Islamic Influence on Hitler -- Can It Be True?

Addition 4-22-2021

see below:

Le fascisme vert -- c'est l'islamisme! ["Green fascism -- that's Islamism!" Khalida Massaoudi, Algerian feminist] 

 We hear a lot these days about Islamofascism and Green Fascism, even in some mainstream American publications that are almost always ready to bend over backwards in order not to say anything bad or mean or even unfavorable or unpleasant about the Arabs or Islam, even if it's true. The term Islamofascism implies that there is a brand of fascism that is Islamic, just as there were German and Spanish and Italian, Hungarian, Croatian, etc., varieties of fascism. What this label overlooks is that there was Islamic influence on Hitler himself in developing his mass murderous ideas. Muhammad `Inayat Allah Khan [also called al-Mashriqi] was a Muslim theologian born in Punjab in 1888. Yet he was not an Indian nationalist. He wanted a Muslim state for the Indian Muslims, separate from India. In another words, he was an exponent of the Pakistan idea, which Walter Wallbank describes in his A Shorter History of India and Pakistan. Khan spent time in Europe, including Berlin, where he met the Fuehrer in the early years of his leadership of the National Socialist [Nazi] Party. Their meeting took place in 1926 in the National Library. Here is the gist of Khan's report on his relationship with Hitler.

"I was astounded when he [Hitler] told me that he knew about my Tazkirah. The news flabbergasted me. . . I found him very congenial and piercing. He discussed Islamic Jihad with me in details. In 1930 I sent him my Isharat concerning the Khaksar movement with a picture of a spade-bearer Khaksar at the end of that book. In 1933 he started his Spade Movement." [pp 11-12; see source data below]

So, Hitler started his own Spade Movement. In other words, Hitler copied something that Khan was doing. More importantly, Hitler was interested in Islamic Jihad. That means, that Hitler, who worshipped war, was interested in how the Jihad concept could help him conduct fanatic, perpetual war by means of his own people. The Khaksar movement was similar to the Nazi SA, the brownshirts, in its "first stage," while Germany was still "demilitarized." Khan considered Hitler's Mein Kampf a "masterpiece." Members of Khaksar wore brown uniforms and carried a spade, "symbolizing both labor and a readiness to fight." Islamic Jihad, that Hitler was so interested in, is defined by Jacques Ellul, one of the most eminent French sociologists:

But a major, two-fold fact transforms the jihad into something quite different from traditional wars, waged for ambition and self-interest, with limited objectives, where the "normal" situation is peace between peoples; [where] war in itself . . . must end in a return to peace. This two-fold [distinguishing] factor [of jihad] is first the religious nature, then the fact that war has become an institution (and no longer an "event"). . . This war is a religious duty. . . In Islam . . . [in contrast with other religions], jihad is a religious obligation. . . . jihad is not a "spiritual war" but a real military war of conquest. . . . . . the second important specific characteristic is that the jihad is an institution and not an event, that is to say it is part of the normal functioning of the Muslim world. [Jacques Ellul, in his Foreword to Bat Yeor, The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press, 1996), pp 18-19].

Obviously, Hitler found something here that he could like. Mmm. Perpetual war as a religious duty. Mmm. [quotes from JMS Baljon, Modern Muslim Koran Interpretation, 1880-1960 (Leiden: EJ Brill, 1961), pp 11-12] [also see article by Baljon in World of Islam, iii, 3-4 (1954), p 187. UPDATING: `Inayat Allah Khan is also called, by Pakistanis, Allama Inayat Ullah Mashriqi - - - - - Coming: Jews in Jerusalem under Arab-Muslim

domination, Poems of Zion, etc.

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Addition 4-22-2012

A new book by Haifa University historian Stefan Ihrig shows how hitler much admired Kemal Ataturk, often called the "founder of modern Turkey." He also continued the Armenian genocide after WW One and drove at least 1 1/2 million Greeks out of what is now Turkey. He was much admired in Germany in the 1920s and inspired hitler's  belief that he could murder millions of Jews and get away with it.

See a review of Ihrig's book here.