To say Americans have little understanding of the ‘Middle East’ outside of what they know from the Bible, can be a bruising, but accurate assessment. Utter Levant to folks in Middle America and it fails to register, same with historical references to Palestine, Mesopotamia and Trans-Jordan.
This is why Sean McMeekin’s The Berlin-Baghdad Express excels, it provides a complete and well detailed historical primer on the rush to war and the resulting extremist theocratic ideals it helped nurture.
On the face of it, The Berlin-Baghdad Express should be a book about the railway of the same name. Yet McMeekin smartly stitches together a historical quilt, with chapter after chapter of portraits, military campaigns, and political subterfuge that lead to World War I.
What quickly becomes apparent is McMeekin is taking this German-centric story off in generally unplumbed depths, exploring the concept of a Christian state-sponsored jihad.
McMeekin smartly notes that the largest Muslim nation in the world at the curtain of the 19th century was Great Britain, with 100 million Muslim subjects in India, Sudan and a number of other states from north Africa to Arabia. Followed behind by Czarist Russian, France and finally, Germany, with its African colonies.
There was no Muslim ill-reputation attached to the empire of Kaiser Wilhelm II at that point and the Orientalists within the Prussian halls of power thought this could be exploited for colonial and economic glory. Push the British to collapse in India, secure the Suez Canal and even create the final steely empirical stranglehold, a railway line that stretch from the Balkans to the cradle of civilization, Mesopotamia.
McMeekin sums up Wilhelmine policy best with his, “Let the Americans have the plains, the Russians Siberia, the French and Belgians and British various malaria-ridden lands in Africa. Germany would build her own economic empire in the very cradle of Western civilization.”
To achieve this goal outside of overwhelming might, even with a well-lubricated Ottoman alliance, the Germans realized fomenting religious zealotry against the British and her allies could brutally effective force multipliers.
Sometimes farcical, rarely effective, McMeekin demonstrates how much effort, lives and riches were pumped into manipulative German jihad efforts. McMeekin also uses these pins on a historical map to lay blame, in part, on the Germans of World War I for the continuing religious extremism of today.
When historical work uncovers facts to provide context rather than attribute guilt, it is at its best. McMeekin argues his case by tying Kaiser-era religious machinations to the blossoming of state-sponsored anti-Semitic and industrializing Muslim fanaticism.
More a round-out of German-Turko intrigue than about the railway itself, McMeekin demonstrates portraitist skills in a ranging history that will surely prove illuminating for those unfamiliar with this element of Middle Eastern history.
The Berlin-Baghdad Express by Sean McMeekin was purchased by Boston Book Bums for review.
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