"how did Constantinople, which in 1914 had a population that was 50% non-Muslim, come now to be Istanbul, with a population less than 1% non-Muslim?"

There is an apparent paradox in Hugh's essay: why would there be more non-Muslims living in Constantinople before Kemalism, and fewer after Kemalism? You'd think it would be the other way around.

Posted by: remote_control at August 14, 2006 6:01 PM

gorniak

Thanks - but TV's original point remains instructive - the Ottoman sultanate was the Caliphate, thereby presumably a fanatical regime, which it was, as borne testimony by the Greeks, Bulgars, Serbs. Yet, under them, Constantinople was a 50% Islamic city, whereas under an ostensibly 'secular' Kemalism, it became a completely (secular?) Muslim, if not Islamic city.

Posted by: Infidel Pride at August 14, 2006 7:07 PM

In a recent post at The Brussels Journal Paul Belien, under increasing harassment from the Belgian government as a 'right-wing extremist', made some striking observations.

(Begin quote)

...In Turkey last May it struck me that the Turks have far more realistic views on the danger of islamism than the European political and media establishment. At least they do not equate criticism of islamism with criticism of religious Muslims. A Turkish friend told me that I would always be welcome in her country if the Belgian authorities should prosecute me for alleged 'racism' or 'islamophobia.' She was a Muslim herself but said that she did not understand why the West European countries tolerate islamist extremism to a degree that is not tolerated in her country. She explained that it was easy to recognize who the fanatics are. 'Just watch the way people dress,' she said.

'I have seen you wear a headscarf myself,' I said.

'I am not talking about headscarves, which are the traditional women's wear of the Turkish countryside, but about hijabs and burqas,' she said.

'Are you saying that all the women wearing those are terrorists?' I asked.

'No, but you can be fairly sure that families where the women dress like that sympathize with the terrorists.'...

(End quote)

Anyone care to comment on this?

The present article may cast Turkey's potential welcome of West European anti-Islamist dissidents (what a bizarre notion that is) in a somewhat different light. And yet...one should keep in mind that even "religious Muslims" are not necessarily enemies.

Posted by: snowpea at August 14, 2006 8:07 PM

"There is an apparent paradox in Hugh's essay: why would there be more non-Muslims living in Constantinople before Kemalism, and fewer after Kemalism? You'd think it would be the other way around."
-- from a posting above

I just saw this, and will later this evening discuss what is indeed only an "apparent" paradox but what, if all the relevant details are known, is no paradox at all.

Posted by: Hugh at August 14, 2006 8:25 PM

Egypt: Months of Harassment Force Coptic Blogger to Censor Herself

Ummah News Links

Posted by: ummahnewslinks at August 14, 2006 8:58 PM

Baykal: There are no minorities in Turkey

Ummah News Links

Posted by: ummahnewslinks at August 14, 2006 9:00 PM

"And ask yourself again: how did Constantinople, which in 1914 had a population that was 50% non-Muslim, come now to be Istanbul, with a population less than 1% non-Muslim?"

This happened.

http://www.bibleprobe.com/christianmartyrs-armenia.htm

Posted by: arjun.sevak at August 14, 2006 10:12 PM

Why aren't essays such as this by Fitzgerald published in the MSM. Oh, I know why, he has clarity and we wouldn't want that on islam, now would we?

Posted by: Alarmed Pig Farmer at August 14, 2006 10:35 PM

Hugh/

Great post! Wonderful words! We all want The City to be ours again!

Now!

Let's be real, let's get real!

How about telling the truth for once - just once, please, pretty please. No spin. No anti-islam agenda. No stupid American cultural supremacy. No leaving-out-facts-to-suit-my-argument sort of thing. Just tell it like it is. Oops, sorry, forgot. You're Hugh and you're American so you no-can-do.

I've attended services at St. George at the Phanar - Orthodox Christmas and Easter services (as well as private family services) when the surrounding streets and squares were choked not only by Christians but by moslems, mainly Turkish, seeking the blessing of the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholemew. I have seen, at first hand, ordinary Turkish moslems hold up their children to be blessed by His Holiness The Patriarch Bartholemew. I have encountered, first-hand, ordinary Turkish moslems who have travelled to The City from far distant provinces simply to have a child blessed by The Patriarch on that child's name day. Last (Orthodox) Easter hundreds of thousands of people (including at least half the population of The City - much to the worry of The City's police) attended The Patriarchs Blessing of the Cities and the World.

Black-and-white, black-and-white: that's all you can see, isn't it.

It simply isn't as simple as that.

Stop misleading people, please. The shades of grey matter. There are more doors to God than you, or I, can possibly imagine.

Email me! Lets do His Holiness's Easter Blessing in The City of the Cities and the World in front of St. George's Church at the Phanar together one Easter - like next Easter, perhaps?

Dominic.

Posted by: necessitasnonhabetlegem at August 15, 2006 12:44 AM

No. I'm having none of your nonsense and at this point systematic attempts here, and at other threads, to derail me, and to throw sand in the eyes of the unwary about the nature of Islam and of most (not all, but most) Muslim populations, so easily self-primitivized, so easily whipped up into hysteria of one sort or another. You dare to suggest that the millions of Greeks who lived in Turkey and who have been reduced in numbers to a few thousand (you remember the last big anti-Greek frenzy, don't you -- in September 1955, under Adnan Menderes?). In the century and decade that have passed since the first large-scale massacre, by both Muslim Turks and Muslim Kurds, of Armenians in 1894-96, impelled not by etnhnic but by anti-Infidel animus, an animus obvious in the accounts of the many Western eyewitnesses (Americans, Germans, and British). You know what has happened. The mass murder by Muslim Turks and Kurds of a million, or more, Armenians. The massacre of Greeks and the expulsion of the Pontic Greeks, so that now there cannot be more than a few thousand Greeks who live in Turkey and who, even if they are Turkish citizens, are not regarded as real "Turks" for whom the idea of "Turkishness" is inextricably linked to Islam.

What does it mean when, after 80 years of Kemalism, Islam keeps coming back, and the secularists are constantly on edge, constantly having to fight merely to retain what they had thought had been achieved long ago -- as in the universities where secularist rectors are now alarmed, and so are all those who, until recently insufficiently grateful, and insufficiently alert to the permanent menace of Islam threatening to undo the Kemalist constraints (like Rasputin surviving Yusupof's attempts), now are stirring.

Go to Hagia Sophia. Look at the Green Banner of Islam proudly waving. Tell me why you think the Turkish government, and the Turkish people, whom you think are so devoid of any anti-Infidel sentiments, are incapable of doing the obviious: that is, of permitting Christians in Turkey, whom you claim have it so good (if so, then why were those Turkish converts to Christianity on that bus in Galata a few years ago so anxious to speak in whispers, why did they keep looking around to make sure that no Turks -- that is, no Muslims -- could hear what they were saying to me?), to use the Hagia Sophia, or one small corner of it, for the conduct of Christian services?

Why?

Posted by: Hugh at August 15, 2006 1:05 AM

remote control (aka TV?): excellent question. I wonder what the resolution of the paradox is...

Posted by: traeh at August 15, 2006 1:21 AM

traeh,

Pending further explanation from Hugh, the only rational conclusion one can come to is that the Ottoman Empire was more hospitable (in that Muslim overlord taking Mafiosist care of his second-class dhimmi subjects kinda way) to non-Muslim populations than Kemalist Turkey has been -- though gorniak's theory above would be plausible (namely, that the 20th century and Kemalist progress facilitated the ability of non-Muslims to leave a hostile environment where earlier they had less ability).

Posted by: remote_control at August 15, 2006 1:42 AM

Too tired at the moment to fulfill my promise to discuss the "apparent" paradox of the decline in the non-Muslim population in Turkey, but will do so tomorrow. But a few things can quickly be noted:

1) the Armenian genocide that began in 1915
2) the attacks on Greek populations during and just after the war, and the wholesale expulsion of Pontic Greeks
3) the formal constraints on Islam took decades to create the possibility for a secularist class to exist.
4) the replacement of Islam or rather, the attempt to substitute for Islam, a national myth of "The Turk" and to claim for "The Turk" the entire history of Anatolia, including that of the Byzantine Greeks, a claim going back to the times of the Hittites, nonetheless did not allow for non-Muslims to be considered as real or full Turks (see Lewis, "The Emergence of Modern Turkey"). In other words, even the Kemalists could not and would not deny that "Turkishness" required Islam, and no non-Muslim could feel he could participate fully in Turkish life or be considered fully a Turkish citizen in the sense that Muslims were.
5) the general decline in the population of all kinds of non-Muslims was paralleled in other countries -- such as Egypt (consider what happened to the Greeks, Jews, Italians of Alexandria and Cairo in the 1950s and 1960s) and Iraq. Pan-Arabism may have placed less direct emphasis on Islam, for Nasser, like Saddam Hussein after him, knew that his political enemies, the Ikhwan in Nasser's case, the Shi'a in Saddam Hussein's case, were based in the mosques, their appeal entirely based on appeals to religion.
6) Kemalism did not create at once out of docile Muslims a class of those willing or possibly eager to be able to avoid the full effect of Islam in every area of life. And just as even "reformist" or so-called "secularists" in the Arab countries nonetheless manage to retain the hostility toward Infidels and incomprehension of Infidel rights (as exhibited in their continuing hostility toward Israel, or in the case of, say, Pakistani "secularists," toward India and its retention of Kashmir), so did Turks who accepted Kemalism nonetheless retain the belief that non-Muslims were not entitled to be treated as full citizens. This was not lost on whatever Greeks, Armenians, Jews may have remained in Turkey.

And the hostility can be seen today, in the refusal to allow the training of Greek Orthodox priests in Turkey itself, in the refusal to recognize the Armenian genocide (as a matter of Turkish -- even "Kemalist" Turkish -- state policy), and of course the hideous popularity of "Mein Kampf" and other antisemitic books and movies which have recently been so popular.

A sketch. I'll see if I can fill it out tomorrow.

Posted by: Hugh at August 15, 2006 2:09 AM

Hugh/

Thank-you. We must sleep.

Dominic.

Posted by: necessitasnonhabetlegem at August 15, 2006 2:32 AM

Hugh/

Thank-you. We must sleep.

Dominic.

Posted by: necessitasnonhabetlegem at August 15, 2006 2:34 AM

necessitasnonhabetlegem,
You have seen the link that I posted before. What do you think was the fault of these people ? They made a major mistake, other than being born infidel. They forgot the genocides of their ancestors. They thought that all that was 'behind'. And they paid for this mistake with their lives. muslims, throughout history, exhibit this behaviour. They are capable of living in peace, but that does not mean that they will continue to do so, the koran tells them to kill, and one day they remember that, and start on the infidels.

What do you think is the condition of infidels in pakistan and bangladesh ? They are killed randomly. The few cases that international media manages to get are not the tip of the iceberg. One day these countries will have no infidel populations. The same fate awaits infidel populations in all lands islamic.

Posted by: arjun.sevak at August 15, 2006 2:59 AM

Mr. Fitzgerald:

In all fairness, you must remember that there was the Turco-Greek War of 1919-1922, in which the Greeks invaded western Anatolia in the hope of regaining territory lost to the Ottomans nearly 500 years before.

The Greeks were turned back and the remaining Greek population still living in Asia Minor was relocated to Greece in 1922. All of which is to say that there is an argument to be made that the decline in non-Moslem population in Istanbul might have resulted because Turks were acting as nationalists rather than religiously.

Posted by: Chatillon at August 15, 2006 10:29 AM

The overlap between Islam and Kemalism, or rather in the whole business of the followers of Ataturk and the national myth of "The Turk," should not be overlooked. The Greeks in Smyrna were certainly attempting to establish Greek control of that city, and not only troops, but the Greek population,was massacred, while French ships bobbed in the offing. The pitiable condition of the Greeks, and of the Armenians, and their victimization, could not in any case reflect those systematic constraints on Islam identified with Kemal Ataturk.

Why not? Well, the massacres of the Armenoians took place, by Muslims (not only Turks but Kurds, and even in the Syrian Desert Arab tribesmen would help themselves to straggling Christian Armenian girls) and prompted by the attitudes of Islam, in 1894-96 and again from 1915-1920. When did Kemalism begin? Only after 1924. Furthermore, the effects of Kemalism on the minds of Turks did not begin at once, but worked slowly, and slowly, over many decades, a class of secularized Turks was created. They are not a majority. They control, still, the army, and the govnement-run universities. They no longer control, under Erdogan, many other branches of the government. But in any case, the replacement myth for Islam, promted by the Kemalists, of "The Turk" as a historic and magnificent figure, and of Ataturk as a historic and magnificent figure(the officially encouraged cult of Ataturk as the Perfect Man and Greatest Turk of all time obviously replacing that other Perfect Man, Muhammad. Systematic restraints on Islam began in the mid-1920s. But it took decades for the minds even of 10%, or now possibly as much as 20-25%, of the Turkish population to begin to exhibit something like the rationality, and ability to tolerate criticism, of Western, non-Muslim man. The old order, the old belief-system, remained in control, and few things show this as vividly as the towing of the Struma and then the deaths of the hundreds of Jewish refugees aboard, with not a single attempt to help rescue them or a word of regret, and then the 1942 wartime legislation imposing a confiscatory tax on non-Muslims, and then the 1955 attack on the Greek community of Istanbul.

Posted by: Hugh at August 15, 2006 11:26 AM

Any way you slice the Turkey, the huge statistical change of non-Muslim population in Constantinople from 50% (during the fin du siècle of centuries of Muslim Ottoman rule) to 1% (after decades of counter-Islamic Kemalist rule) compels a reasonable mind to conclude that Muslim Ottoman rule was more hospitable to non-Muslim populations in Constantinople than was Kemalist rule.

Since we all agree that Islamic rule is bad for non-Muslims, and that it is highly likely that any counter-Islamic rule would be better for non-Muslims, we indeed have a paradox here. If we can dissolve that paradox, it will have been shown to be only an "apparent" paradox.

One way to dissolve it is to argue that the Muslim Ottoman Sultans of the one or two centuries (19th and 18th, possibly going back further) preceding Kemalism maintained a benign attitude about the non-Muslim populations in Constantinople. We on our part can still maintain the perniciousness of Islam in the face of such a benign attitude by noting that oftentimes in the history of Islam, this or that Muslim ruler might show benign attitudes to his non-Muslim populations, but that such benign attitudes were largely cultivated in spite of what Islam teaches, and were examples of Muslim rulers behaving like the few Mafia bosses or Southern slaveowners who for reasons of personal psychology decide to be "generous" and "kind" and "merciful" to the people in the grips of their power -- but that nothing in the essential Mafia creed or the Southern slaveowning culture would prevent any particular Mafia boss or Southern slaveowner from turning on a dime and treating any given subject with ruthless cruelty if he wanted to.

However, if the maintenance of a 50% non-Muslim population in Constantinople can be proven to have been constant for a sufficiently long time -- for one, two, three (or more) centuries -- this would seem to indicate some factor beyond mere personal idiosyncrasy on the part of this or that Sultan: it would seem to point to some kind of subcultural factor in Ottoman Islam, a "silver lining" in an otherwise evil regime.

Posted by: remote_control at August 15, 2006 3:01 PM

Hugh,

Article at FrontPageMag, "Turkey's Forgotten Islamist Pogrom" may have some useful background info on why Turkey's non-Muslim population dropped.

To summarize the article, there were a number of discriminatory laws passed against non-Muslims in the early part of the 20th Century, which would provide an incentive to uproot and emigrate.

In the 19th Century, the long-standing jizya tax on non-Muslims was repealed, under pressure from various European countries. I'm thinking that a consequence of this is that it removed the profit motive for the central authorities protection of the non-Muslim population

Posted by: PapaBear at August 15, 2006 4:00 PM

Re: Apparent paradox. A few additional factors to consider (if they have not been mentioned already):

-Muslims generally outbreed non-Muslims.

-non-Muslims are more likely to emigrate.

-Muslim marriage laws demand or pressure the non-Muslim to convert, whereas non-Muslim ideological groups do not demand that Muslims convert out of Islam.

-Those who leave Islam and those who criticize it will be threatened, punished and/or killed by ordinary Turkish Muslim citizens, so people are afraid to leave Islam or chip away at it. Therefore there is not much tendency of reduction in the Muslim population.

-possible changes in classification/labelling of "Muslims" (99% Muslims seems to high for Turkey).

Posted by: Archimedes at August 15, 2006 5:21 PM

To Dominic, you stated that you have witnessed on Easter and I believe other holidays streets full of Turks holding their babies for blessings from the Patriarch Bartholomew. I have heard these types of stories also, however you are extremely short sighted on your views here.

Did you not see the thousands of Turks rioting in the streets on several occasions, in protest of the Patriarch Bartholomew's desire to re-open the school of theology there? Please tell me you saw the hundreds of likenesses of the Patriarch Bartholomew being burned outside his residence during these riots. Did you ever go past the Patriarch's residence and ask yourself, why does the head of the Orthodox Church sit in a bunker surrounded by barbed wire and high impenetrable walls? Do you see the Vatican holed up the way the Patriarch is there?

I would like to know why you believe the worlds greatest Greek city has less than 2,000 Greeks living in it. Please do not tell me that you did not know that Constantinople was the worlds largest Greek city? Let's face it almost nothing that tourists see there is Turkish, it's all Greek and yet it never sinks in to the average tourist. Why is it that Greeks cannot inherit land in Constantinople unless they convert to Islam?

Why is it so important that the Patriarch of Constantinople by Turkish law is only allowed to be a Turkish born citizen? Pretty obvious to me, but can you tell why? Islam in Turkey is a huge boa constrictor on all other cultures and allows no room for anything else to survive. 99% Muslim in a secular country should be more than obvious to the deafest of deaf, and blindest of blind.

Please Dominic go insult someone Else's intelligence as you cannot pass here without being exposed as a fraud. And Dominic as a Greek, I truly hope you are not one of my people, because personally nothing distresses and disgusts me more than hearing from traitors amongst my flock.

Niv

Posted by: niv at August 15, 2006 6:39 PM

Archimedes, all your points still point to a paradox: why would centuries of Muslim rule under the Ottomans not have resulted in those factors you cite, and then only a few decades under counter-Islamic Kemalist rule, suddenly those factors assert themselves?

Posted by: remote_control at August 15, 2006 6:49 PM

Gorniak, in response to your post, Greeks talk about this all the time, but we fear we are speaking into a vacuum.

No one out there seems to be interested in our problems, and this is why Greece has in the past several decades gone from a country that loved the U.S., to a country that hates the U.S..

This has all happened as Greeks always see the financial, military, and political aid Turkey always receives from the U.S., and seemingly undermines Greeks collectively. No one seems to care what happens to Greeks and other minorities in Turkey, as she has been the beneficiary of western aid for at least 2 centuries.

We all hope and know that our only chance for peace with our disturbed neighbour will come only after a huge shift in allegiance from the large western powers. Until then we'll feel as isolated as Serbs do watching criminal element around them be rewarded for being nothing other than neighborhood thugs.

Niv

Posted by: niv at August 15, 2006 6:49 PM

"why would centuries of Muslim rule under the Ottomans not have resulted in those factors you cite, and then only a few decades under counter-Islamic Kemalist rule, suddenly those factors assert themselves?"
-- from a posting above

Under Muslim rule, and not only in the Ottoman Empire, non-Muslims either accepted their onerous and vexed status as dhimmis, or they converted to Islam to escape that status, or in a very few cases, managed to leave Dar al-Islam for Dar al-Harb. By 1900, after all, 90% of the world's Jews lived outside the MIddle East, in Europe and North America. Armenians and Maronites also managed, with the new and better transportation by both land and, especially, sea, to leave for the port of Marseille (a few bars of "Le Chant du Depart" please) or even for distant America.

Western powers began to pressure the Ottoman government to treat its non-Muslims better, beginning in the 1820s and 1930s. The so-called Tanzimat reforms of 1839, and then later reforms announced by various Ottoman governments and sultans, appeared to meet Western demands. But what was supposed to be official policy took a long time in being implemented, and most Turks of course were horrified by the idea that non-Muslims could or should receive better treatment, even possibly full legal equality. Such an idea was an offense against Islam, an abomination. One result werer the attacks on Christians and Jews, some of whom had come to believe that a new order was dawning, and the very idea that the old order changeth caused Muslims to become still more violent, their supremacy challenged by Western military power and diplomatic pressure. The massacre of Maronites in 1860 in Damascus, the massacres of Armenians in 1894-1896, and then the subsequent mass murder of Armenians from 1915 to 1920, and the attacks on Greeks, signalled that if the non-Muslims would no longer be forced to submit to Muslmi rule as dhimmis, because the Ottoman government was too weak to resist Western pressures, then other ways of dealing with these uppity populations would be found.

Too much is read into the mere physical survival of people as dhimmis. Their lot was, by our standards, intolerable. Just because they survived does not mean that they were well-treated. And Kemalism did not suddenly efface or erase deep-seated attitudes of hostility and contempt for non-Muslims, now seen as people who might hold Turkish citizenship, would never be Turks. There was, after World War I, far more opportunity to learn about Europe, to meet Allied soldiers in Constantinople, to take the train or boats out of Turkey, to seek other places to settle far from the persistent attitudes, rooted in and explained by, Islam, that did not die just because Ataturk constrained the political power of Islam. The expulsion of non-Muslim Greeks in some places, and the officla transfer, in exchange for the Greek-speaking Muslims who were sent from Greece to Turkey, diminished the Greek community to a few tens of thousands. Now, in all of Turkey, there may be fewer than 4,000 people who call themselves Greek.

Similarly, in Egypt, under the supposedly "secular" Nasser -- "secular" only in the sense that opposition to his rule centered on the Muslim Brotherhood, the Ikhwan al-muslimin -- the Greeks, Jews, Italians, and others who had lived in Egypt for many centuries, and even been recognized for services to the state under the ancien regime of decadent, lazy, fat, easygoing Farouk, propped up by British civil servants, holdovers from the days of Lord Cromer and Edward Cecil, author of the classic "The Leisure of an Egyptian Official."

New modes of transportation, new awareness of the West and the possiblity of leaving Turkey and going to that West, were products of the twentieth century, and had their effect on those few Armenians, those still fewer Greeks, those hardly discernible Jews, who continued to live in Turkey after 1924, the date at which the Kemalist reforms can be said to have begun. What counted most for non-Muslims were not those reforms, but rather whether the attitudes of contempt and hostility toward them would continue. Turkey remained an Islamic country. Turks remained Muslims under Ataturk, and under Inonu, and Menderes, and the others. That did not change. And the attitude toward non-Muslims, so easily appealed to, as we have seen, some with shock, and all with horror, at how easy it has been for the Turkish media, and for many who are prominent in Turksih political life, to describe American soldiers in Iraq as "worse than Nazis" and appear to willingly believe it.

Several postings above, read seriatim, provide what I think constitutes an explanation for what seems only to be an "apparent" paradox. It was not "Kemalism" that drove out non-Muslims. Most of them had been driven out, or had left to escape further persecution and murder, before 1924. And "Kemalism" did not change the attitudes of Muslims in Turkey toward non-Muslims in Turkey, not for many decades, and even where it did, finally, some 40 years after Ataturk began his program, it was only among the highly educated secular elite in business and the professions. Otherwise, the old hostility remained, easily appealed to, readily inflamed.

Posted by: Hugh at August 15, 2006 11:02 PM

I appreciate Hugh's in-depth explanation. It makes sense overall, although one would still at least want to say that the unprecedented sociopolitical trauma of the end of the Caliphate (a good thing) followed by the rise of Kemalism (another good thing or at any rate better than Islam) triggered or unleashed certain bad things that might have otherwise remained dormant (i.e., 50% down to 1% non-Muslim populations in Constantinople).

Posted by: Television at August 16, 2006 11:54 AM