Page - 138 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 07/01

138 | Ulrike Luise Glum www.jrfm.eu 2021, 7/1, 123–143 Qur’an: Women tattooed dots on their hands to ensure (or repel) their hus- band’s love; one of Smeaton’s informants stated that the best results were achieved when the tattoo was applied on a Friday at noon, while a female mullah was reading the Qur’an.51 Though it is likely that some of the designs found on the Armenian women had an apotropaic purpose, the eyewitness accounts do not draw a direct con- nection between the tattoos and religion. Many speak of forced conversions to Islam,52 but they do not document the victims as perceiving the tattoos to be a sign of such a conversion. Hakob Hovhannes Moutafian is the only wit- ness who mentions religion and tattoos in the same context: During the massacres many Armenian girls and boys were able to escape, in various ways, from the Turkish murderers and find refuge, naked and hungry, at the Arab desert Bedouins. The latter had tattooed with blue ink the faces of many Armenian girls according to their custom, had made them Mos- lems and had kept them for years. Most of those Armenians had grown up, had forgotten their mother tongue, had become Arabs, but there are those among them who still remember that their ancestors were Armenians.53 Even if the tattoos were not perceived as a physical manifestation of an alien religion, they were evidently perceived as a means of inscribing a new cultural identity onto the women’s bodies. And this cultural identity included an alien religion. For the American press of the time, by contrast, the connection between tattooing and religious conversion was evident. “The victims of the branding and tattooing, in every case, were Christians and their captors thus marked them as Mohammedans”,54 declares the Prescott Journal Miner article cited above. Similarly, an article in the New York Times from 1919 claims, “In the tents of the Arabs in the Syrian desert, many were bound and forcibly tat- tooed on the forehead, lips and chin, to mark them as Moslem women.”55 Fi- nally, in the article from the Standard-Examiner cited above (fig. 9), the tattoos 51 Smeaton 1937, 54–55. 52 See Svazlian 2011, 200, 204, 222, 272, 287. 53 Svazlian 2011, 546. 54 https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=906&dat=19191209&id=hncNAAAAIBAJ&sjid=D- FIDAAAAIBAJ&pg=3752,3372070 [accessed 28 December 2020]. 55 https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1919/06/01/97089721.pdf [accessed 28 December 2020]