Islam is the core of about 2 billion people on this congested globe and the daily life revolves around this majestic and the most beautiful religion. The believers are thriving in numbers exponentially and estimates say, that every street in the world may have at least one Muslim. In the late 20th and early 21st century we have seen evidence for Islam being politically used by both Muslim and Non-Muslim powers for regional greatness. This isn’t a new technique as it dates back to the two world wars. It is really interesting of how each country desperately used Islam for gaining crucial momentum against each other and I presented an excerpt of that history written below.
Nazi Germany used many nefarious ways in using Islam and Muslims in benefitting their war efforts and manpower which they showed by recruiting Muslim men from Sarajevo, North Africa and Crimea. Nazi Germany was not the only power that sought to employ Islam to mobilize support in the Muslim world. In fact, both of its Axis partners, Japan and Italy, made similar efforts, and by the middle of the war they faced competition not only from the British but also from the Americans and Soviets, all promising to defend Islam and to protect the faithful, a phenomenon that may be called the Muslim moment of the war.
As early as 1937, Il Duce arranged to be presented with a bejeweled "Sword of Islam" (which had actually been produced in Italy) at a public ceremony in Tripoli, thereby symbolically promoting himself as the patron of the Muslim world. Italy, Il Duce declared, would respect the "laws of the Prophet". "Mussolini is traveling through Africa and thereby is paying homage to Islam. Very clever and cunning. Paris and London are immediately suspicious", Goebbels commented in his diary. Italy’s employment of Islam reached its height during the war, with Italian propagandists throughout the Muslim world glorifying Mussolini as a "protector of Islam".
An even more comprehensive and better organized attempt to instrumentalize Islam was made by Japan, aimed at mobilizing Muslims across Asia against Britain, the Netherlands, China, and the Soviets. Although, as in Italy, the origins of this policy could be traced back to the late 1930s— the "Greater Japan Islamic League" (Dai Nippon Kaikyo Kyokai) and the Tokyo Mosque were both founded in 1938— Japan intensified its political and propagandistic engagement with Islam during the invasion of the Dutch Indies in spring 1942. Paid Muslim emissaries organized local Islamic leaders and communities to aid the incursion of Japanese troops. In a drive to give an Islamic character to the occupying regime, military authorities tried to co-opt the local ‘ulama, who had felt suppressed under the Dutch. Japanese officials began thrusting prepared texts on imams to be included in their Friday sermons and encouraged the faithful to say prayers for the emperor and for the success of the war. They also forced numerous groups into a common representative body, the "Council of Indonesian Muslims" (Majlis Sjuro Muslimin Indonesia, or Masyumi).
In early April 1943, the ‘ulama and Islamic dignitaries from Sumatra and Malaya were summoned to a conference in Singapore, at which the Japanese announced to the Muslims of Southeast Asia that Tokyo was the true protector of their faith. The ‘ulama departed the meeting, giving formal expression of their satisfaction with Japan’s commitment to protect Islam, and declared Muslim support for the war effort. A second conference of religious leaders was convened in December 1944 in Kuala Kangsar on the Malay peninsula. From the Japanese capital, the Tatar imam Abdur Rashid Ibrahim (‘Abd al- Rashid Ibrahim), the "patriarch of the Tokyo Mosque" and "respected patriarch of the Muslim world, " preached a warlike interpretation of jihad. "Japan’s cause in the Greater East Asia War is a sacred one and, in its austerity, is comparable to the war carried out against the infidels by the Prophet Muhammad in the past, "he proclaimed in the summer of 1942. The same Japan committed the horrendous crime of sexual abuse of millions of Koreans and Chinese during their reign of terror. Not to forget, Japan have been rightly been accused of abusing millions of women as sex slaves.
For the Allies, Islam appeared both as a potential threat and as a powerful instrument of political warfare. Winston Churchill, who had experienced the political significance of Islam first as a young officer during the late nineteenth-century wars at the Northwest Frontier and in the Sudanese Mahdi rebellion, took Islamic anti-imperialism quite seriously. In early 1942 he stressed that Britain "must not on any account break with the Moslems, "who represented a strong force in the empire and formed a significant element of Britain’s own military personnel, most notably in the British Indian Army. The prime minister’s opinion was widely shared by British officials. 16 After the outbreak of the war, London had established an intensive program to strengthen the ties between the empire and the world of Islam. In 1941 British authorities opened the East London Mosque, and the Churchill War Cabinet decided to build the London Central Mosque in Regent’s Park to demonstrate London’s respect for Islam. Washington, too, was becoming aware of the significance of Islam. As early as November 1940 a major national daily anxiously raised the question: "Whom will the Muslims support during the European War?"
Once US troops arrived in Muslim territories, policies and propaganda frequently took Islam into consideration. In 1943, the US military distributed religious pamphlets that called for jihad against Rommel’s troops in North Africa. 19 The US War Department trained its soldiers in how to interact correctly with Muslims and prepared manuals designed to instruct them in the basics of Islam.
Even the Kremlin, which had ruthlessly suppressed Islam in the interwar years, changed its policy in 1942, establishing four Soviet Muslim councils, or "spiritual directorates". New mosques were built, Muslim congresses were organized, and Moscow started openly supporting Islamic religious practices, permitting even the hajj pilgrimage, which had been banned before the war. Speaking from the "Central Muslim Spiritual Directorate", headquartered in Ufa, Abdurrahman Rasulaev, Stalin’s "red mufti, " launched a series of propaganda appeals, calling on the Muslims of the Soviet Union to rise up against the Nazi aggressor and to pray for the victory of the Red Army. This was a direct response to Germany’s campaign for Islamic mobilization on the southern fringes of the Soviet Union. Overall, the Allies religious policies propaganda not only sought to counterbalance Axis attempts to provoke unrest in their Muslim territories and indeed the wider Islamic world but also aimed at mobilizing their Muslim subjects for the war effort.
This history of the politics of Islam during the Second World War may be seen as part of a much wider story of attempts by non-Muslim powers to instrumentalize the Muslim faith for political and military purposes. It is an unfortunate but unsurprising account to witness how these so-called civilized nations acted as orientalists and used Islam during the war and never show remorse in bad mouthing the religion till today.
