- Peter Hopkirk, On Secret Service East of Constantinople: The Plot To
Bring Down The British Empire (London, 1994) discusses the attempts
by German agents to foment jihad against the British in India, Iran,
Caucuses, Afghanistan.
As an infidel, of course, the Kaiser had no authority to summon
Muslims to a Holy War [...] only the Ottoman Sultan himself, in his
capacity of Caliph of all Islam, had the authority which was required to
issue such an awesome order. It was essential, therefore, that Turkey
should ally itself with Germany, regardless of the best interests of its
[German] people. [...] Within three months of the outbreak of war,
Turkey threw in its lot with Germany [...] and one week later the Sultan
called upon Muslims everywhere to rise and slay their Christian
oppressors “wherever you may find them”. [...] In mosques and bazaars
through the East rumours were circulated that the German Emperor had
been secretly converted to Islam. ʻHajiʼ Wilhelm Mohammed – as he was
now said to call himself – had even made a pilgrimage, incognito, to
Mecca [...] word was to be spread that the entire German nation had
followed their emperorʼs example and converted to Islam en masse.
(pp.3-4)
It might come as little surprise that following victory in World War I
that Britain decided that the Caliphate must be destroyed. See also Barry
Rubin and Wolfgang Schwanitz, Nazis, Islamists and the Making of the
Modern Middle East, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2014, p.52.
For decades around the turn of the twenty-first century, Germany
imported millions of Turkish immigrants. Before the end of the twentieth
century, Chancellor Helmut Kohl said “If we today give in to demands
for dual citizenship, we would soon have four, five, or six million Turks
in Germany instead of three million”. See Philip Martin, “Germany:
Managing Migration in the Twenty-First Century”, in Wayne Cornelius,
Controlling Immigration: A Global Perspective, Stanford, 2004, p. 246.
Germany’s association with the former Islamic State (the Ottoman
Empire) are long and deep. ↵
dana p.
(Dana P.)
#1