Inventing the Holy Land by Rogers Stephanie Stidham;

Author:Rogers, Stephanie Stidham;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books

“MUSLIMS CONTROL CALVARY”: PROTESTANT ANGER

Control of Christian holy sites by “inferior” Muslims was especially aggravating to Protestant pilgrims. Summarizing the view of many, Phillips Brooks wrote in the 1870s, “It is sad to see how Moslem power rules here. The very keys of the Holy Sepulcher are kept by the Mohammedans!”[126] Muslims had also refused to allow most Protestants to tour their holy sites such as the interesting and oriental Al Aqsa Mosque (sitting atop the ancient temple mount in Jerusalem) until the 1870s.[127] Phillips Brooks’s comments much later on the eve of the British victory in Palestine (1918) echo decades of American Protestant frustrations. Political events occurring in Palestine were interpreted more and more in a postmillennial light due to the growing influence of Scofield Bibles[128] among broad swaths of American fundamentalists and some evangelicals after the turn of the century. There was also a new sense of outrage about Muslim ownership in pilgrims’ accounts. The situation was further politicized by the fact that Muslim peddlers crowded about Christian areas shouting, while “the Mohammedans never allow anything of this kind to profane their places of worship.”[129] Increasingly, Palestine bore the weight of a religious myth, and some Protestants wanted Palestine in the role that they claimed the Bible had predicted.

The low regard in which Christians were publicly held in some areas of Palestine such as Damascus was well publicized in the 1869 publication of Innocents Abroad, Twain’s bestselling book during his lifetime. Christian pilgrims were regularly treated roughly at pilgrimage sites. One pilgrim wrote, “The Turkish soldier chuckles with concealed delight as he pitches into this frantic mass of hated infidel foes with the bayonet or the butt end of his gun.”[130] Twain was angered by the disdain of the Muslims towards Christians and wondered at the recent global alliances that had protected the Ottomans:

in Damascus they so hate the very sight of a foreign Christian that they want no intercourse whatever with him; only a year or two ago, his person was not always safe in Damascus streets. It is the most fanatical Mohammedan purgatory out of Arabia. Where you see one green turban of a Hadji elsewhere (the honored sign that my lord has made the pilgrimage to Mecca), I think you will see a dozen in Damascus. The Damascenes are the ugliest, wickedest looking villains we have seen. All the veiled women we had seen yet, nearly, left their eyes exposed, but numbers of these in Damascus completely hid the face under a close-drawn black veil that made the woman look like a mummy. If ever we caught an eye exposed it was quickly hidden from our contaminating Christian vision; the beggars actually passed us by without demanding bucksheesh; the merchants in the bazaars did not hold up their goods . . . on the contrary, they only scowled at us and said never a word. . . .

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.

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