Long before the term jihad became part of the 21st century global lingua franca, it was Europe’s weapon of choice to establish its influence in the disintegrating Ottoman Empire. Much is known of Britain’s ham-handed efforts to do so in Egypt and Sudan (General Gordon’s death at the hands of the Mahdist army) and its double game in the Arabian Peninsula (with the British crown backing one pretender via Lawrence and the British-Indian government another). But it was another grandson of the Empress Victoria who also attempted to exploit jihad to achieve a precarious balance of power: Germany’s last Emperor Kaiser Wilhelm II.
Today, this sometimes tragicomic slice of history has been buried under the weight of West Asia’s fractious contemporary politics. But remnants of it can be seen in the railway systems in the new countries of the region and, most of all, in the sumptuous architecture of the Hyderpasha station in Istanbul, the starting point for the Turkish end of the ambitious Berlin-to-Baghdad Express. Had it been completed, this theatre of World War I and, who knows, subsequent 20th century history, may have panned out very differently.
Although it takes its title from this railway project, the book is really a history of the abortive Wilhelmine bid for global power. It had its roots both in the 1907 Triple Entente between Great Britain, France and Russia and in Wilhelm’s personality. The son of Victoria’s eldest daughter, he was a breech baby, born after a long, hard labour that left him with one arm six inches shorter than the other. Small and weak, he was cloistered by his domineering mother and largely ignored by the future George V of England and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia.
When he ascended the emperor-ship of the recently unified Germany, he presided over a technologically and culturally advanced nation but one that hardly matched his cousins’ domains. Where Russia had expanded east into Siberia and the British into Asia, Germany, a latecomer to the colonial game, owned scraps of Africa. So the unstable Kaiser’s vision of empire was at once romantic and practical. As McMeekin writes, “The subjects he wished to bring into the modern age were not primitive tribesmen, but the once-great peoples of the Near East… Let the Americans have the plains, the Russians Siberia, the French and Belgians and British various malaria-ridden lands in Africa, German would build her own economic empire in the very cradle of western civilization.”
The ultimate aims were Egypt and India. Since the Turkish Caliphate was still nominally the head of Islam and all the Entente powers had large populations of Muslims in their domains, Islam became the Kaiser’s deux e machina, operating on the “enemy’s enemy” principle. Till his ascendancy Germany had a negligible, if moderately successful, presence in the Turkish Empire in the shape of a military mission under General van der Goltz (or Goltz Pasha). But where the complexities of post-Crimean War politics had prompted his father’s Iron Chancellor Bismarck to adopt an attitude of studied coolness towards the Orient, the Kaiser – “Hajji Wilhelm” – chose to befriend Sultan Abdul Hamid II.
Known to the world as either the Bloody Sultan for his massacre of the Armenians or Abdul the Damned, Abdul Hamid was as keen to befriend the Kaiser to balance the threats on his European border from Russia and in Arabia from Britain and France. Germany’s interest in the Turkish Railway, which had the potential to skirt British naval power and carry thousands of troops to Asia, was already underway when the Kaiser made his overtures. The first leg was designed by a German engineer and partially bankrolled and built by, respectively, Deutsche Bank and the staunchly imperialist Siemens.
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For Abdul Hamid, too, the 2,000-mile railway concession would mark an exercise of power and the chance to raise revenues from associated customs, ticket and mining concession revenues. As McMeekin explains, the bankrupt empire was at the mercy of “proliferating ‘Capitulations’ which allowed Europeans to run the Ottoman Empire’s finance, postal services and transport, making Abdul Hamid something of a guest in his own house”.
As events panned out, both protagonists were on the wrong side of history. The broad story of European rivalries over the “Sick Man of Europe” is played out against the politics that led to World War I, the end of the Caliphate and Turkey’s fateful decision to fight on the side of the Axis powers. But McMeekin has researched his subject deeply enough to provide an authentic history with a novelist’s touch. To be sure, this is not hard to do — there are enough freelance spies and adventurers, archaeologists and Orientalists and various odd-bods who added their mite to the Great Powers’ battle from Khartoum to Persia.
It is his Epilogue, however, that has current significance because it traces the shifting inter-war politics of Zionism. The Kaiser was as much a Zionist supporter as an Islamic one. But Germany’s defeat so completely destroyed the balance of power not just in Europe but also in West Asia that it threw the Jewish Question open to cynical manipulation by the victors. The rest, as they say, is history — and much of that bloody legacy rests on the shoulders of a mentally unstable emperor and a deranged dictator.
THE BERLIN-BAGHDAD EXPRESS
Sean McMeekin
Allen Lane
460 pages; Rs 899