Piano-Playing Butcher?
Mustafa Akyol’s “A Sultan with Swat” (Dec. 26) ends with the suggestion that we “recover the spirit of Islamic modernity personified by the piano-playing Sufi, Abdul Hamid II.” That same Abdul Hamid II was responsible for murdering over 200,000 Christian Armenians between 1894 and 1896, which laid the groundwork for the 1915 Armenian genocide. He was not the gentle, melodious musician that Akyol would have you believe; rather, he was a paranoid and homicidal maniac hell-bent on exterminating the Armenian race, only stopping with the threat of European intervention. How could this man–known as the “Ottoman Butcher” for making his Sunni Muslim subjects brutally murder innocent Christians–possibly embody the “spirit of Islamic modernity”?
Brian Sieben
Portsmouth, R.I.
Mustafa Akyol responds: I did not intend to portray Abdul Hamid II as a completely faultless ruler; rather, I wished to stress the great dichotomy between this prominent caliph–a modernizer of Islamdom and a friend of the United States–and the contemporary self-declared warriors for the caliphate, exemplified by al Qaeda terrorists.
Moreover, although the massacres of 1894 to 1896 are a stain upon the sultan’s record, he was not a “butcher,” mainly because of his attachment to the Islamic faith. According to historian Robert Melson in Revolution and Genocide, “The main reason total genocide was not perpetrated by the Ottoman regime in 1894-96 was its commitment to Islam, to the millet system [Ottoman religious pluralism], and to restoring the old order. . . . To commit genocide by destroying the Armenian millet would have been a radical departure from the sultan’s ideology.”
Ease up on Emerson
In “Hawthorne’s God” (Jan. 2 / Jan. 9) Patrick Walsh creates a false dichotomy between Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson, a handy tool for demonizing Emerson’s gnostic beliefs (aka “America’s reigning dogma”). As Walsh acknowledges, Hawthorne was not a regular churchgoer. He did not adhere to a particular faith and longed for something that did not seem to exist: “a belief that would unite people in a community of love that connected the living and the dead.” So Hawthorne, like Emerson, wanted his own version of truth. In this, both men were very much products of their day. Joseph Smith, another New Englander, rejected the Protestant faith of his childhood and founded a new religion, just as William Miller (a New Yorker) created Seventh Day Adventism. The 19th century saw Protestantism’s Second Great Awakening in the mid-1800s, as well as a boomlet of new offerings in the 1870s–Christian Scientists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, agnosticism, and more.
If Emerson’s “gnostic dogma” won the war of ideas, as Walsh asserts (although many would dispute this), then its victory was won fair and square in a thriving religious marketplace. Americans had a wide spectrum of beliefs from which to choose, because everyone was selling their version of the truth. Why single out Emerson as a unique case?
Walsh celebrates Hawthorne’s awareness of man’s limitations: “It has been said that the opposite of love is not hate, but power.” Indeed, it has been said, but Walsh should have mentioned who said it. “Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other,” wrote Carl Jung. Jung was no gnostic, but he believed strongly in the “religion of self,” and in fact articulated the concept of “introversion” that Walsh bewails in our culture.
Michele Kerr
Santa Clara, Calif.
