From Berlin to bin Laden

A history of the Baghdad Express illuminates the resilience of politicized Islam.

By Christopher Hitchens

 

Image credit: Marc Yankus

 

 

 

Few moments in the annals of derring-do will surpass the one at the opening of John Buchan’s Greenmantle (1916) when Sir Walter Bullivant explains the Ottoman side of the Great War to Richard Hannay:

By Sean McMeekin Harvard

You are an intelligent fellow, and you will ask how a Polish adventurer, meaning Enver, and a collection of Jews and gypsies should have got control of a proud race. The ordinary man will tell you that it was German organization backed up with German money and German arms. You will inquire again how, since Turkey is primarily a religious power, Islam has played so small a part in it all. The Sheikh-ul-Islam is neglected, and though the Kaiser proclaims a Holy War and calls himself Hadji Mohammed Guilliamo, and says the Hohenzollerns are descended from the Prophet, that seems to have fallen pretty flat. The ordinary man again will answer that Islam in Turkey is becoming a back number, and that Krupp guns are the new gods. Yet—I don’t know. I do not quite believe in Islam becoming a back number … There is a dry wind blowing through the East, and the parched grasses wait the spark.