Omaha Daily Bee Newspaper, October 18, 1903, Page 33

¥ 4 Defense of the Mohammedan | By An European Traveler Who Has Spent Years in Mohammedan Countries (Copyright, 1903, by T. C. McClure)) XTRY! EXTRY! Awful murders in Macedonia! Turks kill 50,000 Christians! Speshul extry! And the newsboy sped down the street, selling his papers like hot cakes to people eager to read about the latest atrocities of the “unspeakable Turk." An educated Mohammedan from Con- stantinople, on a visit to America, bought one of the papers and read the cablas grams and editorial comments, smiling cynically the while. “Do you people really believe all this?*® he asked an American friend. “Do you really belicve that we Mohammedans are such monsters of depravity, and that we take pleasure in wiping out Christians just because they are Christians? Such a course is totally opposed to the spirit of Mohammedanism." “Then,” asked the American, ‘“how do you account for these massacres we heap 80 much about?” “Many of them never happen,” reply. ‘“They are Invented by the Mace= donian revolutionary committee, the Bule garian authorities and other enemies of the Ottoman empire. Other ‘massacres,’ a$ your papers call them, are really battles, When the Macedonian rebels are beaten in a fight, the survivors call it a massacre.” ““And what about the Armenian affair? Burely the same remarks can't apply, there.” “The Armenians and the Kurds,"” said the Mohammedan apologist, ‘“have always been at deadly feud. For centuries Ar- menians have slain Kurds, and Kurds Ar- menians. It is not a matter of religion at all; it is a matter of race, of polities, of commerce—there are a thousand points of difference. The Armenians have become a race of cowardly hucksters and usurers, while the Kurds have remained a race of warriors. The Kurds are paying back old gcores, and the Armenians can no longer ‘keep their end up,’ as you would say. That is all there is to it “Believe me, any slaughter of Christians in Turkish dominions, or in any other Mo- hammedan country, arises from some other was the NUBIAN cause thanr thHe ffict thiat tlans. We NHave no animosity toward Qhris- tlans. They are what the Prophet called ‘people of a book' (‘ahl kitab')—thsxt is to say, followers of a revealed religion—and kindly treatment of them i expressly com- manded in the Kornm.. They. ars tolernted by us, and evem c‘rerished and assistied when. they deservec !f. lyy reasen of high they are Chris- LR T MOHAMMEDANS BY THE NILR of the poor. The Mohammedan peasant would probably offer the same reasons for killing them that the Russiuns offer for the Kishineff massacre and the persecution of the Jews. Others are political plotters of the most desperute, anarchiztic type, who think nothing of blowing up a mosque full of people with dynamite, or of poisoning the streams upon which a Mohammedan Jews and Christians of all gects are pers mitted to live and practice their religion within his territory. And the better Jews and Christinns they are the better he likes them, he avers. ¢ The Mohamm:dan asserts that he ex- tends tolerance to the practices and exac- tions of any faith, be it what it may. lis religion teaches him reverence not only A COPTIC SCHOOL TOLERATED BY THE MOHAMMEDANS, . character and good works.” ‘““Then, if you are so tolerant,” sald the still skeptical American, “why all this trou- ble?” “There are many reasons,” said the Mo- hammedan, ‘A great many of the Chris- tians in Turkey and throughout the Levant are not by any means nice people. If you had them here 1 don't think you would like them. “Many are usurers who grind the faces THE RAW MATERIAL village depends for water, “If they simply practiced the Christian religion, and were otherwise peaceable, law abiding, useful subjects nobody would trouble them. Hundreds of thousands of other Christians, who have those qualities, live under Turkish rule and have no com- plaint to make about it."” ‘This, in brief, is the defense of the Mo- hammedan. He denles strenuously that he is intolerant, and points to the fact that for his own creed, but for all revealed re- ligions, If the Salvation army went through the streets of a fanatical Moham- medan city, beating its drums and flaunting its banners, it would meet with none of the fnsults which it sometimes encounters in the slums of western cities. As roon as the Mohammedans undertocd that this curious and novel demonstration was orda'nsd by the religious pelief of the actors, they would treat it not merely with polite tol- OF A MOHAMMEDAN ARMY.