God's Armies

by Malcolm Lambert

  Kaiser Wilhelm II and the Ottoman Sultan

  The assumption that Western powers in the Middle East were crusaders and that all Muslims (or at least Sunnis) had a duty to resist them goes back to the skilled manoeuvring of the Ottoman sultan Abdul-Hamid II, who reigned from 1876 to 1909. At the start of his reign he accepted a constitution which allowed for a representative assembly and was designed to pave the way for more profound reforms of the failing empire’s stultified bureaucracy. The sultan, appalled when it was apparent that this was only the beginning and designed to lead to more far-reaching reform; also shaken by the Russian response to a rising by the Bulgarians, he abrogated the assembly and ruled thereafter as a dictator. Reform had been the work of the Tanzimat movement of Ottomans who loved the old empire but saw that it had to accommodate to the modern world to survive. It was their achievement to have abolished the Janissaries, replacing them with a modern trained army, and to have reformed the bureaucracy, trained diplomats in languages and put forward the principle of equality in citizenship, abolishing in effect the distinction between Muslim and non-Muslim. The last reform in particular was strongly opposed by Islamic scholars but nonetheless began to change the nature of the Ottoman Empire.

  The Ottoman Empire was the sick man of Europe, unwieldy, yet controlling much land and having a major role in trade. As portions broke away and received virtual independence, the question exercising the Great Powers was, who was to control it – Russia, or Austria-Hungary, or even a Greek state formed out of early struggles for independence? Russia fought against the empire four times in the nineteenth century, seeking a warm water outlet for their fleet, and established what was in effect a protectorate over its Slav Christians. A Bulgarian rising in 1876 was put down with ferocity by the Turks and stimulated W. E. Gladstone in a white heat of passion in late August 1876 to compose a pamphlet on the massacres, Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East, which sold over 20,000 copies. At its heart was a demand that the Ottomans go away. ‘Let the Turks’, Gladstone wrote,

  now carry off their abuses in the only possible way, by carrying off themselves. Their Zaptiehs and their Mudits, their Bimbashis and their Yuzbashis, their Kaimakans and their Pashas, one and all bag and baggage shall I hope clear out from the province they have desolated and profaned. This ...is the only reparation we can make to those heaps on heaps of dead, to the violated purity of matron, maiden and of child.

  The massacres were not exaggerated: 12,000 victims, men, women and children were reported. In September Gladstone spoke to a crowd of 10,000 at Blackheath assembled in the pouring rain where in a great silence he repeated slowly the evocative description of the Ottoman officialdom, Bimbashis and Yuzbashis and the like whom he had exhorted to go. W. T. Stead, no mean polemicist himself, thought it one of the most memorable experiences of his life. But Gladstone never explained who was to take over to protect the Bulgarians; by implication, he was in the last resort prepared to accept Russia.

  The Russians themselves were quite clear that it was their task. In command of their armies both the Tsar and the Grand Duke Nicholas called themselves crusaders and although the new Turkish army established under the Tanzimat reforms earned respect by its five-month defence of the town of Plevna against the Russians, losses to Russia elsewhere forced them to accept defeat. After victory, the Congress of Berlin in 1878 made a settlement allocating the spoils: Serbia, Romania, Montenegro and part of Bulgaria gained independence; Bosnia-Herzegovina was allocated to Austria-Hungary, France received Tunis, and Britain Cyprus. It all played into the hands of Abdul-Hamid’s propaganda. In the Constitution of 1876 he had claimed the caliphate: ‘His Majesty the Sultan, the Supreme Caliph, is the Protector of the Muslim religion.’ Defunct as the caliphate was, it still carried an emotional significance as it recalled the days when great swathes of territory fell to caliphs’ victorious armies. Some precedent existed for Abdul-Hamid – it was, for example, customary from the early nineteenth century for sultans at their succession to gird on the sword of the great caliph Umar. Abdul-Hamid went further, appealing to Muslims everywhere to accept his religious as well as political leadership. He moved skilfully and subsidised newspapers to proclaim his message in Muslim lands. If Western colonial powers came to be troubled by agitators questioning his right to rule Muslims, they would be distracted from dismantling his empire. He smeared the Western powers and the Russians and warned the Muslim world to resist these greedy interlopers, who were, whether they admitted it or not, crusaders. A series of revolts against colonialists involving Muslims gave colour to Abdul-Hamid’s stand.

  The leading nations of the time who assembled at Berlin in 1878 were not crusaders but statesmen attempting to secure a balance of power and seeking to prevent any one of their number establishing an overwhelming advantage. They included a resolution urging fair treatment of the Armenians, a very capable people who were scattered across the empire and much more difficult to protect than the Bulgarians. The precedent of the Bulgarian rising was dangerous to them and there were massacres, again denounced by Gladstone in his last years.

  The sultan earned the title Abdul the Damned and was all the more moved when Kaiser Wilhelm II advanced in his flamboyant style to provide support for the shaky regime. Germany, throwing off its ancient divisions, had firstly established a customs union and later created an empire under the leadership of Prussia. They looked back to the Emperor Barbarossa, to Frederick II and the achievements of German crusaders to encourage them in their move to imperialism and, along with all the other powers in the scramble for Africa, in their will to establish colonies of their own. In his feverish rivalry with Britain, Kaiser Wilhelm saw opportunities to recruit the Ottoman sultan as an ally and worked hard to bring him on side. Business opportunities were of mutual interest: the sultan dreamed of a railway from Baghdad to the Black Sea and Germans began work on it. Wilhelm’s own militarism, arrogance and anti-Semitism gave free rein to the worst elements in the late nineteenth-century German leadership. Wilhelm had an incurable defect to his left shoulder caused by an obstetrician’s forceps and had been subjected to vain and humiliating attempts to cure him, a victim throughout of the notion that a German emperor could not have a major physical disability. Posturing and militaristic gestures were a response to this and to an unhappy childhood – his bluestocking mother, Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter, being unable to express maternal love for him.

  A visit to Jerusalem in October 1898 cemented the alliance with Abdul-Hamid. The Kaiser’s talent for costume came into its own as he ceremonially rode on horseback into Jerusalem through a breach specially made in the walls, wearing a helmet surmounted by a golden eagle, in a costume designed by himself with Arab dress on his back and a cross on the front, recalling the crusaders and the Teutonic Knights. A mounted procession followed, dressed like the Hospitallers and including, in fourth place, carrying a banner marked ‘Thomas Cook and Son’, John Mason Cook, son of the founder of the travel firm. Both Cook and the Kaiser suffered from the curse of the Near East, attacks of dysentery, which killed Cook who died the following year at his home in Surrey. The Kaiser recovered. In the course of his visit Wilhelm inaugurated the German Lutheran Church of the Redeemer, a triumphalist structure overshadowing the Holy Sepulchre and commissioned a German hospice on the Mount of Olives, showing him and his consort in its chapel in company with German crusaders, including Barbarossa and Frederick II.

  In Damascus he visited Saladin’s mausoleum and saw his white marble sarcophagus which he promised to restore. He laid a laurel wreath of gilded wood with the inscription ‘From one great Emperor to another’ on Saladin’s tomb.* At a gala dinner in Damascus he praised Saladin as one of the most chivalrous leaders in history and charmed his audience by saying that the sultan, Abdul-Hamid II, and the 300 million Muslims who revered his name should know that the German emperor was their friend for ever.

  Punch made merry over the Kaiser seeking support in the East against Britain and France and yet having
to use the leading British travel firm to organise the trip. In fact the visit and his almost pantomime performance, supporting both the crusaders and Saladin, had important effects when, in November 1914, the Turks entered the war on the German side.

  The dictator Abdul-Hamid was a reformer with an interest in education, a major builder of schools, hospitals, docks and railways. However, a group of modernisers and secularisers formed a party reacting against the Sultan’s repression, called the Committee of Union and Progress, later known as the Young Turks. They ousted Abdul-Hamid in 1909 and brought back the constitution he had abrogated, but still in the end they were drawn into jihad and war. Enver Pasha, albeit a member of the Young Turks, was influenced by the past actions of the Kaiser and Abdul-Hamid and the special links with Germany then established. He was convinced Germany would win the war and its victory would best serve the Ottoman Empire. He made a secret agreement with Germany, and in November 1914 Mehmet V Rashid, the puppet caliph of the day, declared jihad. The entry of Turkey into the First World War against the Entente led to a vain attempt by the British to penetrate the Bosphorus with a naval force, losing capital ships to mines and to the botched land attack on Gallipoli. It led to the discrediting of Winston Churchill, who as First Lord of the Admiralty was closely associated with the great disaster and who also fatally delayed his potentially war-winning plans for mass production of tanks to break the deadlock on the Western Front.

  In 1917 British campaigning against the Turks achieved success in the capture of Jerusalem. Allenby, a fine cavalry general transferred from the Western Front and an imaginative thinker about the Near East who worked with the War Cabinet, left no misunderstanding. One power, acting for the Entente, had defeated the Turks in battle and was not carrying out a crusade. In contrast to the Kaiser, the British general dismounted at the Jaffa Gate and entered on foot, at pains to avoid all British jingoism in announcements and flying no Union Jack. Punch published a cartoon showing Richard in full armour looking down at Jerusalem and saying, ‘At last my dream come true’. It was a misinterpretation. Allenby included Muslims in his army and commanded an Egyptian Camel Corps.

  Colonialism, Dictatorship and Abuse

  In the 1850s two egos clashed over the Holy Sepulchre. Tsar Nicholas I of Russia and the French Emperor Napoleon III fought each other about custody and access to the Holy Places in Jerusalem. Their conflict was an abuse of the passionate wish of the medieval crusaders to recapture the Sepulchre, for there was no true crisis about its possession in the mid-nineteenth century; it was one of the oddest wars in history, fought with remarkable incompetence on the Crimean peninsula, far from Jerusalem. Nicholas I loved war and uniforms, dreamed of recovering Constantinople and may even at one time have thought of capturing Jerusalem for Russian Orthodoxy. Moscow was, in the minds of many of his clergy and aristocrats, the Third Rome, heir to all the rights and claims of Byzantium. He sent an artist to Jerusalem to record just what the Sepulchre looked like, so that the seventeenth-century monastery south of Moscow, which deliberately imitated the layout of the Holy Places and had suffered fire, could have its substitute Sepulchre rebuilt like the original. He presided over a massive increase in Russian pilgrimages to Jerusalem, embracing all classes and including peasants in great numbers, who walked to Odessa and took the steamship, inundating the old city and the sacred sites and raising fears that the Russians were going to take over Jerusalem.

  The President of the Republic, Bonaparte’s nephew, made himself Emperor Napoleon III in 1852. A skilled operator, master of a controlled press, his aim was to overcome the ancient hostility between Britain and France by drawing Britain into alliance, effacing the humiliation inflicted on France through the failure of Napoleon’s Russian campaign and rallying the nation to its former greatness in Europe: his interest, in short, lay firmly in the West and not in Jerusalem. But it mattered for his political purposes, because he knew that the Sepulchre and Catholic rights therein would rally to him all the Catholics who, though they cared for France, disliked the Revolution and Napoleon’s atheism.

  British attitudes were not necessarily favourable to Russia as a fellow Christian country. Preaching mattered: there was still an interest in Jerusalem and many a pulpit was devoted to the topic on purely religious grounds. Evangelicals such as Shaftesbury, made aware of the practices of Orthodox priests in Slav enclaves in the Ottoman Empire by reports of British merchants trading there, disliked the Orthodox more than the Turks, who, they felt, should be given time to reform on Tanzimat lines.

  Palmerston was more belligerent: he saw the conflict over the Sepulchre as a stepping-stone towards dismembering the Russian Empire and eliminating the menace it represented to British interests in India. Britain sent an ultimatum to Russia in February 1854. Aberdeen, then Prime Minister, hoped military action would in the end not be necessary; however, Palmerston’s view won the day. So Britain and France ended up fighting over the keys of the Sepulchre on behalf of the Ottoman sultan against the Christian tsar of Russia. Nicholas died of natural causes in 1855, and his successor, Alexander II, although he abandoned Nicholas’s great schemes, maintained Russia’s leading role at the Sepulchre and made peace in 1856. Many lives had been lost, and the Russian state in the aftermath engaged in large-scale ethnic cleansing, chasing out the Crimean Tartars – that is, the descendants of the Mongols, who had aided the attacks on the Russians and had not been protected from reprisals by the Peace – and forcing out Muslims from the Crimea. Russia prevailed; the French rejoiced and feted Napoleon III; the British were disappointed.

  Tsarist tradition was strongly anti-Semitic, and when Alexander II was assassinated in 1881 there was quite unjustified suspicion of Jewish responsibility. Pogroms followed on a great scale. The situation was made even worse by the libellous work The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, forged by a chief of secret police in the time of Nicholas II. Millions fled and, although most went to the USA, there was a great increase in Jewish immigration to Palestine. In anti-Semitic Vienna Theodor Herzl read the signs of the times and began to work for a major Jewish presence in Palestine and inevitably in Jerusalem, though he would have preferred Haifa: Zionism was born.

  A paradoxical result of the publicity given to Jerusalem and its Holy Places by the war was a great increase in numbers of Western pilgrims and the slow transformation of a shabby Ottoman town into a more efficient pilgrim centre with hotels and banking. The sultan gave the Emperor Napoleon III Melisende’s church of St Anne, which the French then renovated.

  The Eastern Question, so long a thorny problem caused by the Ottoman decline, had a bloodstained outcome as the British errors at Gallipoli opened the way to a successful counter-attack by a Turkish officer, Mustafa Kemal, whose prestige propelled him into leadership as the Ottomans collapsed and then on to a decisive victory in the Greco-Turkish war of 1922. Dhimmis in the Ottoman Empire were forced out of their homes and there was much suffering. Mustafa established himself as a reforming leader with the title Kemal Atatiirk, transferred the capital from Istanbul to Ankara, abolished the veil for women, did away with the caliphate and created the modern state of Turkey.

  Between 1915 and 1917 the British made contradictory promises to the French, the Arabs and the Jews under exigencies of war needs. After the failure at Gallipoli, easterners in the War Cabinet who believed the war could be won by knocking out Turkey, attacking Germany’s soft flank and saving the dreadful losses on the Western Front turned to the possibilities of an Arab revolt to defeat the Turks. Young Turks had proved themselves to be far more formidable than the old Ottoman leadership. Jemal Pasha, their governor of Jerusalem, was a ferocious despot. Might this fearsome man capitalise on the jihad declared in 1914 and attack the British in Egypt? The British, determined to divert attention from Egypt, stimulated an Arab revolt. T. E. Lawrence, archaeologist, pioneer in the study of crusader castles and intelligence agent in Egypt, emerged as a guerrilla leader of great talent, a man who understood Bedouin and promoted a candidate for k
ingship in Faisal, son of the Sherif of Mecca. Allenby saw his gifts and backed him, using his fighters to meet numerical deficiencies in his own troops. In a great coup by his Arab camel force Lawrence took Aqaba and set about wrecking the Turkish railway line in Hijaz. Vague promises buoyed up Arab hopes.

  In early January 1916 the British government sought to defuse hostility with France by a secret treaty. They were old enemies, pushed into a shotgun marriage in order to meet the menace of the Kaiser’s Germany, and the prime minister, Lord Asquith, wished to eliminate tension. He remembered how the French had tried to challenge British power in the Sudan at Fashoda in 1898 and wanted to set clear boundaries to stop future trouble. Sir Mark Sykes, MP for Hull and an inveterate traveller in the Levant, convinced the Cabinet that he would put a limit on French ambitions by drawing a line on the Near Eastern map running from the ‘e’ of Acre to the ‘k’ of Kirkup. All land north of the line was to be a French sphere of influence, where they were free to colonise; all land to the south was to be in the British sphere. The other signatory was the French diplomat François Georges-Picot, strongly influenced by his father, an intransigent nationalist who had wished to establish French power in Asia and in Africa. The Sykes–Picot agreement did not stay secret for long. After the Revolution in Russia, the Bolsheviks discovered it in the Tsarist archives and promptly published it, showing that it confirmed the allegations of Abdul-Hamid II that Britain and France, despite their protestations, were just like the crusaders of the past, forcing themselves yet again on Muslims.