At this website by various means we seek to defend life, to encourage Christian faith, to promote Catholic tradition, to edify Marriage in its link to the Creator, to encourage families and individuals, and to support missionary disciples of Jesus. G.S.
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After The Great War, Jerusalem was lost to Christian Europe.
To this day, Muslims ask: When will it be reclaimed?
On
Monday, at the Commonwealth ceremony of remembrance in Glasgow Cathedral, the
Reverend Laurence Whitley began: “We meet because on a summer’s day like this
one, one hundred years ago, the world changed. Our nations and peoples found
themselves in a war the like of which had never before been experienced, and
the memory of which still haunts us all.”
The
centenary of the outbreak of World War I is most often remarked as just that —
the event that changed the world. Its effects haunt Europe’s bloodiest century.
The
Austro-Hungarian Empire foundered upon nationalisms that tore apart the dual
monarchy, nationalisms that would tear apart Europe again and again. The
Russian monarchy fell, giving way to communist tyranny. The German monarchy
fell, giving way to the unstable Weimar Republic, which in turn gave way to
Nazi tyranny.
In the
West, we understandably focus on the European consequences of how the world
changed. Yet the effects haunt what is unfolding in the Middle East even today.
The Ottoman Empire was the fourth great dynasty to fall. It is not possible to
understand fully the Middle East today, with its unravelling post-WWI
settlement, without attempting to understand how many Islamic eyes see that
war.
With the
end of the Ottoman Empire, Islam lost its geopolitical expression on the world
stage. The great territories of Arabia were carved up by the British and the
French, a dramatic consequence of Islam’s defeat at the hands of (what many
Muslims consider) Christian Europe. More vivid still was, as an immediate
consequence of that defeat, the British mandate over Palestine and the loss of
Jerusalem.
The
conquest of Jerusalem by Islamic armies in 636 was of utmost symbolic
importance — the holy city of Judaism and Christianity had been taken. The
Islamic geopolitical presence expanded and contracted over a millennium but,
with the exception of the crusader interludes, Jerusalem remained a Muslim city.
Jerusalem’s most distinctive features — the 7th-century Dome of the Rock and
the 16th-century walls of the old city — were Muslim constructions. After WWI,
it was lost to Christian Europe. When would Muslims reclaim it?
The
creation of the state of Israel by the United Nations after World War II was a
consequence in part of Zionism and in part the Holocaust — a safe national
homeland for the Jewish people at a time when independence was coming to
colonies the world over. In a contrasting view, historic Muslim lands had been
lost when Islam was geopolitically weak, first to Christian Europe and then to
world Jewry. The defeat of the Arab armies in 1948 only confirmed that
Jerusalem had been lost only because Islam was militarily feeble. In a common
Islamic reading, it is WWI, not WWII, that determined the (unjust) settlement
of the Middle East.
The first
sustained attempt to recapture what had been lost in WWI was the project of
Arab nationalism. The Arab nation as a whole would reconstitute Islam’s
geopolitical force, but largely on lines of secular nationalism. After that
project catastrophically failed in the comprehensive defeat of the Six Day War
of 1967, the project became less Arab and more Islamic.
The war
in Gaza and the lethal expulsion of Christians from the “Islamic State” in
territories of Syria and Iraq are but the latest manifestation of the internal
war that dominates the Islamic Middle East. Can what was lost after WWI be
reclaimed — a caliphate that will unite Muslims and restore Islamic sovereignty
over Jerusalem?
The
secular Arab states have made their peace, by treaty or de facto, with Israel,
so the remaining option seems to be a non-state movement of jihad. To the
extent that it gains political control over territory — whether in Gaza or the
Sinai or the “Islamic State” or in Egypt or Libya — things go very badly for
both Jews and Christians.
To
present this Islamic reading of post-WWI history is neither to be sympathetic
to it, much less endorse it. But it behooves us to understand it. The summer of
1914 gave rise to 77 years of European bloodshed and tyranny before the last of
the evil empires was dismantled. Due in part to this global preoccupation with
Europe’s pathologies, a brake was put on history in the Middle East. History is
now accelerating there again. The guns of August echo still.
National
Post
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https://nationalpost.com/opinion/scott-van-wynsberghe-the-great-wars-jihad
Scott
Van Wynsberghe: The Great War’s jihad
Special to National Post - November 9, 2012
As the eleventh day of the eleventh month once again approaches, inspiring remembrance of past sacrifices, the First World War — which led to the very concept of Remembrance Day — continues to confound. Typically portrayed as a conflict that tore apart Western civilization, it is not often recognized as something else altogether, namely, an official Islamic holy war.
The Great
War’s jihad has received uneven treatment from historians. Fritz Fischer, in a
1961 book on Germany’s grand strategy in the war, made clear that Berlin aimed
to inflict Islamic uprisings on the colonial empires of the Allies. However,
Fischer’s message had trouble getting through.
A 1973
account of the war, by David Sherman, did not mention jihad at all. As late as
1989, David Fromkin presented a survey of the Ottoman Empire for the period
1914-1918 that minimized the issue of holy war. General overviews of the First
World War by Martin Gilbert (1994), David Stevenson (2004) and G.J. Meyer
(2006) followed the leads of Sherman and Fromkin, saying little or nothing on
the subject. If not for the efforts of such writers as Peter Hopkirk (1994),
Donald M. McKale (1998) and Sean McMeekin (2010), the whole line of enquiry may
have languished.
Possibly
encouraging disregard for the Great War’s jihad is the fact that it partly
originated in the mind of not a Muslim but an erratic infidel, Germany’s Kaiser
Wilhelm II. Quirky and impulsive, Wilhelm had a weakness for odd ideas. (Among
other things, he helped invent the paranoid racial notion of the “Yellow
Peril.”) Even by his standards, however, what he did in the Middle East was
unusual.
In the
fall of 1898, reportedly as a means of strengthening ties with the Ottoman
Empire, Wilhelm toured parts of that realm. His destinations included Jerusalem
(where he dedicated a church), but it was a side-trip to Damascus that got all
the attention. During a banquet in his honour on Nov. 8, he became enthusiastic
and declared, “May the [Ottoman] Sultan, and his 300 million Muslim subjects
scattered across the Earth, be assured that the German Kaiser will be their
friend for all time.” Germany thus found itself in an alliance with the Islamic
world. According to Sean McMeekin, the news was so surprising that wild stories
about Wilhelm converting to Islam spread across the Middle East.
German-Ottoman
relations ballooned. The years leading up to the First World War witnessed a
huge engineering project, the famous “Berlin-to-Baghdad Railway,” and the
number of German military personnel posted to the Ottoman Empire reached about
2,000. As well, the Ottoman Empire itself changed in ways that favoured Germany.
As of 1914, there was still a sultan, but he was a figurehead, power having
shifted to a revolutionary movement formally called the Committee of Union and
Progress but better known as the Young Turks. Central among the Young Turks was
Enver Pasha, who had received military training in Germany and had served as
the Ottoman military attaché in Berlin.
On the
surface, much of the above looked secular, not theological, yet a religious
component lurked underneath, as shown by the career of German diplomat Max von
Oppenheim. A fervent orientalist, Oppenheim had traveled across the Middle East
and had been trained in Arabic and Islam at Cairo, where he served for many
years in the German consulate until his retirement in 1910. Oppenheim was a
strong believer in the power of Islam, and Wilhelm’s Damascus shocker created a
huge opportunity for him, opening doors at the highest levels in Berlin.
Thus,
when the First World War erupted in August 1914, it was a safe bet that the
Ottoman Empire would join the fight on Germany’s side, and that Germany would
use the Ottomans to cause Islamic trouble for the Allies. (Just as predictable
was Oppenheim’s return to service: He was put in charge of a unit devoted to
Middle Eastern subversion.) Sure enough, the Ottomans declared war in the
following November — and then came the jihad.
The exact
procedure for the Ottoman declaration of holy war has caused confusion. Some
historians (Caroline Finkel, Andrew Mango and André Gerolymatos) pinpont the
declaration at the Topkapi palace in Constantinople (now Istanbul) on Nov. 13.
Against that, Sean McMeekin has opted for the 14th and the Fatih Sultan Mehmed
mosque in the same city, with Peter Balakian agreeing on the date and Peter
Hopkirk the site. There is a consensus that Sultan Mehmed Reshad V — who,
technically, held the additional title of caliph, or head of the Sunni branch
of Islam — was present, as was the top Ottoman cleric, Ugurplu Hayri Bey
(reportedly a Young Turks appointee, says Balakian). The issuance of at least
one “fetva” (that is, a fatwa or spiritual decree), and possibly up to five of
them, was linked to the event.
So the
holy war was on, sort of. From the beginning, results were mixed. There was no
mass uprising of Muslims against the Allies — some Arabs, for example, were not
so fussy on the Turks — but there were some startling moments. According to
Peter Hopkirk, a regiment of Baluchi soldiers from present-day Pakistan
suffered a 1915 mutiny that killed the unit’s British commander. During a
1915-1916 standoff between British and Ottoman forces at the Suez Canal, Muslim
soldiers from two Indian battalions tried to defect. Historian Peter Mansfield
says they were shot. In Egypt, Mansfield adds, there were two attempts to
assassinate Britain’s puppet ruler there, Hussain Kemal.
London
became so nervous that it asked the pro-British head of the Ismaili Muslims,
the Aga Khan, to agitate in favour of the Allies. Biographer Anne Edwards
claims he made enough progress that German agents tried to kill him. In Persia
(now Iran) and Libya, however, he apparently had little influence.
By 1915,
Persia was a mess. Such German operatives as Wilhelm Wassmuss had fanned out
across the country and recruited locals for attacks on targets connected to
Britain and Russia. (Although nominally independent, Persia had undergone a
pre-war division into spheres of influence by those two powers.) Kidnappings,
bank robberies and assassinations followed, and the British alone had to deploy
11,000 troops to quash this mischief. By the end of the war, Persia had been
beaten up by all sides, giving it one more reason to hate the West.
In Libya,
the Allies got another scare, this one at the hands of a religious movement,
the Sanusi (or Sanussi, Senussi, Senoussi and so on). Espousing an austere form
of Sufi mysticism in the early 1800s, this movement had won over tribes
conducting trans-Saharan commerce and thereby became an economic force spanning
much of the region. That ended in the late 1800s, as European empires advanced
on all sides. Sporadic fighting with the French began in the early 1900s,
followed by an Italian invasion of the whole of Libya (which was loosely held
by the Ottomans) in 1911.
German
and Ottoman agents were soon plying the Sanusi with guns and cash and urging
them to join the jihad. Although already at war with Italy, the Sanusi attacked
French positions in the Sahara during 1915-1916, wiping out the garrison at
Djanet, in Algeria. Overstretching themselves, they also invaded Egypt during
the same period, driving as far as the port of Mersa Matruh and grabbing a
string of isolated oases near the Nile valley. The British needed some 35,000
troops to end the threat.
Ironically,
as the disappointing German-Ottoman jihad fizzled out, it turned on itself. One
of the Ottoman soldiers advising the Sanusi was an Arab, Jafar al-Askari (or
Jafar Pasha), who would be captured by the British and would change sides.
Working in concert with such British figures as Lawrence of Arabia, he aided
Arab forces that had revolted against the Ottomans in 1916 and had liberated
Mecca. Backfires do not get much worse than that.
National
Post
At this website by various means we seek to defend life, to encourage Christian faith, to promote Catholic tradition, to edify Marriage in its link to the Creator, to encourage families and individuals, and to support missionary disciples of Jesus. G.S.
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