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t w o The story begins during World War I with John Buchan’s novel Greenmantle and the plot to bring down the British Empire: “There is a dry wind blowing through the East,” we read, “and the parched grasses await the spark and the wind is blowing towards the Indian border. . . . I have reports from agents everywhere—pedlars in South Russia, Afghan horse-dealers, Turcoman merchants, pilgrims on the road to Mecca, sheikhs in North Africa, sailors on the Black Sea coasters, sheep-skinned Mongols, Hindu fakirs, Greek traders in the Gulf, as well as respectable Consuls who use cyphers. They tell the same story. With these facts, Sir Walter Bullivant of the British Foreign Office briefs Richard Hannay, who has just returned from the Western Front. “The East is waiting for a revelation. It has been promised one. Some star-man, prophecy , or trinket—is coming out of the West. The Germans know and that is the card with which they are going to astonish the world.”1 Hannay’s mission, should he agree to undertake it, is to find the mastermind, foil the plot, and save England. Armed with three clues obtained at great cost from an agent who died near Kut in Mesopotamia, Hannay agrees and the first British spy novel about the Middle East gets underway. Accompanied by colleagues, who include Sandy Arbuthnot, a multilingual Orientalist who resembles T.E. Lawrence and wanders throughout Spies and Holy War J i h a d and W orld War I S p i e s a n d H o l y W a r 15 Anatolia as a Sufi dervish impersonator gathering intelligence, and John Blenkiron, a pragmatic American capitalist who, despite American neutrality in the war, wants to “get let into the game somehow,”2 Hannay works out a plan and the group decides to meet in Constantinople. Sandy disappears for parts East, and Hannay and Blenkiron take a European route to the Ottoman capital where they discover that not only are the Germans behind the plot, but that the mastermind is an unlikely character. Their nemesis is not the German military embodied in the repulsive Colonel Stumm, but, surprisingly, a German woman, none other than the notorious Hilda von Einem, an archaeologist, who was once married to a German diplomat . Von Einem tries to recruit Arbuthnot into her anti-British conspiracy to unite Muslims across the Ottoman Empire in a strike at the heart of the British Empire. She needs him to impersonate her Muslim “Mahdi,” Greenmantle , who has inconsiderately forsaken her by dying before the onset of the holy war. She tempts Sandy with greatness and the prospect of leading millions, but he, in typical British form, decides to save the Empire instead. The novel Greenmantle was published in 1916 in the midst of World War I and presents a conspiracy—an Islamic jihad against the British Empire in the Middle East. Buchan’s fictionalized account of the “plot to bring down the British Empire” is the first real spy novel to use the Middle East and its peoples for plot and character. It drew on popular late nineteenth century British imperialist views of the Middle East. These included the key elements that readers had come to expect from the popular fiction of the day, creating a paradigm that would be incorporated in political thrillers and spy novels throughout the twentieth century: namely, a conspiracy by the Arab/Muslim world to destroy the West—thwarted, in this case, by a British hero. Successful when it first appeared, by 1960 the novel had sold more than 350,000 copies.3 For his fiction, Buchan (1875–1940) drew upon a Scottish Calvinist upbringing that taught the moral imperative of serving good as well as love of Empire.4 Before World War I, he worked in South Africa on post-Boer War refugee and repatriation issues and returned to England to work in law and politics. Like many civil servants in precarious financial situations, he added to his income by writing fiction, biographies of great men, and popular history . In 1913, too ill to serve in the military because of ulcer problems, he also decided to write “shockers”— The Thirty-Nine Steps remaining one of his most popular. Buchan spent the war years working first for the Intelligence Corps and then, in 1917, was appointed director of propaganda for the Ministry of Information. His connections with the British secret service during that time are reflected in...

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