2. The Jihad Plan

Five Fatwas

After the CUP had deposed Abdul Hamid II in 1909, after a failed counter-coup to restore his absolute power, Rida sided with the CUP, claiming that his deposition was lawful according to the Sharia, since the Sultan had proved himself unwilling to abide by the consultative basis of the constitution.[1] Rida finally turned against the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP). Rida identified the Young Turks, who he thought were conspiring with Zionists in building a Jewish Kingdom of Zion in Palestine, as the Masonic fifth column who were engineering a war between the Islamic and Western worlds. Rida believed that the term “Freemason” itself referred to the re-construction of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem. He emphasized that while the founders of Freemasonry were both Jewish and Christian, the Jews led and dominated the movement. He also argued that Jews wielded immense influence over the CUP and the treasury of the Ottoman Empire. Within two years of the Young Turk Revolution, Rida became convinced that the Ottoman Empire had succumbed to a “Zionist-Masonic influence.”[2] In November 1910, he publicly asserted that the Young Turk Revolution was a Jewish response to Abdul Hamid II’s regime’s rejection of Zionist plans to reclaim Palestine, in order to build their Third Temple on the site of al Aqsa, through which they sought to reestablish their kingdom.[3]

Sultan Mehmed V (1844 – 1918), the son Abdulmejid, succeeded his half-brother Abdul Hamid II who was deposed after the 31 March Incident of 1909 by pro-constitutionalist forces after he attempted to reassert his absolutism. In November 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, five Fatwas were issued in Istanbul followed by a proclamation of Jihad issued over Mehmed V’s imperial seal, which read:

 

Gather about the lofty throne of the sultanate, as if of one heart, and cleave to the feet of the exalted throne of the caliphate. Know that the state is today at war with the governments of Russia, France and England, which are its mortal enemies. Remember that he who summons you to this great holy war is the caliph of your noble Prophet.[4]

 

There is some evidence that, perhaps at German urging, the CUP considered the reissuance of the original call for Jihad as a mobilizing instrument. In the middle of 1916, an agent in the employ of British Intelligence overheard five or six “eminent” Egyptian Ulama in conversation at the entrance to al-Azhar:

 

They were maintaining that the movement of the Sherif [Hussein] is a political device arranged between the Sherif and the Turkish Government, to deceive the British, by an apparent loyalty… The Allies were to be deceived, and the pilgrims were to arrive from Egypt, India and elsewhere. Mecca would then be made the meeting place of a Moslem congress, which would arrange a general union of Islam and a declaration of a Holy War in all Christian-controlled countries.[5]

 

As Barry Rubin and Wolfgang Schwanitz detailed in their 2014 book Nazis, Islamists and the Making of the Modern Middle East, the issuance of the Fatwa was the result of a deliberate provocation coordinated by Max von Oppenheim (1860 – 1946), a friend of Kaiser Wilhelm II, became convinced that Berlin could harness the Pan-Islamic movement, using it as a strategic weapon, providing the success of the Mahdi of the Sudan as an example.[6] According to Ronald Storrs:

 

[Oppenhein] was known to lose no opportunity of reminding the Egyptian Nationalist Press of the syllogism that Islam was threatened with extinction by Europe, that Britain and France were at the head of the anti-Islamic movement, that the Sultan was the last hope of the faithful and that Germany was the friend of the Sultan and therefore the only Muslim-minded European Power.[7]

 

Max was a member of the extremely wealthy Jewish Oppenheim family of bankers, founded by Salomon Oppenheim, Jr. (1772 – 1828), the scion of an illustrious family of “Court Jews” and a friend of Beethoven. His sons, Simon (1803 – 1880) and Abraham (1804 – 1878), together with their mother Therese, transformed the bank into “one of the earliest and most important examples of modern commercial and industrial capitalism in Germany.”[8] They were linked by marriage to other Jewish banking families, like the Rothschilds, the Habers and the Foulds.[9] Max was the son of Albert Oppenheim and Pauline Engels. Albert had converted to Catholicism in 1858 to marry Catholic Pauline Engels, from an established Cologne merchant family. In 1868, Abraham, the brother of Max’s grandfather, was awarded the title of Freiherr (Baron) in Austria-Hungary. As the title was also valid in Prussia, the family now styled itself “von Oppenheim.”[10]

On the eve of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s 1898 trip to the Middle East where he met with Herzl in Mikveh Israel, von Oppenheim advised him to back Islamism as a political movement. Wilhelm confidently explained to Tsar Nicholas II that Oppenheim had met a Muslim prophet so influential in India that a signal from him would spark revolution there. That “prophet” was Abdul Qader al-Keilani (1874 – 1948), Abdul Qadir al Gilani, the founder of the Qadiriyya Sufi Order, also called Keilani, that had spread to China, India, Pakistan, Turkey, the Balkans, and Africa. Oppenheim also told the Kaiser of eight similar brotherhoods, such as the Sanussi of North Africa, that Germany might use to organize a Jihad against its enemies.[11] In North Africa, British intrigue was headed by the Sanussi Brotherhood, founded in Mecca in 1837 by an Algerian named Ali al Sanussi (1787 – 1859), who had come under the influence of the Wahhabis. The Sanussi Brotherhood remained only a minor facet of British intelligence until 1897, when Wilfred Scawen Blunt, took an active role. “Through the Sanussi Brotherhood, headquartered in Cairo,” explained Robert Dreyfus, “Britain’s Arab Bureau had established fortresses of British influence stretching down the deepest recesses of central Africa.”[12]

Von Oppenheim returned to the Foreign Ministry on August 2, to run covert warfare in the Middle East, implementing the program he had advocated for two decades. As von Oppenheim had explained in 1898, his mission was to unleash “Muslim fanaticism that borders on insanity.”[13] The most important experts recruited for the mission included Carl Heinrich Becker (1876 – 1933), Hugo Grothe (1869 – 1954), and eminent Jewish scholar Eugen Mittwoch (1876 – 1942), who assembled a program entitled “Germany and Islam.”[14] In 1902, Becker became a privatdozent for semitic philology at the University of Heidelberg, where he came into contact with Max Weber. In 1910, he founded Der Islam, a journal for the history and culture of the Middle East, and was its first editor. Becker and his colleague Martin Hartmann (1851 – 1918) were among the first to combine modern sociological thinking with Islamic studies. Although he wanted to become a Rabbi, Mittwoch became the founder of Modern Islamic Studies in Germany, and Berlin. Mittwoch became director of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, founded in 1914 with a donation of $50,000 from Jacob Schiff, to provide assistance to Jews living in Palestine in the Ottoman Empire.[15] In 1916, Mittwoch succeeded von Oppenheim in running the German Jihad campaign, and after the war he became the University of Berlin’s professor of Semitic studies. Mittwoch was praised by his students, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (1903 – 1993), a seminal figure by Modern Orthodox Judaism.[16] During his years in Berlin, Soloveitchik befriended Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902 – 1994), who was destined to command the Chabad Lubavitch movement centered in Brooklyn, New York—and Netanyahu’s mentor—and Rabbi Yitzchok Hutner (1906 – 1980), who would become the Dean of the Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin also in Brooklyn.[17]

 

German-Ottoman Alliance

On July 30, 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, the Kaiser explained: “Our consuls and agents in Turkey, India and Egypt are supposed to inflame the Muslim regions to wild revolts against the British,” and if the plan succeeded, “England shall lose at least India.”[18] Most of the Young Turks involved in the revolution of July 1908 were German-trained officers. Enver Pasha—part of the dictatorial triumvirate known as the “Three Pashas,” along Talaat Pasha and Djemal Pasha—was a strong Germanophile  and became military attaché in Berlin from 1908 to 1911, and War Minister in 1913. As a result, relations between Germany and the Ottoman Empire became ever tighter. In December 1913, General Otto Liman von Sanders arrived with forty officers to become Inspector General of the Ottoman army, and added German advisers into key positions.[19]

Von Oppenheim hired a dozen German experts and two dozen, mostly Muslim, non-Germans. Among them was Shaykh Abdul Aziz Jawish (1872 – 1929), a Muslim journalist and activist devoted to the cause of Ottoman supremacy.[20] Jawish received a traditional education at al-Azhar and the Cairo Dar al-Ulum, but then proceeded to England where he studied at a teachers’ college, taught Arabic at Oxford, became interested in British orientalism, and met E.G. Browne and D.S. Margoliouth. By his own account, the experience sharpened his skills as a Muslim apologist and polemicist, as it had done for Afghani.[21] On his return to Egypt in 1906, Jawish drew close to Mustafa Kamil and Muhammad Farid, who together had been leaders of the revived version of the al-Hizb al-Watani (National Party), which had been part of Afghani’s network of Masonic activity during the Urabi Revolt.[22] After the war, Jawish would be a key adviser of Hasan al-Banna in the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood.[23] The Lebanese Druze Pan-Islamist Shakib Arslan (1869 – 1946), who would ultimately be the most famous and influential of von Oppenheim’s advisors.[24] Arslan was born into a Druze family but later converted to Sunni Islam.[25] Influenced by the ideas of Afghani and Abduh, Arslan became a strong supporter of the Pan-Islamic policies of Abdul Hamid II.[26] When he became part of von Oppenheim’s network, he worked closely with Enver Pasha.[27]

In early 1914, the Turks secretly negotiated an alliance with Germany, and on August 2, as the war was beginning, the two countries signed an agreement in which the Ottomans would enter the war if Russia did so on the condition that the Germans provided support and equipment. On August 5, just three days after the German-Ottoman alliance was concluded, Chief of the German General Staff General Helmuth von Moltke asked the Ottomans to invade Egypt to trigger Pan-Islamic revolts. Enver Pasha, how Ottoman War Minister, gave the order to prepare the operation. He admitted to a visitor from Berlin: “I am conducting this war according to orders from the German General Staff. I have asked for [German] advisers in all ministries. And this shows my real intention.”[28] On October 21, 1914, Enver became Ottoman commander in chief, and shared his war plan with Berlin the following day. Within a week, the Ottoman navy, under the command of German Admiral Wilhelm A. Souchon, was ordered to attack Russian Black Sea ports. On November 2, Russia declared war on the Ottoman Empire, followed three days later by Britain and France.[29]

Von Oppenheim established propaganda bases throughout the empire, mainly in Medina, Jaffa, Jerusalem, Cairo, Baghdad, and the Shiah Muslim centers of Karbala and Najaf. The team he assembled included the Jewish-born Young Turk Munis Tekinalp, who had collaborated with Jabotinsky’s Le Jeune Turc, and became an ardent advocate of Pan-Turkism.[30] Tekinalp’s 1915 pamphlet, “The Turkish and Pan-Turkish Ideal,” advanced the unification of all Turkic peoples—including those ruled by Russia—into a great nationalist-Islamist empire that would be allied to a Germany, which he claimed, “is the only country” that would help create and sustain the new Turkey.[31] Von Oppenheim’s group also produced “how-to” manuals for Jihad. One of the most widely circulated was by Jawish who worked both for the Germans and for Enver’s intelligence operation in Berlin. The booklet called for assassinations and “inciting of hatred to the foreign infidel.” Referring to the many Christians serving as officials on Ottoman railroads, von Oppenheim advised they should be threatened and “members of their families taken hostage to ensure they would not engage in sabotage.”[32]

German ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Hans von Wangenheim (1859 – 1915), oversaw Max von Oppenheim’s successful attempt to induce Mehmed V to declare Jihad against the Triple Entente.[33] Their principal resolution urged the Ottoman Shaykh-al-Islam, Musa Kazim Efendi, to issue a new set of Jihad Fatwas, but this time the documents were to be collective works, with the expectation that they would be more compelling. “These fatwas,” said a French report, “will be elaborated by the Shaykh-al-Islam, along with a gathering to various ulama representing those diverse religious communities bound to the caliphate. This resolution was not effected, for it was repeated in the winter of 1916-17, by a similar assembly of Ottoman and exiled Muslims convened in Istanbul. Among the resolutions of this gathering, which reportedly was held at German suggestion, was an invitation to the Ottoman Shaykh-al-Islam to publish a new jihad fatwa, in the hope “that support of an extraordinary council would produce [a] stronger impression than [did] the first such fetva.’’ And yet the Ottoman Shaykh-al-Islam, Musa Kazim, although widely known for his political activism, issued no further fatwa, and no council or assembly was organized in his support.”[34]

Enver Pasha was simultaneously planning the deportation and massacre of Armenians. As noted by Rubin and Schwanitz, von Oppenheim’s Jihad plan was largely a failure because Muslims either no longer obeyed the Sultan or didn’t trust the Young Turks’ religious pretensions:

 

But the most momentous immediate event arising from the German jihad strategy was the mass murder of Ottoman Armenians. Von Oppenheim either urged or supported Ottoman repression of the Armenians and Jews, as well as the execution of Arab nationalists, groups he saw as favoring the Allies. When German officials warned about massacres of Armenians, von Oppenheim told them to shut up.[35]

 

In an interview with an American journalist, Wangenheim excused: “I do not blame the Turks for what they are doing to the Armenians… They are entirely justified.”[36] Von Oppenheim’s aide, Erwin von Scheubner-Richter (1884 – 1923), sent three reports to Wangenheim about the cruelties being perpetrated against Armenians in the Lake Van region. Scheubner-Richter reported rumors that deportations were being conducted according to advice from the Germans. Personally, he explained, he didn’t believe the story and tried to help ease the pressure on the Armenians, but Wangenheim ignored his request for intervention. Only one week after receiving a report on October 8, 1915, that the Ottoman government were intending the extermination of the Armenians, von Oppenheim was telling Berlin that the deportations were justified war measures because the Armenians were betraying the Ottomans by supporting their Russians.[37]

 

Characteristics of Despotism

Muhammad Farid also became an advisor to Von Oppenheim.[38] Before and during the war, Farid organized banquets of notable Muslims, where he again advocated for a Muslim congress:

 

I spoke of the pilgrimage from a political, economic, and social perspective. Shaykh Shawish [Jawish] spoke on the religious and historical dimensions… at the end of my speech, I spoke of the need to use the annual pilgrimage as a Muslim congress, to strengthen the bonds of unity between Muslims, so that we might realize political unity between the Ottoman state and other Muslim peoples… The event was a great success.[39]

 

Another advocate of the congress idea was Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi (c. 1854 – c.1902), one of the most prominent intellectuals of his time, who was also influenced by the teachings of Afghani and Abduh.[40] Both Rida and Kawakibi advocated the revival of Ijtihad. In one of his most influential books, Tabai al-Istibdad wa-Masari al-Isti’bad (“The Characteristics of Despotism and the Destructions of Enslavement”), al-Kawakibi put forward that among the reasons beyond the Ottoman’s contribution to the decline of the Muslims was Taqlid, which caused the Muslims to become stagnant. Instead, of continuously trying to interpret the Quran and Hadith, he proposed, Muslims relied on interpretations from centuries ago. Other reasons for the decline of Muslims he added, were that Muslims abandoned Islamic values and relied on superstitions, and also that they disregarded science and thereby, were not able to keep up with the advancements of modern society.

However, Kawakibi noted that the tyrannical nature of regimes was the root cause of the struggle of Arabs. An early contribution to Arab patriotism was made by Afghani and Abduh, who shared their thoughts on reform for Islamic societies by publishing in the journal al-Urwa al-Wuthqa. Abduh believed the Arabs’ Muslim ancestors bestowed “rationality on mankind and created the essentials of modernity,” borrowed by the West.[41] In the preface to Tabai al-Istibdad, Kawakibi boldly asserts that the root cause of the region’s backwardness is “political despotism,” and its remedy lies in “constitutional democracy.”[42] The truest expression of Islamic politics was democracy, Kawakibi claimed, as long as it was based on the brotherhood and unity of Arabs regardless of religion and ethnicity.[43] He was a vocal opponent of the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire and believed that the Sultan had no right to control the Arab people. Kawakibi also published a newspaper in his hometown, Aleppo, that promoted equal rights for Armenians, Christians, and Jews. Kawakibi stated that Arabs were, “of all nations the most suitable to be an authority in religion and an example to the Muslims; the other nations have followed their guidance at the start and will not refuse to follow them now.”[44]

Al-Kawakibi additionally believed that Mecca should be the capital of the Islamic world, not Istanbul, and that the rightful Caliph should come from the Quraysh tribe of Muhammad. These ideas are reflected in Kawakibi’s well-known Arabic treatise, Umm Al Qura (“The Mother of Villages”), one of the names of Mecca, where he presents a fictional story of an Islamic congress taking place. Rida made this work famous by serialization in al-Manar. Many believed that the Meccan congress described in Umm Al Qura had taken place. The book itself probably stirred the rumor current in Egypt in 1901, that seventy-two delegates from all Muslim countries had met in Mecca and decided to remove Abdul Hamid II from the caliphate.[45]

In his La Réveil de la nation arabe (The Awakening of the Arab Nation”), Negib Azoury (c. 1870–1916), a Maronite Christian who espoused Arab nationalist ideals, alleged that Kawakibi had been unjustifiably persecuted by Abdul Hamid II, adding:

 

Last year, a committee composed of several ulama met at Mecca to deliberate on the institution of a purely religious caliphate located at Mecca. This committee decided to confide this important dignity to a Christian foreigner, rather than leave it to the loathsome Abdul-Hamid, for it is written in the sacred books of Islam that an infidel but just prince is better than an unjust Muslim prince. The sultan learned of the existence of this committee and of some of its resolutions. To prevent this dangerous movement from spreading beyond the tomb of the Arab Prophet, he ordered the vali of the Hedjaz to provoke a massacre of pilgrims, and so render the trip perilous to all civilized Muslims.[46]

 

But whether mistaken for as a political literature, or disclosing a true secret, Umm Al Qura attracted important interest in the congress idea, explains Kramer.[47] Azoury was also joined by a number of orientalists who took the proceedings of Umm Al Qura as genuine. For example, D.S. Margoliouth (1858 – 1940), an English orientalist and member of the council of the Royal Asiatic Society, was perhaps among the first to write about the congress as though it had occurred, which was then often repeated after him.[48]

 

Gasprinsky Plan

The idea for an annual Islamic congress was again proposed in Cairo, before an audience of three hundred Egyptian political, religious and literary figures at the Continental Hotel in November 1907 by Ismail Gasprinsky (1907 – 1914), a Crimean Tatar and one of the first Muslim intellectuals in the Russian Empire. Gasprinsky had been considerably influenced by Young Ottoman writers, including their views on Pan-Islam.[49] Gasprinsky served as the mayor of his town of Bakhchysarai in the Crimea, from 1877 to 1881, when he resigned to dedicate his life to the cause of Pan-Turkism and Pan-Islam.[50] As a student cadet in Moscow, Gasprinsky was “adopted” socially by the family of Blavatsky’s publisher and ally to Afghani, Mikhail Katkov, who invited him to his home each week.[51] Katkov’s Pan-Slavic ideas deeply influenced Gasprinsky.[52] At the time, Katkov was a central figure in the Moscow Slavic Benevolent Committee, which organized a pan-Slavic congress in 1867. Gasprinsky also had been involved in the three Russian Muslim congresses of 1905-6. Gasprinsky’s appeal for a “general Muslim congress” first appeared in his Tercüman, a Turkish newspaper published continuously at Baghchesaray from 1883, exercised a wide influence among Turkish-speaking Muslims under Russian rule.[53]

Gasprinsky’s idea was brought to the attention of the world in a letter from Budapest to the London Times by Arminius Vambery. Reuters published a summary of Vambery’s letter, bringing the news to Cairo. Gasprinsky, explained Vambery, lamented that Muslims, “wherever and under whatever rule they be, they always remain behind their neighbors. In Algiers the Mahomedans are superseded by the Jews, in Crete by the Greeks, in Bulgaria by the Bulgarians, and in Russia by everybody.”[54] Vambery added:

 

The congress, embodying our learned clergy and literary celebrities, must not be frightened by the European clamour of Pan-Islamism, for our representatives, gathering from all parts of the world, and striving to solve many social and cultural questions, will open more than one hitherto barred way and door. We shall thus be able to sanction the unavoidably necessary reforms and innovations in Islam… The world is constantly changing and progressing, and we are left behind for many miles. As this congress, owing to certain reasons, cannot meet in Constantinople, we trust ta be able to unite in Cairo, which is looked upon as the second centre of Islam.[55]

 

Rashid Rida wrote of how a rumor then spread that some who were present at the speech at the Continental Hotel were working behind the scenes to gain control of the congress. Shaykh Ali Yusuf, publisher of Al-Mu'ayyad, countered on behalf of the Khedive Abbas II by organizing the Continental Hotel forum, and arranged a meeting to establish a congress preparatory committee.[56] Shaykh Ali Yusuf was aided by Shaykh Muhammad Tawfig al-Bakri (1870 – 1932), leader of Egyptian religious confraternities, who volunteered his home for the session. Shaykh al-Bakri was reported to have told Abdul Hamid II that “I wish for you to understand that I am not a simple mollah; I am a political man, I have general ideas, and I have read Aristotle, Montesquieu, J.-J. Rousseau, Spencer, Leroy-Beaulieu, etc.”[57] Lord Cromer asked himself, “Was this fin de siècle Sheikh, this curious compound of Mecca and the Paris Boulevards, the latest development in Islamism?” His response was, “I should add that the combination produced no results of any importance.”[58]

Gasprinsky also began proposing his plan to the Ottoman authorities. However, Al-Ahram reported that the Sultan was opposed to the congress. Of concern to the Ottomans would have been the presence of two Syrians, Rafiq al-Azm and his cousin Haqqi al-Azm (1864 – 1955), on the ad hoc preparatory committee.[59] Rafiq had belonged to a Young Turk movement in Syria, and when the Ottoman police discovered he had established contacts with exiled Young Turks in Europe, he fled to Egypt. There, with Rashid Rida and Abdullah Cevdet—one of the founders of the CUP, who converted to the Bahai Faith, and a friend of Theodor Herzl—he founded the Jam’iyyat al-Shura al-‘Uthmaniyya (“Ottoman Consultation Society”), which consisted of Turks, Armenians, and Circassians living in Egypt and called for Islamic unity under Ottomanism.[60] Cevdet favorably mentioned the congress plan in his own periodical, Ijtihad. When Shaykh Ali Yusuf published in Al-Mu’ayyad that Hafiz Awad, another preparatory committee member, declared that not a single Egyptian wished to see Ottoman authority reestablished in Egypt, the newspaper was banned once again in Syria.[61]

Following the Young Turk revolution of 1908, and the restoration of the Ottoman constitution, there seemed to grow again some hope for Gasprinsky’s proposal. The magazine Sirat-i Müstakim, created by Mehmet Akif Ersoy (1873 – 1936)—a member of the CUP and admirer of Afghani[62]—gave Gasprinsky’s proposal considerable coverage in 1909.[63] One faction of the Istanbul press had urged Gasprinsky to transfer his enterprise to the Ottoman capital. Such was the case with Mizan, one of the official media outlets of the CUP, founded by Mizanci Murat (1853 – 1912), a member of the Young Turks and a pan-Islamist, who also could cite from Rousseau and Montesquieu and was imbued with liberal ideas.[64] Mizan, which Murat launched during a period of Egyptian exile, became an important Turkish organ for the spread of liberal political concepts within the Ottoman Empire.[65] The idea again registered in a secret resolution of the ruling CUP meeting in September–October 1911 in Salonica.[66] The third example of Gasprinsky’s influence was a proposal published in 1913 in Istanbul by Shaykh Abdul Aziz Jawish. Jawish’s congress, however, did not materialize, and he spent the war contributing to Ottoman propaganda in Berlin and Istanbul. Following the Ottoman defeat, he found refuge first in Berlin, then with Atatürk in Anatolia, before returning to Egypt where he finished his career.[67]

 

 


[1] Haddad. “Arab Religious Nationalism in the Colonial Era,” p. 261.

[2] Shavit. “Zionism as told by Rashid Rida,” pp. 24, 29, 30, 34, 38.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ceride-i ilmiyye (Istanbul) (Muharrem 1333), 1(7): 462. / 56; cited in Kramer. Islam Assembled, p. 55.

[5] Arab Bulletin (Cairo) (June 30, 1916), no. 7, p. 5, in L/P&S/10/657; cited in Kramer. Islam Assembled, p. 57.

[6] Barry Rubin & Wolfgang G. Schwanitz. Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East (Yale University Press, 2014), p 15.

[7] Sir Ronald Storrs. Orientations (London: I. Nicholson & Watson, 1937), p. 121; cited in Noor-Aiman I. Khan. Egyptian-Indian Nationalist Collaboration and the British Empire (Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), p. 61.

[8] Cited in Lionel Gossman. The Passion of Max von Oppenheim (Open Books Publishers, 2013), p. 3.

[9] Gossman. The Passion of Max von Oppenheim, p. 3.

[10] Rubin & Schwanitz. Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, p. 14.

[11] Rubin & Schwanitz. Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, p. 13.

[12] Dreyfus. Hostage to Khomeini, p. 131.

[13] Rubin & Schwanitz. Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, p. 32.

[14] Ibid., p. 33.

[15] “American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and Refugee Aid.” Holocaust Encyclopedia (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, June 20, 2014). Retrieved from http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005367

[16] Rubin & Schwanitz. Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, p. 33.

[17] “Joseph Soloveitchik.” Jewish Virtual Library. Retrieved from https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/joseph-soloveitchik

[18] Rubin & Schwanitz. Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, p. 32.

[19] Ibid., p. 25.

[20] Ibid.,. 39.

[21] Kramer. Islam Assembled, p. 51.

[22] Arthur Goldschmidt. “National Party (Egypt).” Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East and North Africa. Retrieved from https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/asia-and-africa/middle-eastern-history/national-party

[23] Rubin & Schwanitz. Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, p. 39.

[24] Ibid., p. 39.

[25] William L. Cleveland. Islam Against the West: Shakib Arslan and the Campaign for Islamic Nationalism (University of Texas Press, 1985).

[26] Adria K. Lawrence. Imperial Rule and the Politics of Nationalism: Anti-Colonial Protest in the French Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

[27] Rubin & Schwanitz. Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, p. 80.

[28] Ibid., p. 35.

[29] Ibid., p. 35.

[30] Ibid., p. 36.

[31] Ibid., p. 36.

[32] Ibid., p. 46.

[33] Peter Hopkirk. On Secret Service East of Constantinople (Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 55–56.

[34] Kramer. Islam Assembled, p. 58.

[35] Rubin & Schwanitz. Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, p. 52.

[36] Peter Balakian. The Burning Tigris (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), p. 285.

[37] Rubin & Schwanitz. Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, p. 52.

[38] Rubin & Schwanitz. Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, p. 39.

[39] Muhammad Farid. Awrag Muhammad Farid, 85, 101, 117-18, 147, 219-20, 232-33, 261. cited in Kramer. Islam Assembled, p. 55.

[40] Charles Kurzman. Modernist Islam, 1840-1940: A Sourcebook (Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 152.

[41] Rashid Khalidi. The Origins of Arab Nationalism (Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 8.

[42] Line Khatib. Quest for Democracy: Liberalism in the Modern Arab World (Cambridge University Press, 2023)

[43] Elizabeth Thompson. How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs: The Syrian Congress of 1920 and the Destruction of Its Liberal-Islamic Alliance, 1840-1940: A Sourcebook (Grove Atlantic, 2021).

[44] Haim. Arab Nationalism, p. 27; cited in Adeed Dawisha. Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century: From Triumph to Despair (Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 23.

[45] Kramer. Islam Assembled, p. 34.

[46] Negib Azoury. Le Réveil de la nation arabe, p. 229; cited in Kramer. Islam Assembled, p. 34.

[47] Kramer. Islam Assembled, p. 34.

[48] Kramer. Islam Assembled, p. 34.

[49] Jacob M. Landau. “The Dönme: Crytpo-Jews Under Turkish Rule” Jewish Political Studies Review, 19: 1/2 (Spring 2007), p. 146.

[50] Ibid.

[51] Kramer. Islam Assembled, p. 37.

[52] A. Holly Shissler. Between Two Empires: Ahmet Agaoglu and the New Turkey (London, New York: I.B. Tauris, 2002), p. 106.

[53] Kramer. Islam Assembled, p. 37.

[54] Ibid., p. 37–38.

[55] Vambery letter of October 12, 1907, in The Times (October 22, 1907); cited in Kramer. Islam Assembled, p. 38.

[56] Kramer. Islam Assembled, p. 40.

[57] Ibid.

[58] According to Rashid Rida’s obituary for Kawakibi, in al-Manar (July 1902), 5(7)), p. 279; cited in Kramer. Islam Assembled, p. 40.

[59] Kramer. Islam Assembled, p. 41.

[60] Ibid., p. 43.

[61] Ibid.

[62] Jacob M. Landau. “The Dönme: Crytpo-Jews Under Turkish Rule” Jewish Political Studies Review, 19: 1/2 (Spring 2007), p. 75.

[63] Kramer. Islam Assembled, p. 44.

[64] Ibid., 49.

[65] Aziz Tuncer. “The Roots of Turkish Liberalism” (MA thesis). (Bilkent University, 1997), pp. 43–44, 53.

[66] Kramer. Islam Assembled, p. 50.

[67] Ibid., p. 53.

Divide & Conquer