In the preceding pages, we have noted instances (the most common) of conversion to Islam that took place while the deportations were underway; they involved, above all, women and children “adopted” by Turkish or Kurdish families.
We have not, however, discussed the families that agreed to convert in order to escape the deportations or keep their property. While some of these families were sent to their deaths a few weeks after their compatriots, others, especially in the countryside or among the craftsmen of the urban centers, did indeed survive.
As the reader will readily imagine, these converts who were allowed to remain in their homes did not often talk about their experience. One of the rare exceptions was Hovhannes Khanzarlian, a native of Erzerum, who confessed that he had been “compelled to abandon Christianity and adopt Islam.”
Anticipating his critics, Khanzarlian says that they do not know what it means to spend days on end in a prison filled with nauseating odors, to be tortured daily, or to see one’s companions strangled or sent off to die: “Ordinary mortals like me abandon their religion easily when they see that every other way out has been blocked and that conversion offers a glimmer of hope.”
Khanzarlian also notes, however, that he felt indescribable shame when he went to the mosque for the first time and began to pray; he had the feeling that “his ancestors shuddered.”
Our witness does not, however, refer only to his lineage.
He also recalls what his teachers taught him and affirms that his national feelings also made it impossible for him to remain a Muslim. He points out, quite reasonably, that “in this infernal Turkey, nationality and religion are indissolubly linked.” He also evokes the violence inflicted on his relatives, adding that he could not bear the fact that he bore the name “of those who had murdered his father and raped his sister”; that he felt as if he had “betrayed” their memory.
The last argument advanced by Khanzarlian is, as it were, theoretical. It shows rather clearly how the Armenians of the provinces perceived their Muslim environment and the consequences of a possible conversion: “I was going to deprive myself of the benefit of exchanges with powerful minds.”
In other words, he thought that if he accepted the law of the Prophet, he would be denied all access to modernity and the world of ideas – that to which the Ottoman Armenian world precisely aspired in this period.
To be continued
Note- this chapter is from Raymond Kévorkian’s book ARMENIAN GENOCIDE: A Complete History, p. 315.
Photo- Armenian woman and her children from Geghi
