Metin Hulagu

I picked this up out of curiosity (and because it was on the clearance shelf...), thinking that a Turkish perspective on the Hejaz Railway might offer some interesting new insights.

The book reads like an academic dissertation written by someone who is not a native speaker of English (which is presumably what it is). There's a lot of data there, so it's probably a book I shall be coming back to for reference, but only a real masochist would attempt to struggle through it from cover to cover.

Dr Hülagü's conclusion, essentially, seems to be that the railway was of great symbolic importance as a great 20th century engineering project funded largely by the contributions (voluntary or otherwise) of ordinary Muslims around the world, and built primarily for religious purposes. It failed to reach Mecca and Jeddah partly for technical reasons, partly because the Ottomans no longer had the political and military clout to push it through against the wishes of the local people (interestingly, the word "Arabs" never appears - they are always "locals" or "Bedouins"). And of course it never got going again properly after 1918 because of the evil British and French dividing up the middle East between them. So nothing that you can't read in any other work on the region, really. On the other hand, the tables of dates, mileages, bridges, tunnels, etc., though deadly boring, are something quite useful that you can't easily find elsewhere.… (mere)