‘Khaki crusaders’: crusading rhetoric and the British Imperial soldier during the Egypt and Palestine campaigns, 1916–18

Abstract

Much of the historiography of the First World War in the Middle East suggests that the soldiers of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force motivated themselves by seeing the British campaign against the Ottoman Empire as a crusade against Islam. The construction of the campaign as a crusade was a product of the need for politicians to portray the Egyptian Expeditionary Force's operations to the British public as relevant to the wider course of the First World War. Inter-war memoirists and novelists also chose this topos in order to boost the sales of their works. By examining the letters and diaries of soldiers from across the British Empire, it is clear that this assumption is erroneous. A religious fringe within the British Imperial Army in Palestine did perceive the campaign in such terms, but they were only a minority. Instead most soldiers focused on the Islamic culture that they encountered in the Middle East, demonstrating that a strong vernacular orientalism was present in early twentieth-century British culture.