THE BLIGHT OF ASIA
MOHAMMEDANISM has been propagated by the sword and by
violence ever since it first appeared as the great enemy of Christianity, as I
shall show in a later chapter of this book.
It has been left to the Turk, however, in more recent years,
to carry on the ferocious traditions of his creed, and to distinguish himself
by excesses which have never been equaled by any of the tribes enrolled under
the banner of the Prophet, either in ancient or in modern times.
The
following is a partial list of Turkish massacres from 1822 up till 1904:
1822 Chios, Greeks 50,000
1823 Missolongi, Greeks 8,750
1826 Constantinople, Jannisaries 25,000
1850 Mosul, Assyrians 10,000
1860 Lebanon, Maronites 12,000
1876 Bulgaria, Bulgarians 14,700
1877 Bayazid, Armenians 1,400
1879 Alashguerd,
Armenians 1,250
1881 Alexandria,
Christians 2,000
1892 Mosul,
Yezidies 3,500
1894 Sassun,
Armenians 12,000
1895-96 Armenia,
Armenians 150,000
1896
Constantinople, Armenians 9,570
1896 Van,
Armenians 8,000
1903-04
Macedonia, Macedonians 14,667
1904 Sassun,
Armenians 5,640
_______
Total 328,477
To this must be added the massacre in the
province of Adana in 1909, of thirty thousand Armenians
So imminent and ever-present was the peril, and so fresh
the memory of these dire events in the minds of the non-Mussulman subjects of
the sultan, that illiterate Christian mothers had fallen into the habit of
dating events as so many years before or after “such and such a massacre.”
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