Berlin's Jihadizing of Islam

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Berlin's Jihadizing of Islam

How Max von Oppenheim fueled the Islamic revolution

Executive Summary

In both World Wars the German diplomat Max Freiherr von Oppenheim (1860-1946) did create plans „to revolutionize the Islamic territories of our enemies“.
His great German-Ottoman plan of 1914 and his shorter German-Arab plan of 1940 are discussed here. Both plans are analyzed in the light of Berlin’s Middle East policy. Max von Oppenheim was the German Abu Jihad. He served as architect of this approach to the doctrine of a Holy war. Although Islamic revolutions in Egypt, Iraq and India did not occur, his destabilization of the colonial hinterland by Jihad was not unsuccessful: he entangled a whole lot of enemy combatants in the Islamic areas. Moreover, the Ottomans motivated their troops by his concept of a selective Jihad: just against the British, the French, and the Russians. The Ottoman Sheik Salih adapted this Jihad to the coalition war. In the second half of the last century the idea of Islamic revolution lingered on. Was it a result of Berlin’s Jihadization of Islam?

As the emperor Wilhelm II corroborated, Max von Oppenheim established the News Department of the Orient within the Foreign Office shortly after the Ottoman Empire did join the War on the side of the Central powers. The News Department was supported by the German Higher Command. It combined a dozen of academics, officers, and natives. They guided the Jihad propaganda in Islamic languages „according to the psychology of the indigenous peoples“. The Department had two tasks. First, to influence all the Muslim prisoners of war to rejoin the combat on the side of the Central powers, and second, to agitate the Muslims in the enemy’s service to turn around applying the Jihad against their alien rulers. Although the Ottomans failed to fulfill such aims as revolutionizing the British, French and Russian colonial areas and conquering of the Suez Canal, the intellectual seeds of an Islamist Jihad was spread throughout the Muslim regions. This on a massive scale two years until combat dramas unfolded in Northern Africa and West Asia. Since the Grand Sherif of Mecca, Husain Bin Ali, switched sides as an ally of T.E. Lawrence of Arabia mid 1916, the Jihadization lost its spiritual heart: Mekka. The same was true with the fall of Jerusalem at the end of 1917. However, the German Jihad propaganda went on until the end of the war.

Muslim nationalists took that politicized or Islamist Jihad made in Germany up. They started to regionalize it. This was for example the case with the Muslim Brotherhood that was founded in Egypt in 1928. A lot of similar organizations popped up in desert towns and in oasises. Muslim regions became a proving ground for this Jihadization of Islam: it was here that their activists learned how to conspire, here that their Mujahidin learned to hate the West, here that networks learned what it will take to vanquish selected Western infidels.

In the First World War Max von Oppenheim propagated this selective Jihad, just against the British, the French, and the Russians. In World War II he tried to instigate Islamist revolutions within the British Empire only, from Egypt via Iraq to India. Since the French were then neutralized, their regime of Vichy provided in Greater Syria new venues for the Axis powers to stir up Muslim resentments. On the other hand the Russians were not yet in the war. So the Nazis took the chance for promoting Muslim uprisings in the Middle East as in Iraq. For this, the Grand Mufti Amin al-Husaini proclaimed the Jihad against the British. In this crisis the allied Joint Psychological Warfare Committee met in Washington DC. When the German Africa Corps of General Erwin Rommel advanced toward the Egyptian town of Alexandria in mid 1942, the Committee discussed how to stop these German and Italian tanks. A study by the U.S. secret service Office of Strategic Services proposed to use Muslim leaders like Abd al-Karim of Morocco and Idris as-Sanussi of Tripolitania against the Axis powers (as the Germans did with Amin al-Husaini).
But General Kroner pointed out far reaching effects, a Christian-Muslim war. So that project was not given to General Eisenhower who was preparing the Operation Torch, the invasion of Morocco and Algeria.

All in all the Allies did not promote an Islamist Jihad. But in the Cold War Washington did it, a Jihad made in U.S.A. against the Soviets in Afghanistan. As in the German case, the Americans legalized therewith the Jihad against the Judeo-Christian tradition. So at first this Jihadization of Islam bore clearly a German trade mark, then an American one. Consequently, the selective Jihad turned into a global one against the Western hinterland at the end of the Cold War. Thus, not only Max von Oppenheim dropped the values of the Enlightenment.

Die Berliner Islamisierung des Islam