TURKEY: Christendom vs. Islam

During the week two opposed views on Turkey were presented, one in a book* by Clair Price, the other in a magazine article by Edward Hale Bierstadt.

In the compass of 234 pages Mr. Price follows the career of Mustapha Kernel Pasha, first President of the Republic of Turkey, gives the Turkish angle of the War and presents some rather acrimonious comment on Christianity in the Land of Islam. So far so good. The author goes farther afield and animadverts upon “Germany in Islam,” British policy toward Turkey, Russia and Turkey. In particular does he berate the Anglo-Russian treaty of 1907 which paved the way for completion of the Triple Entente by King Edward VII with the Tsar of Russia at Reval in 1908. Although much that is said is entirely pertinent and substantially correct, the reasoning is seeminglyparalogical. Mr. Price’s vision is circumscribed by Islam, the needs and problems of the West find no place in his dogmas; in the sphere of foreign relations he is often irrationally pro-Turk.

As a whole the book is well written and interesting, but the subject is handled journalistically and there is little trace of scholarship. It probably has little historical value, if any—yet it is well worth reading.

Among the most apposite remarks Mr. Price made are those on religion. The relations of the British Crown, as the greatest Mohammedan Power on earth, with India while fighting Mohammedan Turkey are summed up: “One sometimes wonders, on that exalted plane on which Sovereigns dwell, what the Emperor of India has been saying to the Defender of the Faith. . .”†

We found in the Turks a people of integrity and tolerance, but because they refused to turn Christian, we have visited the butcher-legend upon them while exalting Greeks and Armenians upon an equally artificial martyr-legend. Among Imperialists, one can understand the necessity of an inflexible attitude of superiority, but among Christians it corresponds neither to reality nor to the teachings of the First Christian. . . .

Americans at home have assumed that the word Christian is an all-sufficing label . . . the missionaries’ supporters at home are firm believers in prohibition, but the missionaries themselves know that the liquor traffic in the Ottoman Empire has been in the hands of native and Western Christians. . . . The city of Islam has been under Christians’ control for four years and the sight of it has been such a rebuke as Christendom has not suffered since the great Moslem reformation first purged the decadent Eastern Christendom of the Middle Ages. … I believe that American Protestantism and British Nonconformism have their greatest task still ahead of them and that that task is nearer home than Islam. I believe that task is nothing less than the salvage of the practice of Christianity from the wreck the Christians themselves have made of it.

In The Christian Herald, entitled The Great Betrayal, appeared an article by Edward Hale Bierstadt. It is obviously improper to make conclusive comment on a story as Turkophobe as Mr. Price’s book is the opposite, since the first instalment has only recently appeared.‡ Mr. Graham Patterson, the publisher, with inconceivable rashness, declares that “We are publishing the truth about the Near East.” There is probably no one alive capable of fulfilling such a gigantic task, much less Mr. Bierstadt, whose first article may tell the truth, but not all the truth.

In brief the story brings out the persecution of the Christians by the Turks, stresses the burning of Smyrna as “one chapter in a tale begun 600 years ago,” says that “American religious and educational institutions have been virtually wiped out.” To say all this, and the author says more, without taking into account the persecution of Turks by Christians, the military exigencies of Turkey, etc., is to be grandiloquently superior to mere history. The Turk is barbarous and has been cruel, but as a respecter of religion history proves him to have been more tolerant than Western civilization.

—THE REBIRTH OF TURKEY — Clair Price. Seltzer ($3.00).

† Titles of the King of Great Britain, etc.

† See The Christian Herald, Dec. 8, 1923.