On the Divers Forms of Lunacie in the Orient
Volume the Third
Portraits of Orientalists as Commanders of the Faithful
This summons was immediately followed by a solemn march to the German and Austrian embassies, then by the first bellicose action: after the speech, a Turkish policeman emptied his weapon point-blank into a noble English clock in the lobby of the Grand Hotel Tokatliyan, the starter pistol for the jihad, if we are to believe the memories of the German dragoman Schabinger, one of the artisans of this solemn proclamation that precipitated all Orientalist forces into battle. Alois Musil was dispatched to his dear Bedouin tribes and to Auda Abu Tayya the bellicose to ensure their support. The British and French were not to be outdone; they mobilized their scholars — the Lawrences, Jaussens, Massignons, and company — to launch a counter-jihad, with the success we know: the great cavalcade of Faysal and Auda Abu Tayya in the desert. The beginning of the legend of Lawrence of Arabia that, unfortunately for the Arabs, ended in French and English mandates on the Middle East. I have on my computer Sarah’s article on the French colonial soldiers and the German jihad, with images of that model camp for Muslim prisoners of war near Berlin where all the ethnologists and Orientalists of the time passed through; an article “exposing the facts” for an illustrated journal, History or God knows what publication of that kind, here’s something that will make a wonderful accompaniment to the herbal tea and the radio news:
We know these two men only from the archives preserved in the collections of the Ministry of Defense, which patiently digitalized some one million three hundred and thirty thousand files for the million three hundred and some thousand men who died for France between 1914 and 1918. These handwritten files, filled out in beautiful cursive script in black ink, are succinct; surnames, first names, date and place of birth of the deceased soldier are recorded, along with the rank, army corps to which he belonged, his serial number, and this terrifying line, which does not bother with the euphemisms of civilians: “Kind of death.” The kind of death does not embarrass itself with poetry; the kind of death is nonetheless a silent, brutal poetry, where words unfold in terrifying images of “killed by the enemy,” “wounds,” “disease,” “torpedoed and sank” in an infinity of variations and repetitions — and erasures, as well; the mention “wound” might be crossed out, written over with “disease”: “disappeared” might be crossed out later, replaced by “killed by the enemy,” which signifies that later on the body of this disappeared soldier who would not return was found; this non-reappearance while alive would earn him the mention “died for France” and the honors that ensued. Then, still on the same file, the place where the kind of death in question is inscribed, which means giving a definitive end to the soldier’s journey on this Earth. We know, then, very little about the two combatants who interest us here. Even their civilian status is fragmentary, as is so often the case for colonial soldiers. Just the year of birth. First names and family names reversed. I suppose, though, that they were brothers. Brothers in arms, at least. They came from the same city of Niafunké by the Niger River, south of Timbuktu, in the French part of Sudan that today is called Mali. They were born two years apart, in 1890 and 1892. They were Bambaras, from the Tamboura clan. Their names were Baba and Moussa. They were assigned to different regiments. They were volunteers, or at
least that’s how conscripted colonials were known: the governors of each region were required to provide their quota of soldiers; not much concern was given, in Bamako or Dakar, to the way in which they were obtained. We also do not know what Baba or Moussa left behind in Mali — a job, a mother, a wife, children. We can on the other hand guess their feelings, at the time of departure, their perhaps modest pride in the uniform; their fear of the unknown, probably, and especially that deeply felt, keen wrenching feeling that goes with leaving one’s native country. Baba was lucky, Moussa less so. Baba was first assigned to an engineer’s battalion, he barely escaped a departure for the butchery of the Dardanelles and would remain for several months billeted in Africa, in Somalia.
Having reached Marseille in France in the beginning of 1916, Moussa was trained to handle weapons in the camp of Fréjus, before joining the fray in the spring of 1916 at Verdun. One can imagine the power of discovering Europe for these Senegalese infantrymen. The unknown forests of trees, the calm rivers that streak the plains so green in the springtime, the surprising cows with black and white spots. And suddenly, after a detour by a camp in the rear and an endless march from Verdun, all hell breaks loose. Trenches, barbed wire, shells, so many shells that silence becomes a rare and unsettling thing. The colonial troops would discover death at the same time as the white soldiers dying at their side. Never had the expression “cannon fodder” been so justified. The men broke into pieces like mannequins under the effect of the explosives, they were torn apart like paper under the shrapnel, shouted, bled; the parapets disgorged human debris crushed by the pepper mill of the artillery. Seven hundred thousand men fell in Verdun, on both sides of the Meuse. Buried, burned alive, torn to pieces by machine guns or the millions of shells that furrowed the terrain. Moussa, like all of his comrades, experienced fear, first of all, then very great fear, then immense terror; he found courage in the heart of the horror, the courage to follow a corporal to mount an assault upon a position that was too well-defended; he’d have to give up conquering it, after seeing his brothers in arms fall around him, not really understanding for what strange reason he remained unharmed. The sector had a fitting name, le Mort-Homme, Dead-Man; it’s hard to believe there could have been a village in this mass grave that the spring rains transformed into a swamp where, instead of aquatic plants, fingers and ears floated. Moussa Tamboura would finally be captured on May 24, 1916, with most of his squad in front of that hill 304 that ten thousand soldiers had just died defending in vain.
While Moussa, who had narrowly escaped death, was wondering whether his brother was still alive, Baba was setting up his tent in the environs of Djibouti. His battalion would be reformed, with other colonial elements. Soldiers arrived from Indochina to join them before going on to France.
For Moussa captivity was a relief, why deny it; the Germans reserved special treatment for Muslim soldiers. Moussa Tamboura was sent to a prisoners’ camp south of Berlin, a thousand kilometers away from the front. During the trip, he no doubt thought that German landscapes looked like what he had seen of the North of France. The camp where he was interned was called the “Camp of the Crescent,” Halbmond-Lager, in Zossen near Wünsdorf; it was reserved for “Mahomedan” prisoners, or prisoners presumed to be so. There were Algerians, Moroccans, Senegalese, Malians, Somalis, Gurkhas from the Himalayas, Sikhs and Indian Muslims, Comorians, Malays, and, in a neighboring camp, Muslims from the Russian Empire, Tatars, Uzbeks, Tajiks, and Caucasians. The camp was conceived as a little village, with a pretty wooden mosque in the Ottoman style; it was the first mosque in the environs of Berlin. A mosque of war.
Moussa guessed that the battles were over for him, that the shells would never catch up to him so far away, in the depths of Prussia; he was hesitant about rejoicing in this. True, he no longer risked horrible wounds, worse than death; but the feelings of defeat, exile, and remoteness were other, more insidious pains — on the front, the constant tension, the daily fighting against the mines and machine guns occupied your mind. Here, between the barracks and the mosque, he was among survivors; people endlessly told each other stories from their countries, in Bambara, and the language sounded strange there, so far from the Niger, in the midst of all these languages and all these fates. Ramadan began on July 2 that year; fasting on those endless northern summer days was
a real torture — there were barely five hours of darkness at night. Moussa was no longer cannon fodder, but fodder for ethnologists, Orientalists, and propagandists: all the scholars of the German Empire visited the camp and conversed with the prisoners, to learn their customs, their habits; these m
en in white smocks photographed them, described them, measured their skulls, made them tell stories about their countries, which they recorded in order to later study their languages and dialects. From these Zossen camp recordings a number of linguistic studies would emerge — for example, those of Friedrich Carl Andreas, husband of Lou Andreas-Salomé, on the Iranian languages of the Caucasus.
The only image we possess of Moussa Tamboura was taken in this camp. It’s from a propaganda film for the Muslim world,
which shows the festival of Eid al-Fitr at the end of Ramadan, on July 31, 1916. A Prussian nobleman was the guest of honor, along with the Turkish ambassador to Berlin. We see Moussa Tamboura in the company of three of his comrades, in the process of preparing a ritual fire. All the Muslim prisoners are seated; all the Germans are standing, with fine mustaches. The camera then lingers over the Gurkhas, the handsome Sikhs, the Moroccans, the Algerians; the ambassador from the Sublime Porte has a vacant look, and the prince looks full of curiosity about these ex-enemy soldiers of a new sort, whom they would very much encourage to desert en masse or rebel against colonial authorities: they tried to show that Germany was a friend of Islam, as it was an ally of Turkey. A year before, in Istanbul, all the Orientalists of the German Empire had written a text in classical Arabic calling on Muslims around the world to wage jihad against Russia, France, and Great Britain, in the hope of making the colonial troops rise up against their masters. Hence the camera, which Moussa Tamboura did not seem to notice, absorbed as he was in building the fire.
In this model Zossen camp, a journal, soberly titled Jihad, was written and printed in runs of fifteen thousand copies, “a journal for Mahometan prisoners of war” which was published simultaneously in Arabic, Tatar, and Russian; another journal, The Caucasus, for Georgians; and a third, Hindustan, in two editions, Urdu and Hindi. The translators and writers of these publications were prisoners, Orientalists, and “natives” experienced in German politics, most of them coming from the provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Max von Oppenheim, the famous archaeologist, was one of those responsible for the Arabic version of the publication. The Minister for Foreign Affairs and the War Minister hope to be able to “reuse” the colonial soldiers, after their hoped-for “reconversion” to the new holy war.
We don’t know much about the actual repercussions of the German jihad in the territories concerned; they were probably almost nonexistent. We do not even know if the announcement reached Baba Tamboura in Djibouti, for example. Baba was unaware that his brother was taking part against his will in the German enterprise; he imagined him on the front, perhaps dead, rumors making their way through censorship, to
the borders of the Red Sea: heroism, glory, and sacrifice, that’s how Baba imagined the war. He must have been sure his brother was a hero, over there, in France, that he was fighting bravely. He might have been less sure of his own feelings, a confused mixture of desire for action and apprehension. Finally, at the beginning of December 1916, as the freezing Berlin winter was starting for Moussa, Baba learned that his battalion would finally be sent, via Port Said and the Suez Canal, to the front in France. At the end of December, 850 infantrymen boarded the liner Athos of the Messageries Maritimes, a handsome almost-new ship 160 meters long and weighing thirteen thousand tons, coming from Hong Kong with a consignment of Chinese coolies who were already occupying the hold — in the end, the ship wouldn’t depart until the beginning of February while, in Berlin, Moussa was ill, coughing and shivering from cold in the Prussian winter.
The Athos left Port Said on February 14, 1917, and, three days later, a few miles away from the island of Malta, just when the infantrymen were starting to get used to the wildness of the sea in the depths of their third-class hold, the Athos crossed the path of German U-Boat No. 65, which sent a torpedo right into its port side. The attack claimed the lives of 750 of its passengers, including Baba, who will have seen of the war only its sudden, ferocious end, a terrifying explosion followed by cries of pain and panic, cries and bodies soon drowned by the water flooding the holds, the bridges, the lungs. Moussa would never hear about his brother’s death since, a few days later, he died of disease in captivity in the Zossen camp hospital, if we are to believe the kind of death in his “died for France” file, today the only trace of that suffering of exile in the Camp of the Crescent.
What madness that first truly worldwide war was. Drowning in the darkness of a hold, how horrible. I wonder if that jihadist mosque still exists, south of Berlin, in those sandy plains of the March of Brandenburg interrupted by lakes, interlaced with marshes. I should ask Sarah — one of the first mosques in northern Europe, the war has strange consequences indeed. That German jihad makes for the most incongruous bedmates — scholars like Oppenheim or Frobenius, soldiers, Turkish and German diplomats, Algerians in exile or pro-Ottoman Syrians like Shakib Arslan the Druze prince. The way holy war today is anything but spiritual.
They say that the Mongols made pyramids of cut-off heads to frighten the inhabitants of the lands they invaded — now the jihadists in Syria are using the same method, horror and fear, by applying to men an atrocious technique of sacrifice reserved till now for sheep, their throats slit, then the neck cut with difficulty till it separates, this in the name of holy war. Another horrible thing constructed by both East and West. Jihad, at first sight an idea that’s as foreign, external, exogenous as possible, is a long and strange collective movement, the synthesis of an atrocious, cosmopolitan history — God save us from death and Allah akbar, Red Love, decapitation and Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Octet for Strings.
Thank God the news is over, back to music, Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer, sworn enemies of Wagner, especially Meyerbeer, object of all Wagner’s hatred, a terrifying hatred — I’ve always wondered if that was the cause or the effect of Wagner’s anti-Semitism: maybe Wagner became anti-Semitic because he was terribly jealous of Meyerbeer’s success and money. Wagner wasn’t without his contradictions: in his Judaism in Music, he insults Meyerbeer, the same Meyerbeer he had buttered up for years, the same Meyerbeer he dreamed of imitating, the same Meyerbeer who helped him put on Rienzi and The Flying Dutchman. “People take revenge for the help others give them,” said Thomas Bernhard, there’s a phrase for Wagner. Richard Wagner did not measure up to his work; he was hypocritical, like all anti-Semites. Wagner took revenge for the help Meyerbeer gave him. In his observations, Wagner blames Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn for not having a native language and hence jabbering an idiom that, generations later, still reflects “Semitic pronunciation.” This absence of personal language condemns them to an absence of their own style and to plagiarism. The horrible cosmopolitism of Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer prevents them from attaining art. What incredible stupidity. But Wagner is not stupid, hence he is operating with bad faith. He is aware that his statements are idiotic. It’s his hatred speaking. He is blinded by his hatred, as he will be by his wife Cosima Liszt during the republication of his pamphlet, this time under his own name, twenty years later. Wagner is a criminal. A criminal full of hate. If Wagner knows Bach and that harmony he uses so magnificently to revolutionize music, it’s to Mendelssohn he owes that knowledge. Mendelssohn who, in Leipzig, pulls Bach out of the relative oblivion into which he had fallen. I can see again that atrocious photo where a very self-satisfied German policeman, with a mustache and spiked helmet, poses in front of the statue of Mendelssohn chained to a crane, ready to be demolished, in the mid-1930s. That policeman is Wagner. Say what you like, but even Nietzsche was disgusted by Wagner’s hypocritical nature. And it doesn’t matter if it was also for personal reasons that he rejected the little policeman from Leipzig. He is right to be disgusted by Wagner the anti-cosmopolitan, lost in the illusion of the Nation. The only acceptable thing to come out of Wagner are Mahler and Schönberg. The only palatable work of Wagner’s is Tristan and Isolde, since it’s the only one that isn’t atrociously German or Christian. A Celtic or Iranian legend, or else invented by an unknown medieval author,
it doesn’t matter. But Vis and Ramin are in Tristan and Iseult. There is the passion of Majnun the Mad for Layla, the passion of Khosrow for Shirin. A shepherd and a flute. Desolate and empty, the sea. The abstraction of the sea and of passion. No Rhine, no gold, no Rhine maidens swimming ridiculously on the stage. Ah Wagner’s productions in Bayreuth, that must have been something else, in terms of bourgeois kitsch and pretentiousness. The spears, the winged helmets. What was the name of that mare Ludwig II the Mad offered for the production? A ridiculous name that I’ve forgotten. There must be images of that famous nag; the poor thing, they had to put cotton in its ears and blinders on its eyes so it wouldn’t take fright or graze on the river maidens’ nets. It’s amusing to think that the first Wagnerian of the Orient was the Ottoman sultan Abdülaziz, who sent a large sum of money to Wagner for the theater at the Bayreuth festival — unfortunately he died before he could enjoy the spears, helmets, mare, and unparalleled acoustics of the place he had helped erect.
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