Part 11

1. The Grand Vezir, or Prime Minister. 2. The Minister of the Interior. 3. The Minister of Foreign Affairs. 4. The Superintendent of the Cabinet Council. 5. The Commander-in-chief, or Minister of War. 6. The Minister of the Navy. 7. The Minister of Finance. 8. The Minister of Commerce and Public Buildings. 9. The Minister of Sacred Properties. 10. The Minister of Education. 11. The Sheik-ul-Islam, or religious head.

There is no election in Turkey; all officers are appointed by the Sultan, who can dismiss any of them at any time, and appoint some one else, and I have already explained why he almost always appoints bad ones. The Sublime Porte has no power to decide anything; it is simply a farce council to cheat the European powers; a dumb tool in the hands of the Sultan. For instance, the Sultan calls the Grand Vezir, the president of the Sublime Porte, into his presence, and tells him such a question is to be discussed in such a way, and this or that conclusion reached. "Very well, my Lord and Master," says the Grand Vezir; he goes to the Sublime Porte palace, and says to the council: "To-day I was permitted to come into the presence of His Majesty the Sultan, and he instructed me that I must bring such a question before you, and after we discuss it in such a manner, we must come to such a decision." Then all of them stand up and say, "Sultan's will be done," and that is all; their "decision" is announced to the Sultan, and he "sanctions" it. There is no discussion for days or weeks, as in England or here; it is all cut short. The Sublime Porte can decide any question in a few minutes. This is the sort of thing Mr. Carlyle wanted. You have seen the beautiful effects of it.

The question naturally arises, Why does the Sultan keep a Sublime Porte, since he decides everything himself?

There are three reasons.

First, it is the old custom. All the other Sultans have had one, and he might offend the Turks if he abolished it.

Second, as the Sultan can do no wrong, there must be somebody else to lay blame on. He is the representative of God and Prophet Mohammed. If there is any mistake in any decision, he is not responsible for it; the Sublime Porte is responsible.

Third, because he has relations with the European powers, and if any decision needs to be reversed, it can be if it is that of the Sublime Porte; but if it were the personal decision of the Sultan it could not be changed, because he is considered immutable, just as God is.

When people read about the Sublime Porte after this, I hope they will understand that there is not really any Sublime Porte; that it is a mere name, an echo, a farce, a show to bunco the world with.

Some newspaper and other writers think it is "impartial" to say that the Sultan means well, but he has a "corrupt ministry"; that it is the Sublime Porte that ruins the Turkish Empire; if it were left to the Sultan, he would reform the country; he would not let the Armenians be massacred. Put no faith in such ignorant rubbish. The Sultan dictates everything; and if any minister has the sense and courage to suggest any improvement, the Sultan dismisses him, saying that it is his own business to consider the improvements of the country and not that of any one else. The governors would not dare to order the Kurds and the Turks to wreak their worst and vilest will on the Armenians without direct orders from the Sultan. The Sultan originates all these cruelties. The recent Grand Vezir, Said Pasha, at one time was a very decent Turk. When he differed with the Sultan about massacreing the Armenians, the Sultan threatened to kill him, and he had to fly to the English embassy for protection. Murad Bey was another good Turk who remonstrated against the cruelties; his life was threatened, and he fled to Europe; now he is in Egypt, denouncing the Sultan in the press and in letters. The Sultan sentenced him to death, and asked the British government to hand him over to the Turkish officers; but the representative of the British government in Cairo refused. Just before the Armenian atrocities in Constantinople, the members of the Sublime Porte tried to have the Armenian grievances redressed, and the people pacified; the Sultan would have no such pottering, and ordered the soldiers to kill the Armenians in the streets. But this was a rare piece of virtue in the Porte. Mostly they are as bad as the Sultan himself, for he appoints men of his own stripe. Good men would not be useful tools. The Sultan has another trick of management; before making any one a member of the Porte, he tries to find out whether he is a friend to any of the ministers already in; if so, he will not appoint him. On the other hand, if the man happens to be an enemy to one of the members, he is almost sure of appointment. The Sublime Porte, therefore, is a group of mutual enemies, hating one another, and ready to betray one another at any time. He thinks if they are friendly, they may unite and depose him some day. Besides this, there are more detectives in the Sublime Porte, watching the ministers on behalf of the Sultan, than there are members. They keep the Sultan informed about the situation. If any minister or officer acts contrary to the wishes of the Sultan, he is marked for death.

THE SHEIK-UL-ISLAM.

Sheik-ul-Islam means chief of Islam--the Mohammedan religion. His office is solely religious; he has nothing to do with politics. He sees that the mosques and priests are kept in order, and the religious services properly conducted; and there are many questions among the Mohammedans which are settled without going to a magistrate, by the Sheik-ul-Islam, or by his deputies, called Muftees. These Muftees can be found in every city in Turkey. The Sheik-ul-Islam and his representatives issue Fetvas (religious decrees) according to the Koran.

There is no inconsistency between this and what I have said before about the Sultan being the representative of Mohammed, and therefore the chief of his religion. Both the Sultan and the Sheik-ul-Islam are the heads of it, just as the Greek emperor and the Patriarch were of the Greek church, and the relative position is about the same. The Sheik-ul-Islam is the special head of the ecclesiastical organization. The Sultan appoints him, but once appointed, if he is insubordinate and opposes the Sultan, the latter cannot suppress or replace him without grave scandal to the Mohammedan world. It is like Henry II and Becket; it is easier to make a head of a church than to rule him afterwards. It is like the Emperors and the Popes in the Middle Ages; and as with them, sometimes the Sheik-ul-Islam joins with political officers to depose the Sultan, and his fetva, or decree, makes it legal. When Abdul Aziz was deposed, the then Sheik-ul-Islam, Khairollah Effendi, issued the fetva for it, reluctantly, for Heussein Avni Pasha forced him to do it under threat of death. As Heussein's own head was in immediate peril, he had no scruples about the Sheik-ul-Islam's. Every fetva has two questions and one answer. A case is set forth; after a brief discussion the question Olourni (To be?) and Olmazmi (Not to be?) are asked, and the answer is given as either Olour or Olmaz (To be, or Not to be). The fetva which Heussein forced the Sheik-ul-Islam to sign was something like this:--"If a Sultan should prove to be unworthy to govern his people, is it necessary to uphold him or not?" The answer was Olmaz, and Abdul Aziz was deposed.

MOHAMMEDANISM AND THE INTERNAL STATE OF TURKEY.

Nobody who has not lived in Turkey can realize how hopeless, almost self-contradictory, it is to talk of "reforming" Turkey. It could not be reformed and be Mohammedan Turkey; the lack of reform or power of reform is just what makes it what it is. The root of the evil is Mohammedanism itself; it is embodied social stagnation, corruption, ultimate ruin. Neither the Sultan nor the Turks can improve the state of the Empire, even if they wished. The usual "broad-minded" statements about Mohammed and his religion are simply elaborations of ignorance, made up out of men's own minds, and what they think must be true. It is customary for writers to talk in this fashion:--"Mohammedanism is a half-way house to Christianity; Mohammed converted the heathen Arabs to a belief in the true God. Mohammed established a great religion and a great Empire," etc., etc. There is no truth in this, for all its plausible sound. Mohammedanism is not even on the road to Christianity; and Arabia, Asia Minor, and Palestine were all much better off before the Mohammedan conquest than after it. Buddhism and Brahmanism are better religions than Mohammedanism. The Chinese, the Japanese, the people of India are much better than the Turks. The Chinese Emperor and the Japanese Mikado are far better men than the Mohammedan Sultan. The heathen religions rear better men than Mohammedanism. The Mongols are more humane and sympathetic than the Turks. Heathenism at its worst, though a low form of religion, is really a form of religion; but Mohammedanism is not a religion at all. Then what is it? It is a system of imposture and false pretense, and of lives of human lust and cruelty. Mohammed practiced all these, and his successors have done the same, and taught the same ever since; and the system means just that now, and nothing else. There is neither love nor sympathy, manliness nor humanity in Mohammedanism. Can a system lacking all these be considered a religion? This is the substance of Mohammed's teachings:--"Love your fellow believers, hate and slay all who refuse to accept your religion. Marry as many wives as you can afford; if you can afford but one do not repine, for you shall have seven thousand to enjoy in Paradise. If you conquer a country, show no mercy to the people unless they embrace Islam; if they refuse, either kill them or make slaves of them." What sort of reforms can you expect in Armenia, or in Turkey, when the very religion that is to make people better, inculcates such principles? If one does not know a language he cannot speak it; if he has not a principle he will not practice it; how can the Sultan, a vicious man to begin with, trained in a religion calculated to make a cruel and licentious animal even out of a decent man, reform anything? His very religion forbids it; he cares nothing for the religion when it stands in his way, but he will follow its injunctions to please the Mohammedans, especially when they gratify and justify his worst passions.

I shall be asked if the Mohammedans do not believe in one God, and the same God as the Christian; and if that does not make it a religion, and very near that of Christians. Yes, they do; and so do the devils. That is what Mohammedanism is, the religion of devils. Most of the Turkish conversation consists of oaths and smut. I do not mean among the common people--theirs is nothing else--but of the educated upper classes, their scholars, teachers, governors, and priests. I came in contact with them for years, and I hated to listen to them, their talk was so full of cursing and filth. You never see the fruits of the spirit in them; only the fruits of the flesh. They do not understand what spiritual life is; with them all is sense,--eating and drinking, finery and lust,--lust above all, everywhere and always, like cattle. They seem never able to forget sex and its uses. Some people think the climate makes the Turks lazy; it is enough on that point to say that Constantinople is almost exactly in the same latitude as New York, and Smyrna as St. Louis. The Turkish climate is a temperate and salubrious one, with no greater extremes of temperature than the United States; not tropical or enervating. Nor is it their race that makes the Turks lazy; they were not so at the outset. It is their religion and the habits it breeds. Their minds and bodies are enervated by the unwholesome nervous excitation of lust, their energies further sapped by a falsehood that leaves no room for aspiration, their vanity as a military caste in not working takes all the spirit of manly enterprise out of them. If the climate enervates the Turks, why does it not the Christians? In the very same cities you find the Christians rich, enterprising, full of energy; the Turks poor, ignorant, unambitious, and lazy. The religion makes all the difference. Christianity teaches purity, sympathy, and industry; Mohammedanism teaches impurity, hate, and sloth. The pure life of the Christian conserves all the energies; the hopes of Christianity give vigor and endurance. The promise of each for the future gives the clue to the history of each; the Christian heaven of unity with God, the Mohammedan heaven of a lot of street dogs and sluts.

Here I must comment on the extraordinary statement of Alexander Webb, at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago. Mr. Webb was an American consul in the East, and became a convert to Mohammedanism, or professes to have done so; it is not very hard to guess what part of that so-called religion attracted him. He said the religion of Mohammed teaches the Fatherhood of God, and the Brotherhood of Humanity. Now, as a fact, Mohammedans believe in neither one. As to God, they believe he is a monarch, and that no one can approach him; they have the same idea the Jews had. "Our Father who art in Heaven" is a purely Christian aspiration, not that of any other religion on earth; it is Christianity alone that teaches the Fatherhood of God. And Mohammedans directly ridicule the idea of God the Father, or of a Son of God. They say God is not married, and cannot be a father; and that when they go to heaven they will not be in his presence, nor wish to be, but will have a separate heaven, to enjoy their wives in. They look at everything from a sexual or sensual standpoint. As to brotherhood, there is no such thing in Mohammedanism; even sons of the same mother are not brothers in feeling. A Mohammedan has not confidence enough, even in his brother, to show his wives to him, and even in heaven they will have to live in different places on account of their wives. How can there be brotherhood without love or purity? And we have seen and know what the "brotherhood" of Mohammedans to other nations and religions is; there can be no relations whatever but of master and slave, or murderer and corpse, or violator and victim. The impudence of this talk of brotherhood is fathomless.

And then he said he was proud to be a convert to Islam, because that meant believing in purity! This is more outrageously impudent still. His ideal of purity must be a curious one if he finds more in Mohammedanism than in Christianity; in a religion with a heaven stuffed with concubines than in one where even earth is sprinkled with nuns; in one that makes Titanic lust its crowning reward, as if men were so feeble in sexual desires that they needed to be stimulated, than in one which makes chastity its key-note, and pronounces the very coveting of more than one wife a spiritual adultery; in one that prescribes polygamy (that is, keeping erotic turbulence stirred up much oftener and longer than it naturally would be), than in one that allows but one wife, and smiles on getting along without that; in one whose devotees are ashamed of foul language, and even of foul thoughts, than in one whose devotees are rank and rotten with lustful ideas and talk to correspond.

The whole Mohammedan system is designed to make the gratification of lust as easy and plentiful as possible short of a promiscuity that would lead to civil anarchy. A Mohammedan can divorce his wife any time he pleases by paying back her dower, and marry another and do likewise; every week, or day if he sees fit, and he can remarry and redivorce the first one as often as he pleases. It is like trading horses; as little sentiment or morality in one as the other; the slightest possible regulation of sheer animal desire. There is, however, one form or divorce which is complete, and does not allow of remarriage until another marriage has intervened; that is called the achden docuza (three to nine) divorce, from the terms the husband uses in doing it, "I divorce you three to nine." Nobody knows what it means or meant. After this, if he wants his wife back, he must get somebody else to marry and divorce her regularly; and as this is perilous, because the second husband after marrying her may take a notion to keep her, or anyway keep her much longer than the first one relishes, or demand a large sum of money, the usual plan is to fix on a very poor man, or a blind beggar (preferably blind, so that he cannot see the wife, and be so charmed by her beauties that he will wish to keep her), get him to become the woman's husband for a few days, and then pay him something to divorce her. Then the first can marry her again if he chooses.

There are many more specimens of Mohammedan "purity" too shameful to write, and too shameful to read; I cannot soil the paper with them. Doubtless they are part of Mr. Webb's pride in being a Mohammedan. But I must mention one more engine of corruption which lies at the very root of Mohammedanism itself: the pilgrimage to Mecca, to the birthplace of Mohammed in Arabia. Once a year Mohammedan pilgrims from every quarter of the world go to Mecca to pay homage to their beloved prophet; averaging a million a year. It is their duty to sacrifice animals there, and about a million are so sacrificed. This is done on the hills which surround the great temple, the greatest mosque in the world. It is a square building, which covers several acres of land. Just in the cluster is the Holy Well, called Zemzem. Mohammedans believe that if they drink of that water, hell-fire cannot burn them, and every pilgrim does so; then they begin to die from cholera to the tune of fifty thousand a year or so, for the well is a mere cesspool. You see, after cutting the throats of the animals, they leave the filth and blood just as they are, for the Mohammedan religion does not allow the sacrifice to be touched. The sandy soil absorbs this putrid filth, which leaches into the well. But it is a great merit to die on the spot where Mohammed was born; one goes straight to heaven if he does. That is not the worst, however; they fill bottles with that water, and carry it to their families, and friends throughout the Turkish Empire, Persia, and India, from which cholera is spread abroad over the world.

The pilgrims do not take their wives as far as the birthplace of Mohammed, but leave them half-way, and on reaching Mecca they marry temporarily. About 20,000 prostitutes there make a business of being short-term wives of the pilgrims, getting $5 to $25 from each, and being his wife for anywhere from a day to a fortnight, so that each woman marries from fifty to a hundred pilgrims a year. This is not prostitution; it is religion--and Mohammedan "purity." Mecca is considered the most holy spot on earth by Mohammedans; but it is the most corrupt spot. It is a hell. And the Mohammedan Paradise is worse than Mecca.

In one word, Mohammedans have no right to exist, politically, socially, or religiously. In the first they have wrought nothing but ruin; in the second nothing but corruption; in the third nothing but devilishness. They are working nothing else now in either of the three. They have never built up anything; they are pure destroyers. Anything which is built in any Mohammedan country is built both by Christian money and by Christian architects; Mohammedans have neither the money, the architects, nor the sense. The day one becomes a Mohammedan he loses his intellect, his skill, and his common sense. Mohammedanism is a poison fatal to any good gifts or graces; it cultivates in him falsehood, cruelty, and lust. It was sent by God for a curse to the Christians; as a punishment, just as the Philistines were sent to the people of Israel.

V.

THE GREAT POWERS AND THE ARMENIAN QUESTION.

There was no Armenian question till the time of the present Sultan; under Abdul Aziz, whatever his faults as a ruler or a man, the Armenians prospered well, and though the whole system of administration is bad, corrupt, and uncertain, they had no special grievance as a race to complain of. I have already referred to Abdul Hamid's usurpation, his Bulgarian atrocities, his famous war against Russia, and the Congress in Berlin in which the powers ordered him to execute reforms in Armenia, and report to them, and the Sultan signed the treaty promising to do it. This was in 1878. The Sultan lost no time in violating the treaty, and not only so, but in acting grossly contrary to it. He called in Circassians and Kurds to settle in the midst of Armenians, and confiscated Armenian lands for them to settle on. The Armenians were far worse off than before the treaty; but foolishly depending on the powers, they did not try to arm themselves for the future. They have had plenty of chance to repent in blood and tears, agony and shame, their faith that Christian nations would not ignore a solemn obligation, voluntarily entered into, to save a whole people from being exterminated by fire and sword. England was the worst of these sinners, for she had taken on special obligations by a separate treaty, and forced those who would have taken the Sultan by the throat to let go.

THE ANGLO-TURKISH CONVENTION.

This took place at the same time as the Berlin Congress; it was simply between Turkey and England.

Article I. "If Batoum, Ardahan, Kars, or any of them shall be retained by Russia, and if any attempt shall be made at any future time by Russia to take possession of any further territory of His Imperial Majesty, the Sultan, in Asia, as fixed by the Definitive Treaty of Peace, England engages to join His Imperial Majesty, the Sultan, in defending them by force of arms.

"In return, His Imperial Majesty, the Sultan, promises England to introduce necessary reforms, to be agreed upon later between the two powers, into the government and for the protection of the Christian and other subjects of the Porte in these territories; and in order to enable England to make necessary provisions for executing her engagement, His Imperial Majesty, the Sultan, further consents to assign the Island of Cyprus to be occupied and administered by England.

Article VII. "If Russia restores to Turkey Kars and the other conquests made by her in Armenia during the last war, the Island of Cyprus will be evacuated by England, and the convention of the 4th of June, 1878, will be at an end."