The Sword and the Tongue: Jihad’s Long Shadow over Christians in Turkey

In a previous article about jizya, the author argued that the poll tax imposed on Christians and Jews under Islamic rule functioned as a religiously mandated instrument of subjugation rather than a reciprocal protection fee.[1] This article extends that argument outward, situating jizya within the wider doctrine of jihad, tracing the doctrinal and administrative continuities that connect classical dhimmitude to the mass violence inflicted on Ottoman Christians in the early twentieth century. The author argues that jihad is properly understood not as a single act but as a family of related struggles, by the sword and by the tongue, that share a common objective—the subordination or elimination of communities that decline to submit to Islamic sovereignty. Demographic mechanisms embedded in classical practice, including enslavement, deportation, the child levy known as the devshirme, and, in some historical contexts, castration of captives, are examined as precedents for the tools later used against Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians in 1914 to 1923. A nineteenth-century prelude of provincial massacre, forced conversion, and international indifference is treated as the hinge connecting classical practice to twentieth-century catastrophe.

I. Jihad Is Not One Thing

It is a commonplace of apologetic literature, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, that jihad means, at root, only “struggle,” and that the struggle in question is chiefly internal and spiritual, the individual Muslim’s effort against sin. That reading is not false. It is incomplete. Classical Islamic jurisprudence recognized several distinct categories of jihad, and two of them are directly relevant to the argument of this article, jihad of the sword (jihad bi’l-sayf), the military struggle to expand and defend the territory of Islam, and jihad of the tongue (jihad bi’l-lisan), the intellectual and rhetorical struggle to defend Islamic doctrine and win converts through argument, preaching, and debate.[2]

The classical jurists did not treat this typology as decorative. Al-Mawardi’s eleventh-century manual of statecraft, Al-Ahkam al-Sultaniyya, folds the conduct of jihad into the ordinary administrative duties of the caliphate, alongside taxation and the appointment of judges, describing the ruler’s obligation to wage it against those who withhold submission until they convert, pay jizya, or are subdued.[3]Qur’an 9:5, commanding that idolaters be fought “wherever you find them,” and Qur’an 9:29, requiring that the People of the Book be fought until jizya is paid “in submission,” were read by the classical exegetical tradition not as descriptions of a single seventh-century campaign but as standing legal instructions, a reading modern scholarship on the doctrine’s formation, however much it debates the balance between defensive and expansionist motives in practice, agrees was dominant among the jurists who systematized the law.[4]

These two forms are not competitors for a single label; they are complementary instruments of the same project. Jihad of the sword produces territory and captive populations. Albeit Jihad of the tongue can be used as an alternative to the Jihad of the sword in some contexts, it can also be used to consolidate what the sword has taken, justifying the new order to the conquered, converting the wavering, and refuting the objections of those who resist. Ibn Taymiyya, writing in the aftermath of the Mongol invasions when the sword arm of the Islamic world was in retreat, devoted much of his considerable energy to precisely this second front, polemical treatises against Christians, Jews, and what he regarded as insufficiently rigorous Muslims, on the theory that doctrinal consolidation mattered as much to the umma’s survival as battlefield success.[5]

The relationship between the two forms of jihad is the subject of this article’s first argument. The relationship between jihad and demographic catastrophe is its second.

II. Jizya as the Financial Expression of Conquest

It can be argued that jizya was a status-conditioned instrument of subjugation rather than a civic tax. Read within the broader jihad framework, its logic becomes still clearer. When Islamic armies took a territory by the sword, the native population confronted a structured choice, and that choice was itself the point. Conversion absorbed the individual and, over time, his land and labor into the umma directly. Refusal to convert, for Christians and Jews classified as Ahl al-Kitab (i.e., dhimmitude), meant paying jizya, becoming, in effect, a standing revenue source extracted from the conquered population in perpetuity, for as long as that population declined to dissolve itself into the conquering faith. Rejection by non-scriptural peoples left, in the dominant classical reading, only the strong alternative of conversion or death.[6]

Viewed this way, the dhimma system was not a religious accommodation bolted onto an otherwise ordinary state. It was the administrative infrastructure of an expanding imperial order, newly acquired land and its inhabitants were reclassified as assets of the polity, some absorbed through conversion, others retained as a taxable, legally disabled resource. This is not a novel observation, historians of early Islamic expansion have long described the amsar garrison-city system, the kharaj land tax, and the jizya poll tax together as the financialarchitecture of conquest administration.[7] Hugh Kennedy’s survey of the seventh-century conquests describes a broadly consistent administrative pattern across Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and Iran, garrison cities established at a deliberate remove from the conquered population, tribute and tax obligations imposed on that population as the price of continued cultivation of its own land, and revenue flowing from the countryside into the garrisons rather than the reverse.[8]

What the jizya-as-protection-fee apologetic obscures is that this architecture was built to serve the material needs of the conquering polity, not the welfare of the conquered. A system organized on this logic bears comparison to other historical imperial and colonial arrangements in which subject populations were reclassified as extractable resources upon conquest, and the comparison is not flattering to any of them.

III. The Demographic Toolkit — Enslavement, the Child Levy, and Castration

An Ottoman official registers Christian boys taken in the devshirme, the child levy that claimed conquered non-Muslims’ sons as a resource of empire, in a miniature painting from 1558.

Picasa

Jihad’s territorial and financial ambitions were accompanied, across long stretches of Islamic history, by demographic techniques aimed not merely at taxing conquered non-Muslim populations but at reshaping them. Four deserve particular attention because of their direct line of descent into the twentieth-century catastrophes discussed below.

Enslavement. Classical Islamic law permitted the enslavement of non-Muslim captives taken in the course of jihad, and slave markets supplied by frontier raiding remained a feature of Islamic economies from the early conquests through the nineteenth century.[9] Byzantine, Slavic, Caucasian, and sub-Saharan African populations were all, at various periods, subject to systematic capture and enslavement by forces operating under the banner of jihad or its Ottoman successor institutions. The scale of this traffic on Islam’s northern frontier is documented in the corsair records of the Barbary regencies, whose raiding fleets, operating under Ottoman suzerainty and religious sanction, are estimated to have taken well over a million Christian Europeans into slavery along the shores of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic seaboard between the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a traffic that ran in the opposite direction, and on a comparable scale to, the better-known transatlantic trade with which it was contemporaneous.[10] A parallel and even longer-running traffic moved sub-Saharan Africans north and east across the Sahara and the Indian Ocean into Islamic markets over more than a millennium, a trade whose scale, duration, and distinctive reliance on castrated male labor and concubinage has, in the assessment of historians who have studied it, been comparatively neglected relative to its Atlantic counterpart.[11]

The child levy. The Ottoman devshirme, the periodic conscription of Christian boys from Balkan provinces for conversion to Islam and induction into the Janissary corps or imperial administration, is the most institutionally developed example of a broader pattern, the state’s assertion of a claim on the bodies and futures of conquered non-Muslim people as a resource of empire.[12] The system, formalized by the fifteenth century and documented in surviving Ottoman recruitment registers, operated on a rough periodic cycle, provincial officials with quotas moving village to village, selecting boys by physical fitness and apparent intelligence, over the objections of families who sometimes attempted bribery, flight, or premature marriage of sons to render them ineligible.[13] Families lost sons permanently to a system that erased their prior religious and familial identity by design; the loss was not incidental to the devshirme‘s function but its stated purpose, and the empire’s own administrative records treat the yield of the levy as a resource to be counted, not a hardship to be mitigated.

Castration. The historical record, drawn from both Muslim and non-Muslim chroniclers, documents the castration of captive boys and men at various points across Islamic history for service as eunuchs in courts, harems, and administrative posts, a practice with precedent in earlier Mediterranean and Near Eastern slave systems but sustained and institutionalized within Islamic polities across centuries.[14] The office of eunuch attendant to the sanctuaries of Mecca and Medina, and the parallel institution of the palace eunuch corps in Cairo and Istanbul, were staffed continuously across the Mamluk and Ottoman periods by men obtained through this process, a fact that historians of the institution treat not as an isolated curiosity of court life but as a durable feature of how conquest societies converted captive bodies into administrative capital.[15]

Forced deportation and resettlement. A fourth and less remarked technique, the compulsory transfer of conquered or rebellious populations from one region of the empire to another, sürgün in its Ottoman form, was used repeatedly to break the cohesion of communities regarded as unreliable and to repopulate strategically important territory with more trusted subjects, a state practice with an unbroken administrative lineage from the early sultanate through the population transfers of the empire’s final decades.[16]

None of these practices was continuous, uniform, or applied identically across thirteen centuries and three continents, a caution this article takes as seriously here as its companion did regarding jizya. But their recurrence across period and region establishes them as recognized instruments within the toolkit of an expansionist system, not aberrations invented by later critics. It is this toolkit, developed and normalized across centuries, from which the demographic engineering of the early twentieth century drew its methods, if not always its explicit doctrinal justification.

IV. From Millet to Massacre — The Nineteenth-Century Prelude

The line from classical dhimmitude to twentieth-century genocide did not run directly. It passed through a nineteenth-century hinge, decades in which the formal legal disabilities of the dhimma were nominally abolished even as the underlying habits of the system reasserted themselves through mass violence rather than through law.

The Ottoman reform edicts of 1839 and 1856, the Hatt-i Şerif of Gülhane and the Hatt-i Hümayun, formally abolished jizya and proclaimed the legal equality of all Ottoman subjects regardless of religion, a change celebrated at the time, and since, as evidence of the empire’s capacity for modernization.[17]Historians of the late Ottoman state have argued that the practical effect of these reforms on the ground was considerably more ambiguous than the decrees themselves suggest, formal legal equality did not translate into a corresponding shift in the social and administrative habits built up over centuries, and in some respects the loss of the dhimma’s formal protections left minority communities more, rather than less, exposed once other guarantees of the old order eroded alongside it.[18]

Armenian victims of the November 1895 massacre at Erzurum, part of the Hamidian massacres of 1894–1896.

(William Sachtleben)

The clearest evidence of that ambiguity is the Hamidian massacres of 1894 to 1896, in which tens of thousands of Armenians across the eastern Anatolian provinces were killed by irregular Kurdish cavalry units and local mobs operating with the tacit or active cooperation of Ottoman provincial authorities, in a pattern of violence scholars of the period have shown was frequently accompanied by mass, and often coerced, conversion of surviving Armenian communities to Islam as the price of being permitted to remain in their villages at all, a documented recurrence of the ancient conversion-or-elimination structure this article traces to the classical jihad framework, now operating without the mediating legal apparatus of the dhimma to regularize it.[19] The 1909 massacre of Armenians in Adana and the surrounding Cilician towns, which killed on the order of fifteen to twenty-five thousand people within days, in the immediate aftermath of the supposedly liberalizing Young Turk constitutional revolution, demonstrated that neither reform nor revolution had displaced the underlying pattern; a new and formally more egalitarian political order proved as willing as the old to tolerate, or organize, the mass killing of a Christian minority under conditions of perceived communal threat.[20]

These episodes matter to the argument of this article for a specific reason. They show that the demographic toolkit examined in Section III did not require the formal legal scaffolding of the dhimma to be activated. Once removed from that scaffolding, and combined with the ethnic nationalism and territorial anxiety of a collapsing multi-confessional empire, the same underlying assumption, that a Christian minority’s continued residence in Muslim-majority territory was conditional and revocable, reasserted itself as unmediated violence rather than administered subordination. The road from Section III to Section V of this article runs directly through this prelude.

V. 1914 to 1923 — The Toolkit Applied at Industrial Scale

The Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek populations of the late Ottoman Empire were, in 1914, among the last large, indigenous Christian communities remaining in the historic Islamic heartland, communities whose ancestors had lived under the dhimma system, paid jizya in its Ottoman form (the cizye, formally abolished only in 1856), survived the Hamidian and Adana massacres examined above, and carried the legal and social disabilities catalogued in this article’s companion piece into the twentieth century as social memory even after their formal abolition. Bat Ye’or has observed that the Armenians were, in relative terms, the wealthiest stratum of the empire’s dhimmi population, a fact that made them simultaneously more integrated into Ottoman commercial life and more conspicuous as a target when the empire’s Young Turk leadership turned toward a program of forced homogenization.[21]

Between 1914 and 1923, the Ottoman state and its successors carried out the systematic destruction of these communities, the Armenian Genocide, in which an estimated one to one and a half million Armenians were killed through massacre, forced deportation marches, and starvation; the Assyrian genocide, or Sayfo (“sword” in Syriac), which devastated Assyrian and Chaldean Christian communities in the same period; and a parallel campaign of massacre, expulsion, and forced population exchange against Ottoman Greeks, particularly in Pontus and Smyrna.[22] Detailed reconstructions of the deportation process, drawing on Ottoman, German, and Allied archival material, describe a bureaucratically organized removal of Armenian populations from their home provinces along forced marches that were, by design or by the foreseeable consequence of their planning, calculated to kill a substantial proportion of those who set out on them through exposure, starvation, and organized massacre by escorting units and irregular forces along the route.[23] The destruction of in September 1922, in which the city’s Greek and Armenian quarters were burned and a substantial civilian population was killed or forced onto the waterfront to await evacuation under conditions that foreign observers on ships in the harbor documented in detail, brought the Ottoman Greek catastrophe to its best-known and most visually documented climax.[24]

Historians debate the relative weight of nationalism, wartime paranoia about Christian minorities as a fifth column, and territorial consolidation as proximate causes of these events, and this article does not claim that religious doctrine was their sole or even primary trigger, a claim the historical record does not support and this article does not need.[25]

The Smyrna waterfront after the destruction of the city’s Greek and Armenian quarters in September 1922.

(Lorenzo Cassar)

What the historical record does support is a narrower and, this article argues, still important claim. The perpetrators of these genocides had at their disposal a demographic toolkit, deportation, forced Islamization of people, mass expropriation of the property of a legally subordinated religious minority, that Ottoman and pre-Ottoman Islamic administration had normalized over centuries, and had already redeployed once, in the Hamidian period, as a permissible way of treating conquered non-Muslim populations. Contemporary accounts and later demographic reconstructions describe tens of thousands of Armenian men and women absorbed into Muslim households, harems, and orphanages during and after the deportations, a continuation, however informal and however far removed from classical jurisprudence’s own categories, of the same logic of absorption that once ran through conversion and the devshirme.[26]The dhimma system did not, by itself, cause the genocides of 1914 to 1923. But it built, over thirteen centuries, the legal and social infrastructure within which a Christian minority could be categorized, disabled, and ultimately marked as separable from the body of the nation, a categorization the Young Turk regime inherited and radicalized rather than invented from nothing. As Bat Ye’or has noted, no Nuremberg-style tribunal, and no equivalent of the postwar settlements extended to Jewish communities in Europe, was ever convened for the Armenian, Greek, or Assyrian survivors of this period.[27]

That absence is itself part of the unfinished accounting this article’s companion piece calls for.[28]

VI. The International Silence

The absence of a postwar accounting was not for lack of contemporaneous notice. American missionaries, diplomats, and consular officials stationed across the Ottoman provinces cabled detailed reports of the deportations and massacres to Washington and to American news articles throughout 1915, reporting that reached a wide public readership at the time and generated a sustained American relief effort, Near East Relief, that raised substantial sums and fed hundreds of thousands of survivors in the years that followed.[29] Postwar Ottoman courts-martial convened in Istanbul in 1919 and 1920 did try and convict, largely in absentia, several senior Committee of Union and Progress leaders for the organization of the deportations and massacres, a domestic acknowledgment of culpability that has itself been cited by historians as evidence that the events were understood as a prosecutable crime by the successor Ottoman government of the immediate postwar period, whatever the subsequent Turkish state’s position on the matter became.[30]

That early acknowledgment did not survive the diplomatic settlement that followed. The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which replaced the more punitive Treaty of Sèvres and secured international recognition of the new Turkish Republic, contained no reparative provision for Armenian, Greek, or Assyrian survivors and no mechanism resembling the war-crimes provisions the Allied powers had briefly contemplated at Sèvres, a diplomatic outcome historians of the period attribute to the priority the Allied powers placed on securing a stable settlement with Ankara over pursuing accountability for the wartime destruction of Ottoman Christian communities.[31] The consequence was that the demographic toolkit examined in Sections III through V produced no postwar settlement at all, no tribunal binding on the successor state, no reparations, and no restitution of the enormous quantity of Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian property and land confiscated in the course of the deportations, a silence that has persisted, with only partial and contested exceptions, for a full century.

VII. Accountability and Challenge

The question I put to Muslim religious elites, preachers, and scholars, including the version of myself who spent two decades in that role, is this. You proclaim a God of mercy, compassion, and justice. Yet the doctrinal architecture your tradition built around jihad, dhimmitude, and jizya supplied, across thirteen centuries, a working toolkit of subjugation that was still available, still normalized, and still recognizably Islamic in its logic when it was turned, first against Armenians in the Hamidian provinces of the 1890s and then at industrial scale in the 1910s, into a machine of mass killing against Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians. What accounts for that gap?

An honest answer requires more than defensive apologetics of the kind this article’s companion piece already addressed and found wanting. It requires formal acknowledgment that dhimmitude’s legal architecture was discriminatory by design, not merely in occasional application. It requires theological engagement with Qur’an 9:29 and its most authoritative commentary. And it requires support, rather than resistance, for the program of restitution and reparative accounting proposed in this article’s companion piece.

VIII. Conclusion

Assyrian refugees from Jilu, in the Hakkari mountains, cross the Asadabad Pass in western Persia during the exodus of 1918, when tens of thousands fled Ottoman forces in a march that cost thousands of lives. No tribunal and no reparations followed for the survivors of the Sayfo and other massacres. Their descendants are still waiting for an accounting.

(Ariel Varges via Wikimedia)

Jihad of the sword built empire; jihad of the tongue justified it; jizya financed it; and the demographic toolkit of enslavement, forced conversion of people, and, in its most extreme historical applications, mutilation and mass killing, disposed of the populations who would not be absorbed. The nineteenth-century massacres at Sasun, across the Hamidian provinces, and at Adana showed that this toolkit could operate independently of the dhimma’s formal legal scaffolding once that scaffolding began to erode. The Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek genocides of 1914 to 1923 were not a doctrinal inevitability, and this article does not claim they were foreordained by scripture alone. But they were not a rupture with the dhimma system either. They were what that system’s toolkit made possible once a state willing to use it at industrial scale, and an international order willing to look away at Lausanne, arrived together. The descendant communities of that catastrophe, like the descendant communities of the jizya system more broadly, are still waiting for the accounting this articleand its companion argue is owed.

A Note on Scholarly Debate

A final note for the respected readers. It should be clear that the causal claims advanced here sit within contested historiographical terrain. Most specialists on the Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian genocides, including Taner Akçam, Donald Bloxham, and Ronald Grigor Suny, locate the immediate drivers of the 1914 to 1923 catastrophes primarily in Committee of Union and Progress nationalism, wartime security panic, and a specifically modern, ethno-nationalist project of Turkification, rather than in religious doctrine as such, and caution against reading a fourteen-centuries-old legal category directly onto a twentieth-century state crime committed by a self-consciously secularizing nationalist movement.[32]Selim Deringil’s work on the Hamidian-era conversions in particular emphasizes that late Ottoman administrators pursued forced or induced Islamization as an instrument of state-building and demographic engineering specific to that crisis-ridden imperial moment, a bureaucratic and nationalist logic distinct from, even if drawing raw material from, the classical jurisprudence this articlesurveys in Sections I through III.[33]

This article ‘s claim is narrower than a claim of doctrinal causation. It is that the dhimma system’s centuries-long normalization of population disability, forced religious transfer of people, and enslavement, reasserted once already in the Hamidian period without the mediating structure of formal dhimma law, supplied tools and precedents the Young Turk regime could draw on and radicalize, not that Qur’an 9:29 dictated the Armenian Genocide. Readers should weigh that narrower claim against the fuller nationalist and geopolitical account the specialist literature provides, an account this article ‘s argument supplements rather than replaces.

Endnotes

[1] Jalal Tagreeb, “Confronting the Legacy of Jizya as an Instrument of Subjugation: Modern Muslim States Must Abandon the Mythology Surrounding the Jizya and Confront Its Damage to Religious Minorities,” Middle East Forum, July 15, 2026, https://www.meforum.org/dhimmitude-project/confronting-the-legacy-of-jizya-as-an-instrument-of-subjugation.

[2] Rudolph Peters, Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam (Princeton, Markus Wiener Publishers, 1996), 1–8, on the classical juristic division of jihad into categories of the sword, the tongue, the heart, and the hand.

[3] Al-Mawardi, Al-Ahkam al-Sultaniyya, trans. Wafaa H. Wahba, The Ordinances of Government(Reading, Garnet Publishing, 1996), see generally, on the caliph’s obligation to wage jihad against those who withhold submission.

[4] Reuven Firestone, Jihad, The Origin of Holy War in Islam (New York, Oxford University Press, 1999), 17–50, 137–150, on the classical exegetical treatment of Qur’an 9:5 and 9:29 as standing legal instruction rather than occasion-bound description.

[5] David Cook, Understanding Jihad, 2nd ed. (Oakland, University of California Press, 2015), 66–90, on Ibn Taymiyya’s polemical writings against Christians, Jews, and rival Muslim currents in the aftermath of the Mongol invasions.

[6] Majid Khadduri, War and Peace in the Law of Islam (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press, 1955), 175–202.

[7] Fred M. Donner, The Early Islamic Conquests (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1981), 221–250.

[8] Hugh Kennedy, The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In (Philadelphia, Da Capo Press, 2007), 34–65, “The Foundations of Conquest,” on the amsar garrison system and its fiscal relationship to conquered populations in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and Iran.

[9] Murray Gordon, Slavery in the Arab World (New York, New Amsterdam Books, 1989), 15–42.

[10] Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters, White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500–1800 (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), on the estimated scale of Barbary corsair enslavement of European Christians.

[11] Ronald Segal, Islam’s Black Slaves, The Other Black Diaspora (New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), on the scale, duration, and demographic character of the trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trades.

[12] V. L. Menage, “Devshirme,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., vol. 2 (Leiden, Brill, 1965), 210–213; Speros Vryonis Jr., “Isidore Glabas and the Turkish Devshirme,” Speculum 31, no. 3 (1956), 433–443.

[13] Basilike Papoulia, Ursprung und Wesen der “Knabenlese” im Osmanischen Reich (Munich, R. Oldenbourg, 1963), on the administrative mechanics and periodicity of devshirme recruitment and documented family resistance to it.

[14] Shaun Marmon, Eunuchs and Sacred Boundaries in Islamic Society (New York, Oxford University Press, 1995), 3–22.

[15] David Ayalon, Eunuchs, Caliphs and Sultans, A Study in Power Relationships (Jerusalem, Magnes Press, 1999), see generally, on the continuous institutional staffing of court and sanctuary eunuch corps under the Mamluk and Ottoman states.

[16] On sürgün as an instrument of Ottoman demographic and administrative policy, see Halil Inalcik, The Ottoman Empire, The Classical Age, 1300–1600 (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), see generally, on population transfer and resettlement practice.

[17] On the 1839 Hatt-i Şerif of Gülhane and the 1856 Hatt-i Hümayun, see Roderic H. Davison, Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1856–1876 (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1963), 52–80.

[18] Selim Deringil, Conversion and Apostasy in the Late Ottoman Empire (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012), introduction and ch. 1, on the ambiguous practical effects of formal Tanzimat-era equality.

[19] Selim Deringil, “‘The Armenian Question Is Finally Closed’, Mass Conversions of Armenians in Anatolia during the Hamidian Massacres of 1895–1897,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 51, no. 2 (2009), 344–371.

[20] Bedross Der Matossian, Shattered Dreams of Revolution, From Liberty to Violence in the Late Ottoman Empire (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2014), see generally, on the 1909 Adana massacres and their relationship to the Young Turk constitutional revolution.

[21] Bat Ye’or, The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam, From Jihad to Dhimmitude, Seventh–Twentieth Century (Madison, NJ, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996), 227–247, on the disproportionate wealth and commercial integration of the Armenian dhimmi population relative to other Ottoman Christian communities; see also this article ‘s companion, “Confronting the Legacy of Jizya as an Instrument of Subjugation,” Middle East Forum, July 15, 2026.

[22] On the Armenian Genocide generally, see Ronald Grigor Suny, “They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else,” A History of the Armenian Genocide (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2015), see generally; on the Assyrian genocide, or Sayfo, see David Gaunt, Massacres, Resistance, Protectors, Muslim-Christian Relations in Eastern Anatolia during World War I (Piscataway, NJ, Gorgias Press, 2006), see generally; on the parallel Ottoman Greek catastrophe, see Constantine G. Hatzidimitriou, ed., American Accounts Documenting the Destruction of Smyrna (New York, Aristide D. Caratzas, 2005), introduction.

[23] Raymond Kevorkian, The Armenian Genocide, A Complete History (London, I.B. Tauris, 2011), see generally, on the organization and route-by-route reconstruction of the 1915 deportations.

[24] George Horton, The Blight of Asia (Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill, 1926), the eyewitness consular account of the destruction of Smyrna in September 1922; Hatzidimitriou, American Accounts Documenting the Destruction of Smyrna.

[25] Taner Akcam, A Shameful Act, The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility, trans. Paul Bessemer (New York, Metropolitan Books, 2006), 12–35.

[26] Uğur Ümit Üngör, The Making of Modern Turkey, Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–1950 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011), see generally, on the absorption of Armenian women and children into Muslim households during and after the deportations.

[27] Bat Ye’or, The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam, 391–405, on the absence of any postwar tribunal or restitution mechanism for Ottoman Christian communities comparable to those extended to European Jewry.

[28] Tagreeb, “Confronting the Legacy of Jizya.”

[29] Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris, The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response (New York, HarperCollins, 2003), see generally, on missionary and consular reporting and the Near East Relief effort.

[30] Vahakn N. Dadrian and Taner Akçam, Judgment at Istanbul, The Armenian Genocide Trials (New York, Berghahn Books, 2011), chs. 10–13, 195–336, on the 1919–1920 Istanbul courts-martial and their verdicts.

[31] Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide, Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005), see generally, on the diplomatic priorities underlying the transition from Sèvres to Lausanne.

[32] Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide, 1–20; Ronald Grigor Suny, “They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else,” xi–xxiv.

[33] Selim Deringil, “‘The Armenian Question Is Finally Closed’,” 344–350.

Works Cited

Akçam, Taner. A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility. Translated by Paul Bessemer. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006.

Ayalon, David. Eunuchs, Caliphs and Sultans: A Study in Power Relationships. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1999.

Balakian, Peter. The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response. New York: HarperCollins, 2003.

Bat Ye’or. The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude; Seventh–Twentieth Century. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996.

Bloxham, Donald. The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Cook, David. Understanding Jihad. 2nd ed. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015.

Dadrian, Vahakn N., and Taner Akçam. Judgment at Istanbul: The Armenian Genocide Trials. New York: Berghahn Books, 2011.

Davis, Robert C. Christian. Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500–1800. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Davison, Roderic H. Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1856–1876. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963.

Deringil, Selim. “‘The Armenian Question Is Finally Closed’: Mass Conversions of Armenians in Anatolia during the Hamidian Massacres of 1895–1897.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 51, no. 2 (2009): 344–71.

———. Conversion and Apostasy in the Late Ottoman Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Der Matossian, Bedross. Shattered Dreams of Revolution: From Liberty to Violence in the Late Ottoman Empire. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014.

Donner, Fred M. The Early Islamic Conquests. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981.

Firestone, Reuven. Jihad: The Origin of Holy War in Islam. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Gaunt, David. Massacres, Resistance, Protectors: Muslim-Christian Relations in Eastern Anatolia during World War I. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2006.

Gordon, Murray. Slavery in the Arab World. New York: New Amsterdam Books, 1989.

Hatzidimitriou, Constantine G., ed. American Accounts Documenting the Destruction of Smyrna by the Kemalist Turkish Forces, September 1922. New Rochelle, NY: Aristide D. Caratzas, 2005.

Horton, George. The Blight of Asia. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1926.

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