by Uğur Ümit Üngör[1]
The Armenians: A Haunting Historical Echo
Deir ez-Zor is a small city on the banks of the Euphrates in the Syrian desert, and for most non-Syrians it may not ring much of a bell. For Armenians, however, its name carries a haunting echo. During the Armenian Genocide of 1915, the Turkish-nationalist regime, led by Interior Minister Talaat Pasha and War Minister Enver Pasha, condemned hundreds of thousands of Ottoman Armenians to a death march towards Deir ez-Zor. There, abandoned to the merciless desert, they perished and were massacred by the thousands, their blood staining the parched earth. A German diplomat stationed in the region at the time chillingly described the carnage as the victims being “slaughtered like sheep”. To the casual observer, this horrific tale might seem allegorical or hyperbolical, in any case distant and unreal, until the infamous ISIS videos that surfaced years later brought its chilling reality into stark focus. Deir ez-Zor’s desert sands once again ran crimson, and the town’s name became a chilling symbol of bloodshed.
Deir ez-Zor is by no means an isolated case in the current Syrian-Iraqi catastrophe. Tadmor (Palmyra), Raqqa, Kobanî, Aleppo, Mosul, and many other cities and the spaces in between have seen very high levels of violence, both between armed groups and against civilians. In fact, never before has this region witnessed this type of implosion of the state and collapse of societal coexistence. The most conservative estimates place the death toll of post-2003 Iraq at 200,000, and that of the Syrian cataclysm at 400,000. These figures offer only a glimpse of the profound social, economic, and psychological damage inflicted on Iraqis and Syrians across generations. What are the causes and consequences of these conflicts? How are these conflicts interrelated, politically, culturally, chronologically, and theoretically?
The lands between Damascus and Baghdad have witnessed an unprecedented wave of violence in the past century. As two relatively young states, Syria and Iraq share a common cultural heritage, face similar geopolitical challenges, have been embroiled in destructive wars with their respective nemeses (Israel and Iran) and are surrounded by larger powers with competing interests (Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia). While their state institutions had some similarities, it was only in the crucible of utter statelessness, lawlessness, and collusion that an extremist group like ISIS could seize power and impose its radical ideology upon the populations of these societies. However, to fully comprehend the deeper historical and political contexts of this violence, we must delve beyond mere coincidences and repetitions. Are we witnessing the interplay of historical continuities and transformations? Or are there more profound forces at work? These questions have only begun to be explored, and the answers may hold the key to preventing future tragedies.
The Conversion and Deportation of the Armenians
During the Armenian Genocide, the Young Turk regime forcibly converted innumerable Ottoman Armenians to Sunni Islam. Talaat Pasha authorized the conversion of the Armenians by simply issuing several national decrees categorizing those to be persecuted, deported, and converted, as well as specific instructions steering local officials. A secretary close to Talaat noted in his memoirs that the regime had established a committee to enforce the mass conversion of Armenians. The committee convened in his house several times and discussed whether Armenians could, for example, be given farmland if they converted, but this idea was quickly abandoned. The regime’s official directives disclose how the everyday conduct of the process of conversion was implemented. In late June 1915, Talaat ordered all Armenians to be deported, even including those who had converted to Islam. By the end of that year, thousands of Armenians converted to Islam, mostly under duress. On 22 February 1916, Talaat issued an empire-wide decree to the Ottoman police to monitor Armenian converts closely. Well into 1918, Talaat maintained his grip on converted Armenians by having their names, manner of conversion, and lives after conversion registered.
The Armenian response to this cultural violence was ambivalent. It ranged from fearful acquiescence to adamant resistance. The young Armenian boy Henry Vartanian, whose father had been murdered, was offered shelter by a Turkish acquaintance, who demanded he renounce Christianity and convert to Islam in a ceremony attended by an imam. The young Henry recited the Islamic statement of faith ‘There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet’, was ritually circumcised, and from then on went through life as “Esad, son of Abdurrahman”. But having to abandon one’s identity was unacceptable and humiliating to many others. The forced changing of names was humiliating and confusing as well. Khachadoor Pilibosian was a child survivor of the Armenian genocide, and was also kidnapped by a Kurd during the deportations and taken to live with him as a slave. In his memoirs he writes how he was absorbed into a Kurdish household and that the Kurds renamed him ‘Mustafa’. After the war he managed to escape to Aleppo and contact his father in America, where he fled in 1920.
This wartime policy of forced religious conversion had an immense impact on the Armenian community. Yervant Odian, the editor-in-chief of the Ottoman-Armenian newspaper Zhamanag, was arrested in Istanbul on 24 April 1915 and deported to a certain death. Due to a bureaucratic mistake, he miraculously survived, and hid in various Syrian cities until the end of the war. In the summer of 1916, he arrived in Hama, which he described as
a destitute city where the majority of the Arab shops had been forced to close due to the military call up. There were Armenian grocers, butchers, vegetable sellers, haberdashers and cloth sellers, as well as many barbers, shoe makers, carpenters, dentists, photographers, pharmacists, bakers, tailors, metal smiths, and so on. It was the Armenians who first opened photography shops in Hama. The Armenians also opened, for the very first time, two restaurants.[2]
Odian came across 30 deported Armenian women from the Black Sea town of Samsun, who had reached Hama “after a thousand and one tortures”. When the local Turkish authorities deported the entire Armenian community from Samsun, gendarmes and militiamen massacred their husbands, brothers and sons outside of the town. The rest of the “remnants of the sword” (kılıç artığı) were “force-marched endlessly through the mountains for months”. On their way to the Syrian desert, the women were robbed, raped, and humiliated, and “a great many of them had died from exhaustion, torture, hunger and sickness”. Having settled in Hama, Odian relates that their ordeal was not over. In 1917, a CUP official named Kemal Bey arrived and announced to the Armenians that
all those who didn’t hurry to accept Islam in the following three days would be driven, on foot, into the Arabian deserts… The effect was immediate. Hundreds swamped the Ittihad club where the task of making people Muslim and registering their names took place… 5000 Armenian deportees became Muslims in Hama in this way in four or five days.
The women from Samsun refused, claiming that they had nothing to lose since all their relatives had already been killed, and preferred to be deported into the desert. Eventually, Odian and a few other Armenian notables persuaded them in order to save their lives.
Muslim Criticism of Forced Conversion
After the Islamisation of the women from Samsun, Kemal Bey returned victoriously to Damascus (where Jemal Pasha was seated). Meanwhile, in Hama, Odian noted that the mass forced conversion perpetrated by the Young Turks angered the local Arabs, who argued that to make people Muslim in this way was against the Prophet’s commandments. In spite of the fact that all Armenians had become Muslim, none of the Arabs they knew returned their greeting of “salaam alaikum” with “alaikum salaam”. When the Armenians showed up at the mosque for Friday prayers, the newly Islamized Armenians were chased away by the Muslims gathered there.
Odian was not the only chronicler of the mass Islamization. Syrian journalist, lawyer, and politician Fayez al-Ghussein (1883-1968), a member of a notable Arab tribe from the Hawran in southern Syria, wrote a 1916 book entitled “Martyred Armenia”. The book stands as a unique Arab source denouncing the deportation of entire communities, forced marches, starvation, torture, rape, forced conversion, the appropriation of property and material possessions in addition to large-scale massacres. Al-Ghussein censured the Young Turks’ treatment of the Armenians:
I ask you, O Moslems – is this to be counted as a crime?… Is it right that these imposters, who pretend to be the supports of Islam and the Khilâfat, the protectors of the Moslems, should transgress the command of God, transgress the Koran, the Traditions of the Prophet, and humanity? Truly, they have committed an act at which Islam is revolted, as well as all Moslems and all the peoples of the earth, be they Moslems, Christians, Jews, or idolators… It is incumbent on the Moslems to declare themselves guiltless of such a Government, and not to render obedience to those who trample under foot the Verses of the Koran and the Traditions of the Prophet, and shed the innocent blood of women, old men and infants, who have done no wrong. Otherwise they make themselves accomplices in this crime, which stands unequalled in history.[3]
Al-Ghussain was not the only Muslim critic of the genocide. The Grand Shaykh of al-Azhar, the world’s leading religious institution of Sunni Islam, Salim al-Bishri (who held the position from 1909 to 1916) issued a strongly-worded condemnation of the genocide. There were also a number of religious authorities in the Ottoman Empire, such as the mufti of Kastamonu district, who refused to cooperate in the genocide and denounced it instead. But none of this indignation and condemnation had any impact on the progress of the genocide. At the end of World War I, about 3000 Armenian settlements had been emptied and destroyed, over a million Armenians were dead, and many thousands had been forcibly converted to Islam.
The Genocide of the Yazidis
In 2014, ISIS carried out a brutal campaign against the Yazidi community, an ethnoreligious minority in northern Iraq. ISIS viewed the Yazidis as “infidels” because of their non-Abrahamic faith, which incorporates elements of Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Islam. When ISIS forces attacked the Sinjar region in August 2014, they systematically targeted the Yazidis, committing acts of genocide.
ISIS fighters gave Yazidis the choice to convert to Islam or face death. Thousands of Yazidi men who refused were executed, while women and children were separated out. Boys were often abducted, forcibly converted, and indoctrinated into becoming ISIS fighters. Women and girls fared particularly badly: through their own idiosyncratic exegesis of the Quran, ISIS declared it legitimate to marry Yazidi women against their will, and to sell them as sex slaves (sabaya). Videos of ISIS members laughing as they sold Yazidi girls in marketplaces appeared on the internet. This was nothing less than a public rape campaign. Many of the girls were forced to convert to Islam, and were coerced into marriages with ISIS fighters. An unknown number of them continued to live as sex slaves well after the ISIS “caliphate” was defeated. Thousands of Yazidis remain missing, and the trauma inflicted on this community continues to resonate today, with many survivors struggling to rebuild their lives.
For those who survived the initial massacres, conversion was often the only way to avoid death or enslavement. ISIS employed fear tactics, using public executions and threats of violence to compel Yazidis to abandon their faith. In most cases, these conversions were not genuine, as individuals accepted Islam under duress, fearing for their lives and the safety of their families.
ISIS justified its actions by its extremist interpretation of Islamic law, claiming that Yazidis were idolaters. However, the systematic violence perpetrated by ISIS, including the forced conversion of Yazidis, has been recognized as part of a genocidal campaign, and it drew widespread condemnation from the international community.
In one video, ISIS militants are seen offloading Yazidi men from a bus, then guiding them to a hall where they are made to sit and listen to a sermon by an ISIS imam:
Right now, you are still infidels. We will make you recite the shahada “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his Prophet”. After that you will become Muslims and brothers to us, and you will have rights like us. Now repeat after me: I bear witness that there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his servant and Prophet.
The bewildered and doubtlessly terrified Yazidi men raise their index fingers (some of the men raise their left finger rather than their right), and recite the declaration of faith. The scene cuts to the actual prayer, in which the clueless converts perform the rakat (bowing) in an uncoordinated and confused manner. The ISIS video ends with the Yazidis performing the obligatory final greeting (the taslim), but with some men starting the greeting on the left side instead of the right.
The fact is that Islam explicitly forbids forced conversions, and emphasizes that faith must come from sincere belief and free will. In the Quran, Surah al-Baqarah, 2:256, reads: “There is no compulsion in religion.” Yet this seems to not bother the ISIS militants at all. Fear-based conversion, a lack of understanding of the religious rituals, and a focus on external appearances (simply reciting the shahada and performing the salah prayer without understanding) while ignoring the essential internal belief and personal commitment, highlights the ideological and theological distortions followed by ISIS, in which form is more important than substance, and force is more important than belief). But it also serves as an echo from the past, reminding us of the forced conversion of Ottoman Armenians almost exactly a century before.
- Professor Uğur Ümit Üngör teaches at the NIOD Institute, University of Amsterdam ↑
- Yervant Odian, Accursed Years: My Exile and Return from Der Zor, 1914-1919 (London: Gomidas Institute, 2009) ↑
- Fayez al-Ghussein, Martyred Armenia (New York: Doran, 1918) ↑