Historians have generally interpreted the former Seyhulislam Musa Kazim's extensive essay justifying Jihad against the Entente in November 1914 as an attempt to rally support in the Empire among the Arabs and provoke Muslim rebellion in the British and French colonies. Scholars have yet to fully explore the impact of this issue on non-Arab Muslims within the Ottoman Empire itself. Many of the most politically active Ottomans in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century were recent refugees from former imperial territories in the Balkans and Caucasus. They had fled the Russians and Balkan Christian armies who often threatened their livelihood after defeats such as the 1877-1878 Russo-Ottoman War, and the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913. As a result of these defeats the refugees believed prior Ottoman official pronouncements of confessional equality and liberal government triggered the wars by signaling weakness to Pan-Slavic and Christian separatist movements. The refugees therefore tended to oppose the Young Turk and Tanzimat governments that made these statements and support the Pan-Islamists who sought to preserve Muslim dominance in the Ottoman Empire. The refugees' threat to the government was demonstrated a few decades prior to the outbreak of the First World War when, in 1877, they supported Sultan Abdulhamid II's suspension of the Ottoman Constitution and many liberal reforms. Thus, Musa Kazim, aware of a similar threat to his Young Turk reformist government, used his justification of Jihad to appeal to these skeptics to join in armed struggle against their former oppressors and promised them the opportunity to liberate their lost homelands. His extensive interpretation of the Quran proved effective in mobilizing the refugee population by claiming that their struggle to retake their lands was a universal goal of the Muslim community at home as well as abroad.