Astarjian: Our Muslim Brothers
Fri, Jun 24 2011
By: Dr. Henry Astarjian
Even after 65 years I can almost feel it: the backhanded slap my
father unleashed on me for expressing an opinion that was as sinful as
condoning adultery. It hurt, and I carried its psychological scars
until very recently. That was not the norm for my father’s authority;
I had the utmost freedom to talk to him and express diverse opinions
contrary to his – but not this one. His was constructed by his Armenian
nationalistic upbringing tainted with Ottoman norms, which had
prevailed in the overall thinking of Cilician Armenians. Mine was not.
My unorthodox expression came at a time when he was talking with his
friend Aharone about Christianity, especially the Apostolic Church and
Armenian nationalism. For them, the true Armenian was Christian and
belonged to none other than the Armenain Apostolic Church. Catholics
and Protestants were a sort of Armenians, their ethnicity somewhat
diluted by their religious, spiritual allegiance to Rome, and that of
Evangelicals to America, not Etchmiadzin. Both sects, in their
thinking, were people who had betrayed their Mother Church for money
and position, and therefore also their nationality. In a sense, they
were ranked as second-class Armenians.
Some 25 years later I heard the echoes of that conversation from
Beirut, where Antranig Urfalian had published his memoirs. In it he
had quoted my uncle, Dr. Krikor Astarjian, who as a keynote speaker of
a graduation ceremony in Nor Marash High School in Beirut, had said,
`A real Armenian is Apostolic.’ Seated in the front row listening
eagerly were Armenian Catholic priests, bishops, and archbishops,
Protestant pastors and preachers, who were all guests of their
Apostolic counterparts.
`You,’ he declared, addressing the front row, `ought to be ashamed of
yourselves for being tavanapokh (converts of faith). You have betrayed
the Armenian nation by defecting to an alien religion. It is incumbent
upon you, if you are true Armenians, to return to the Mother Sea.’ A
deadly atmosphere, full of emotional diversity and upheaval, had
ensued. Urfalian says he remedied the faux-pas by taking control of
the microphone and saving the proceedings.
My father and Aharone had some anecdotes to prove their point: In the
pre-genocide era, when Armenian fedayees, organized by Armenian
Revolutionary Federation, bore arms to defend their villages, their
families, and their property, the non-Apostolic Armenian churches
erroneously believed that they were exempt from the Ottoman plans and
actions against the Armenians, because they enjoyed the protection of
America and the Vatican. So, based on this, their support for the
fedayees was weak, to say the least.
They were not alone in this delusion. Some Apostolic clergy believed
that the cause of the Turkish atrocities had been the Armenian
fedayees, who had provoked the government with their armed attacks.
Some Apostolic clergy who held this view even turned in some fedayees
to the Ottoman authorities in lieu of protection.
All their calculations were wrong. With Ottoman-Turkish planning and
implementation, the Turks and the Kurdish tribes committed the
Armenian Genocide, and they did not discriminate between Apostolic,
Catholic, or Protestant Armenians. They implemented the plan
regardless of faith: They were Armenians, and that was enough to be
slaughtered.
Today’s argument is an extension of the one that earned me a
backhanded slap some six decades ago. The issue is resurrected by the
plans to settle a few dozen Muslim-Armenian families in Karabagh;
these are the Hamshens of Central Asia. Armenian Muslims! The social
impact of this on Karabagh Armenians and, by extension, the rest of
the Armenians of the world is speculative. There are over 400,000
Hamshen who live in the Trabzon area and Georgia. This is a sizable
population, larger than the population of Artsakh, who speak modified
Armenian, consider themselves Armenians, and demand recognition as
such. (see Alice Aliye Alt’s Hamshen Armenians in the Mirror of
History).
Obviously this new ethnic situation does not sit well with the
chauvinist Turkish government who has done everything to evade the
mandates of the Lausanne Treaty, to which it is a signatory. They have
already denied the Greeks’, Armenians’, Assyrians’, and other
minorities’ rights proscribed by this treaty. The Hamshens’ rise in
ethnicity awareness is another problem for the Turkish government to
deal with.
Recently Ismet Shahin, one prominent Hamshen-Armenian in the Istanbul
political world, decided to form a new political party after being
ostracized by the Turkish political establishment. Similarly the
political establishment denied seven Turkish-Armenian politicians the
opportunity to run for parliamentary elections on June 12.
A similar subject begging development is the issue of some 700,000 or
more Turkish-Armenians who are descendants of those forcefully
converted to Islam during the genocide of 1915. These people should
have the full right to openly claim their Armenian ethnic origin, and
to choose the religion they wish. It is incumbent upon all Armenian
political parties and entities, especially the ARF World Council,
which is scheduled to convene shortly, to raise awareness on this
vital issue and coin a strategy for action. The church hierarchies of
the four major Apostolic Seas have to take the initiative in this
matter, and bring their flock home.
This whole problem raises vital questions, which the Armenian
intelligentsia has to address with an open mind: Is it mandatory for
an Armenian to be a Christian, and an Apostolic at that? Can an ethnic
Armenian be a Zoroastrian? Can s/he be a Muslim? Were the
pre-Christian Armenian tribes Armenian? Were the Arshagunis,
Bagratunis, Artashesians, Tigran the Great, and other Tigrans,
Christians? Are Hamshens not Armenian because they are Muslim? Should
Hamshens not be wholeheartedly welcomed to our national cradle because
they are not Christians? Could we have true brothers who are Muslim?
Are they not Armenians because they are not Christians, and Apostolic
at that?
These questions earned me a backhanded slap when my father, with
Aharone, and later my Uncle Krikor, insisted that Apostolic
Christianity defined one’s Armenian-ness and that a true Armenian was
Christian Apostolic.
After reading this column, a lot of people will wish that my father
was alive now to teach me a lesson. So do I, albeit for different
reasons.
http://www.armenianweekly.com/2011/06/24/our-muslim-brothers/