“The history of the Crusades (which has long since been, so to speak, a monopoly of the Christian world) is the greatest source of injustice to the Saracens. To-day it is acknowledged by those experts who have investigated this vast subject that the Christians domiciled in the East rarely made common cause with the Crusaders, and that those who did so were not molested by the Saracens after the withdrawal of the former. When the Crusaders of the Third Crusade got as far as Constantinople they found that the Byzantine Emperor and his Christian subjects were in close alliance with the Saracens. History relates that instead of directing their efforts against the Saracens, the Crusaders on more than one occasion fell out among themselves and robbed the Greeks. In fact, wherever the Crusaders went they brought rapine and seduction with them. Neither do we ever hear how it came to pass that the Christians in Asia never joined the Crusaders against the Saracens or assisted them in any way. Thus we are bound to assume that as far as their religion is concerned the Christian population was, at least at that time, not molested by the Mohammedans. “I tell you that a Christian place of worship has never been desecrated by a Turk, except, as at the taking of Constantinople, during the heat of battle. And for this very simple reason: that the Koran expressly lays down that a Christian church is sacred as an edifice devoted to God, and must be respected as such. You yourself have had ample opportunity of seeing that this injunction has been strictly carried out in the past by the untouched condition of the many Christian monasteries on the road between Trebizond and Erzeroum. You can see it even in Constantinople to-day, where many mosques which were formerly Greek churches still show the images of Christian saints on the walls restored to-day, as they were over 500 years ago, notably in the Kaarie Mosque.[24] The fresco images of the saints of the Byzantine Church look down from the walls upon the Mohammedan worshippers. Footnote 24: Midhat Effendi himself took me over this particular mosque during one of my visits to Constantinople. “As a matter of fact, it is wonderful to me how little differentiates the Moslem faith from the tenets of Christianity. It is true we do not accept the Trinity, but neither was it accepted as a dogma by the Evangelists; indeed, it is never once mentioned in the Old or New Testament. Also, at the Council of Nicæa (A.D. 325) only two hundred priests, backed by Constantine the Great, accepted this doctrine, but two thousand two hundred priests refused to subscribe to it.