Dear all
An Interesting article, I recieved from a friend. I hope you find time to read this article. You will find it interesting in view of the current happenings in the region.
........................Prologue...........................
In the summer of 1914, when Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany realised that he had gravely miscalculated, and that a bloody showdown with Britain was unavoidable, he vowed to unleash against her a Holy War which would destroy her power in the East for ever. ‘Our consuls and agents’, he ordered, ‘must inflame the entire Muslim world against this hateful, lying and unscrupulous nation.’ If he had to fight, then here was his chance of bringing down the entire British Empire. He would rally the people of the Ottoman Empire, the Caucasus, Persia and Afghanistan against Britain’s far-flung imperial interests. Together they would light the fuse leading towards the greatest, and most vulnerable, of these – India. If India could be wrested from Britain’s grasp, then the rest of her ramshackle empire, held together largely by bluster and bluff, would quickly collapse. India itself, Wilhelm’s advisers assured him, was a powder keg of disaffection, and needed only the torch of revolution to ignite it. If that were to happen, then India’s crown, together with the country’s vast wealth, might well pass from his detested British cousin, King George V, to himself.
For years, ever since coming to the throne, Wilhelm had dreamed of making Germany the greatest power on earth, with its armed forces replacing those of Britain as the guardians of the world. This grandiose ambition he had hoped to achieve by means of economic superiority and diplomatic penetration, backed by military and naval muscle, rather than by going to war with his British cousins and rivals. With the aggressive support of Germany’s great banking houses, Wilhelm’s diplomats and industrialists had plotted and schemed to extend their country’s political and commercial interests and influence throughout the world. But it was in the East that they had concentrated their efforts. For in the dying Ottoman Empire they saw their chance, and nothing was spared in securing a place there in the sun for Germany by befriending the then friendless Sultan who had enraged European opinion by his barbaric treatment of his Christian minorities. A weak Turkey dominated by Berlin, Wilhelm decided, would serve as the economic and political base from which an expansionist Germany would spread its power and influence eastwards into Asia. In the event, however, his grandiose schemes had gone disastrously wrong, and had instead plunged Europe into the black abyss of war, dragging with it much of the rest of the world.
This book tells, for the first time, the extraordinary story of how in that war Germany sought to harness the forces of militant Islam to its cause with the help of its ally Turkey. By unleashing a Holy War against them, Wilhelm and his hawkish advisers aimed to drive the British out of India, and the Russians from the Caucasus and Central Asia. It was a bold and adventurous strategy, for there were no precedents for a jihad in modern warfare. Yet, as the German historian Fritz Fischer points out, it was no more than ‘the continuation by other means’ of the aggressive Eastern policy pursued by Wilhelm since the 1890s. Prussia had once been a tiny, landlocked state whose numerous parts were widely separated from one another by the lands of others. Since then, however, it had come a long way, thanks largely to the genius of Bismarck. Now, Wilhelm was convinced, was Germany’s chance to carve out a great new empire in the East.
Masterminded by Berlin, but unleashed from Constantinople, the Holy War was a new and more sinister version of the old Great Game. Fought out between the intelligence services of King, Kaiser, Sultan and Tsar, its battlefield was to stretch from Constantinople in the west to Kabul and Kashgar in the east. It was to spill over into Persia, the Caucasus and Russain Central Asia. It took in the whole of British India and Burma, where Berlin hoped, with the aid of smuggled arms and funds, to foment violent revolutionary uprisings among the restive natives, whether Muslims, Sikhs or Hindus. But the conspiracy’s sinuous tentacles stretched far beyond the frontiers of Asia. Berlin’s grand design embraced arms dealers in the United States, a remote island rendezvous off Mexico’s Pacific coast, and a revolver range in London’s busy Tottenham Court Road where assassinations were planned and rehearsed. It would involve schooners loaded with enough arms to launch a second Indian Mutiny, and crates of revolutionary literature smuggled into India behind the innocuous dust-wrappers of the English classics.
However, the main thrust of the Holy War was to be delivered eastwards from Constantinople, across neutral Persia and Afghanistan, and finally down through the passes into India. Berlin’s first aim, therefore, was to win the support of the Shah of Persia and the Emir of Afghanistan. If this could be achieved, then their armies, led by German and Turkish officers and spurred on with promises of dazzling loot, could be turned against India. Thus, besides a handful of carefully chosen officers and NCOs, the Holy War need cost virtually nothing. All that it would require would be promises, to be redeemed after the war, and gold, much of which could be plundered from the vaults of British-owned banks in Persia. If, at the same time, India’s dissident millions could be persuaded to rise, then the British would find themselves attacked from within and without simultaneously. Meanwhile, the Turks would seek to rally their fellow Muslims in the Caucasus and Central Asia to the banner of the Turco-German Holy War. Greatly encouraged by the reports of their agents on the spot, the strategists in Berlin and Constantinople could visualise the whole of Asia going up in flames, and their British and Russian foes being consumed in the conflagration.
As an infidel, of course, the Kaiser had no authority to summon Muslims to a Holy War. It needed much more than gold, arms and post-war promises to do that. Indeed, only the Ottoman Sultan himself, in his capacity of Caliph of all Islam, had the authority which was required to issue such an awesome order. It was essential, therefore, that Turkey should ally itself with Germany, regardless of the best interests of its people. Here Wilhelm’s far-sighted, if cynical, pre-war cultivation of Turkey and its unpopular sovereign paid off handsomely. Within three months of the outbreak of war, Turkey threw in its lot with Germany and Austria-Hungary, and one week later the Sultan called upon Muslims everywhere to rise and slay their Christian oppressors ‘wherever you may find them’.
First and foremost this meant, as it was intended to, the British in India. For there they ruled by far the largest Muslim empire, in terms of sheer numbers, anywhere on earth. Indeed, King George V’s Muslim subjects greatly out-numbered even those of the Sultan-Caliph himself, and were many times more than those of Russia and France. The Kaiser, conveniently enough, had no Muslim colonies or subjects, and had for years been proclaiming himself, to the intense irritation of the British, Russians and French, the protector of Muslims everywhere. The Sultan’s declaration was to cause considerable alarm among the British in India and in other regions where Allied subjects lived surrounded by Muslim populations. Never before in modern times had a Holy War been declared against a European power, and no one knew what to expect.
But even for the Germans the Holy War raised one awkward question which had to be addressed lest it undermine the entire enterprise. What, it would be asked by many Muslims, was a Christian sovereign doing fomenting and funding a Holy War aimed at killing those of his own faith? Wilhelm’s advisers, who included a number of eminent German orientalists and scholars, were ready for that one. In mosques and bazaars throughout the East rumours were circulated that the German Emperor had been secretly converted to Islam. ‘Haji’ Wilhelm Mohammed – as he was now said to call himself – had even made a pilgrimage, incognito, to Mecca. Muslim scholars friendly to the cause were able to find mysterious passages in the Koran which purported to show that Wilhelm had been ordained by God to free the faithful from infidel rule. Later, word was to be spread that the entire German nation had followed their emperor’s example and converted to Islam en masse. Finally, false reports of great Turkish and German victories would be circulated, and these piously attributed to the righteousness of the Turco-German cause. All this was designed to legitimise Germany’s role in the minds of ordinary Muslims.
Meanwhile, in Berlin, small groups of hand-picked German officers were being recruited for the task of setting the East, and ultimately British India, ablaze with the heady message of the Holy War. Liberally supplied with gold, arms and bales of inflammatory literature, they would make their way eastwards from Constantinople, headquarters of this new Great Game, and discreetly enter neutral Persia. There, as they rode across the deserts and mountains towards Afghanistan, they would spread word of the jihad among the tribesmen and villagers along their route and try to win their active support. But it was in the Afghan capital that their most crucial task would lie – that of winning over the powerful Emir to their cause, and persuading him to unleash his tribal armies against India’s ill-guarded frontiers. At the same time, in Teheran, similar pressure would be directed against the young Shah to try to draw him and his Muslim subjects into the Holy War. In India itself attempts would be made to coerce leading princes, some of whom were allowed by the British to have their own private armies, into joining the Truco-German cause. Personal letters from Kaiser Wilhelm, promising them almost anything they wanted if they changed sides, were being prepared, sumptuously bound in leather, to be smuggled to them when all was ready.
PETER HOPKIRK
ON SECRET SERVICE EAST OF CONSTANTINOPLE
