ABSTRACT
Habent sua fata auctores—of all the strange fates of twentieth century writers that of Mohammed Essad Bey may well have been the most extraordinary. Cometlike he appeared on the Berlin literary firmament in the nineteen twenties, an Oriental prince suitably adorned—a flowing robe, a turban and, of course, an enormous dagger which would have been the envy of Crocodile Dundee, in his belt. Within a few months he became the expert of leading newspapers and literary magazines for the mysterious East, the rise and fall and reemergence of Islam, eastern philosophy and religion, the oilfields, the Russian soul, Camels and oases, dark betrayal, fiendish murder—in brief, everything north and east of Constantinople. By the age of thirty he had written biographies of Stalin, the prophet Mohammed, Tsar Nicholas II, Reza Khan of Persia, as well as a history of the Caucasus but also the story of the Cheka, the Soviet secret police, the fate of the White Russian emigration, the geopolitical importance of oil. He had predicted the coming victory of Muslim fundamentalism (Wahhabism) and the renaissance of the Arab world. He had written a love story (Nino and Ali which became a cult book but also “Was Tolstoi epileptic?”: His books were successful and translated into many languages.
