HISTORY : The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany's Bid for World Power 1898-1918, By Sean McMeekin, Allen Lane, 460pp. £25
THROUGHOUT THE 1980s the CIA funnelled arms to anti-Soviet guerrillas in Afghanistan in what was the largest covert operation in the organisation's history. But Congressman Charlie Wilson and co were by no means the first Westerners to seek to enlist the forces of jihad against a larger adversary. For, as Sean McMeekin's book The Berlin-Baghdad Expressillustrates, Imperial Germany made a determined effort to rally Muslim fighters across the Middle East and Central Asia during the first World War. And just as the US today finds itself mired in the unpredicted consequences of its earlier intervention, so Kaiser Wilhelm's agents learnt to their cost that "holy warriors" rarely make reliable allies.
The roots of this doomed and unlikely partnership grew from a combination of the young Kaiser Wilhelm's eccentricity and chauvinism. Once deprived of the restraining influence of Bismarck, who had been forced from the Chancellorship in 1890, Wilhelm expounded an increasingly provocative Weltpolitik,typified by his decision on a trip to Constantinople in 1898 to proclaim himself a friend to the world's 300 million Muslims, thereby asserting a firm proprietary interest in the fortunes of British, French, and indeed Russian imperial subjects (100 million Muslims lived in the British Empire alone). The rumour spread, meanwhile, that the Kaiser himself had become a devotee of Allah. At the very least, he giddily wrote to Tsar Nicholas II that "if I had come there without any religion at all I would certainly have turned Mahommetan!"
The following year, a German consortium signed a contract with the Ottoman government to build a railway across Anatolia all the way to Baghdad – a concession which was immediately hailed across Europe as a harbinger of German domination of the Middle East.
This project gives McMeekin’s book its title but the work’s focus is far larger, albeit crucially shaped by the progress of the railway. For Wilhelm’s Islamophilia struck a chord with a generation of German scholars and misfits who combined a passion for the Orient with hostility towards the British Empire, which had also begun to make flattering overtures towards the Sultan.
Chief among these was Baron Max von Oppenheim, scion of a Jewish banking family turned visceral anti-Semite, who hit it off with the Kaiser, gradually becoming Germany’s chief conduit in the Middle East despite never holding a formal diplomatic post.
By the time war came in 1914, he duly elaborated an audacious plan to rouse Muslims as far afield as Afghanistan and India against the British infidels. In October, Ottomans joined the war on Germany's side, a declaration sanctified in somewhat awkward fashion by the Sultan as "a jihad against all Europeans with the exceptions of Austrians, Hungarians, and Germans". Oppenheim and his agents thus began a series of trouble-stirring journeys around the Middle East, accompanied by camels laden with guns, money, and pro-jihadi propaganda. By and large, these efforts at oriental agitprop met with little success, not least because the British tended to offer larger bribes. For example, Alois Musil, brother of the novelist Robert, concluded early on that Bedouin tribesmen could never be relied upon to fight for Germany and accordingly resolved to use the funds at his disposal to undertake some scholarly field work whilst keeping up the appearance of jihadi activism with the occasional pessimistic field report.
Genuine military action came in the form of an ill-fated attempt to seize the Suez Canal led by Lieut Col Kress von Kressenstein who vainly hoped that British colonial troops would defect when they saw the green banner of Mecca. Having crossed the Sinai desert with 20,000 men in early 1915, a lack of surprise and firepower soon saw the Turco-German force beaten back. In this, McMeekin avers that the inability to complete crucial sections of the Berlin-Baghdad railway proved decisive because it deprived the Germans of effective supply lines. Subsequent failures to enlist Muslim potentates in Libya and Persia (along with the Arabian Prince Faisal of Lawrence of Arabiafame) also played their role. But McMeekin's larger point is that emotional appeals to holy war did not make the slightest difference in a war which was ultimately decided by manpower, infrastructure, and treasure. Base, in other words, triumphed over superstructure.
DESPITE ITS MANYqualities, The Berlin-Baghdad Expresssuffers from a number of flaws which more editing should have corrected. Pre-war diplomatic history and intra-Ottoman squabbling are discussed in excessive length and detail. Given the number of unfamiliar individuals in the narrative, a glossary containing brief biographies would have been welcome. McMeekin also has a habit of repeating the same information twice and the word "extraordinary" appears with irritating frequency.
But most troubling is a bizarre digression in the Epilogue when McMeekin descends into Fox News caricature as he seeks to compare Oppenheim to today’s “limousine liberals” in what amounts to an ugly swipe at Jewish critics of Israel. This section also contains some pretty sweeping statements about the influence of Oppenheim’s legacy on subsequent collaboration between Muslim figures and the Nazis – an interesting conjecture but one which he makes little attempt to prove.
Max McGuinness is a faculty fellow at the Department of French and Romance Philology at Columbia University
