Islam in Europa, Revolten in Mittelost: Islamismus und Genozid von Wilhelm II und Enver Pascha über Hitler und al-Husaini bis Arafat, Usama Bin Laden und Ahmadinejad sowie Gespräche mit Bernard Lewis by Wolfgang G. Schwanitz (review)

Sometimes the title of a book can be misleading, in terms of not reflecting the content’s quantity or quality at first glance. Neither is the case here. Especially the subtitle, which describes exactly what the book is about and, at the same time, displays the problem of the content in general. Wolfgang Schwanitz draws a continuous line from Kaiser Wilhelm II to Mahmud Ahmadinejad and makes Germany, a lesser actor in the Middle East, the root of violence, extremism, and genocide in the 20^th century history of the region. Moreover, he connects these with the artificial term of “jihadization” in general, which, after a German-enforced Ottoman proclamation of jihad of 1914, became the guiding script for generations of German and Islamic political leaders.

It is only possible to do this if you avoid a serious examination of the history of imperialist domination and its political, social, and cultural aftermath. Only then, could a provisional attaché of the German consulate general in Cairo, Max von Oppenheim, be regarded as a mastermind, author of an influential master plan and the point of origin for jihadization. Schwanitz’s portrayal of Oppenheim makes him the chief ideologue, one influenced, within the two decades before World War I, not only the kaiser and the complete foreign and military policies of Germany, but also the Ottoman sultancaliph, the Sublime Porte and the whole Muslim world in a way never seen before.

This thesis on the influence and singlehanded responsibility of Oppenheim is not a particularly new one. It has been something of a recurrent topic in German and Anglo-Saxon research, ever since the pre-World War I French and British media placed him at the center of conspiracy theories about secret German insurgencies in the Middle East. This notwithstanding, the author’s account is no less absurd.

Schwanitz does not know anything reliable about Oppenheim’s function and activity within the German foreign service between 1896 and 1909. Furthermore, his knowledge of Germany’s Middle East policy is extremely nourished by his idea of an official and coherent jihad policy, for which he could not provide any archive-based information (unsurprisingly, because it never existed). Apart from the legendary 1914 master plan “Die Revolutionierung der islamischen Gebiete unserer Feinde” (“The Revolutionizing of the Islamic Regions of Our Enemies”), Schwanitz only refers to one of 467 reports Oppenheim wrote in his 13 years in Cairo. To conclude, only by the fact of their existence, that they have influenced German and Ottoman/Islamic politics and practice on a global and long-term dimension, is not only bold, it is downright wrong. No high-ranking member of the foreign office has ever read his master plan. And why should they? In reality, the text was only finished after the declaration of jihad on November 14, 1914, and it mainly deals with commonplace diplomacy. There had already been long-established geopolitical axioms and constructions of menace, in that the Suez Canal was regarded as the Achilles’ heel and India as the “crown jewel” of the British Empire, while London and Paris constantly feared an uprising of “their” Muslims, not least because of their perception of almightiness of the caliphate and its right to proclaim a jihad.

Besides the fact that jihad was a usual element of war within the Islamic world, it was also one of the most powerful narratives of the “Eastern Question” during the age of high imperialism. Whereas...