World War One through Arab Eyes – special series

World War One through Arab Eyes – special series on war’s centenary

On Tuesday, November 18th, 2014, Al Jazeera English will start broadcasting a three-episode documentary series commemorating one hundred years since the outbreak of theGreat War.

In this series, Producer Journalist Malek Al Tureiki, provides a political and cultural reading into World War I from an Arab and Islamic perspective, citing the commencement date of the war as November 14th 2014, when Arabs were involved in the “jihad” against the Allied troops upon the call of the Mufti of the Ottoman Empire in Istanbul. This is in juxtaposition to the date Britain commemorates the war on August 4th, 2014 – the day it entered the war.

The series sheds light on how colonized nations, which had no say in their own fate, ended up being forced into wars which resulted in enormous sacrifices. As a result of this, the number of victims within the Ottoman population, including Arabs, is in fact much higher than that of the Europeans. While the percentage of victims in Germany was 9% and 11% in France, it reached between 14-25 % in Turkey and the Levant.

It was also in the Battle of Gallipoli that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern day Turkey, began to rise as a military commander and political leader. The unknown truth until today, even in Turkey and the Arab World, is that two thirds of the troops involved in the Ottoman victory over Allied troops were from Iraq and the Levant.

World War I through Arab Eyes relies on archival materials presented for the first time, telling the fascinating story of how the war affected the Middle East – reverberations still being felt to the present day.

-ENDS-

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