Xavier Bougarel, Raphaëlle Branche, Cloé Drieu, eds. Combatants of Muslim Origin in European Armies in the Twentieth Century: Far from Jihad. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. 256 pp. $100.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4742-4942-3.
Reviewed by Richard Fogarty (University at Albany, SUNY)
Published on H-War (October, 2020)
Commissioned by Margaret Sankey (Air University)
Not long after the United States invaded Iraq, provoking a wave of criticism and anti-American sentiment among Muslims (and others) across the globe, the George W. Bush Administration attempted to burnish the nation’s image through public diplomacy efforts aimed squarely at Muslim audiences. These efforts at best had little effect, and at worst stimulated derision and contempt. This was not least because the officials tasked with leading the campaigns proved themselves spectacularly inept because of their ignorance about Islam and the people they were seeking to talk to, and their tendency to see the vast, diverse population of Muslims around the world as a monolith. American officials seemed to believe in the existence of a single “Muslim world” to which the United States could address an undifferentiated appeal based on broad stereotypes rather than detailed knowledge of local, regional, and national diversity, not to the mention ethnic, linguistic, and doctrinal variation that marks what is a community in only the loosest sense. But the United States was really only following in a long tradition of approaching Islam and its followers this way, an approach pioneered by the European empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And this approach took very concrete and revealing forms in the particular circumstances of the military service of Muslims in the ranks of these empires’ armies. As this volume demonstrates, the world wars provoked the Great Powers to rely on Muslim soldiers to pursue international rivalries and policy goals. Policies toward these soldiers grew, more often than not, out of stereotypes and culturally conditioned assumptions that limited the effectiveness of both the policies and larger political goals of European nations.
The substantive chapters of the book begin with Gilbert Meynier’s survey of Algerians’ service in the French army during the First World War. Of note, this performs the not-inconsiderable service of bringing to English-speakers the scholarship of one of the pioneers of colonial and Algerian history in France. (In fact, the book does a similar service in several other cases as well, since many of the authors usually publish in languages other than English.) Meynier shows that it was not just the experience of war but also the return after the war that helps explain the subsequent trajectory of nationalism, violence, independence, and even continued military rule in Algerian history. Neither the anticolonial and pro-Islam propaganda of the Germans, on the one hand, nor the overly egalitarian treatment some officials thought Algerians had encountered in France and even in the army, on the other hand, explained evident rising frustration with life under French colonialism after the war. Rather, “the return to Algeria and the realization that nothing had really changed” (p. 42) propelled Algerians toward the nationalism that would, later, inform an independence movement.
Meynier documents the lengths to which the French army went in efforts to maintain the morale of its Muslim Algerian soldiers. Other contributors to the volume follow his lead. Emmanuel Cronier’s fascinating chapter on food provision for French North and West African and British Indian troops in France during the Great War makes clear just how seriously First World War militaries took the maxim, attributed to both Frederick the Great and Napoleon, that “an army marches on its stomach.” Quartermasters did their best to make sure soldiers used to very different diets were able to eat familiar staples and observe religious dietary restrictions. In East Africa, Tanja Bührer shows, Muslims living under German colonial rule in 1914 supported the Central Powers both rhetorically in their public stances and more concretely as soldiers because of long-standing German attention to the responsibilities of patronage. Salavat Iskhakov elucidates how long-standing imperial Russian policies sought to accommodate Muslim presence in the ranks, including the provision of imams to serve as chaplains, and Bolsheviks continued policies designed to maintain the morale and loyalty of Turkic Muslim soldiers.
The Second World War witnessed similar approaches. The Red Army, Kiril Feferman demonstrates, sought to create a larger space for Central Asian Muslims by easing the strict atheism of communism. Xavier Bougarel shows that the Nazi SS did much the same, seeing Islam as a “convenient religion” in the words of Heinrich Himmler and seeking to encourage enlistment and fighting effectiveness by, for instance, providing imams for Bosnian Muslims in the 13th SS Division Handschar. Officers for Muslim Military Affairs in the French army, according to Claire Miot, were an important element in helping to manage Muslim soldiers by making sure their religious needs were met during the campaign to liberate France in 1944-45 And we learn from Julie Le Gac that special attention to the supposedly inherent and different psyches of these Muslim soldiers was a critical element in French ideas about and treatments of war neuroses. Finally, Daniel Owen Spence’s examination of the service of Muslim sailors, recruited mostly from the colonial Indian Ocean littoral, in the British navy during the Second World War focuses, as does Meynier’s first chapter, on the longer-term implications of policies and experiences during the period of decolonization.
Yet each of these scholars shows equally convincingly the limits of policies of accommodation. French and British army food provision was not enough to outweigh the lack of material reward for service, so full bellies during the war did not lead to postwar quiescence in the face of racist colonial orders. The Central Powers’ call to jihad did not inspire East African Muslim soldiers to serve Germany, and in fact the hardships of war and Germans’ increasing inability to provide customary patronage eventually eroded the trust and loyalty of these askaris. Despite the presence of imams, life was difficult for Muslims in the Russian army during the First World War. The political interests of Russian and then Bolshevik leaders always came first, at the expense of the long-term political and cultural aspirations of Turkic soldiers, and real political rewards for service were not any more forthcoming here than in other empires.
A quarter of a century later, not much had changed. Soviet policy and exposure to German propaganda did in fact lead Central Asians in the Red Army increasingly to see themselves as Muslims rather than in more purely ethnic terms, but this development was not primarily the result of religious convictions that both Soviets and Nazis assumed motivated Muslims. Quite apart from the limits Nazi ideology placed on real cooperation with non-Aryans, the SS found its religious accommodation of Bosnian Muslim troops had less than the hoped-for effect on their decision-making and fighting effectiveness. The Free French army’s officers promoted the well-being of Muslim soldiers but only on the condition that the men’s beliefs and practices conformed to stereotypes of “proper” Islam and contained no elements of a “subversive” religious identity resistant to submission to the French colonial order. If Muslims suffering war neuroses received special attention from French army medical personnel, the psychiatric treatment these men received sought “to confirm a set of presuppositions about Islam” (p. 184). Muslims’ inherent primitivism and fatalism supposedly made them different, more prone to hysteria than native French soldiers. During and after the Second World War, British navy recruitment policy was driven by “martial race theory,” resting on stereotypes about the special suitability of Muslim sailors to militarization and command, leading to a racist (and often completely arbitrary) ideology of colonial control playing a formative role in the postindependence societies of the region.
So despite sustained and often seemingly sincere efforts to integrate Muslim soldiers meaningfully into military structures and war-making activities, the policies of European armies and navies were shot through with problems and misconceptions. Indeed, the misconceptions usually explained the problems, and the disappointment when Muslims’ identity and behavior did not conform to stereotypes and expectations. What European political and military officials all too often failed to grasp, as would the US government in the early twenty-first century, was that Muslims were as likely as any other group of people to decide for themselves what their religious identity should and would mean, and how it would shape their decisions and behavior. As Xavier Bougarel observes of Bosnian Muslims recruited by the Waffen-SS, “Muslim soldiers did not perceive Islam as a warlike political ideology to be followed blindly, but as a set of religious principles and practices to be negotiated day after day” (p. 154).
The mistake that Europeans, and Westerners in general, all too often make is to view Islam as a monolith, Muslim identity as all-consuming, unchanging, and undifferentiated. This leads to a belief that propaganda and accommodation, focused almost exclusively on a presumed religious identity, can sway Muslims who are assumed a priori to be suspicious of or hostile to the West, and convince them to collaborate in a cause not their own. This amounts to a failure to understand that Muslims could (and can) see very clearly the self-interest behind these efforts, and that public diplomacy and propaganda could never work by themselves in the absence of real, concrete policies of which Muslims could approve because they appealed to the interests of Muslims, and even then not only to their interests as Muslims alone but as complex people with diverse interests and goals. This volume shows very clearly the trap European militaries repeatedly fell into, of treating Islam and Muslims as problems subject to “paternalistic management” (p. 162), when they are in fact elements of a complex social web in which all people are bound together.
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Citation:
Richard Fogarty. Review of Bougarel, Xavier; Branche, Raphaëlle; Drieu, Cloé, eds., Combatants of Muslim Origin in European Armies in the Twentieth Century: Far from Jihad.
H-War, H-Net Reviews.
October, 2020.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=54146
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