For Great Britain’s attitude toward Turkish politics is dictated by Delhi rather than London. As ruler of the most numerous political group of Mohammedans in the world, the king of England’s residence in his European capital cannot affect India’s geographical needs, among which the maintenance of a clear road from its shores to the mother island is of prime import. Thus the establishment of a British zone in southern Persia and the attempt to substitute British law in Mesopotamia where, after all, the Sultan’s authority is most precarious in character, merely reveal England’s necessity of consolidating her power over the approaches to her great Asiatic colony.
In dealing with Indian geography and the vast body of Mohammedan Hindus, attention is necessarily riveted on the question of Arabia. British stewardship of the peninsular table-land seems inevitable. Not that those huge wastes of burning sand contain resources convertible into profit; but Arabia represents a wedge of barbarism driven in between the civilizing influences exerted by Great Britain in Egypt and India. The danger of its becoming a generating center of revolutionary currents involving British colonial policies in destruction is not mythical. Millions of Indian Moslems turn daily in prayer toward the direction of the Kaaba. A glance at India’s history suffices to reveal the extent to which the Sea of Oman has linked the two peninsulas.
To detach Arabia from a shadowy allegiance to the Sultan of Turkey and bring it within the uplifting sphere of British activity was part of the political program elaborated at Downing Street after the bombardment of Alexandria in 1882. In pursuance of this policy British influence is now markedly felt along Arabia’s three coasts. It is firmly planted on the southeast, where Arabia is nearest to India. From Koweit to Muscat every petty potentate exercising an antiquated patriarchial authority has learned to rely on British protection against Turkish encroachments. Aden, on the southwest coast, is a lone outpost of civilization from which western ideas radiate and occasionally reach the plateau land of Yemen or the niggardly wastes of Hadramut. This British seaport is the natural outlet of Yemen. Products of the favored districts around Kataba, as well as between this town and Sana’a, can be transported with greater facility to Aden than by the arduous routes which lead to Red Sea harbors.
The question of Arabia involves other considerations. Mecca and Medina, its holy cities, are essentially the religious center of the Islamic world. From their sites Mohammedanism has spread about 4,000 miles both east and west. Among Arabs as well as the majority of Mohammedans outside of Turkey desire for the restoration of the Caliphate at Mecca is strong. Arabs especially consider the Sultans as usurpers of the title. Selim I had been the first to adopt it after the conquest of Egypt and Arabia in 1517. Arabs however refuse to recognize the right of any but descendants of the Prophet’s family to this supreme post of the Mohammedan ecclesiastical hierarchy. According to Islamic traditions the Caliph must be a member of the Koreishit tribe. This explains why any ambitious leader who succeeds in circulating the report of his relationship with Mohammed’s progeny has always secured a following among his co-religionists in Asia or Africa.
The Arabs have aired this chief grievance of theirs in English ears. They found ready sympathy among British officials no less than among the leaders of their faith in Egypt or India. The complete severance of the Mohammedan Caliphate from the Turkish Sultanate will, therefore, be a probable result of Franco-British success in the present war. The reëstablishment of the Prophet’s family in its hereditary right and capital will have the advantage of providing Islam with a geographical center at the very point of its birth.
Modern German ascendancy in Turkey has constituted the gravest menace to the British project of uniting Egypt to India by a broad band of British territory. German diplomacy has exerted its best efforts during the past generation in the attempt to defeat this design. In overcrowded Germany the need of land for colonization is felt as keenly as the necessity of providing new markets for the country’s busy industries. Germany does not contain within its borders an agricultural area of sufficient extent for the requirements of its fast-growing populations. Against this it has been estimated that with adequate irrigation Asia Minor can turn out a million tons of wheat annually, as well as at least 200,000 tons of cotton. The basis of Teutonic southeasterly expansion lies in these facts. The immediate aim of German imperialism is to spread through Austria and the Balkan peninsula into Turkey down to the Gulf of Alexandretta and the shallow waters of the Persian Gulf. But its realization implies the shattering of British projects.
This rivalry in the west Asian field became inevitable from the moment that men of German speech became conscious of the power they had acquired in 1870 by banding together in a single state. The task of national consolidation once accomplished, the thought of German leaders naturally turned eastward in the direction in which land extended. Eight years later the prestige acquired by the newborn empire gave it a decisive voice in the treaty of Berlin. The first peg in the line of the Teutons’ southeasterly march was driven then by the revision of Bulgarian frontiers delimited by the treaty of San Stefano. The Slavic obstacle seemed removed from the Teutons’ path and its place filled by the more easily negotiable Turkish obstruction.
From the date of that treaty to the events of these years of war Germany’s conduct in Turkey has been determined entirely by the call of the land. In 1882 a German military commission undertakes to reorganize the Turkish army. In 1889 the Deutsche Bank—whose directors are leaders of Germany’s oversea affairs—is granted a concession for a through line from Constantinople to Konia. This concession has since been modified so as to comprise the trans-Anatolian trunk railway which connects the capital with Bagdad. In 1898 the Kaiser visits Damascus in person, there solemnly to proclaim assurances of his unalterable good-will to the millions of Mohammedans scattered over the surface of the earth. In 1902 the Bagdad line is definitely awarded to a group of capitalists, among whom Germans represent the majority of investors. From that date on, railroad, mining and irrigation concessions in Turkey seemed to have been reserved exclusively for Germans. The transfer of Turkey’s unexploited riches to German ownership became almost an accomplished fact.
It was the “Drang nach Osten,” a movement directed primarily by the valleys of the Danube and the Morava, and forking out subsequently along the Vardar and Maritza gaps. To clear this road to Turkey, Serbia was wiped off the map of Europe in the fall of 1915 by Teutonic armies. For this too had Serbian nationality been split into three separate bodies at the behest of Teutonic diplomatists. Bosnia and Herzegovina, lands Serbian in heart and logic, were administered by Austria, an empire in name like Turkey but virtually ruled by Prussia since the day of Sadowa. Montenegro, of old the refuge of martyred Serbia, had always been prevented by Austria from uniting with its sister state. In truth Serbia lay under the bane of a geographical curse. It was always in the way.
The misfortune of position is shared fully by Turkey. Coming at right angles to Germany’s southeasterly drive, Russia’s steady southwesterly advances in the nineteenth century foreshadowed the conversion of all the Black Sea and its Bosporus entrance into Russian waters. With the most inaccessible parts of the Armenian mountains in Russian hands since 1878, further expansion through western Armenia into Anatolia cannot be delayed much longer.