Sultan proclaims jihad

On 14 November 1914 a huge crowd gathered in front of the Fatih Mosque in Constantinople. According to some accounts it numbered nearly 100,000 people. The head of the fatwa office, Ali Haydar Efendi, read out from the steps of the mosque the fatwas of 11 November, and with them Sultan Mehmed V’s call to holy war. The Sultan was acting as caliph, the spiritual head of all Sunni Muslims. His proclamation to the army and navy recalled that Russia, England and France had never ceased plotting against the caliphate. The soldiers were to throw themselves on the enemy “like lions”, for on their victory depended the existence of the empire and of the “300 million Muslims” whom the Sultan had summoned to battle by a holy fatwa.

After the ceremony a procession with flags and a band marched through the city. It stopped outside the German embassy, where the ambassador, Hans von Wangenheim, greeted it from the balcony. Beside him stood a dozen or so Moroccans in French uniforms, according to some accounts prisoners from the Western Front, and one of them made a short speech in Arabic. The demonstrators cheered the German Emperor as a friend of Islam and moved on to the Austro-Hungarian embassy. According to eyewitnesses, several shops and houses belonging to Christians were looted at the end.

A jihad “made in Germany”?

The Germans were delighted. The idea of stirring up revolts among the Entente’s Muslim subjects had long been current in Berlin. As early as 1898, in Damascus, Emperor Wilhelm II had proclaimed himself the friend of “300 million Muslims”. The chief advocate of the idea was the diplomat and orientalist Baron Max von Oppenheim. In October 1914 he presented the German Foreign Office with an extensive memorandum on “revolutionising the Islamic territories of our enemies”. In it he pointed above all to Egypt and India, the most sensitive points of the British Empire. Oppenheim became head of a special propaganda bureau for the East, which flooded the Muslim world with pamphlets and leaflets.

In 1915 the Dutch orientalist Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje called the jihad proclaimed in Constantinople a holy war “made in Germany”. The label stuck for a long time, although modern historians stress that the idea also had Turkish roots. The Young Turks, especially Enver Pasha, themselves believed that Islam could unite Turks and Arabs and give the empire strength in its war with the great powers.

A call without response

More than half of the world’s Muslims then lived in the British, French and Russian empires. The Allies feared their revolt, but there was no mass uprising. Muslim leaders in India, the Bey of Tunis and the notables of Morocco and Algeria professed their loyalty and portrayed Turkey as a tool of Germany that had betrayed the duties of the caliph. Many of these declarations were made under obvious pressure from the colonial authorities, but hundreds of thousands of Muslim soldiers went on fighting in the Entente’s armies, including against the Turks.

The call did not pass without trace, however. In February 1915 Muslim soldiers of an Indian regiment mutinied in Singapore, and at the end of 1915 the Senussi order took up the fight against the British in western Egypt. The greatest blow to the idea of jihad, however, proved to be the Sharif of Mecca, Hussein bin Ali. He had been in talks with the British since the autumn of 1914, did not support the Sultan’s call, and in June 1916, as guardian of the holiest cities of Islam, he raised the Arab Revolt against the Turks.