During the First World War, he converted to Islam while serving with the general staff of the Ottoman Empire with Enver Pasha.

[9]: 277–278  El-Raschid was supported in his endeavor to create a division by Prince Mansour Daoud, a relative of King Farouk of Egypt, who joined its forces and bolstered their character.

Among his choices were SS-Hauptsturmführer Quintus de Veer, SS-Untersturmführer Körber of the 5th SS Mountain Corps, Gerd Schulte, and SS-Sturmbannführer Franz Liebermann.

This division was finally deployed by order of Heinrich Himmler on October 20, 1944, and it was supposed to be dubbed the Osttürkischer Waffenverband.

The division was composed mostly of soldiers from Muslim communities of the southern Soviet Union, especially the Turkmens as well as Caspian and Black Sea Tatars that felt no loyalty to the USSR.

1 mutinied - partially due to them being mooted for transfer to Andrei Vlasov's Russian Liberation Army, which was seen as a betrayal of their anti-Russian ideals, and el-Raschid's general incompetence and inability to interact well with his men.

[4] During the War, el-Raschid wrote the novel Schwartz oder Weiss: Ad Imperium Romanum versus (Black or White: Towards the Roman Empire), published in Berlin in 1940.

El-Raschid and his men were later handed to the 1st Armored Division, and the Tatars were sent back to the Soviet Union, where they were either promptly shot or sent to gulags.

[14] In late March 1956, former Imam of the Osttürkischer Waffenverband Nurredin Namangani returned to Germany, landing in Munich.

He argued that Muslims in Germany lacked a politically free mosque and a "dignified central religious and cultural center", as they did in other Western countries.