The Kurds, a powerful and populous element of the Turkish Empire, had no written language and no literature of any kind until the American missionaries created one for them and translated the New Testament into the local dialect written with Armenian characters.
The Albanians had no literature when the Americans came, and it would not be far from the truth to say that they have none now except what the missionaries have given them.
Although every Turk is a Mohammedan and the sultan of Turkey is the recognized head of that faith, the Koran, the Moslem Bible, written by the prophet Mohammed, has never been printed in the Turkish language, but remains exclusively in the Arabic tongue, in which it is written, but the Bible has been printed in Turkish for nearly seventy-five years, and may be read to-day in his own dialect by every one of the many races which constitute the Mohammedan world.
When the Americans first began to issue literature in Arabic the scholars of that race criticised the type, which had been made in Europe and was about as perfect as English type would be if it were made by an Arab. Rev. Eli Smith, who was in charge at that time, realized that half the value of the American publications would be lost unless their typographical appearance met with the approval of the artistic taste of Mohammedan scholars. The type did not exist and it was his duty to create it. He made models of the letters of the alphabet by copying them from choice Arabic manuscripts, and in 1836 he took them to Germany to be cast. The voyage ended in a shipwreck and all his work was lost in the waters of the Mediterranean. Dr. Smith, however, was a patient and persistent man. He began again at the beginning and did it all over with the greatest care and fonts of type were cast in the Tauchnitz establishment at Leipzig under his supervision. After five years of patient labour, the first book was issued from the mission press at Beirut in 1841, and it was not only a model of the “art preservative,” but was undoubtedly the most perfect and beautiful specimen of Arabic printing ever seen.
Then the work of printing the Bible was decided upon and Dr. Smith was detailed to superintend it. It was the labour of his life, and no literary task was ever conducted with such conscientious care. As soon as he had completed one of the books it was put into type, and a hundred proofs were struck off and sent to educated Syrians and Arabs and British, American and German scholars, whose criticisms were carefully considered, and, after twenty-eight years of hard work by Dr. Smith and his successor, Dr. Van Dyck, the American press at Beirut issued a translation which has received the approval of all the real Arabic scholars of the day.
The next step was to electrotype the pages and secure duplicate plates that would insure its preservation forever, and that long and costly labour, which involved probably the hardest task of proof-reading ever undertaken, has recently been completed by Dr. Franklin P. Hoskins of Beirut.
The mission press of Beirut, under Dr. Hoskins’s direction, had already issued 1,535,266 copies of the Arabic Bible up to December 31, 1909, which have been distributed among the Mohammedan races from the Adriatic to the Yellow Seas. Thousands of copies have gone to our Mohammedan wards in the Philippines. They are to be found in Yucatan, in Brazil, in the Argentine Republic, and at the Cape of Good Hope. There is a regular demand from every section of Asia and Africa, where most of the followers of Mohammed live. They generally accept the Old Testament as history and claim the patriarchs and the prophets as their own.
Next in importance to the publication of the Bible, has been the work of producing text-books for the schools in the East. Like the general literature, they are mostly reprints and translations of American editions, but they have to be adapted in a measure to local conditions. The courses in the American colleges in Turkey are conducted in English, but French, German, Turkish, and other languages are taught. For these American text-books are used, the same as in our own colleges, but for the common schools of the Turkish Empire an entire set of school books had to be created by the American missionaries, which have since been adopted by the government for local use.
No geography, or history, or arithmetic, or anything else in Turkish or the other ten languages in common use in that empire existed when the Americans undertook their campaign of education seventy-five years ago. They had to be prepared and printed with the sultan’s stupid and malicious censors looking over the shoulders of the writers and the printers and the proof-readers to prevent the publication of anything that might reflect upon the benign policy of “the great assassin,” as Mr. Gladstone called him, or suggest to the people ideas inconsistent with their poverty and retrogression. Many amusing stories are told of the ridiculous rules and corrections made by these censors. Even the text of the Bible had to be changed and certain passages omitted because they taught the doctrine of human rights and referred to penalties visited upon unjust rulers by God and man. The word Armenia, the name of one of the largest provinces of the Ottoman Empire, was forbidden, and the name of Macedonia, another, was also placed upon the list of terms that could not be used. The same rules that were applied by the censors to daily newspapers were applied to the Bible and all other books, but nevertheless the presses have never been stopped and the influence of the literature they have issued is incalculable.
For two generations the two publishing houses of the American missions have issued newspapers in Armenian, Greek, Bulgarian, Arabic, and other languages used in the Turkish Empire, which have had a wide circulation and a permanent influence among all classes. These papers contain reviews of current events, religious intelligence, stories and poetry, miscellaneous information, and have been the only newspapers that have been allowed to circulate in certain portions of the empire.