On 11 November 1914, Ottoman Sultan Mehmed V proclaimed holy war against the Entente powers and appealed for support from Muslims in Entente-controlled countries. The declaration, which called for Muslims to support the Ottomans in Entente-controlled areas and for jihad against "all enemies of the Ottoman Empire, except the Central Powers", was initially presented on 11 November and published in Takvim-i Vekayi the following day. The proclamation included five fatwa or legal opinions endorsed by 29 religious authorities. Several days later, on 14 November, it was read out to large crowd outside the Fatih Mosque by Ali Haydar Efendi, the fetva emini ('custodian of the fatwa', the Ottoman official in charge of dictating tafsir on behalf of the Shaykh al-Islām).
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1914 Ottoman jihad proclamation in the context of McMahon–Hussein Correspondence
The McMahon–Hussein correspondence is a series of letters that were exchanged during World War I, in which the government of the United Kingdom agreed to recognize Arab independence in a large region after the war in exchange for the Sharif of Mecca launching the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire. The correspondence had a significant influence on Middle Eastern history during and after the war; a dispute over Palestine continued thereafter.
The correspondence is composed of ten letters that were exchanged from July 1915 to March 1916 between Hussein bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca and Lieutenant Colonel Sir Henry McMahon, British High Commissioner to Egypt. Whilst there was some military value in the Arab manpower and local knowledge alongside the British Army, the primary reason for the arrangement was to counteract the Ottoman declaration of jihad ("holy war") against the Allies, and to maintain the support of the 70 million Muslims in British India (particularly those in the Indian Army that had been deployed in all major theatres of the wider war). The area of Arab independence was defined to be "in the limits and boundaries proposed by the Sherif of Mecca" with the exception of "portions of Syria" lying to the west of "the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo"; conflicting interpretations of this description were to cause great controversy in subsequent years. One particular dispute, which continues to the present, is the extent of the coastal exclusion.