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January 21, 2006

Abdulhamid II and the 'Armenian Genocide'

After my piece on The Weekly Standard on Abdulhamid II, a disagreeing letter to the editor was published along with my reply. Here is the letter:

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.

Continue reading "Abdulhamid II and the 'Armenian Genocide'"

Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 4:05 PM | Comments (13)