The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (11 page)

Just Like Today: Muslim leaders call for restoration of the dhimma

S
ure, Jews and Christians lived as dhimmis in the old Islamic empires, but that’s a relic of the past, right? No Muslims want to reinstitute dhimmi status for them today, do they? Of course they do. Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad, a controversial pro-Osama Muslim leader in Great Britain, wrote in October 2002 that even though there was no caliph in the Islamic world today, that didn’t mean Muslims could simply kill unbelievers. He affirmed that they must still be offered the choice to live subject to the Muslims: “We cannot simply say that because we have no Khilafah [caliphate] we can just go ahead and kill any non-Muslim, rather, we must still fulfill their Dhimmah.”
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Likewise, Sheikh Yussef Salameh, the Palestinian Authority’s undersecretary for religious endowment, in May 1999 “praised the idea that Christians should become dhimmis under Muslim rule, and such suggestions have become more common since the second intifada began in October 2000.”
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In a recent Friday sermon at a mosque in Mecca, Sheikh Marzouq Salem Al-Ghamdi spelled out the Sharia’s injunctions for dhimmis:

If the infidels live among the Muslims, in accordance with the conditions set out by the Prophet—there is nothing wrong with it provided they pay
Jizya
to the Islamic treasury. Other conditions are…that they do not renovate a church or a monastery, do not rebuild ones that were destroyed, that they feed for three days any Muslim who passes by their homes…that they rise when a Muslim wishes to sit, that they do not imitate Muslims in dress and speech, nor ride horses, nor own swords, nor arm themselves with any kind of weapon; that they do not sell wine, do not show the cross, do not ring church bells, do not raise their voices during prayer, that they shave their hair in front so as to make them easily identifiable, do not incite anyone against the Muslims, and do not strike a Muslim…If they violate these conditions, they have no protection.
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Sheikh Abdullah Azzam (1941–1989), one of the founders of al Qaeda, also assumes that the Islamic state he fought to restore would collect the jizya from dhimmis. In his book
Defence of the Muslim Lands
he discusses various categories of jihad. In accordance with traditional Islamic theology, he explains that offensive jihad is an obligation of the Islamic community, and adds, “And the Ulama [Muslim scholars] have mentioned that this type of jihad is for maintaining the payment of Jizya.”
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PC Myth: Historically the dhimma wasn’t so bad

But in practice, it couldn’t really have been like that, could it? Islamic apologist Stephen Schwartz, a convert to Islam, argues that in reality, dhimmitude wasn’t all that bad and maintains that its horrors have been exaggerated: “The dhimma is now held out by a demagogic element in the West as a terrifying symbol of Islamic domination.”
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And it is certainly true that no law is ever universally enforced with uniform zeal and thoroughness. In the ninth century, Theodosius, the patriarch of Jerusalem, wrote that the Muslims “are just and do us no wrong nor show us any violence.”
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But the legal status of the Christians and Jews was still precarious at best. Historian A. S. Tritton notes:

At one moment the dhimmi appears as a persecuted worm who is entirely negligible, and the next complaint is made of his pernicious influence on the Muslims around him. Laws were made, observed for a time, and then forgotten till something brought them to the remembrance of the authorities…. One feels that if events had been governed by logic, Islam would have swallowed up the subject religions; but they survive, vigorous though battered.
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Battered, indeed. The humiliations took various forms, but they were almost always present. Historian Philip Hitti notes one notorious example from the ninth century: “The Caliph al-Mutawakkil in 850 and 854 decreed that Christians and Jews should affix wooden images of devils to their houses, level their graves even with the ground, wear outer garments of honey color, i.e. yellow, put two honey-colored patches on the clothes of their slaves,…and ride only on mules and asses with wooden saddles marked by two pomegranate-like balls on the cantle.”
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Later, Christians in the Ottoman Empire, according to historian Steven Runciman, “were never allowed to forget that they were a subject people.”
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This extended to the appropriation of their holy places by the conquering people: When the Turks took Constantinople in 1453, according to Hoca Sa’deddin, tutor of the sixteenth-century Sultans Murad III and Mehmed III, “churches which were within the city were emptied of their vile idols and cleansed from the filthy and idolatrous impurities and by the defacement of their images and the erection of Islamic prayer niches and pulpits…many monasteries and chapels became the envy of the gardens of Paradise.”
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In the fourteenth century, the pioneering sociologist Ibn Khaldun explained the options for Christians: “It is [for them to choose between] conversion to Islam, payment of the poll tax, or death.”
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Taxpayer woes

Paying the special tax on non-Muslims, the jizya, wasn’t as easy as filling out a 1040. The Syrian orthodox patriarch of Antioch, chronicler Michael the Syrian (1126–1199), recorded how crushing this burden was for the Christians in the time of the Caliph Marwan II (744–750):

Marwan’s main concern was to amass gold and his yoke bore heavily on the people of the country. His troops inflicted many evils on the men: blows, pillages, outrages on women in their husbands’ presence.
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Marwan was not alone. One of his successors, al-Mansur (754–775), according to Michael, “raised every kind of tax on all the people in every place. He doubled every type of tribute on Christians.”
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Payment of the jizya often took place in a peculiar and demeaning ceremony in which the Muslim tax official hit the dhimmi on the head or back of the neck. Tritton explained, “The dhimmi has to be made to feel that he is an inferior person when he pays, he is not to be treated with honour.”
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This ensured that the dhimmi felt “subdued,” as commanded by Qur’an 9:29. The twelfth-century Qur’anic commentator Zamakhshari even directed that the jizya should be collected “with belittlement and humiliation.”
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The thirteenth-century Shafi’i jurist an-Nawawi directed that “the infidel who wishes to pay his poll tax must be treated with disdain by the collector: the collector remains seated and the infidel remains standing in front of him, his head bowed and his back bent. The infidel personally must place the money on the scales, while the collector holds him by the beard, and strikes him on both cheeks.”
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According to historian Bat Ye’or, this blow as part of the payment process “survived unchanged till the dawn of the twentieth century, being ritually performed in Arab-Muslim countries, such as Yemen and Morocco, where the Koranic tax continued to be extorted from the Jews.”
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Non-Muslims often converted to Islam to avoid this tax: This is how the vast Christian populations of North Africa and the Middle East ultimately became tiny, demoralized minorities. According to the seventeenth-century European traveler Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, in Cyprus in 1651 “over four hundred Christians had become Muhammadans because they could not pay their
kharaj
[a land tax that was also levied on non-Muslims, sometimes synonymous with the jizya], which is the tribute that the Grand Seigneur levies on Christians in his states.” The following year in Baghdad, when Christians “had to pay their debts or their kharaj, they were forced to sell their children to the Turks to cover it.”
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In other instances, however, conversion to Islam was forbidden for dhimmis—it would destroy the tax base.
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Pushing too hard

Eventually, all this oppression provoked a reaction. Historian Apostolos E. Vacalopoulos describes an instructive set of circumstances surrounding Greece’s early nineteenth century struggle for independence:

The Revolution of 1821 is no more than the last great phase of the resistance of the Greeks to Ottoman domination; it was a relentless, undeclared war, which had begun already in the first years of servitude. The brutality of an autocratic regime, which was characterized by economic spoliation, intellectual decay and cultural retrogression, was sure to provoke opposition. Restrictions of all kinds, unlawful taxation, forced labor, persecutions, violence, imprisonment, death, abductions of girls and boys and their confinement to Turkish harems, and various deeds of wantonness and lust, along with numerous less offensive excesses—all these were a constant challenge to the instinct of survival and they defied every sense of human decency. The Greeks bitterly resented all insults and humiliations, and their anguish and frustration pushed them into the arms of rebellion. There was no exaggeration in the statement made by one of the beys of Arta, when he sought to explain the ferocity of the struggle. He said: ‘We have wronged the rayas [dhimmis] (i.e. our Christian subjects) and destroyed both their wealth and honor; they became desperate and took up arms. This is just the beginning and will finally lead to the destruction of our empire.’ The sufferings of the Greeks under Ottoman rule were therefore the basic cause of the insurrection; a psychological incentive was provided by the very nature of the circumstances.
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Today the jihadist terrorists complain that the West has destroyed their wealth and honor; however, as they continue to commit acts of violence against innocent people—as they did on September 11 and in many other attacks—this complaint will ring increasingly hollow. It is even possible that these continued acts of violence will eventually give rise to a stronger and more forthright resistance to Islamization than we have seen.

PC Myth: Jews had it better in Muslim lands than in Christian Europe

PC spokesmen assert every day that even if the dhimma really did subject Jews and Christians to ongoing and institutionalized discrimination and harassment, it certainly wasn’t as bad as the way Jews were treated in Christian Europe. Historian Paul Johnson explains: “In theory,…the status of the Jewish
dhimmi
under Moslem rule was worse than under the Christians, since their right to practise their religion, and even their right to live, might be arbitrarily removed at any time. In practice, however, the Arab warriors who conquered half the civilized world so rapidly in the seventh and eighth centuries had no wish to exterminate literate and industrious Jewish communities who provided them with reliable tax incomes and served them in innumerable ways.”
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Certainly in terms of legal restrictions, the Muslim laws were much harsher for Jews than those of Christendom. In 1272, Pope Gregory X repeated what Pope Gregory I first affirmed in 598: Jews “ought not to suffer any disadvantage in those [privileges] which have been granted them.” Gregory X also repeated earlier papal decrees forbidding forced conversions (as does Islamic law) and commanding that “no Christian shall presume to seize, imprison, wound, torture, mutilate, kill, or inflict violence on them; furthermore, no one shall presume, except by judicial action of the authorities of the country, to change the good customs in the land where they live for the purpose of taking their money or goods from them or from others.”

Muhammad vs. Jesus

“And he sent messengers ahead of him, who went and entered a village of the Samaritans, to make ready for him; but the people would not receive him, because his face was set toward Jerusalem. And when his disciples James and John saw it, they said, ‘Lord, do you want us to bid fire come down from heaven and consume them?’ But he turned and rebuked them.”