The Jihad Declaration and Its Significance during the Great War

Although it is not particularly well-known, on entering the war in November 1914, the Ottoman Empire called on its citizens to stage a holy war, or ‘jihad’ on the Entente Powers (England, France, and Russia). Although the Empire had, by this time, been taken over by a secularizing military government which was deeply suspicious of religious leaders and of Islam more generally, it hoped that by making this declaration, it could bind together the disparate peoples of the Ottoman hinterlands. In this paper, I want to explore ways in which teachers could use the jihad declaration to talk about 1.  the ways in which prewar colonialism made the European powers vulnerable once a ‘world war’ began; 2.  the ways in which states or groups have used ‘holy war’ as a tactic, and Muslim populations have not followed blindly the dictates of religious leaders; 3.  how the Ottoman’s German allies responded to the declaration; and 4.  how central the Ottoman Empire was to the way the war was fought, and to the fate of Europe (and the Near East and Africa) after 1919.   The point is to reiterate that the Great War didn’t just happen in the trenches in Flanders.