The bluff Sir Walter was quite right about one thing: German technical and military skill were only half the story. And if it had been up to Germany’s greatest military tactician, Otto von Bismarck, their combined impact would have been even less. The “Iron Chancellor” was above all interested in playing Russia against France, and regarded the Orient rather as he regarded the Balkans—as the swamp to end all swamps. Determined to escape from his conservative shadow, the young and conceited Kaiser Wilhelm II undertook two momentous eastern voyages as the guest of Sultan Abdul Hamid II. On the second tour, in 1898 (the significant centennial of Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt), he brought ostentatious gifts of weaponry and led triumphant parades through Jerusalem and Damascus. On the second stop, he visited the tomb of Saladin and commissioned a lavish refurbishment of it. And it was during this pilgrimage that he confided to his then-ally Tsar Nicholas II that if he had come to Jerusalem “without any Religion at all [he] certainly would have turned Mahommetan!” Thus, as McMeekin notes,

was born Hajji Wilhelm, the mythical Muslim Emperor of Germany … Following the visit to Damascus, rumors of the Kaiser’s conversion to Islam spread widely throughout the bazaars of the Middle East, helped along by the discovery of “passages in the Koran” which “showed that the Kaiser had been ordained by God to free Muslims from infidel rule.”

(The citation is from Thomas Hughes’s work on the 1915–16 German mission to Afghanistan, which shows how far-flung was the effort and how dog-eared is our notion of the Muslim “street.”)

Some historians—most recently David Fromkin—have been inclined to relegate this Wilhelmine fantasy to a peripheral role in German strategy. But two kinds of evidence sustain McMeekin’s view that jihad was a salient part of Berlin’s design. The first is material: the systematic provision by Germany to Turkey of all the sinews of war, from rail to artillery, accompanied by German military advisers of the highest caliber. The second might be called ideological: no sooner had war erupted with Britain and Russia, in the first days of August 1914, than General Helmuth von Moltke, chief of the kaiser’s general staff, was cabling to Constantinople asking Enver (then nominally the head of a neutral regime) to begin inciting “Islamic uprisings.” And Baron von der Goltz, who had already seen enough service in Turkey to have earned the title of pasha, was transferred from the military government of invaded Belgium to become military aide to the sultan. These are not mere details.

Nor is it of minor significance that German money and influence subsidized the writing and distribution of the succession of fatwas that culminated, on November 14, 1914, in the sultan-caliph’s proclamation of a war in which it became the sacred duty of all Muslims to slay any infidels except those of German, Austrian, Hungarian, or American provenance. The sinister-cum-farcical phrasing of this is easily enough explained by brute realpolitik: the first three categories of infidel were financing the whole business; and the fourth, represented in Constantinople by the imperishable figure of Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, constituted an imposing neutral power. The non-Muslim populations of the Ottoman dominion, such as the Armenians and the Greeks, were not specifically named in the fatwas, but after reading McMeekin’s book, I am more convinced than ever that it was the Nacht und Nebel created by the holy war that led to these peoples’ long-meditated extirpation. Indeed, the pretext for the genocides—secretly helping the empire’s enemies—was the same. (And so was the ultimate beneficiary of the madness: Russia.)