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Ties <strong>that</strong> Bind<br />
2<strong>11</strong> Ibid, p.55<br />
212 Ibid, p.46<br />
213 Ibid, pp.7-32<br />
214 Ibid, p.7<br />
215 Ibid, p.9<br />
216 Ibid, p.17-19<br />
217 Ibid, p.20<br />
50 | policyexchange.org.uk<br />
The pamphlet was widely circulated. The government of India, for example,<br />
maintained a list of sixty-three different ‘Muslim owned newspapers’ across the<br />
country with express instructions <strong>that</strong> they should ‘receive all war material;<br />
ordinary departmental material and articles of Islamic interest’. 2<strong>11</strong> Partial analysis<br />
conducted by the Home Department of the government of India revealed <strong>that</strong> it<br />
received 804 column inches of coverage from just twenty-three different<br />
newspapers – although the Home Department was keen to point out <strong>that</strong> ‘as only a<br />
selection of the Muslim press is analysed in this bureau, the real results achieved are<br />
undoubtedly greater’. 212<br />
For good measure, in addition to translating the pamphlet from Arabic to<br />
English, Arberry also submitted ‘dialogues written by myself’ to the MOI which<br />
were to ‘ultimately be published in Arabic through secret channels and will appear<br />
as having been composed by a Muslim Arab’. 213 Some of the pamphlets written<br />
by Arberry included:<br />
? What do the Germans think of the Arabs?<br />
? What is a quisling?<br />
? Are the Germans friends of the Arabs?<br />
? What do the Germans think of Islam?<br />
? What have the Germans done to Islam?<br />
These pamphlets were framed as a series of conversations between a father and son<br />
– they all bore the subtitle ‘conversations with my son’ – and took a dialectic form.<br />
In ‘What do the Germans think of the Arabs?’, the father explains Nazi thinking<br />
to his son – first in terms of Hitler’s attitudes towards the Arab people, before<br />
explaining the Nazi view on Islam. The son, known as ‘Ahmad’, starts by saying,<br />
‘I repeated what you told me concerning the lies and hypocrisy of the Germans<br />
and their leaders to my friends at school, and they asked me if I could prove <strong>that</strong><br />
the Germans are in fact the enemies of the Arabs and Moslems. They asked me if<br />
the German leaders and writers have ever expressed their opinion of us Arabs and<br />
Moslems openly, and if so, what this opinion was’. 214<br />
Naturally, the pamphlet then offers a systematic analysis of the Nazi view<br />
towards both the Arabs and Muslims while showing how some aspects of their<br />
belief – such as the idea of Aryan racial superiority – contradicted verses from the<br />
Quran. The father explains:<br />
[In Mein Kampf Hitler] will not undertake to champion the rights of any oriental peoples<br />
who may consider themselves to be oppressed by other nations. So much for his pretence to have<br />
the cause of Arabs at heart. In another passage, speaking of those Egyptians and Indians whom<br />
he had met in Germany, Hitler describes them as ‘gabbling pomposi<strong>ties</strong>’ and ‘inflated Orientals’.<br />
So much for Hitler’s opinion of the Arabs and Moslem peoples, whose friend and saviour he now<br />
pretends to be. 215<br />
Similar sentiments are expressed in ‘Are the Germans friends of the Arabs?’,<br />
although it offers much more history of the conflict itself, explaining Germany’s<br />
remilitarisation of the Rhineland and invasion of Poland. 216 Unsurprisingly, by the<br />
end, ‘Ahmad’ concludes ‘it is the duty of Moslems not to have anything to do with<br />
men who are liars and unjust tyrants [i.e. the Nazis]’. 217
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