Imperial and Individual Journeys in a Global War

At the beginning of the First World War, Moroccan Aiyesh Ben Mohammed came to France to fight in the French army on the Western Front. Wounded and taken prisoner in 1915, Ben Mohammed ended up in a camp in Germany built especially for Muslim prisoners.  His captors urged him to join the Ottoman Empire in a holy war against the Entente.  In March 1916, the Germans forced Ben Mohammed and several hundred of his fellow prisoners into a battalion and enrolled them in the ranks of the Ottoman Army in the Middle East.  Ben Mohammed then deserted to British lines.  After a time in Egypt, he returned to Casablanca, where he recounted his story to French military officials.

Ben Mohammed’s journeys and experiences were part of a global war, which included an effort by the Central Powers to initiate a global Islamic “revolution.”  Tales like his are vivid, and can provide all too rare access to the past as the lived experience of individuals, allowing us better to understand the larger questions historians seek to understand—about war, colonialism, violence, religion, and many others.  Yet how can we integrate the largest scale—the clash of empires and ideologies, and the thinking and experience of millions of Muslims around the world—and the smallest scale—the journeys of one man, the day-to-day struggle to survive and make sense of experience, the balancing of family, religious, political, and other loyalties—into a story that illuminates the past at both ends of the scale, and at the levels in between? On one hand, Ben Mohammed’s personal story makes little sense without its connections to the larger story of world war. On the other hand, the contest for leadership of the Muslim world would matter little if it did not decisively shape individuals’ lives.