The Berlin-Baghdad Express

The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power, 1898-1918, by Sean McMeekin, Allen Lane, RRP£25, 496 pages

At the height of the first world war, John Buchan wrote a thriller based on a German plot to harness Islamic extremism to overturn the British empire. What makes Greenmantle such a remarkable book is that, already in 1916, Buchan got so much of the history right – the Germans really were inciting Asian Muslims to rise up against British rule.

Sean McMeekin is the second historian to tell the “true story” behind Greenmantle. In his 1994 study, On Secret Service East of Constantinople: The Plot to Bring Down the British empire, Peter Hopkirk drew on British archives to recount the failed jihad made in Germany. McMeekin adds a wealth of documentation from Russian, Ottoman, German and Austrian archives to tell the story of German and Ottoman wartime efforts to raise a holy war against the Entente powers. The result is a captivating new history of the Eastern Front in the first world war.

In 1898, the German emperor Wilhelm II made a state visit to the Ottoman empire, declaring Germany’s perpetual friendship for the Ottoman sultan “and his 300 million Muslim subjects scattered across the earth”. This visit marked the beginning of a German-Turkish special relationship based on a misconception of the sultan’s authority in his titular role as caliph, or spiritual leader of the world’s Muslims.

The prophet of German Islam policy was the explorer and scholar Baron Max von Oppenheim (1860-1946). From his home in Cairo, he filed extensive reports to the German foreign office that fused hostility to the British empire with his growing conviction in the anti-imperial power of pan-Islam.

A railway project linking Berlin to the Persian Gulf was devised. In December 1899, the Ottoman government awarded a German group headed by Deutsche Bank the concession to build a railway from the Anatolian city of Konya to the port of Basra at the head of the Persian Gulf, via Baghdad, within eight years. For the Ottomans, the railway provided a means to consolidate their hold over their remote Arab provinces in Syria and Mesopotamia. For the Germans, the Berlin-to-Baghdad railway would create a strategic land bridge that reduced travel time from the Mediterranean to India by as much as three days over the Suez Canal route. It would be a pressure point on one of the vital arteries of the British empire in India.

When Europe went to war in the summer of 1914, Germany was determined to secure Turkey as an ally. The Ottomans drove a hard bargain and, when they finally entered the war in November 1914, the sultan duly proclaimed a jihad against the Entente powers, a move which, Oppenheim claimed, would turn Muslims in British and French colonies into jihadi insurgents. The move provoked deep concern in Britain and France but had no effect in the Muslim world.

Undeterred, the Germans unleashed missions in Afghanistan, Persia, the Hijaz, Mesopotamia, Central Arabia, Sudan and the Libyan desert to provoke local jihads that, collectively, might encourage a global movement. McMeekin traces these ill-fated missions, led by colourful adventurers such as Oskar von Niedermayer in Afghanistan, Leo Frobenius in the Red Sea and Wilhelm Wassmuss in Persia. Relatively unknown today, these men and their exploits would have been as famous as Lawrence of Arabia, had the Germans and Ottomans won the war.

Ironically, the roots of the Turco-German defeat lay in the Berlin-Baghdad railway. Logistical problems in the Taurus and Amanus mountains meant that whole sections of the line had not been completed by the outbreak of war. Armenian communities along the length of the railway line were deemed a security risk and deported to the notorious death marches in the Syrian desert. Aside from the human tragedy, the deportation of Armenian workers denied German railway engineers the skilled manpower they needed to complete the line in Cilicia. Without the railway, the Germans lacked the means to transport men and weapons to remote parts of Asia.

McMeekin has written an engaging history peopled by larger-than-life characters in exotic settings. There is, however, a disconcerting tendency for the eccentric and racist views of German orientalists to filter into his own analysis of Islam – nowhere more so than in his epilogue, where McMeekin tries to connect Oppenheim and his acolytes to the pathological anti-Semitism of the Third Reich, the Palestine-Israel conflict, and the rise of Salafi jihadism today. “One does not have to saddle Oppenheim with personal responsibility for the actions of murderous muftis and mullahs,” McMeekin concludes, “to see that his idea of a worldwide holy war targeting innocent civilians set an extremely dangerous precedent”. The lesson from the Berlin-to-Baghdad railway should be the opposite: Muslims are no more susceptible to single-minded fanaticism today than when they ignored the German-Ottoman appeal to jihad in 1914.

Eugene Rogan is director of the Middle East Centre, University of Oxford, and author of ‘The Arabs: A History’ (Allen Lane)