April 24 marked the 105th anniversary of the 1915 Ottoman Empire’s deportation of 200 Armenian intellectuals from the Ottoman capital of Istanbul, an event that is remembered as the start of the Armenian genocide. Fitting reflections for this time come from Sister Hatune Dogan, a Syriac Orthodox Christian nun from Turkey, who has written about how 1915, this “so-called year of the sword,” fits within centuries of Muslim sharia subjugation of Christians.
Born in 1970, Dogan came with her family as refugees to Germany and now heads there a Christian humanitarian aid organization. In 2010, she wrote in German about her life and work in Es Geht ums Überleben: Mein Einsatz für die Christen im Irak (It is about Survival: My Work for the Christians in Iraq). She gave this author a copy during a 2014 presentation in Washington, DC.
Readers of Dogan’s biography would find unsurprising the 2019 book by Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi, The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894-1924. These Israeli historians extensively documented how World War I’s infamous Armenian Genocide was part of wider ethnic cleansing campaigns of successive Turkish regimes against Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek Christian communities. In these three decades, jihadist beliefs played a central role in the slaughter of an estimated 1.5 to 2.5 million Christians in Asia Minor; Christians plummeted from 20 to two percent of Anatolia’s population.
Dogan’s family memories confirm such longstanding historical Christian suffering under Islamic domination. The practice of Turkish society was that a “Muslim may not namely be punished because of a Christian and land in prison,” and “no decade passed without plundering, murders, kidnappings, and rapes,” she wrote. Her community remembered how often in the past sharia restricted non-Muslims, such that Christians could not ride horses and had to wear distinctive clothing, while Christians’ houses could not be higher than those of Muslims.
Dogan’s family had its own share of 1915’s horrors. One marauding Kurdish tribal irregular forced one of her great aunts into a “marriage,” and even called his “wife” a houri after the eternal virgins who supposedly please faithful Muslim men in the afterlife. By contrast, Dogan’s family has remained friendly with one Muslim Turkish family, whose ancestors helped protect her maternal grandmother from a Muslim mob.
From more recent times, Dogan recalled how Christians in Turkey would say goodbye with tears to relatives entering military service and worry about not seeing them again, given frequent military abuse of Christians. Such recruits “have war from the first roll call—and indeed in their own company,” she wrote. In the Turkish military, Christians “are the enemy” and the “victim of harassment, mistreatment, and torture” from fellow Muslim officers and men.
Across decades, Dogan’s father and brothers would tell “always the same” stories of Turkish military service. At the beginning of her father’s military service, 80 men confronted him in the shower, insulted him, and spat upon him as an uncircumcised Christian. They screamed demands that he undergo circumcision and become a “regular Muslim.”
Dogan, meanwhile, remembered that state lesson plans prescribed weekly two hours of Muslim religious instruction, even though her teacher was the local school’s only Muslim. Dogan and her fellow students agreed to boycott the instruction, but they could not avoid speaking Turkish, as their mother tongue of Aramaic was “strictly prohibited.” Not even during breaks could they speak Aramaic.
Only with Dogan’s work with Christian refugees in Iraq did she discover a place where Christians had had a “certain protection”: under the dictator Saddam Hussein. Unlike much of the Muslim-majority Middle East, under Hussein’s Baathist nationalism the “Arab nation—not the Islamic—was the center point of the worldview of this strictly secular dictatorship.” Iraqi Christians accordingly enjoyed certain rights and freedoms denied to their coreligionists in neighboring countries.
Dogan particularly noted that Iraq’s Christians were “disproportionately in high positions,” such as the Chaldean Christian Tariq Aziz, for many years Hussein’s foreign minister. Having attended Christian-led, state-subsidized schools, Christians were “often better educated than Muslims,” wealthier, and “more modern” in outlook. Hussein even preferred in his bodyguard Christians to Shiites, whom his Sunni-minority-based dictatorship deeply distrusted.
Yet even under Hussein, Christians had a precarious position, Dogan noted, and an estimated 100,000 Christians left Iraq in the mid-1990s. After the 1991 Gulf War, the “Islamization waves in the Orient no longer passed by without trace Iraq, which had become internationally isolated and domestically under strong pressure,” she wrote. “‘Allahu Akbar’—‘God is almighty’ [sic] —decorated from now on the flag of Iraqis, anti-Americanism was increasingly Islamist-based,” while Hussein planned to build the world’s largest mosque in Baghdad.
Even worse, Iraqi Christian prospects declined precipitously after the 2003 American-led overthrow of Hussein. Dogan observed that Iraqi “Christians came collectively under suspicion of having sided with the Americans and British.” The American military’s frequent employment of Christians as translators often provoked the accusation that Christians were collaborators and supporters of “American invaders.”
So being Christian in Iraq became a “stigma,” Dogan noted. “Hardly a half year after the American invasion began a systematic persecution of Christians.” Thus “churches were blown apart, priests were murdered in beastly manners, nuns were raped, children were kidnapped, mistreated, and murdered,” while beheadings “quasi publicly executed” some individuals.
Dogan has come to the conclusion that in Iraq and elsewhere, Christian “refugees currently cannot be integrated into Islamic societies” that reject universal human rights. “In some Muslim lands Christian women count as wild game,” she wrote in a time before the Islamic State’s jihadist sex slavery shocked the world, while Christian schools in Jordan raise fears of proselytizing Muslims. In all, for both Shiites and Sunnis, a “democratic form of government following Western examples is directed against Islam and therefore a work of Satan.”
Dogan, as well as Morris and Ze’evi, have provided in their writings a fuller, more proper remembrance of 1915’s murderous events. This year was no isolated incident, but the logical result of a sharia supremacist culture that has dominated the greater Middle East from its seventh-century Muslim conquests until the present. Armenian genocide memorials should never forget that.
Michael Copeland says
Sister Hate has done wonderful work with Christian girls dreadfully abused by muslims.
Michael Copeland says
Dreaded Otto Spelczech unnoticed. Should, of course, be Hatune.
Myron J. Poltroonian says
Ahh, “Mr. SpelCzech” rears his ugly rear again. Glad to see you’ve given my creation a first name.
somehistory says
When humans listen to and obey satan, they become like him; they become his children and imitate his evil behavior.
And just as a liar will point the finger and accuse others of lying, satan’s children accuse others of being satan, just as that evil demon accused God of lying and evil actions, “withholding good” from His creation.
When humans listen to and obey satan, they carry out demonic actions against other humans. This is what moslims do; they listen to and obey satan and carry out his demonic instructions against other humans, Christians in particular. Just as satan made a target of Jesus Christ, satan’s children target Jesus’s children.
Battle says
God bless Sister Hatune Dogan.
gravenimage says
+1
GreekEmpress says
Sister Dogan’s family went to Germany. Mine did too—before being sponsored to come to America, and I am grateful to Germany for letting my family in.
Germany has always been a conundrum to me.
First, they were allied with the Turks in WW1. They were first hand witnesses to the genocide.. Between and after the world wars, refugees from the Turkish terror were allowed to emigrate to Germany. Fast forward to the present and Germany is being destroyed from within by Muslim immigrants, predominantly from Turkey(?) Did they not see or understand what the refugees from Anatolia were fleeing from? Are they blind to the destruction of other faiths and cuItures which Germany saw for itself from its WW1 ally? Did Germans not think that the Muslims would do the same to them, being Christians? I would appreciate comments/insight from fellow posters here at JW. I ask because of the unique history Germany has had with Turkey over the last 100+ years.
PS—I know that not all Germans (like AFD) are on board with what’s happening.
gravenimage says
Good question, GreekEmpress.
Despite their being allies of Turkey, many Germans in Turkey were horrified by the Armenian Genocide.
hugh farquharson says
Hitler was asked about the wisdom of his policy towards the Jews. His reply? “Does anyone remember the Armenians?”
gravenimage says
Yes–good point, Hugh. And Hitler modeled the Holocaust on the Armenian Genocide.
gravenimage says
1915’s “Year of the Sword” and Beyond
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Good article.
One small point: the Armenian Genocide did not begin in 1915. It was executed in waves beginning in about 1895, then flared up in 1915 with the cover of WWI, and then again in 1922 with the destruction of the great city of Smyrna. By that time, between 1.5 and 2 million Christians had been murdered, and more driven out.
Andrew Harrod says
The aritcle discusses this.
Myron J. Poltroonian says
My grandparents on my father’s side came here around the turn of the last century to escape the “Tender Mercies” of the Ottoman Empire. They had three children here, yet never taught their children their “Native” language from the “Old Country” apart from “Hello. How are you?” and “I’m fine, thank you”. As my grandmother put it, “I told my children ‘You’re in this country. You learn to read, speak and think in the language of success'”. My grandfather died when my father was 11. He, being the oldest son, went to work after school to put his older sister and younger brother through school then college. He went to RISD (Rhode Island School of Design) on a scholarship. My grandmother went to work teaching “Citizenship Classes” for well over 50 years and never, not even once, taught her children or we, her grandchildren to hate the sons and grandsons of those who massacred her fellow Armenians. And, while the rest of my antecedents are English, French, Dutch and Scots and I will forever consider myself to be a proud, unhyphenated American, all the rest of that changed for me on September 11, 2001. As I’ve been saying since that heinous and fateful day, “If you want to know what life would be like in a Caliphate and/or under Sharia, ask an Armenian”.
gravenimage says
Glad your family got out.