In the first section on Armenia I related how that country was one of the most Christian in the world. In this section I cronicle how that caused them to become one of the most persecuted countries, ever, by the Musilms. What happened to them is one of the most stupendos atrocities in world history. You must read about it.
Ron
Armenia’s medieval capitol of Ani was called “the city of a 1,001 churches,” with a population of 200,000, rivaling the populations of the largest cities of the era, such as: Constantinople, Baghdad, Damascus, Florence, Rome, Paris, London, and Milan. And it was all Christian.
Islam emerged in the 7th century and quickly conquered throughout north Africa, Egypt and the Middle East.
In 704 AD, Caliph Walid tricked Armenian nobles to meet in St. Gregory’s Church in Naxcawan and Church of Xram on the Araxis River. Once they were all inside, he broke his promise, a practice called “taqiya,” and ordered his soldiers to surround the church, set it on fire, and burn to death everyone inside.
In 1064, Muslim Sultan Alp Arslan and his Seljuk Turkish army invaded Armenia and after a 25-day siege, destroyed the city of Ani.
Arab historian Sibt ibn al-Jawzi recorded: “The city became filled from one end to the other with bodies of the slain. The army entered the city, massacred its inhabitants, pillaged and burned it, leaving it in ruins. Dead bodies were so many that they blocked the streets; one could not go anywhere without stepping over them. And the number of prisoners was not less than 50,000 souls. I was determined to enter city and see the destruction with my own eyes. I tried to find a street in which I would not have to walk over the corpses; but that was impossible.”
Ottoman Turks reduced conquered Christians, Jewish, and non-Muslim populations to a second-class status called “dhimmi,” and required them to annually ransom their lives by paying an exorbitant tax called “jizyah.”
Sultan Murat I (1359-1389) began the practice of “devshirme” — taking away boys from the conquered Armenian and Greek families. These innocentboys were systematically traumatized and indoctrinated into becoming ferocious Muslim warriors called “Janissaries,” similar to Egypt’s “Mamluk” slave soldiers. Janissaries were required to call the Sultan their “father” and were forbidden to marry, giving rise to depraved practices and abhorrent pederasty — “the sodomy of the Turks.”
For centuries Ottomans conquered throughout the Mediterranean, Middle East, Eastern Europe, Spain and North Africa, carrying tens of thousands into slavery.
Beginning in the early 1800s, the Ottoman Empire began to decline. Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania won their independence.
When Armenia’s sentiments leaned toward independence, Sultan Abdul Hamid II put an end to it by massacring 100,000 from 1894-1896.
President Grover Cleveland reported to Congress, December 2, 1895: “Occurrences in Turkey have continued to excite concern. Massacres of Christians in Armenia and the development of a spirit of fanatic hostility to Christian influences have lately shocked civilization.”
The next year, President Cleveland addressed Congress, December 7, 1896: “Disturbed condition in Asiatic Turkey, rage of mad bigotry and cruel fanaticism, wanton destruction of homes and the bloody butchery of men, women, and children, made martyrs to their profession of Christian faith. Outbreaks of blind fury which lead to murder and pillage in Turkey occur suddenly and without notice. It seems hardly possible that the earnest demand of good people throughout the Christian world for its corrective treatment will remain unanswered.”
President William McKinley told Congress, December 5, 1898: “The envoy of the United States to Turkey is charged to press for a just settlement of our claims of the destruction of the property of American missionaries resident in that country during the Armenian troubles of 1895.”
On December 6, 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt reported to Congress of: “systematic and long-extended cruelty and oppression of which the Armenians have been the victims, and which have won for them the indignant pity of the civilized world.”
Sultan Abdul Hamid II made a league with Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, trading guns for access to oil.
When Sultan Hamid was deposed in 1908, there was a brief euphoria among the citizens of Turkey, as they naively hoped the country would adopt a constitutional government guaranteeing individual rights and freedoms.
Instead, the government was taken over by the “Young Turks” — three leaders or “pashas”:
- Mehmed Talaat Pasha,
- Ismail Enver Pasha, and
Ahmed Djemal Pasha.
They acted as if they were planning democratic reforms while they clandestinely planned a genocidal scheme called “Ottomanization,” ridding the country of all who were not Muslims Turks.
In the first step unsuspecting Armenian young men were recruited into the military. Next they made them “non-combatant” soldiers and took away their weapons. Finally, they marched them into the woods and deserts where they were ambushed and massacred.
With the Armenian young men gone, Armenian cities and villages were defenseless. Nearly 2 million old men, women and children were marched into the desert, thrown off cliffs or burned alive.
Armenian cities of Kharpert, Van and Ani were leveled. Entire Armenian populations were deported to the deserts of Syria and Mesopotamia where hundreds of thousands were killed or starved to death.
Theodore Roosevelt recorded the fate of Armenians in his 1916 book Fear God and Take Your Own Part:
“Armenians, who for some centuries have sedulously avoided militarism and war are so suffering precisely and exactly because they have been pacifists whereas their neighbors, the Turks, have been militarists. During the last year and a half. Armenians have been subjected to wrongs far greater than any that have been committed since the close of the Napoleonic Wars. Fearful atrocities. Serbia is at this moment passing under the harrow of torture and mortal anguish.”
Roosevelt continued:
“Armenians have been butchered under circumstances of murder and torture and rape that would have appealed to an old-time Apache Indian. The slaughter of the Armenians must be shared by the neutral powers headed by the United States for their failure to protest when this initial wrong was committed. The crowning outrage has been committed by the Turks on the Armenians. They have suffered atrocities so hideous that it is difficult to name them, atrocities such as those inflicted upon conquered nations by the followers of Attila and of Genghis Khan. It is dreadful to think that these things can be done and that this nation nevertheless remarks ‘neutral not only in deed but in thought,’ between right and the most hideous wrong, neutral between despairing and hunted people — people whose little children are murdered and their women raped — by the victorious and evil wrong-doers. I trust that all Americans worthy of the name feel their deepest indignation and keenest sympathy aroused by the dreadful Armenian atrocities. I trust that they feel that a peace obtained without righting the wrongs of the Armenians would be worse than any war.”
Historian Arnold Toynbee wrote: “Turkish rule is slaughtering or driving from their homes, the Christian population. Only a third of the two million Armenians in Turkey have survived, and that at the price of apostatizing to Islam or else of leaving all they had and fleeing across the frontier.”
Attaturk was the founding father of the Republic of Turkey and served as President from 1924 to 1938, ushering in an era of moderation. He abolished sharia courts, and made Friday a workday, instituting the “weekend” of Saturday and Sunday. He outlawed polygamy and elevated the status of women, appointing the first female judges, and insisting on education of girls. He abolished women wearing of scarves, veils, chadors or burqas – the full-length body dress worn by Muslim women, and requiring women to wear skirts.
Ataturk stated:
“If henceforward the women do not share in the social life of the nation, we shall never attain to our full development. We shall remain irremediably backward, incapable of treating on equal terms with the civilizations of the West.”
Ataturk abolished the position of the Sultan and set up a secular government. He ended the religious Caliphate, thus preventing Muslim religious leaders from controlling government affairs.
In an effort to cut ties with the fundamentalist past, he introduced the western use of last names, replaced Arabic Islamic names with Turkish names, and encouraged the next generation not to take Arabic names but instead ethnic Turkish names. He abolished the use of Arabic and Persian script, and replaced it with the Latin alphabet.
In spite of all that Ataturk did, In some Islamist countries, Christian minorities continue to suffer persecution and even genocide:
- Iraqi Chaldean Christians,
- Assyrian Christians,
- Syriac Christians,
- Lebanese Maronite Christians,
- Egyptian Coptic Christians,
- Aramaic Christians,
- Melkite Christians, and
Kurds.
Harvard Professor George Santayana wrote in Reason in Common Sense (Vol. I of The Life of Reason, 1905):
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Similarly, Will and Ariel Durant wrote in The Lessons of History (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1968): “Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew. If the transmission should be interrupted civilization would die, and we should be savages again.”
True Texan Tales 