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Islam and Nazi Germany's War . By David Motadel . Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press , 2014. Pp. 500. Cloth $35.00. ISBN 978-0674724600 .
Review Essay
In his global bestseller, Inside the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler's former architect and armaments minister, Albert Speer, cited the German dictator's view that if the Arabs had won the Battle of Tours in the eighth century, "the world would be Mohammedan today." That was the case, he continued, because "theirs was a religion that believed in spreading the faith by the sword and subjugating all nations to their faith. The Germanic people would have become heirs to that religion. Such a creed was perfectly suited to the Germanic temperament." Yet, because of what Hitler called Arabs' "racial inferiority" and inability to handle the harsher climate, "they could not have kept down the more vigorous natives, so that ultimately not Arabs but Islamized Germans could have stood at the head of this Mohammedan Empire." Hitler concluded, "It's been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn't we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?"1
In this important book, Islam and Nazi Germany's War, David Motadel had the good idea of drawing attention to Hitler's comments, which most scholars likely dismissed for decades as the lunacy and megalomania of an autodidact. When combined with the substantial recent scholarship on the Nazi regime's approach to Muslims and the religion of Islam, Motadel's study should encourage historians to engage in serious thinking about the relationship between Islam and the racial ideology of the Nazi regime. Motadel offers abundant evidence that Hitler's enthusiasm for Islam--or, rather, what he understood Islam to be--was both serious and consequential, and shared by other powerful figures in the Nazi regime. Motadel's signal accomplishment is to show that Nazi Germany's enthusiasm for Islam encompassed, but was not limited to, areas that other scholars have previously addressed most, namely, propaganda and policy in North Africa and the Middle East, or the Muslim Schutzstaffel (SS) Division in the Balkans. Through remarkable...