ANZACS and Jihadis – Public Lecture by Byron Clark

On November 14,1914 the Sultan-Caliph of the Ottoman empire proclaimed an official ‘Great Jihad’ against the allied powers. Today there is renewed interest in the role of Islam in the first world war, and revisionist histories see the conflict as a ‘clash of civilisations’ in which ANZAC soldiers battled with Jihadis. In his lecture Byron Clark argues that this masks the more interesting true story of how Germany planned to use a strategic alliance with the Ottoman empire to further its own imperial ambitions, hoping the Muslim ummah residing in the British and French empires would take their side in the conflict.