A report from the heartland of America, on ways to fight the “epidemic of anti-Muslim bigotry” that has apparently engulfed us, offers food for skeptical thought:
Breaking through the noise of the 24-hour news cycle, where participants are more likely to yell than offer thoughtful discussion, isn’t easy. But a dozen local churches, religious organizations and academics still are going to try.
The stakes surrounding Islamophobia, they say, are too high — even in the city that is home to the Mother Mosque of America — to leave it to the talking heads.
The reporter does not question, as she should have, her informants’ use of the word “Islamophobia,” a word which was invented to shut down, rather than provoke, thought, a word meant to convince readers that all criticism of, or anxiety about, Islam must surely reflect only a phobia — an “irrational fear and hate” — toward Islam. She might instead have written: “The stakes surrounding what some choose, tendentiously, to label as ‘Islamophobia,’ they claim are too high.”
The “Mother Mosque of America” in Cedar Rapids is the first purpose-built mosque in America, a small nondescript structure that dates from 1934, that soon fell into disrepair and ruin, and has recently been rebuilt. Some in Cedar Rapids seem to think that mosque helps prove, to quote Barack Obama, that Islam has always “been part of America’s story.”
“I recently read a novel by Louis de Bernieres, ‘Birds Without Wings,’ said Charles Crawley, president of the Inter-Religious Council of Linn County. The book, set in Turkey in the early 20th century, documents “how international events tore apart Christians and Muslims who lived together peaceably for centuries.”
Mr. Crawley, a local pillar of the Interfaith community, had just finished a work of fiction that told him all he apparently needed to know about Christians and Muslims who, he now believes, “lived together peaceably for centuries.” But did they? Even in the last half-century of Ottoman rule, there were endless massacres of various Christian communities in the Ottoman domains. In 1876-78, several hundred thousand Bulgarians were killed in three massacres (provoking a famous denunciation by Prime Minister Gladstone). 300,000 Christian Armenians were murdered by Muslim Turks in the Hamidian massacres of 1894-9. 20,000-25,000 Armenians and Assyrians were killed by Muslims in the Adana massacre of 1909. Turks engaged in the ethnic cleansing of Thracian Bulgarians in 1913. The second greatest genocide in history was that of the Christian Armenians by the Ottoman Turks, which lasted from 1915 to 1917; 1.5 million Armenians were killed. At the same time, Muslim Turks also killed Greek and Assyrian Christians.
The allusion by Mr. Crawley to “international events” that explain the Armenian genocide of 1915-17 can only refer to the Turkish argument that whatever killings of the Armenians took place did so in the context of World War I when, those Turks claim, Armenians in the Ottoman Empire betrayed the state, and attempted to help the Allies, especially Russia, and as a consequence were killed in battle (!) with Turkish troops. Those Turkish apologists hasten to add that the number of Armenian victims has been greatly exaggerated. But the genocide that began in 1915 was prompted by the same hatred for Christian Armenians that caused Muslim Turks to murder many of them in the 1894-96 massacres, twenty years before World War I. And the massacres of non-Armenian Christians — Bulgarians, Greeks, Assyrians — by the Ottomans, all have the same explanation: Muslim hatred of the Christians, whatever their ethnicity.
That Mr. Crawley would rely on a single work of fiction for his knowledge of how Christians and Muslims got along over 1400 years is disheartening. He apparently did not think it necessary to spend a few minutes to find online descriptions of the Muslim Turk killers (some Turkish doctors even engaged in “medical experiments,” prefiguring Mengele) and mass murderers of the Christian Armenians, or to find out more about the Bulgarian massacres at Batak, Stara Zagora, and Hamanli, or about the many attacks on the Greeks, and the Assyrians, or to find out more about the Massacre of Aleppo in 1850, when Muslims savagely attacked their Christian neighbors. He knows, from a novel, that in the Ottoman Empire Christians and Muslims “lived together peaceably for centuries.” Few historians would agree.
Apparently the novel Mr. Crawley relies on for his history made no mention of the devshirme, the forced levy of Christian boys in the Balkans who were seized by the Ottomans and taken back to Turkey, a practice that lasted from the 14th to the 17th centuries. The goal was to supply the Ottoman state with capable soldiers and administrators; the boys underwent compulsory conversion to Islam. Christian families were unable to resist. Does the devshirme system suggest that Christians and Muslims “lived together peaceably” during the four centuries of its existence?
Christians and Muslims “lived together peaceably” only intermittently, for Muslim fury could flare up against the helpless Christians at any time. And the Christians, even in the best of times, were required to meet all of the onerous conditions required of dhimmis, including payment of the Jizyah. Can someone forced to endure the dhimmi status be said to live “peaceably”with his Muslim masters?
Mr. Crawley also says nothing about the treatment of Jews under the Ottomans. They were subject to repeated pogroms in Palestine by the local Muslim population of Arabs and Turks. And they, too, as dhimmis, had to pay the Jizyah to the Muslim Turks.
Christians could also be subject to special hardships imposed locally by Turkish overlords. For example, after Cyprus was conquered by the Ottomans in 1570-71, it was forbidden for any Christian to live within the walls of Nicosia. That rule affected many Christians for whom Cyprus was a way-station on the route to the Holy Land, and who were now forced to sleep in stables or on the ground, in the open. This was not a case where Muslims killed Christians, but an example of the many smaller ways that the Christians were subject to unjust treatment by the Muslim Turks.
“If we aren’t proactive, the same thing could happen here, with national and international events used to separate people on a local level,” he [Mr. Crawley] said. “So we want people to know there are forces actively promoting Islamophobia.”
Mr.Crawley seems to think that there is a conspiracy of islamophobes, “actively promoting” their hate, who need to be exposed. He offers no evidence for this claim. Who are these unidentified malignant and powerful “forces” that “promote islamophobia”? And how do these dark forces manage to do it? He doesn’t say.