(left) and
Nesuhi Ertegün (right), and his daughter, Selma (middle) in February 1942|alt= Born in
Istanbul to a civil servant father, Mehmed Cemil
Bey, and a mother Ayşe Hamide
Hanım, who was a daughter of
Sufi shaykh İbrahim Edhem Efendi, he studied law at Darülfünûn-u Şahâne (دار الفنون شهانه), now
Istanbul University, and graduated in 1908. He was a legal counsel for the
Ottoman Ministry of Foreign Affairs, when he saw the birth of his first son, Nesuhi, on 26 November 1917, in Constantinople (now Istanbul), during the
First World War. Ertegün worked also on his government's orders to remove any mention of the
Armenian Genocide in American popular culture. In 1934, he led a ferocious and ultimately successful campaign to quash a film adaptation by
MGM of Austrian writer
Franz Werfel's
Forty Days of Musa Dagh, a historical dramatization of an episode from the genocide. He became the Dean of the Diplomatic Corps in May 1944. He held this last post until he died in
Washington, D.C., of a heart attack in November of the same year. In April 1946, a year after World War II had ended, his body was carried back to Istanbul aboard the
USS Missouri and buried in the garden of
Sufi tekke, in Sultantepe,
Üsküdar. near his
shaykh grandfather
İbrahim Edhem Efendi, who was once the head of the Tekke. (His two sons
Nesuhi and
Ahmet Ertegün also rest there.) When Ertegün died, there was not yet a
mosque in
Washington, D.C., at which his funeral could be held. The
Islamic Center of Washington was built as a result. He also had a daughter named Selma Göksel. ==See also==