Abstract: The Ottoman Empire, under pressure from its ally Germany, declared a
jihad shortly after entering the First World War. The move was calculated to rouse
Muslims in the British, French and Russian empires to rebellion. Dismissed at the
time and since as a ‘jihad made in Germany’, the Ottoman attempt to turn the Great
War into a holy war failed to provoke mass revolt in any part of the Muslim world.
Yet, as German Orientalists predicted, the mere threat of such a rebellion, particularly
in British India, was enough to force Britain and its allies to divert scarce manpower
and materiel away from the main theatre of operations in the Western Front to the
Ottoman front. The deepening of Britain’s engagement in the Middle Eastern theatre
of war across the four years of World War I can be attributed in large part to combating
the threat of jihad.
Keywords: Ottoman Empire, Great War, jihad, WWI, Middle East.
The Ottoman entry into the First World War should have provoked little or no concern
in European capitals. For decades, the West had dismissed the Ottoman Empire as
Europe’s sick man.1
Since the late 1870s, the European powers had carved out whole
swathes of Ottoman territory for their empires with impunity. The Russians annexed
the Caucasian provinces of Kars, Ardahan and Batum in 1878. The French added
Tunisia to their North African possessions in 1881, and the British annexed Cyprus in
1878 and occupied Egypt in 1882. Nor had the depredations ended there. Italy
occupied Libya in 1911 and the Balkan states seized the last Ottoman territories in
Europe in 1912 and 1913. With the outbreak of the Great War, the Entente Powers
confidently anticipated Turkey’s imminent demise.
