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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 November 2020
The Berlin Mosque was the first permanent place of Muslim worship in Germany. Never a purely local affair, the construction of the Berlin Mosque depended on the legacies of imperialism and the shifting geopolitical contexts of the 1920s. International diplomats and former Wilhelmine and Ottoman agents living and working in Weimar Berlin made sense of the mosque project through categories and ideas forged in the decades before the First World War. They gradually recalibrated their ambitions when confronted, as they were, with radical transformations of the Muslim world, from the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the abolition of the caliphate to the emergence of new political leaders from Arabia to Afghanistan. This article demonstrates how the construction and uses of the Berlin Mosque closely followed how diplomats and other actors, both German and non-German, assessed the geopolitical potential of a German–Muslim alliance in the post-Ottoman, post-Wilhelmine moment.
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17 Ottoman historians have gone to great lengths to undermine the assessment of Dutch Orientalist Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, and the conventional historiography that echoed him for close to a century, that this was simply a ‘jihad made in Germany’. The Ottoman Empire was neither dragged to war nor reluctantly pushed to declare jihad. By the eve of the First World War jihad – as a concept if not a formal declaration – had become standard practice and propaganda in the event of foreign war and would have likely been a component of Ottoman warfare in 1914 even without pressure from Germany. For notable examples in the historiographical trajectory, see, for example, Trumpener, Ulrich, Germany and the Ottoman Empire, 1914–1918 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kröger, Martin, ‘Revolution als Programm. Ziel und Realität deutscher Orientpolitik im Ersten Weltkrieg’, in Michalka, Wolfgang, ed., Der Erste Weltkrieg. Wirkung. Wahrnehmung, Analyse (Munich: Piper, 1994), 366–91Google Scholar; Kayalı, Arabs and Young Turks; Aksakal, Mustafa, The Ottoman Road to War in 1914: The Ottoman Empire and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zürcher, Erik-Jan, ed., Jihad and Islam in World War I: Studies on the Ottoman Jihad on the Centenary of Snouck Hurgronje's ‘Holy War Made in Germany’ (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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30 Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes (henceforth PA) NL Grobba 1 & 2; Grobba, Fritz, Männer und Mächte im Orient: 25 Jahre diplomatischer Tätigkeit im Orient (Göttingen, Zürich, Berlin, Frankfurt: Musterschmidt Verlag, 1967)Google Scholar; Schwanitz, Wolfgang, ‘“The Jinee and the Magic Bottle”: Fritz Grobba and German Middle East Policy, 1900–1945’, in Schwanitz, Wolfgang, ed., Germany and the Middle East, 1871–1945 (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2004), 87–118CrossRefGoogle Scholar and, recently, Motadel, David, ‘The Global Authoritarian Moment and the Revolt against Empire’, American Historical Review, 124, 3 (June 2019), 843–77, esp. 851, 872CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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35 On the Ahmadiyya, their expansion into Europe and their network of missions, see Eric Germain, ‘The First Muslim Missions on a European Scale: Ahmadi-Lahori Networks in the Interwar Period’, in Clayer and Germain, eds., Islam in Interwar Europe, 89–127 and Jonker, Gerdien, The Ahmadiyya Quest for Religious Progress: Missionizing Europe, 1900–1965 (Leiden: Brill, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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37 On the pro-British sentiments of the Ahmadiyya before the First World War, see Jonker, The Ahmadiyya Quest, 66.
38 23 Mar. 1923 memo, PA R 77456.
39 4 Aug. 1923 internal memo, PA R 77456.
40 Chalid-Albert Seiler-Chan, ‘Der Islam in Berlin und Anderwärts im Deutschen Reiche’, Moslemische Revue (Oct. 1934), 112–9, 115.
41 ‘Ausgeschobene Grundsteinlegung der Moschee am Fehrbelliner Platz’ Berliner Tageblatt, 10 Oct. 1924.
42 Qtd. in Jonker, Ahmadiyya Quest, 84.
43 Mansur Mustafa Rifat, Die Ahmadia-Sekte: ein Vorkämpfer für den englischen Imperialismus. Belastende Dokumente für ihre Falschheit und Heuchelei (Berlin: Morgen- und Abendland Verlag, 1924).
44 Mansur Mustafa Rifat, ‘Gandhi, Zaghloul of India’, Welt Rundschau Oct. 29, 1924, included in PAAA 78315.
45 On potential connections between German Communism, Rifat and other anti-colonialists, see ‘Eine skandalöse Ausweisung’, Die Rote Fahne, 148, 2 July 1925 and Bauknecht, Muslime in Deutschland, 52–3. Rifat himself never admitted intimate connections to Moscow and historians have disputed such connections; see for example, el-Amin, Mohammed Nuri, ‘Was There an Alliance Between the Watanist (Nationalist) Party, International Communism and the White Flag League in the Sudan?’ British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 19, 2 (1992), 177–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
46 Germans were far from alone in struggling to make sense of anti-imperial movements as anything other than inspired by or loyal to Bolshevism. See, for example, Yenen, Alp, ‘Elusive Forces in Illusive Eyes: British Officialdom's Perception of the Anatolian Resistance Movement’, Middle Eastern Studies, 54, 5 (2018): 788–810CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Yenen, , ‘The Other Jihad: Enver Pasha, Bolsheviks, and the Politics of Anticolonial Muslim Nationalism during the Baku Congress, 1920’, in Fraser, T.G., ed., The First World War and its Aftermath: The Shaping the of the Middle East (Chicago, 2015), 273–93Google Scholar.
47 For example, 5 Nov. 1924 letter from Muhammad Ali (president of the Ahmadiyya in Lahore) to the President of the German Republic (Friedrich Ebert), PA R 78240; other cases of the international support for the Ahmadiyya were motivated in part by their reputation as reformers and modernisers of Islam, see Jonker, Ahmadiyya Quest, 84–5.
48 23 Jan. 1925 letter from Rüdt (Calcutta) to Berlin Foreign Office. For more on Rüdt and his efforts to undermine British interests in India, see Barooah, Nirode K., Germany and the Indians between the Wars (Noderstedt: BoD, 2018), 1–36Google Scholar. For more on German–Iranian relations in particular, see Jennifer Jenkins, Weltpolitik on the Persian Frontier: Germany and Iran in the Age of Empire (forthcoming) and, more generally, Mafinezam, Alidad and Mehrabi, Aria, Iran and its Place among Nations (West Port, CT: Praeger, 2008)Google Scholar.
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50 Jonker, Ahmadiyya Quest, 75.
51 Ibid., 70–93; Motadel, ‘Muslim Communities’ and Höpp, ‘Zwischen Moschee und Demonstration’.
52 The prophethood of Ahmad is itself heretical in Islam, which insists that Muhammad was the ‘seal of the prophets’, or the last prophet. A number of other issues also complicate the legitimacy of the Ahmadiyya within mainstream Islam. See for example, Ichwan, Moch Nur, ‘Differing Responses to an Ahmadi Translation and Exegesis: The Holy Qur’ân in Egypt and Indonesia’, Archipel, 62 (2001), 143–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Beck, Herman, ‘The Rupture Between the Muhammadiyah and the Ahmadiyya’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 161, 2/3 (2005), 210–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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54 This threat is mentioned in the late 1927 issue of El-Islah included in PA R 78240. It remains unclear what parts of the Berlin Bauordungen the municipal authorities would use to justify demolition. However, the Baupolizei was a notably conservative organisation with a habit of bending rules to perpetuate a vaguely defined ‘German’ urban landscape both before and after this period. See, for example, Snyder, Saskia Coenen, Building a Public Judaism: Synagogues and Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 83Google Scholar and Teresa Walch, ‘Degenerate Spaces: The Coordination of Space in Nazi Germany’, Ph.D. thesis, University of California San Diego, 2018, 58–9, 123–41.
55 10 Dec. 1927 letter from Idris to Grobba, PA R 78240.
56 17 Dec. 1928 letter from Ministry Director Schneider to Grobba, PA R 78240; see also, Grobba, Männer und Mächte im Orient, 32–3; Raja, M. Waseem, Modernization, Regression and Resistance: Amir Amanullah Khan's Afghanistan (London: Lap Lambert Academic Publishing, 2011)Google Scholar.
57 23 Dec. 1927 letter from Grobba to Idris, PA R 78240.
58 Ahmed, Faiz, Afghanistan Rising: Islamic Law and Statecraft between the Ottoman and British Empires (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 236CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
59 Newspaper cut-out from 13 Feb. 1928, Landesarchiv Berlin (henceforth LAB) A.Pr.Br. Rep. 030 7501.
60 See the event planning documents in LAB A.Pr.Br. Rep. 030 7501.
61 While this was the biggest spectacle to date, the mosque had been and increasingly was used for similar purposes. See for example, Bauknecht, Muslime in Deutschland, 65–9.
62 25 Jul. 1927 letter from Idris to Richthofen; 1 Aug. 1927 letter from Grobba to Idris, PA R 78240; 10 Apr. 1928 letter from Idris and Hasan to Brandenburg Finance Ministry; 17 Apr. 1928 letter from Finance Ministry to Grobba, PA R 78241.
63 See Dahlhaus, Möglichkeiten und Grenzen; and for a contemporary assessment written by the man who broached the Wünsdorf issue with the Turkish Republic, see Ziemke, Kurt, Die neue Türkei: Politische Entwicklung, 1914–1929 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1930)Google Scholar.
64 4 Jan. 1930 letter from Ziemke to Basri Reschid Bey in the Turkish Embassy; 30 Jan. 1930 letter from Turkish Embassy to Ziemke, PA R 78241.
65 A number of other similar but contextually different continuities exist around the world. For instance, we might well look to the Tokyo Mosque, similarly built in the interwar period for a growing population of Muslim migrants, led in part by an Ottoman propagandist who sought to harness Muslim geopolitical aspirations to Japanese hostility towards European empire. See Aydin, The Idea of the Muslim World, 133–6.