This manifesto assumes that Russia, together with England and France, has started the hostilities; that Turkey therefore was forced to take up arms; that Russia anyway had not during three centuries let one opportunity escape to harm Turkey; that millions of Mohammedans are suffering under the tyrannical rule of the said powers; that therefore the holy war has been declared, upon the issue of which not only the welfare of the Turkish Empire but also the life and future of three hundred million[4] of Mohammedans depend. The mercy of Allah and the support of the Prophet will turn the struggle against the enemies of Islâm, undertaken together with Germany and Austria, into victory.
Constantinople would not be Constantinople if these extravagant utterances of the Committee[5] had not been followed by a demonstration, a numâyashi. When in 1908 I was witnessing the first two months of the revolution brought about by the military under the direction of the Committee, no day passed without a number of those numâyashi; masses of people who jostled behind a couple of flags with the legend “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,” halted in front of some public buildings or residences of persons in authority and there applauded speeches of which nobody could understand anything. If one asked the shouters what it was all about, one was told: “revolution, liberty, hasn’t the police been abolished?” and the like. In a similar manner the Committeemen on November 14th treated the inhabitants to a numâyashi lasting fully eight hours.
In the mosque of Mehmed the Conqueror, which commemorates the greatest victory of the Turks over Christianity, the conquest of Constantinople in 1452, the questions and answers outlined above were read aloud, the fetwa, that is, of the holy war. Prayers were said, long speeches were held, there was no end to the jubilation. The procession passed through the main parts of the city, waited upon the Grand Vizier, and—demonstrated in front of the German and the Austrian embassies. Nazim-bey and Mukhtar-bey, faithful Committeemen, respectively complimented the German and the Austrian ambassadors and their speeches were answered by the ambassadors. The addresses exchanged at the German embassy would not have been worded differently by Dr. Grothe himself. For the German ambassador did not only speak of Germany and Turkey, but of their common struggle for the real welfare of the Mohammedan world; of Germany’s friendship for the Empire of the Ottomans, but especially for the adherents of Islâm, before all of whom, as soon as the German and Turkish arms have achieved victory, there lies a glorious future. The Austrian ambassador was a little more cautious and less Mohammedan in his reply, and only mentioned the holy war which the Empire of the Ottomans is waging together with Austria, and the sympathy which unites Austria and Turkey. But the whole show must have made on the Mohammedans, who would not, as we do, think first of all of a musical comedy of Offenbach, this impression, if any: that Germany and Austria have put themselves in the service of Turkey for waging a jihâd; for naturally, of the three, Turkey is the only one that can be involved in a jihâd. To call a war between kâfirs (unbelievers) a jihâd is for a good Mohammedan either blasphemous or ridiculous.
Grothe has thus voiced the sentiments of the ruling classes in his country, not only where he discussed the economic relations of Germany in most recent times and in the future, but also where he treated of the stirring up of the slumbering Mohammedan fanaticism in the interest of Germany. This makes it somewhat less inexplicable to me that my esteemed colleague, Professor C. H. Becker at Bonn, who until recently honourably represented the science of Islâm in the Colonial Institute at Hamburg, should also have been swept away by the incredible jihâd-craze, which at present seems to possess German statesmen. His pamphlet Germany and Islam[6] breathes the same spirit as Grothe’s, although it is favourably distinguished from the latter by its more moderate tone and, it goes without saying, by its knowledge of Islâm.
Becker materially supplements Grothe’s picture of the future relations between Germany and Turkey, by including in his program of protection of Turkey the military and political renascence of the Empire of the Crescent, in order that it may be re-created into a modern constitutional state with a respectable army. Not only German products and German capital, but also German spirit must set to work in Turkey. It must do so according to a better method than that used by France and England in their colonies: “a sound common-school education according to modern methods, but on the basis of the traditional oriental culture and supported by the best powers of Islamic religion.” We shall revert to this. First a few remarks in connexion with the picture, which may be seen in the writings of both Grothe and Becker, of the growth of political harmony between Germany and Turkey, temporarily leaving aside that which may be achieved through the Caliphate and through Moslim fanaticism.
It is easy to understand that Germany, in view of the rapidly increased interests which she has gained in Turkey, would like to reduce to the smallest proportions the dangers and difficulties that may be caused by competitors. It is just as easy to see that Turkey would after all prefer to deal with Germany, as through this contact loss of territory was not so much to be feared. “After all,” so I said intentionally; for there must have been moments when the Sultan or the Committee must have thought: Where is that friendship? Under Abdulhamîd the German affection was expressed only to him who had all power vested in him, but who is now generally considered to have been the greatest enemy his people ever knew. From 1888 to 1908 Germany ignored the Turkish people, because it could not be of use to Germany. Any one knowing something of the nature of European political friendship will not wonder at this any more than at Emperor William’s small interest in the fate of the once-beloved Abdulhamîd, when the latter was forced by the Committee first to parade as a friend of liberty and later to disappear.
Whoever sought favour or advantage in Turkey after 1908, had to force it or beg it from the Committee. The latter could not at once trust Germany, as also our German writers remark, because the liberal Turks, who had fled their country before the revolution, were given the cold shoulder in Germany on account of the friendship with the despot. When Austria availed herself of the general confusion after the revolution, first to help in the complete detachment of Bulgaria from Turkey, afterwards to annex a piece of Turkish territory herself, Germany did not raise one finger to keep its ally from an amputation so painful to Turkey. Later on Italy took Tripoli and Turkey found it difficult to fully appreciate the fact that Germany was the only one in the Triple Alliance who did not take anything, because Turkey knew, as well as anybody else, what natural obstacles there were to such an undertaking. Where no such natural obstacles existed, Germany took her part as greedily as the others; and in Africa she even has subjected two million Mohammedans to her authority, an authority which will not be found by those concerned to be less tyrannical than the British-Indian and North-African Mohammedans, according to Sultan Mehmed Reshâd and according to Becker, find the British or French administration.
Now Becker may argue: those Mohammedans were already under our rule before our great infatuation with Turkey and Islâm began, and, besides, the coal-black Moslems do not count for much even in the eyes of Turks and Arabs. But this is not a serious answer to the objection, the more so since Islâm not only repudiates the contempt for negroes theoretically, but because practically all ways have ever been much more widely open to gifted negroes in Moslim than in Christian countries. To be sure, Becker has estimated the number of oppressed Mohammedans who must now be helped by Germany at only one hundred and fifty million; so that only Russia, England, and France are counted as oppressors. But the Sultan in his manifesto has mentioned the full three hundred million, at which the Kaiser estimated the adherents of Islâm, as victims to be set free, and has thus by mistake included amongst them the two million German subjects and the Moslims under Austrian and Italian rule, not to mention any others.