May 1909 Grand Sheikh Salim al-Bishri of Egypt issued a Fatwa or religious decree condemning Turkish Muslims for massacring 30,000 Armenians in Adana, a major city in the Ottoman Empire.
Sheikh al-Bishri’s 1909 Fatwa was further reinforced by the decree issued in 1917 by Al-Husayn Ibn Ali, the Sharif of Mecca, ordering all Muslims to defend Armenians and “provide everything they might need … because they are the Protected People of the Muslims about whom the Prophet Muhammad said: ‘Whoever takes from them even a rope, I will be his adversary on the day of Judgment.’”
This document makes it amply clear that the Armenian massacres of 1909 and the subsequent Genocide of 1915 were not the result of religious conflict between Muslim Turks and Christian Armenians.
The Grand Sheikh of Al-Azhar rightly condemned the Turks for the mass murder of Armenians, which was committed for racist Pan-Turkic — not Pan-Islamic — reasons, along with the intent of capturing Armenian lands and properties.
The various Fatwas issued by Turkish Muftis (clerics) were intended to provoke fanatical Turkish mobs to attack and massacre innocent Armenians. In 2009, when Turkish Prime Minister Rejeb Erdogan stated that “Muslims don’t commit genocide,” he was only partly right. He should have said: “Good Muslims don’t commit genocide.”
The leaders of the Young Turk Party who masterminded the Armenian Genocide in 1915 were not faithful Muslims, judging by the teachings of the Quran — the Holy Book of Islam. They were simply criminals who used Islam as a convenient cover to carry out mass murder. The compassionate Fatwa of the Grand Sheikh of Al-Azhar still rings true today.
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