Correspondence
Correspondence 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...
...rather, he was a paranoid and homicidal maniac hell-bent on exterminating the Armenian race, only stopping with the threat of European intervention...
...26) ends with the suggestion that we "recover the spirit of Islamic modernity personified by the piano-playing Sufi, Abdul Hamid II...
...EASE UP ON EMERSON IN "Hawthorne's God" (Jan...
...MICHELE KERR Santa Clara, Calif...
...MUSTAFA AKYOL RESPONDS: I did not intend to portray Abdul Hamid II as a completely faultless ruler...
...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...
...So Hawthorne, like Emerson, wanted his own version of truth...
...The one is the shadow of the other," wrote Carl Jung...
...rather, I wished to stress the great dichotomy between this prominent caliph—a mod-ernizer of Islamdom and a friend of the United States—and the contemporary self-declared warriors for the caliphate, exemplified by al Qaeda terrorists...
...As Walsh acknowledges, Hawthorne was not a regular churchgoer...
...Indeed, it has been said, but Walsh should have mentioned who said it...
...Walsh celebrates Hawthorne's awareness of man's limitations: "It has been said that the opposite of love is not hate, but power...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Where love rules, there is no will to power...
...He was not the gentle, melodious musician that Akyol would have you believe...
...and where power predominates, there love is lacking...
...Why single out Emerson as a unique case...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...In this, both men were very much products of their day...
...2 / Jan...
...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...
...Americans had a wide spectrum of beliefs from which to choose, because everyone was selling their version of the truth...
...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...
...To commit genocide by destroying the Armenian millet would have been a radical departure from the sultan's ideology...
...BRIAN SIEBEN Portsmouth, R.I...
...According to historian Robert Melson in R^^olution 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...
Vol. 11 • January 2006 • No. 18
