On the whole, opinions expressed
in the public sphere were quite diverse— refl ecting the heterogeneity of the
societies in the region— ranging from fascination and sympathy to con-cern and contempt. Yet, what ever their views, the vast majority showed no Islam and the War in North Africa and the Middle East
[ 109 ]
reaction to Berlin’s calls for religious violence and revolt. It is, moreover,
striking that the Islamic slogans of Germany’s propaganda also had little
resonance in religious circles and among the leading ‘ulama— as a broad-
sketch view quickly reveals.
Among the listeners of Radio Berlin in Iran is said to have been the
young mullah Ruhollah Musavi, in the holy city of Qum.215 Every eve ning,
Musavi, who had a radio set built by the British manufacturer Pye, appar-ently hosted numerous mullahs and seminary students who came to his
house to listen to Zeesen’s Persian ser vice. Mullah Musavi, who later be-came known to the world as Ayatollah Khomeini, seemed little impressed
by the German program. In 1942 he published the tract Kashf al- Asrar
(The Revealing of Secrets), his fi rst po liti cal statement, in which he not only
agitated against the antireligious polemics of the Pahlavi state and called
for rule on the principles of Islam but also raged against oppressive regimes
more generally, denouncing the “Hitlerite ideology” (maram- i Hitleri) as
“the most poisonous and heinous product of the human mind.” 216 Some
other younger clerics had more pro- German leanings, most famously the
ardent anti- imperialist Ayatollah Abu al- Qasem Kashani, whose father, the
late Ayatollah Mostafa Kashani, had died fi ghting British troops in south-ern Iraq during the jihad of the First World War, and who, in 1943, was
arrested for pro- German activities by British authorities.217 The conserva-tive clerical establishment in Iran, however, abstained from politics, re-signed to their seminaries.218 Prominent clerics such as Ayatollah Muham-mad Husayn Burujirdi, who shortly after the war emerged as the sole
marja‘- i taqlid, the highest religious authority in Shi‘a Islam, preached po-liti cal quietism.219 Outside Iran, too, Shi‘a authorities remained cautious.
The Shi‘a ‘ulama of Najaf and Karbala was not, unlike during the First World
War, united behind Germany.220 In early 1940, Amin al- Husayni, then in
Baghdad, tried to persuade some of the Shi‘a leaders of southern Iraq to
endorse his jihad, approaching the se nior clerics ‘Abd al- Karim al- Jaza’iri
and Muhammad Kashif al- Ghita, who had both played prominent roles in
Iraqi politics during the interwar years.221 While al- Jaza’iri gave short
shrift to the Palestinian mufti, Kashif al- Ghita was more receptive, issuing
a fatwa with a call for holy war against the British Empire, which was also
announced by Yunus Bahri on Radio Berlin on 13 February 1940— though
with little effect.222 No major Shi‘a uprising broke out during the war. The
Germans had little more impressive to record than some graffi ti: in early Muslims in the War Zones
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1942 a German diplomat reported that in both Beirut and Damascus the
slogan “Hitler, the successor of ‘Ali” had appeared on the walls, scrawled
by Shi‘a rebels or possibly by German agents.223
In the Mashriq, German propaganda received a mixed reception.