottoman jihad had succeeded in diverting over one and a half million soldiers from the Western Front to sustain the campaigns in the Middle East: 500,000 Allied troops in the Gallipoli campaign alone, nearly 800,000 Indian soldiers on all Middle Eastern fronts, and thousands more in the Palestine and Syrian campaigns. Had the weight of these forces been deployed in France instead, it would have altered the balance of power on the Western Front.

Furthermore, jihad politics played a major role in prolonging the First World War. Indeed, one of the great surprises of the Great War was the tenacity of the Ottoman Empire. While Russia—the power most responsible for drawing the Ottomans into the war in the first place—concluded an armistice as early as December 1917, the Ottomans forced the Allies to fight until 30 October 1918—just days before Germany concluded its own armistice with the Entente on 11 November. We cannot rule out the influence of jihad propaganda in motivating Ottoman Muslims to fight so tenaciously for four long years. It is certainly the case that Islampolitik drew the Allies ever deeper into the war in the Middle East and in this way played a key role in lengthening the Great War. Indeed, it is one of the great ironies of the Great War in the Middle East that the British proved more responsive to the Ottoman call to jihad than the global Muslim community.

Excerpted from: "Rival Jihads: Islam and the Great War in the Middle East, 1914–1918," Journal of the British Academy, 2016 #4