Part 1

The Holy War

“Made in Germany”

By Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje

Professor of the Arabic Language in the University of Leiden, Holland; Councillor to the Dutch Ministry of the Colonies, etc., etc.

With a Word of Introduction by Richard J. H. Gottheil Columbia University, N. Y.

G. P. Putnam’s Sons New York and London The Knickerbocker Press 1915

COPYRIGHT, 1915 BY G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

The Knickerbocker Press, New York

INTRODUCTION

The proclamation of a “Holy War” by the Sheikh-ul-Islam at Constantinople has excited interest above and beyond its connection with the present war. It has raised the whole question of the validity and effectiveness of this measure as a political instrument in the hands of a modern Mohammedan government. Students of Islam have asked themselves of what use this weapon, taken from the arsenal of a theocratic form of sovereignty, could be in a state which is in process of conforming to the present-day theory of secular and democratic control. The development of the Ottoman Empire since the granting of the Constitution in 1908 has been followed with an interested eye by those of us who have felt the immense possibilities inherent in the Turkish people and latent in Turkish soil. It is with distinct pleasure that we read the following study of a knotty problem; for it is worked out with the hand of a master. There are few so well equipped or so competent to effect such a study--especially in the relations of the question to the larger problems of the day--as is Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje. One of the rare Europeans who have ever travelled in that part of Arabia considered by Mohammedans to be sacred and exclusive, his stay of eight months in the capital of their faith (1884-1885) enabled him not only to write the most complete and the most reliable history of that city (_Mekka_, Leiden, 1888), but also to talk with the faithful from all the corners of the Mohammedan world. As Councillor to the Government of Netherlands-India, he spent the years 1889-1906 in Batavia, where he came into closest touch with the development of Islam in the farthest East. He has laid down many of his conclusions in his comprehensive work on the Achehnese (_De Atjehers_, Leiden, 1903-1904; English translation, London, 1906). His scholarly lectures on the origins of Islam, given before various American university audiences in the spring of 1914, will long be remembered for the cool judgment and the careful poise they evinced. In the periodical publications of learned societies he has contributed numerous essays which easily place him in the very forefront of authorities on the subject which he has made his own.

The study which is here presented to the English-reading public appeared originally in the Dutch periodical _De Gids_, 1915, No. 1, under the title “Heilige Oorlog Made in Germany.” It has been ably translated by Professor Joseph E. Gillet of the University of Wisconsin, with the distinct attempt to preserve as much of the style of the author as the English language will permit. I am glad of the opportunity to express publicly my thanks to Professor Gillet for the readiness with which he accepted the task I laid upon him.

RICHARD GOTTHEIL.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK March, _1915_.

The Holy War

“Made in Germany”

The Holy War

“Made in Germany”

More than ten years ago I had a conversation with a Turk of a highly intellectual type about religious fanaticism and its bearing on political situations. He concluded his considerations on this subject about as follows: “In former times the inhabitants of the civilized world used to destroy each other for being at variance about the mysteries of the other world. Now, however, glory be to Allah, humanity has overcome this barbarous custom and everybody is free to believe what he likes. But what good is this to us, as long as wars continue to be waged on account of economic and political interests, wars of which the fanaticism is not to be outdone by that of the bitterest religious strife, and of which the destructiveness is continuously being increased by our immense technical progress? Under such circumstances a quiet enjoyment of the hard-won freedom of thought is out of the question.”

This utterance ever again obtrudes itself on my memory in connexion with the events that are taking place at present. Large groups of men, kept apart by varying political and economic interests, have for years and years consumed an important part of their intellectual and material resources in devising means by which, in the fulness of time, they might destroy each other; and now, at last, the long-expected spark has fallen on the accumulated fuel. Every one of the belligerents is horrified by the idea of responsibility for the crimes against mankind which they are perpetrating in common. The culture they shared with each other has been shelved and finds its only expression in a dull series of contentions where each one charges the other with the guilt of what they have all carefully planned together. The sceptical irony of my Turkish friend was not unjustified. Not that it teaches us anything new. Only in this respect might his utterance be somewhat surprising to those of us who are not familiar with the Mohammedan world, that it shows a Turk recognizing without restriction general religious peace and freedom of thought as an undisputed possession. Considered from this point of view the words quoted here are the more valuable, as they express with tolerable accuracy the opinion of all Turkish intellectuals on the problem of religion.

This tolerance seems irreconcilable with the prescriptions of the Mohammedan law concerning the attitude towards the adherents of other religions. For, according to this law, which as a whole claims divine authority, the whole world of man is to be subjected to the Mohammedan community and is also, as far as possible, to be incorporated by it in a spiritual sense. That this aim may be attained, the community of the faithful is to do _jihâd_, _i. e._, carry on a _holy war_ against all that are still living outside the circle of its authority. The leadership in the _jihâd_, the determination of time, place, and means, is one of the chief duties of the head of the community, the Caliph, the successor of Mohammed as supreme governor, supreme judge, and supreme commander of all the Moslims. As the interests of Islâm in his opinion require it, he is to carry on this war with more or less energy or even temporarily to desist from it. Under no circumstances may he agree to a suspension of the offensive against a nation of unbelievers for more than ten years. Provided they subject themselves to the Mohammedan state-authority and are satisfied with the position of subjects without civic rights, adherents of the Jewish and of the Christian religion, and of such religions as obtain equal recognition with those, are granted the exercise of their religion, though with certain restrictions. In the case of real heathens subjection must be accompanied by conversion.

The _jihâd_-program assumes that the Mohammedans, just as at their first appearance in the world, continuously form a compact unity under one man’s leadership. But this situation has in reality endured so short a time, the realm of Islâm has so quickly disintegrated into an increasingly large number of principalities, the supreme power of the so-called Caliph, after flourishing for a short period, has become so much a mere word, that even the _jihâd_-prescriptions have had to be adapted to this state of crumbling authority. As in most other respects so also concerning the waging of the holy war, the law therefore transfers the authority and the duties of the one Caliph to the various territorial heads, to each one for the extent of his dominion. Now it is evident that this shifting of authority from one to many is a great simplifying influence for the internal government; but it is equally evident that by this disintegration the continuance of the world-conquest, as it was started in the first century of Islâm, is made impossible.

To be sure, there were a number of other causes which stemmed the first wild rush of the Moslim legions. They met frontiers where resistance could not be broken at once, and the enjoyment of what had been conquered weakened their energy. The great deeds of the first generations were idealized in the imagination of the later ones, the stains removed from them, and the theory of their desirable continuance elaborated in details, the more casuistical as their realization was getting further outside the sphere of possibilities. Only where a Mohammedan territory is attacked by a nation of unbelievers, there the duty of defence is put upon the whole of the population. Offensive action is justified only when it is ordered and regulated by a recognized head of the state. Where unbelievers succeed in subjecting a Moslim population, the latter must not resign itself to this state of submission, but must grasp the first opportunity for either throwing off the yoke or for emigrating to an independent Moslim country; and this as much in order to ward off the danger with which their own religion is threatened, as in order to strengthen the ranks of the faithful for the struggle against the enemy, _i. e._, the non-subjected unbelievers. Even if the impossibility of effective resistance or emigration should endure for centuries, the relation of dependency upon a non-Mohammedan state-authority created thereby is to be accepted only as temporary and abnormal.

The whole set of laws which, according to Islâm, should regulate the relations between believers and unbelievers, is the most consequent elaboration imaginable of a mixture of religion and of politics in their mediæval form. That he who possesses material power should also dominate the mind is accepted as a matter of course; the possibility that adherents of different religions could live together as citizens of the same state and with equal rights is excluded. Such was the situation in the Middle Ages not only with the Mohammedans: before and even long after the Reformation our ancestors did not think very differently on the matter. The difference is chiefly this, that Islâm has fixed all these mediæval regulations in the form of eternal laws, so that later generations, even if their views have changed, find it hard to emancipate themselves from them. This emancipation became all the more difficult because both the multitude and the scribes clung the more tightly to this questionable legacy of their ancestors, the more circumstances seemed to flout the realization of this mighty program. It is a fact that in the countries of Islâm all through the centuries little care has been given to the education of the masses, and the idea of a future world-domination was too pleasing to their vanity to be lightly discarded. The jurists, in their narrowness, did not partake of the fulness of real life; they anxiously preserved the forms of the ancient ideals without noticing that their contents had vanished. To them the appreciation of religious freedom by intellectual Turks, such as the friend quoted above, was and still is a frivolous concession to the debased spirit of the times.

Nevertheless the minds went on their forward march, in the past century often with surprising rapidity. Through the very harshness of Mohammedan society and the inefficiency and corruption of the Mohammedan governments the whole territory of Islâm, in contrast to its conscious program of world-dominion, gradually came under European influence. This has gone so far already that more than ninety per cent. of all Mohammedans live in conquered territory or in protectorates under the political rule of European powers, whereas the independence of the remaining part, chiefly Turkey, is maintained in appearance only by a certain cleverness in balancing between the large powers which are vying for its tutelage.

This coming into contact of the territory of Islâm and the world outside which has ended with the total loss of the former’s political independence, was originally brought about by the necessity of Europe to expand economically, that is, by the self-interest of the nations which were able to shake off the dust of the Middle Ages and which overtook the Mohammedans in a spiritual as well as in a material sense. Later on only did the narrow idea of exploitation give way to that of annexation and eventually to that of complete absorption of the conquered territories, in the sense that the population was to be educated into partaking, as far as they could and was deemed expedient, of the culture of the conquerors. This was not done at one stroke; the struggle between the egotism of the guardians and their sense of duty to their wards is still in full swing. But the European guardians, even those for whom the consequent application of the newer principles is often too hard a task, would even now be ashamed to profess any other principle of government but that of a pure harmony between the interests of two nations, of which one has been subordinated by history to the other. The Mohammedans under direct or indirect European government have already derived considerable benefit from this; and one may say that on the whole they are better off than their co-religionists in the quasi-independent states, where they suffer the disadvantages both of a corrupt administration and of the struggle for economic gain between the great powers of the West. Still, the oppression under which the population labours in such a country as Turkey has also excited aspirations to intellectual development. The Young-Turk movement of these late years loudly speaks for that.

In the more highly developed circles of all Mohammedan countries the conviction has become general that the mediæval mixture of religion and politics, which the system of Islâm wanted to uphold for ever, is not of our times. The Mohammedans have become inferiors in this world, politically and socially; so much so that the idea of a world-dominion founded on their religion could not keep anything of its attraction for all but the ignorant. The others are almost ashamed of the presumption expressed by the teaching of the _jihâd_, and try hard to prove that the law itself restricts its application to circumstances which do not occur any more.

The lesson of tolerance was least easily impressed on the nations which had stood in the front rank in the political heyday of Islâm, least of all on the Turks who had played the leading part in the last scene of glory. When in 1258 Bagdad was destroyed by the Mongols and the Abasside Caliphate, dating more than five centuries back, was wiped out, the Mohammedan world was not lifted from its hinges, as would have happened if the Caliphate still had had anything to do with the central government of the Mohammedans. In fact, this princely house had already been living three centuries and a half on the faint afterglow of its ephemeral splendour; and if during that time it was not crowded out by one of the many powerful sultans, its very practical insignificance was the main reason for that. So insignificant had these caliphs in name become that certain European writers sometimes have felt induced to represent them as a kind of religious princes of Islâm, who voluntarily or not had transferred their secular power to the many territorial princes in the wide dominion of Islâm. To them the total lack of secular authority, coupled with the often-manifested reverence of the Moslim for the Caliphate, appeared unintelligible except on the assumption of a spiritual authority, a sort of Mohammedan papacy. Still, such a thing there never was, and Islâm, which knows neither priests nor sacraments, could not have had occasion for it. Here, as elsewhere, the multitude preferred legend to fact: they imagined the successor of the Prophet as still watching over the whole of the Moslim community; as, according to historical tradition, he really did during the first two centuries following the Hijrah, and this long after the institution of the Caliphate had disappeared in the political degeneration of Islâm. However, they did not imagine him as a pope, but as a supreme ruler; above all as the _amîr-al-mu’-minîn_, commander of the legions of Islâm, which sometime would make the whole world bend to its power.

The Caliph, the lieutenant of Allah’s Messenger, and the _jihâd_, the holy war against the whole world outside Islâm: with those two names was indissolubly connected the remembrance of those two brilliant centuries in which the course of circumstances seemed to justify the Mohammedan ambition for world-dominion. Whatever disappeared in reality survived in legend; the worship of the shadow-Caliphs of Bagdad made it easier for many Mohammedans to forget the failure of their political ideal.

When Bagdad had fallen and a large part of the Abasside family had been exterminated, this political fetishism still had its after-effects; the sultans of Egypt availed themselves of it by making one of those who had escaped murder continue the tradition of the dummy-Caliphate in their capital and thus creating the impression that their territory had now become the centre of Islâm. But this shadow of a shadow was to fade away entirely when the sun of the Ottomans reached its zenith. Under their direction Islâm ventured its last attempt, not to subdue the world, to be sure, but at least to become a world-power of the first rank. They succeeded in taking Constantinople (1452), a task at which the greatest Moslim princes of yore had vainly tried their strength. When in 1517 they had conquered Egypt and subsequently also the province of the holy cities of Arabia, Mecca and Medina, they felt themselves strong enough to try resuscitating the tradition of the real Caliphate; or, at least, to assume the part of fetish themselves. They were not deterred from this even by the express prescription of the law, which requires that he who shall occupy the Caliphate shall be descended from the noble Arabian house of Qoraish. The sophistry of complaisant jurists helped them to remove this objection, and the multitude did not resist these tricks, seeing that the dreams which they connected with the Caliphate now seemed to turn into realities. The conqueror of Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, Western Arabia, Mesopotamia, and the empire of Byzantium, whom a large part of Europe considered as a formidable foe, might confidently substitute his sword as a fetish for the powerless pedigree of the Abassides.

This re-born Caliphate consequently lacked important traditional characteristics; and in other respects also it could not be considered as the regular continuation of its predecessor. Several of the oldest Mohammedan countries remained entirely outside the Turkish sphere of influence; and those were not only such where, as in Persia, a dynasty opposed to the Turks raised the banner of heresy, but also perfectly orthodox countries in Central Asia, in India, in North-Western Africa, where the Turkish sword found no occasion to assert itself. In Morocco the Turkish Caliphate was even directly ignored, as the local princes, descendants of the Prophet, themselves assumed the highest title. Elsewhere, simultaneously with the rise of the Ottomans or after, there arose new Mohammedan dominions which have never come into contact with any real or supposed political centre of Islâm; such as those in the Far East of Asia and in Central Africa.

Indeed the usurpation of the Caliph-title by the Ottoman Sultans had only this significance, that in their political period of splendour they wished to have it established beyond dispute that no other Moslim prince could compare with them in importance. This could in no wise be more aptly done than by adding to all their high-sounding Persian and Turkish titles the name of the most exalted office which had ever existed in Islâm. To their power this nominal title of Caliph has never added anything; they ruled only what their armies had conquered and outside those limits they did not exert the slightest influence.

The Turkish sword soon lost its edge; long before the policy of the great European powers gnawed off piece after piece from the realm of the Ottomans, several provinces had developed into separate feudal dominions under hereditary dynasties. Since Turkey, entirely dependent in its policy upon non-Mohammedan powers, can only claim about five per cent. of the Mohammedans of the world as its subjects, it would sound highly ridiculous to have the Sultan of that realm called “Lieutenant of God’s Messenger, Supreme Commander of the Faithful,” if also outside Turkey one were not used to much traditional nonsense in princely titles.

It is just in this last century that the Turks, through a concourse of circumstances, have sometimes succeeded in coining some small advantage out of this doubtfully legal, now meaningless title.

Means of communication increased a thousandfold have now brought into contact Mohammedan nations which formerly knew nothing, or hardly anything, about each other’s existence. The approximately 230,000,000 of Mohammedans living under non-Moslim rule mostly do not possess sufficient historical remembrance to understand that the change in administration has been an improvement for them. They see the political past of Islâm only through the veil of legend, and when the present gives occasion for grievances and objections--and where are these lacking?--they are rather prone to believe that all their complaints would be cured, if only the Commander of the Faithful could take their interests in hand. Of the maladministration under which the real subjects of the Sultan of Turkey are labouring, they hear little and experience nothing. And the Sultan, who has been the worst in this respect, until in 1909 he was deposed and exiled by his subjects, has worked more zealously and more successfully than any of his predecessors for the dissemination amongst the Mohammedans of the false imaginations concerning the Caliphate. His wily but short-sighted policy, which brought his own empire ever nearer to its fall, made him seek solace for many a failure in Panislamic intrigues, staged by unscrupulous but mostly ignorant and blundering confederates, who showed the credulous the ideal picture of a Caliph, assuring them that it was a good likeness of Abdulhamîd.

There has often been talk of an organization of Panislâm under the direction of Abdulhamîd, but this is without foundation. In 1897, in connexion with some foul, secretly circulated, pamphlets, which the most intimate counsellors of the Sultan in vying for his favour had let loose against each other, I tried to describe the atmosphere around the despot,[1] and when, in 1908, I witnessed the first two months of the revolution in Constantinople, I found a complete justification of my description.[2] That gang of shallow intriguers was little qualified to lead a serious international movement. They exploited the connexions established with certain Mohammedans of consequence in non-Turkish territory to increase their own advantage and prestige, without being of any real use in the resuscitation of the dead Caliphate. The establishment of a few Turkish consulates in Mohammedan countries under European rule also failed of its aim. They usually forgot to pay the consuls their salaries; the consuls did not even know the languages of the populations amongst whom they lived, and took no pains to learn them. Their mostly very “advanced” manner of living did not serve to heighten respect for the man who sent them.