Mark Twain's Take on the Middle East and Europe

Musings From His Trip Through Syria in 1867

Sometimes I suffer the coincidence of learning some tidbit about history right when that tidbit repeats itself in the current time.  This happened to me most recently the day after the deadly Paris attack by terrorists that saw over a hundred westerners massacred.  The day after the attacks I was switching between watching news coverage and reading The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain, a non-fiction account of his travels through Europe and the Middle East in 1867.  Mark Twain has a famous quote that emphasizes how travel teaches us to be more tolerant of other cultures and generally less of a “jack-ass” as he loves to repeat in The Innocents. 

However, Twain did not hold back in his account Damascus in Syria and the general view of Westerners by the locals.  He even goes so far as to predict that Russia will bomb Syria due to actions by what we now call Jihadist Muslims against Christians (Twain calls all Westerners Christians despite how religious they are).  I have copied the text below.  It picks up as Twain exits Damascus on his way to a memorial built for Christians who suffered the tenants of Jihad; comments in parenthesis are mine for context.

 “and to the mausoleum of the five thousands Christians who were massacred in Damascus in 1861 by the Turks (Syria was then part of the Ottoman Empire now known as Turkey).  They say those narrow streets ran blood for several days, and that men, women and children were butchered indiscriminately and left to rot by hundreds all through the Christian quarter; they say, further, that the stench was dreadful.  All the Christians who could get away fled from the city, and the Mohammedans (Twain calls Muslims Mohammadeans as he sees them as followers of Mohamed) would not defile their hands by burying the “infidel dogs” (Twain’s quotes not mine).  The thirst For blood extended to the high lands of Hermon and Anti-Lebanon, and in a short time twenty-five thousand more Christians were massacred and their possessions laid waste.  How they hate a Christian in Damascus!-and pretty much all over Turkeydom as well.  And how they will pay for it when Russia turns her guns upon them again!

It is soothing to the heart to abuse England and France for interposing to save the Ottoman Empire from the destruction it has so richly deserved for a thousand years.  It hurts my vanity to see these pagans refuse to eat of food that has been cooked for us; or to eat from a dish we have eaten from; or to drink from a goatskin which we have polluted with our Christian lips, except by filtering the water through a sponge! I never disliked a Chinaman as I do these degraded Turks and Arabs, and when Russia is ready to war with them again, I hope England and France will not find is good breeding or good judgment to interfere.”

I mean by sharing this text not to commit libel against any religion or culture, only to share a prediction made a little over a hundred years ago which has come true recently, with Russia and France bombing areas of Syria in response to actions by Jihadist Muslims against Westerners.  To balance out this post and show how Mark Twain equally despised any religion that was wont to cause suffering and condone murder.  I will end with a section of text from earlier in The Innocents when Twain while gazing at the Coliseum speaks satirically of the Roman Catholic Church’s forceful evangelical pursuits to convert or kill pagans.

“Some seventeen or eighteen centuries ago, the ignorant men of Rome were wont to put Christians in the arena of the Coliseum yonder, and turn the wild beasts upon them for a show.  It was for a lesson as well.  It was to teach the people to abhor and fear the new doctrine the followers of Christ were teaching.  The beasts tore the victims limb from limb and made poor mangled corpses of them in the twinkling of an eye.  But when the Christians came into power, when the holy Mother Church became mistress of the barbarians, she taught them the error of their ways by no such means.  No, she put them in this pleasant Inquisition and pointed to the Blessed Redeemer, who was so gentle and so merciful toward all men, and they urged the barbarians to love him; and they did all they could to persuade them to love and honor him--first by twisting their thumbs out of joint with a screw; then by nipping their flesh with pincers—red-hot ones, because they are the most comfortable in cold weather; then by skinning them alive a little, and finally by roasting them in public.  They always convinced those barbarians.  The true religions, properly administered, as the good Mother Church used to administer it, is very very soothing.”