The Irish Famine
and The Sultan (part 2)
By Asim Ahmad
While the apology did little to bandage the indelible scars
left on the psyche of the Irish, the Irish did receive help
from the unlikeliest of places during the famine. Over
3,000 miles to the east an eminent Irish physician by the
name of Justin McCarthy had worked as a physician for
the father of the 24 year old Sultan Abdul Majid I (1823-
1861) for a decade and was now in the service of the sultan
himself. His son returned to Ireland for a brief visit and
met with William O’Neill Daunt, a leading Irish nationalist.
He wrote in his diary, printed as A life Spent for Ireland,
“McCarthy (the Turk) dined with Charles today. He told
me that the Sultan had intended to give £10,000 to the
famine-stricken Irish, but was deterred by the English
ambassador, Lord Cowley, as Her Majesty, who had only
subscribed £1,000, would have been annoyed had a foreign
sovereign given a larger sum”…(Daunt, William, A Life
Spent for Ireland).
This information coming from an insider to the sultan’s
circle and recorded in a private diary is proof beyond
doubt of its authenticity, as Dr. McCarthy was a trusted
physician of the sultan. According to this account, the
English were not only penny-pinching, but worse than that,
more obsessed with fixing their image than with easing the
misery of a starving nation. In The History of the Great Irish
Famine, published 25 years after the famine by Reverend
John Bourke, he confirmed that, indeed, the sultan could
only give £1,000. He said, “They showed a decided anxiety
to receive aid in money, not only from landlords, who
were bound to give it, but from any and every quarter-even
from the Great Turk himself, who subscribed a thousand
pounds out of his bankrupt treasury, to feed the starving
subjects of the richest nation of the world” (Bourke John.
The History of The Great Irish Famine, p. 374).
As the excerpt suggests, this donation was made at a critical
juncture for the Ottoman empire when it was economically
broke and struggling to recover from the Greek war
of independence and revolts from within the empire.
Still, the sultan’s determination to give charity in a state of
semi-bankruptcy to the Irish only proves that the Islamic
spirit of ‘love for others what you love for yourself’
(Bukhari) guided his moral compass.
Irish newspapers also picked up on the generosity of the
sultan. Irish Distress—Turkish Sympathy were the headlines
on the Nenagh Guardian on April 21, 1847. The Church
and State Gazette on April 23 wrote, “Abdülmejid as a ruler
Drogheda on the Boyne River where Ottoman ships purportedly
docked and unloaded provisions for the Irish.
10 March – April 2021 | AL-MADINAH