The Hand of the Invisible Imam [Die Hand des unsichtbaren Imam] by Paul Farkas. Translation from the German of a 1921 satirical political thriller/mystery

The story. A group of Berlin bankers travel to Constantinople in April 1909--a critical moment in the power struggle between the Sultan and the Young Turks--to negotiate a deal to build a rail link from Baghdad to Kerman in southern Persia. This line, which will open up Afghanistan and India, will, according to the bankers, "revolutionize the Orient." Their stated aim is German world economic domination. Impervious to the advice of experienced advisors, the bankers do not take seriously the political difficulties. Nor do they understand the fundamental religious conflict between the Sunni Ottoman Turks and the Shi'ite Persians. In particular, a Shi'ite who is posing as a Young Turk revolutionary--but who is in fact a direct descendant of Hasan-i Sabbah, the founder of the 11th-century Shi'ite sect known as "the Assassins." Working in the service of the long-awaited spiritual leader of the Shi'ites known as the invisible Imam, he plays havoc with the bankers' plans, as well as with those of the Sultan and the Young Turk reformers. The Assassin and a young European Orientalist face off in a hair-raising denouement. At the end, an ominous dark cloud shaped like a hand gathers in the Eastern dusk, presaging future conflict.

The author. Paul Farkas was in Constantinople in April 1909 and witnessed the overthrow of the Constitution by the Sultan as well as the Young Turk counter-revolution that ensued. He wrote about his experiences in Staatsstreich und Gegenrevolution in der Türkei,* published in 1912, and he used almost verbatim significant eyewitness accounts from that book in The Hand of the Invisible Imam.
Farkas was born in 1878 and died in 1921. He had a major interest in sociological issues and was extremely prolific in a number of different fields, including popular fiction. He traveled in the Middle East between 1908 and 1910. Farkas, a Hungarian nationalist conservative allied with Istvan Tisza, represented a district in Transylvania in the Hungarian Parliament from 1910 to 1914. In addition to his political activities, Farkas wrote a large number of novels, plays, and essays, most of them in Hungarian, though Imam was apparently written in German. As a novel Imam has its faults, but Farkas understood how to draw readers into a terrific and compelling story.

The Why? World attention will be riveted on the Middle East for decades to come. However, the crises of today did not come out of nowhere; they arose out of decades of Great Power policies intersecting with simmering unresolved conflicts indigenous to the region itself. Germany played a major role in the Ottoman Empire after about 1890, competing head-to-head with England and France. The major German initiative was the construction of the Baghdad Railway, which was eventually to end at Basra on the Persian Gulf. This plan was consistent with Sultan Abdul Hamid's plan for a pan-Islamic Sunni Caliphate stretching to India; however, it put Germany in conflict with the England.

The Hand of the Invisible Imam is the work of a very perceptive and politically astute outsider--Paul Farkas was a Hungarian Jew--and is a contemporary novel of the time. Extremely critical of German and Great Power short-sightedness, Farkas lost no opportunity to satirize the characters who came under his lens. However, the larger backdrop of the novel is the chasm between the thinking of European Enlightenment-based liberalism and that of parts of the East. The novel is a cautionary tale about the dangers of romanticization, ignorance, and arrogance.

* Palace Revolution and Counterrevolution in Turkey (March-April 1909). Istanbul: Isis Press, 2005

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