Was Dracula a Christian Hero?

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It was really important to me to show the equal humanity of the Ottomans and the Byzantine Christians. I wanted to give some balance, so that there are characters who are either Orthodox Christians or are descended from Orthodox Christians, and then there are characters who are secular Muslims or even devout Muslims. I wanted to show the power that tradition for has for each of those groups in the book. I wanted to show in this era of intense tension and anxiety that we are now living in, that the suffering inflicted in the name of religion--the religious warfare that is sometimes the consequence of the political use of religion--that suffering is experienced equally, whatever a person's faith is. I wanted to say that anybody thrust into this situation by religion or politics is simply human, and that suffering is suffering. The horrors of history are equal for all of us. For me that's a morally important point in the book, and it's become all the more so in this era.

For me it was really a leap of imagination. I don't personally believe in the supernatural, but I do believe in the power of human beings to do good when they rise to a difficult occasion, and the power of that good impulse to overcome violence with humanity. So I tried to imagine what these characters were experiencing as they struggled to suspend their doubt about the supernatural. But I also wanted to show that it was love and hope and rationalism that really brought progress in any situation. It wasn't blind faith, or an irrational belief.

That's very much in the tradition of Bram Stoker's Dracula. The good guys in Dracula, who are opposing the symbol of evil, use a mixture of science and Victorian piety. Even when they are relying on their religious faith for some kind of personal strength, they're always turning to the rational or the logical explanation, or deductive reasoning, to figure out what the villain's next move will be. That tradition in Stoker really fascinates me. The characters have to suspend some of their rational beliefs to encompass the idea that this ancient evil could come out of history and live forever. But they're also using all these scientific methods to try to overcome him. I like that balance--the fact that they oppose Dracula with crucifixes because that's the ancient tradition, not because they think that it's the only thing that works.

I suppose that's possible. It would be blind on anyone's part to assert that religious leaders didn't help some terribly tyrannical bloodthirsty medieval leaders. The connection between the church and violent politics has a record throughout the middle ages. So that would have to be a pretty major revision of history if there were any backlash against that [part of the book].

I think one of the differences between the story I've written and "The Da Vinci Code," is that, at least as I understand it--I don't want to attempt to paraphrase another writer's beliefs--, is that Dan Brown appears to believe that he has evidence for the union of Mary Magdalene and Jesus. And I don't believe that Dracula was a vampire. I certainly believe, like many serious historians, that Dracula was a historical figure. There's a concrete, contemporary medieval record of many of his deeds, and I was just using that record as it stands and adding to it this much later supernatural legend that was created by a Victorian writer.

I haven't really made any religious assertions in the book. But I do see the book as something of a plea for tolerance rather than religiously inspired intolerance or violence. That's why it was very important to me to have the balance of the Ottoman perspective and the Western Christian perspective. I had an interesting experience. One magazine that wanted to take photographs of me to go with an interview had ideas for creative photographs. One of the ideas that I actually rejected was to photograph me holding an old crucifix. One of the reasons I didn't want to do it was that was too loaded a symbol. I didn't want to deal with possible interpretations of this --either offense or the feeling that I was allying myself with the Christian symbolism in the book. But I also felt that it would be an injustice to the Muslim characters in the book.

My hope is that the book gives some sense that history is some strange artifact and that it is a matter of perspective. We have to look at it from many points of view in order to even begin to understand it.

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