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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