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Iraq in World War I Sonderdrucke aus der Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg WERNER ENDE Iraq in World War I ite Mujtahids’ Call for JihÁd׳The Turks, the Germans and the Shi Originalbeitrag erschienen in: Rudolph Peters (Hrsg.): Proceedings of the ninth Congress of the Union Européenne des Arabisants et Islamisants : Amsterdam, 1st to 7th septembre 1978. Leiden: Brill, 1981. (Publications of the Netherlands Institute of Archaeology and Arabic Studies in Cairo ; 4), S. [57]-71 IRAQ IN WORLD WAR I: THE TURKS, THE GERMANS AND THE SHIITE MU JTAHIDS' CALL FOR JIHAD WERNER ENDE One day in January 1915, a small squad of men on horseback was approaching the Shi cite holy town of Kerbela. Five of them, wearing a mixture of both Turkish and German military uniform, were German officers. In addition, there were Ahmad Khan Qajar, a relative of the Shah of Iran accompanying the Germans as inter- preter, and a few Arab and Armenian servants. The group was under the command of major Friedrich Klein, a former German military attaché in Tehran and Cairo. The Iranian ambassador to Istanbul, Mahmild Khan Qajdr, had been instrumental in preparing the ground, in Kerbela, for this rather unusual group of visitors to the tomb of Imam Husain b. 'Ali. The leading men of Kerbela had been notified in advance that major Klein and his group would come as a special delegation from the German Emperor. When approaching the Euphrates, the group was met there by a delega- tion from Kerbela led by a son of the "grand mujtahid", and was guided to the town. There the delegation was received by the grand mujtahid himself and a number of other prominent 'Warn(/' and notables. In the ensuing conversations, which lasted several days, the mujtahids pointed out the recent financial difficulties of Kerbela and Najaf resulting from the outbreak of the war, as the British had stopped disbursement of the grants which until then had been sent regularly to Iraq from India, and had been handed over for distribution to a number of mujtahids by the British Resident in Baghdad. [The most important of these grants was the so-called Oudh(Awadh)-Bequest, established by the Shiite Nawabs of Lucknow a long time ago. This was a large sum of Indian rupees allocated annually to the shrines of Najaf and Kerbela] .1 1 Hamid Algar: Religion and State in Iran, 1785-1906, Berkeley 1969, pp. 237-38; Mahmad Mahrniid: Tarikh-i raweibit-i siyeisi-yi Iran wa Inglis (. .), vol. 6(Tehran 1953), pp. 1741-44; S. H. Longrigg: Four Centuries of Modern Iraq, Oxford 1925, p. 28o note 1; Atiyyah (see note 7 below), pp. 81- 84. For Oudh(Awadh) see M. H. Zaidi: Eine Einfahrung zu den Muharram- 58 W. ENDE The German delegation, in its turn, asked the mujtahids for a fetwa calling on the whole Shiite community, including the Shiites of Iran, to join the Holy War (jihad) which had been declared by the Ottoman Sultan on November 12, 1914, and corro- borated by the Sunnite Shaikh al-Islam two days later, against Britain and her allies. It was planned to use this fetwa in the Klein mission's forthcoming attempts to mobilize the Shiite popula- tion of Iran and—if possible—the whole Muslim East against Britain and Russia. After a series of conversations, and after receiving, as a first major instalment, the equivalent of 50 000.—Reichsmark in Turkish gold coins, the five leading mujtahids of Kerbela promised to write and sign with their seals the fetwa the Germans had asked for. They also sent a telegram of homage to the Kaiser. In addition, the grand mujtahid said he was ready to provide the Germans with a letter addressed to the Shah of Iran, in which the latter was urged by the grand mujtahid to abandon his neutrality and actively support the Central Powers. When still in Kerbela, the German delegation was informed by an emissary of the German consulate in Baghdad that the Turkish authorities there were viewing these direct contacts with the Shi`ite divines with the utmost uneasiness and suspicion. After their return to Baghdad on January 27, 1915, news reached Klein and his comrades that the mujtahids had had second thoughts about their decision regarding the fetwa. Therefore one of the officers, lieutenant Edgar Stern-Rubarth, returned to Kerbela in order to make sure that the mujtahids would keep their promise. Finally this officer and the Persian interpreter (who had remained in Kerbela all the time) received the fetwa, written on a piece of parchment sized zto x 6o cm, and also the letter of the grand mujtahid to the Shah. The fetwa is said to have been distributed secretly by leaflets in the Shiite world as far as India. The letter to the Shah proved useless, as developments in Iran made it impossible to deliver it. It was handed over by Stern-Rubarth to the German Embassy in Istanbul before he left for Europe. Feierlichkeiten (. .), in: ZDMG, Supplement III/I: XIX. Deutscher Orienta- listentag (. .), Vortrage, ed. W. Voigt, Wiesbaden 1977, pp. 629-48, and J. Raj : The Revenue System of the Nazvabs of Oudh, in: JESHO 2/1959/92-104; further article "Awadh" in VI, 2nd ed., I. IRAQ IN WORLD WAR I 59 The above account is based on the memoirs of two members of major Kleins group. They are Hans Liihrs, an archaeologist with earlier experience in Iraq, and Edgar Stern-Rubarth, afterwards a prominent liberal journalist in the Weimar Republic who, for political reasons, emigrated to Britain in the thirties. Ltihrs memoirs (called "Gegenspieler des Obersten Lawrence") were published as early as 1936 and within a very short time went into several re-editions. 2 Stern-Rubarth briefly mentions the Klein mission, including the expedition to Kerbela, in a book about contemporary European politics published in English in 1939 and in German in 1948. $ He gives a more detailed account, however, in his memoirs published in 1964.4 To the best of my knowledge, the negotiations of major Kleins group in Kerbela are nowhere mentioned in the works of Arab or non-German western authors dealing with the history of Iraq and Iran in World War I and/or the role of the Germans behind the Shi cite jilted propaganda. In German historiography, the accounts of both Liihrs and Stern-Rubarth have been used for an important study, by Ulrich Gehrke, about Germanys relations with Iran in World War I. In accordance with the main topic of his book,5 however, the author treats the episode of the negotiations in Kerbela and the related problem of the Shiite mujtahids call for jihad only as a side issue. The internal situation in Kerbela and the other shrine towns and the personal background and political role of the mujtahids who conferred with the German delegation remain, of course, outside the scope of Gehrkes investigation. It is especially to this aspect, and to the general problem of German and Turkish contacts with the Shiite religious establish- ment of Iraq, to which I would like to draw your attention in the present paper. The political attitude of the Shi cite community of Iraq during 2 For the present paper I have used the 5th edition, Berlin s.d. [1937 ?], esp. pp. 10-21. 3 Three Men Tried . Austin Chamberlain, Stresemann, Briand and their Fight for a New Europe, London 1939, esp. pp. 24-26. (German version: Drei Manner suchen Europa, Munich 1948). 4 Aus zuverlcissiger Quelle verlautet . Ein Leben fur Presse and Politik, Stuttgart 1964, pp. 66-83. 5 Persien in der deutschen Orientpolitik des Ersten , Welthrieges, 2 vols. Stuttgart s.d. [1961], esp. I pp. 56-57, II p. 45.—See also Renate Vogel: Die Persien-und Afghanistanexpedition Oskar Ritter v. Niedermayers 1915116, Osnabruck 1976. 6o W. ENDE World War I and the years immediately following it, as well as the internal situation in the Shiite shrine towns have been treated, of course, by a number of Arab (mainly Iraqi) and western (mainly British) authors. As examples of recent studies concerning this subject by Arab authors I may mention the following: 1) Vol. IV (publ. Baghdad 1974) of 'Ali al-Wardi's Lamahcit ijtinui(iya min terikh al-hadith (this volume. being devoted to the years 1914-18), 2) (Abdallah Fand al-Nafisi's book Daur al-shica fi tatawwur al- `Iraq al-siycisi al-hadith, 6 and 3) Ghassan R. Atiyyah's Iraq 1908-1921. A Socio-Political Study.? Wardi's 8 multi-volume work, incidentally, is an interesting and entertaining mixture of social and cultural history, social an- thropology and traditional adab. The books by Nafisi (who is a Kuwaiti) and Atiyyah (an Iraqi of Shiite origin) are based on Ph.D. dissertations submitted to British universities. 9 In the three works just mentioned and in the others concerning the same subject which are known to me, German activities in support of the jihad movement in general and the Shiite jihad in particular are mention- ed here and there. 1° Sometimes the names of Germans, Iranians and Arabs involved in these activities are given. Information concerning this aspect of Iraqi internal politics is drawn almost exclusively 11 from British sources and the memoirs of Iraqi Arab contemporaries of the time under discussion here. German sources and secondary material are—in most cases, of course, for linguistic reasons—conspicuously absent in the footnotes of the paragraphs where this aspect of the story is discussed. (The same holds true, incidentally, for the use of Turkish material concerning this period). Of course I do not claim that the use of both Turkish and German material by Iraqi and other historians would solve all open questions 6 Beirut (Dar al-Nahar) 1973.
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  • Khosrow-Nāma*
    An Unexpected Romance: Reevaluating the Authorship of the Khosrow-nāma* AUSTIN O’MALLEY The University of Arizona ([email protected]) Abstract This article examines the authorship of the Khosrow-nāma, a Perso-Hellenic romance traditionally attributed to ʿAṭṭār. Forty years ago, Shafiʿi-Kadkani laid out a complex argument against ʿAṭṭār’s authorship. He claimed that the attribution was a result of a later forgery, basing his argument on internal chronological evidence, religious and stylistic markers, and the manuscript tradition. The present article systematically evaluates this argument, showing it to be less persuasive than it first appears. First, I introduce new manuscript evidence to demonstrate that the poem was circulating under ʿAṭṭār’s name already before the time of the alleged forgery. I then reassess the internal evidence to show that the Khosrow-nāma could, in fact, fit into a plausible chronology of ʿAṭṭār’s oeuvre. Next, I critique the stylistic and religious arguments against ʿAṭṭār’s authorship, arguing that the romance does not deviate from ʿAṭṭār’s undisputed works nearly as much as is often supposed. I conclude by suggesting that the available data are explained more easily by accepting ʿAṭṭār’s authorship than by adopting the theory of a later forgery. ew poets have had as far-reaching an influence as Farid al-Din ʿAṭṭār (d. ca. 618/1221). The author of the famous Manṭeq al-ṭayr and several other important works, he is remembered both within the tradition and outside it as a critical figure in the devel-
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