About a year after the massacres of 1860, while the European
Commissioners were still in Syria, and Lebanon was beginning to attain
something of its wonted quiet, several Turkish soldiers made an assault
upon a young Maronite girl from the village of Ain Kesur, who was
carrying a jar of water to the workmen on the Deir el Komr road. Mr.
Calhoun was requested by the Relief Committee in Beirut to devote the
charity funds distributed in this part of Lebanon, to giving employment
to the needy in road-building. This girl was employed to supply the men
with water. The brutal soldiers attempted to gag her with a
handkerchief, in order to accomplish their design, but she was too
strong for them. The struggle was long and violent, but she finally
effected her escape, leaving on the road the fragments of the broken
jar, her shoes and shreds of calico which they had torn from her
clothing. Just at that moment Giurgius el Haddad, Mr. Calhoun's cook,
came up, and seeing the broken jar and the clothing, guessed what had
happened, and after finding the girl, and hearing her story, started in
pursuit of the soldiers to Ainab, whither they had gone, and where a
Turkish officer was stationed. He stated the case to the officer, and
received in reply a blow on his arm from a heavy cane. The case was
reported to the Turkish Colonel in Abeih, who summoned all parties and
ordered each of the soldiers to be beaten with forty lashes on the bare
back. But word had reached Col. Frazier, the British Commissioner, and
he came at once to Abeih in company with Omar Pasha, with order from
Evad, Pasha, to examine the case _de novo_. The result was that two of
the soldiers were condemned by military law to be shot, and were shot at
sunset June 5th, in front of the old palace just below Mr. Calhoun's
house. The event produced a profound impression, and Druzes and Moslems
began to feel that a woman's life and honor were after all of some
value.
In April, 1862, when Daud Pasha was governor of Mt. Lebanon, a Druze,
named Hassan, murdered a Druze girl of his own village, supposing that
Daud Pasha would not interfere with the time-honored custom of killing
girls! Much to his surprise, however, he was arrested, convicted and
hung, and the poor women of all sects in the mountain began to feel that
after all they had an equal right to life with the other sex.
In most parts of Syria to-day, the murder of women and girls is an act
so insignificant as hardly to deserve notice. Mt. Lebanon and vicinity
constitute an exception perhaps, but woman's right to life is one of
those rights which have not yet been fully guaranteed in the Turkish
Empire.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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