Thursday, August 29, 2024

Joseph Wilford booth (1866-1928) on Turkish Critics of the Church Playing on the word "Mür" (bitter) to disparage Latter-day Saints

  

January 31, 1899 (Tuesday) [Aintab]

 

Wrote a letter to Bros. Larson and Hintze at Aleppo. YMA night. We took a walk to see Bro Samuel but the folks were not home. We also called at Neresis Kulujian and spent a few moments there. We scarcely ever go to the stree[t] without being saluted with a “Mur-r” from the tongue of both boys and men. It is the way in which they express their disfavor of Mormons. (Joseph Wilford Booth, Journal, January 31, 1899, in Missionary in the Middle East: The Journals of Joseph Wilford Booth, ed. James A. Toronto and Kent F. Schull [Provo, Utah: BYU Religious Studies Center; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2024], 254)

 

Also passing two other calls at the Saints and on our way home as we were passing the door of a weaving room we were met with that usual expression Murrr Murrr from those inside. (Joseph Wilford Booth, Journal, February 2, 1899, in ibid., 255)

 

As the editors note:

 

Mür means “bitter” in Ottoman Turkish, so this could be a play on words to disparage the Latter-day Saint missionaries since a nickname for Church members as “Mormon”—a term that, at the time, the Church embraced as part of its identity. (Ibid., 254 n. 19)

 



 

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