Martin Hartmann

[1] As a professor in Berlin he strove hard for the recognition of Islamic studies as an independent discipline.

[3] Hartmann, who mastered both the Turkish and Arabic languages, had expressed a strong dislike for the Turks whom he considered to be a "dumb race"[4] and had recommended that Arabs should ally with intellectually-similar races, namely the Greeks, Armenians, and some Albanians, in order to overthrow the rule of the Turks.

[5] Several orientalists had identified the primacy of Turks over Arabs, which gradually began first in Baghdad in the late 9th century with the reign of the half-Turkic caliph al-Mutawakkil and culminated with the Tartar invasions which placed various Turkic Atabegs ruling virtually everywhere in the Islamic world, as the beginning of the intellectual and civilizational decline of Islam.

[4] During WWI however, Hartmann completely muted his previous criticism of the Turks and started supporting the direction that the CUP party took during the war and the unification of the cause of Islam against imperial threats.

His anti-Turkish views however impeded his career advancement as appointing him in preeminent university positions became embarrassing for the rather Turcophile Prussian authorities of the time.