During the Balkan War, the independence of Turkey was certainly no less seriously menaced than was now the case before the jihâd-declaration; but even then it received little support from its German friend. Grothe remarks that for the sake of Turkey alone it would have been difficult to stir up in Germany sufficient enthusiasm for a war, whereas now, against the rivals, England and Russia, it has been found so easy. Still, it will have to be admitted that the effect of Emperor William’s visits to the Sultan, with which according to Becker and Grothe, the conscious Islâm-policy of Germany was inaugurated, has not developed normally but that it has long remained exceedingly latent.
All this may emphasize the somewhat one-sided character of Germany’s policy still more than the writings of Becker and Grothe, but it does not do away with the fact that under the present political constellation, Turkey herself may derive great advantage from the alliance with Germany. But, if now we imagine the future as the German writers desire it, the situation stripped of all accessories appears like this: Turkey freed by Germany from all troublesome meddling of England, France, and Russia, will fall under German guardianship, and, though with careful avoidance of the name, it will become a German protectorate. Its army, its administration, its finances, everything will have to be thoroughly reorganized by Germany. The relation will be different in form only from the protectorate of France in Morocco and that of England in many a Mohammedan principality. In calmer times eulogies on the method by which the English in India, the French in Northern Africa, ruled their Mohammedans, have never been lacking in Germany; although criticism and indignation were never lacking either, when German interests were at stake. They talked of the pax Britannica and of the pax Gallica, which had replaced the former insecurity, confusion, and corruption. Even England’s work in Egypt was appreciated, and favourable opinions were heard about the Islâm-policy of Russia in Central Asia. We have no reason to expect less favourable results of a German protectorate in Turkey; nay it would even be possible that they might avoid many mistakes of their predecessors and that the end might prove a blessing to Turkish countries. But the Germans would certainly find that the gratitude of the Turks would end when the absolutely unavoidable interference would start in earnest, even if the Turks did not fail to recognize the advantage to themselves of some of the reforms determined upon.
Besides, the opinions of German experts about Turkey and about Islâm, especially about their possibilities for reorganization, are not, at any rate were not before this war, at all the same as those which are now so warmly defended by Grothe and Becker. Professor Joh. Marquart, at present Professor in the University of Berlin, derides in the preface of his work, The Benin-collection of the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden (1913), “the alleged function of Islâm as a bearer of culture,” and he speaks with biting irony of the “blessings of the jihâd, predatory murder on the path of Allah turned into a religious duty,” i. e., that duty which Germany now has again impressed on Turkey. It was not only in German missionary circles that Islâm was considered as the enemy who was most of all to be fought, but in a German colonial congress this resolution was adopted: “As the expansion of Islâm is a serious danger to the development of our colonies, the colonial congress suggests for earnest consideration,” etc.
Professor Martin Hartmann, who teaches the science of Islâm at the Seminary for Oriental Languages in Berlin, and whose pen has given us a number of notable writings on Islâm and on Turkey, never tires of pointing out that the Moslims are kept from participating in culture mainly by the institutions of Islâm, which scorns woman and despises non-believers.[7]
He calls the Caliphate of the Ottoman Sultans a usurpation which could only have been committed through contempt for the holy tradition, a “means of agitation,” an “easy way to be considered by the world of Islâm as a kind of fetish”; he says that “this double quality [of the Sultan-Caliph] has never been recognized by the civilized powers” and that the honest abandonment of this title would rather strengthen Turkey than weaken her. Of course he also has a few things to say about the holy war. About this he intentionally put his opinion on record when the word jihâd was brought up by the Turks in their war with Italy over Tripoli, and he made use of this expression which has again become topical: “... the threat of holy war, i. e., of war against all unbelievers, except against those who are expressly designated to the community by the leaders of Islâm as friends of Islâm. This idea is madness.” As the seat of the agitation was at that time in Berlin, he adds to this: “Let this be a warning against the creation of unrest by the excitation of religious fanaticism. All civilized nations will unanimously stand together against any such attempt.” I could quote reams of print with similar contents; I content myself with one more: “Islâm is a religion of hate and of war. It must not be suffered to be the ruling principle in a nation of the civilized world.”
I could quote at least as many utterances of the same author which give the impression that the Turks are the nation least fitted in all the Turkish Empire to do any good for the development of their country. Everywhere, where the Turkish element had obtruded itself on other Mohammedans at the point of the sword, it has “destroyed cultural possessions and has created nothing, absolutely nothing, in the way of cultural values.” Their religious conceit is even more intolerable than their national conceit. The Turks of Constantinople are “an awful pack” (“ein schauderhaftes Gesindel”) and the “honest Anatolian” (who also appears in Grothe) is a product of legend. And such an inferior nation “wants to be the ruling element in the great empire from Scutari and Prevesa to Van and Bassora!”
Professor Hartmann has an exceedingly lively temperament, and I would not dream of endorsing all his opinions or denying that his expressions are exaggerated. But in knowledge of his subject he stands far higher than Grothe; and as regards Turkey, also higher than Becker, together with whom he is the chief representative of the science of Islâm in Germany. Besides, Becker himself has formerly expressed himself about the Islâm question in much the same way, although in a more moderate form and in a different tone. Naturally, Becker himself has been the first to feel the contrast between his joining in the flourish with the words Caliph and jihâd in his latest writings, and the opinions expressed by him in former times of quiet scientific work. He himself repeats the concluding sentence of a lecture delivered by him in Paris in 1910: “If the solidarity of Islâm is a phantom, the solidarity of the white race is a reality,” but now he does so in order to weaken the impression of these words and to limit them to the Islâm of the negroes in Africa, who were the main subject of his speech. Probably none of the audience understood this limitation, as the words quoted were immediately preceded by these: “the fear that one power might unite with Islâm to thwart another, does not seem to me very well founded.” Besides Becker had formerly, e. g., in 1904, in an article on Panislamism represented the panislamistic idea as contrary to the real interests of Turkey[8]: “The Young Turks had hoped [after the Russo-Turkish War of 1878] to put an end by their reforms just to that religious element, which made of the Sultan above everything else the Caliph, the protagonist of Islâm, and thus made impossible the normal development of the Ottoman Empire, which after all is mainly made up of Christians.” And in the German translation[9] of the above-mentioned lecture, which was delivered in Paris in 1910, the following additional passage occurs: “The Caliphate of the Sultan of Constantinople was, up to the time of the Young-Turkish revolution, the basis of Turkey’s Islâm-policy. To be sure Young Turkey has not abandoned the claim to the Caliphate; but if she wishes at all to grow into a constitutional state, she will have to make as little use of it as possible.... A strong Turkey, it goes without saying, will never claim political sovereignty over the Islamic subjects of other powers....”
In his latest pamphlet, Deutschland und der Islam, Becker confesses his recent conversion and argues that his long-cherished notions were wrong. He, as well as Grothe, dwells at length on the two visits paid by Emperor William to Sultan Abdulhamîd (1889 and 1898), the second one combined with what Grothe calls “a political pilgrimage to the Holy Land.” The world has considered these visits, the first of which took place one year after the concession of the Anatolian railway, that is to say in 1889, as overgorgeous demonstrations of Germany’s industrial and commercial interest in Turkey. The way it was done made many, even in Germany, shrug their shoulders. First of all Abdulhamîd, the “blood-drinking” tyrant, in whose crimes the great powers after all shared the guilt, on account of what Berard, and together with him Hartmann, called “the conspiracy of silence,” seemed a strange object for such a hearty expression of friendship, which left behind it in Constantinople a lumbering commemorative fountain, which according to experts is an insult to good taste. Furthermore, the impression produced on the Moslim world was not at all such as was intended. To be sure, it was thought remarkable that the monarch of a powerful European empire should go twice to pay homage to the Sultan, the more as it was known that no return-visits of the Sultan followed; the caller therefore showed himself to the inhabitants as the inferior; and simple Mohammedan souls, who draw their knowledge of the world’s map and the world’s history more from legends than from reality, saw in this a confirmation of their belief that the whole earth is subjected to the mightiest Moslim sovereign, and that all princes are his vassals, even if they are in parts very unruly. Those homages in no way contributed to the glory of Germany in the East, whatever flatterers may palm off about it on German travellers. The strangest impression of all, however, was produced on all those who know Islâm by the Emperor’s speech on his second journey (1898), at Damascus, at the grave of Saladin, on which he also deposited a wreath.
Saladin (Salâh-ad-din) has become popular in Europe through the history of the Crusades and especially through Lessing; in the Mohammedan East his name has been long forgotten, except by the few students of history and literature. These know him as an unscrupulous politician, who by faithlessness and treason had risen to great power, and who is forgiven much because he was a strictly orthodox kâfir-hater; and not as the example of eighteenth-century tolerance which Lessing in his Nathan der Weise has made of him. On the grave of this hater of Christianity, the Emperor of a world-empire, which, as Becker reminds us, has Christianity as its state-religion, spoke these words: “The three hundred million Mohammedans that are scattered through the world may rest assured that the German Emperor will eternally[10] be their friend.”