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¹⁰ Ibid., 64–98.

¹¹ Ibid. Throughout this article I have adopted IJMES transliteration standards. Arabic is used for proper names except in cases where individuals are closely associated with a specific place or more frequently known otherwise, as in the case for Ottoman sultan Abdülhamid, rather than Abd al-Hamid.

¹² Secular Ottomanism was a form of imperial patriotism based around the territorial boundaries of the empire, loyalty to the sultan and an aversion to potential religious or ethnic divisions. For more on the politicisation of Islam, his hopes for this transition and the legacies in the Second Constitutional Era, see Karpat, Kemal H., The Politicization of Islam: Reconstructing Identity, State, Faith, and Community in the Late Ottoman State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 210–22Google Scholar and Kayalı, Hasan, Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, 1908–1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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¹⁶ While it remains unclear just how involved he was in the precise Orientpolitik of the First World War, von Oppenheim certainly combined the intellectual threads which gave flight to fancy and was in contact with the Kaiser about these ideas. For more, see, Marchand, German Orientalism, 438–41, 446.

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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¹⁹ Jenkins, ‘Fritz Fischer’, 413–5.

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²³ Khan, Saad Omar, ‘The “Caliphate Question”: British Views and Policy toward Pan-Islamic Politics and the End of the Ottoman Caliphate’, American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, 24, 4 (2007), 1–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Afzal, M. Rafique, A History of the All-India Muslim League, 1906–1947 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 131–46Google Scholar.

²⁴ Khan, ‘Caliphate Question’, 20.

²⁵ Ibid., 21.

²⁶ On the effects of the end of the Ottoman Empire and the caliphate, see Aydin, The Idea of the Muslim World, 130–1; on Wahhabism and the caliphate, 136–41.

²⁷ Wempe, Sean Andrew, ‘“Peripheral Players?” German Colonial Interests, The Press, and the Spirit of Locarno’, The International History Review, 40, 1 (2018): 177–205CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for a broader consideration of German party political discourses of empire in the Weimar Republic, see Kämper, Heidrun, ‘Linguistic Representations of Colonialism as an Ideological-Discursive Construction in the Early Weimar Republic’, in Krobb, Florian and Martin, Elaine, eds., Weimar Colonialism: Discourses and Legacies of Post-Imperialism in Germany after 1918 (Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2014), 45–66Google Scholar.

²⁸ Foreign Office memorandum and letter from German Consul General in Jerusalem, both quoted in Steininger, Rolf, Germany and the Middle East: From Kaiser Wilhelm II to Angela Merkel (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2019), 34Google Scholar.

²⁹ The emphasis of the present article is on this global reordering but for an alternative account of the afterlives of the German–Ottoman alliance, see, Florian Krobb, ‘“Doch das orientalische ist es ja eben, was uns interessiert”: Colonial Desires and Ottoman Space: War Memoirs as Post-Colonial Discourse’, in Weimar Colonialism, 167–88.

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.

³¹ See, for example, his report ‘Der Kongreß gegen Kolonialunterdrückung und Imperialismus in Brüssel 1927’, Die Welt des Islams, 10 (June 1927), 17–28 and, for more, Schmid, Larissa, ‘Competing Visions of Area Studies in the Interwar Period: The School of Oriental Languages in Berlin’, Middle East – Topics & Arguments, 4 (May 2015), 50–60Google Scholar and Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire, 333–67.

³² On Islam and bourgeois culture in Berlin, see Motadel, ‘Islamische Bürgerlichkeit’.

³³ Motadel, David, Islam and Nazi Germany's War (Cambridge, MA: Belknap and Harvard University Press, 2014), 249CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁴ In the Weimar Republic the Foreign Office was restructured in large part to pursue Kulturpropaganda, comprised of activities ranging from setting up schools and exchange programs to giving works of art as diplomatic gifts. In Kurt Jagow's 1923 Politisches Handwörterbuch it was defined as, ‘for the time being, the only possible form of foreign policy activity’. Qtd. in Friedrich Dahlhaus, Möglichkeiten und Grenzen auswärtiger Kultur- und Pressepolitik: dargestellt am Beispiel der deutsch-türkischen Beziehungen, 1914–1928 (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 1990), 243. See also Düwell, Kurt, Deutschlands auswärtige Kulturpolitik: 1918–1932, Grundlinien und Dokumente (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 1976)Google Scholar and, more recently, Trommler, Frank, Kulturmacht ohne Kompass: Deutsche auswärtige Kulturbeziehungen im 20. Jahrhundert (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2014), esp. 289–418Google Scholar.

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.

³⁶ 2 Mar. 1923 letter from Grobba to Sadr-ud-Din, PA R 77456.

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.

⁴⁹ 19 Jan. 1925 interministerial, PA R 78240; Mansur Rifat, ‘Pan Europa und Pan Islamismus’ flier published by the Egyptian National Radical Group (Vienna: Sept. 1926); see also the extended correspondence between his arrest in October 1924 and the final denied petition in June 1926 in PA R 78315; and Gerhard Höpp, ‘Zwischen alle Fronten: Der ägyptische Nationalist Mansur Mustafa Rif'at (1883–1926) in Deutschland’, in Wajih ‘Abd as-Sadiq ‘Atiq and Wolfgang Schwanitz, ed., A'mal nadwat Misr wa Almaniya fi'l-qarnain at-tasi’ ‘ashar wa'l-ishrin fi dau’ al-wathaiq (Cairo: Dar ath-Thaqafa al-'Arabiya, 1998), 53–64, 263–73.

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.

⁵³ Basil Mathews, ‘Une Société des Nations musulmane’, Journal de Genève, attached to 5 May 1926 letter from German Consulate in Geneva to Berlin Foreign Office; 12, 19 and 26 May 1926 letters from German Embassy in Cairo to Berlin Foreign Office; and 5 Oct. 1926 letter from German Embassy in London to Berlin Foreign Office, PA R 78240.

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.