The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (28 page)

Would the ideas of the equality of rights and dignity for all people, which grew out of Christianity and which conflict with Islamic law in numerous ways, be known today in Europe or the Americas?

Just Like Today: Christian persecution in Iraq

I
n 775, the seat of the Assyrian Church was moved from the Persian city of Seleucia-Ctesiphon to Baghdad, and there it has been ever since. However, the increasingly unfavorable situation for Christians in the Middle East today, with the resurgence of jihadist Islam, has led the current Catholicos, Mar Dinkha IV, to live in Chicago since 1980. Patriarch Emmanuel Delly, leader of the Chaldean Catholics (a group of Assyrians who restored communion with the Church of Rome centuries ago), has remained in Baghdad—only to see jihad terrorists target Christians for special persecution all over Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Saddam’s government was relatively secular; jihadists hope to ultimately establish a government that will follow Sharia rules more rigorously. Christians who operate liquor stores have therefore been targeted, in line with dhimmi laws forbidding Christians to “display wine” or sell it in places where Muslims may buy it.
⁴
Christian women have been threatened to wear hijab, the Islamic head covering—or else.
⁵
Many Christians have been killed, and thousands have fled the country. In September 2004, Iraqi columnist Majid Aziza observed that “it is difficult to recall a period in which Christian Arabs were in greater danger than today.”
⁶

Considering Tamerlane, that is saying a great deal.

Case study: The Assyrians

It’s the same story with the Assyrian Church of the East. This is the ancient Church of Edessa, the city that was to become the center of the first Latin kingdom established by the Crusaders. In the fourth and fifth centuries, this church’s ties with churches farther to the West grew increasingly strained, until in 424 the Church of the East finally declared in a synod that its leader, the Catholicos of Seleucia-Ctesiphon (the Persian capital), was not subject to the churches of Rome or Antioch, and was equal to them in authority. Later, the Assyrians adopted the view of Christ articulated by Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople, who had been deposed as a heretic by the third Ecumenical Council in Ephesus in 431. This further alienated the Assyrians from both Byzantine and Latin Christians. After 424, the Assyrians had little or no contact with the great Churches of Constantinople and Rome for centuries.

During those centuries, the Assyrians proved to be some of the most energetic missionaries Christianity has ever known. At one point in time, the Nestorian Church stretched all the way from the Mediterranean to the Pacific Ocean. Nestorian Christians could be found all across Central Asia, as well as in the Byzantine Empire, and particularly in the Middle East and Egypt. At their height, the Assyrians had metropolitan sees in Azerbaijan, Syria, Jerusalem, Beijing, Tibet, India, Samarkand, Edessa, and Arabia (at Sana in Yemen), as well as churches from Aden to Bombay and Shanghai. The Nestorian missionary Alopen took the Gospel into China in 635; the first church in China was completed three years later. By the eighth century, there were enough Nestorians in China to establish several dioceses there; one Chinese emperor called Christianity “the luminous doctrine” and fostered its growth.

However, storm clouds were forming on the horizon. Late in the seventh century, the caliph Muawiya II (683–684) began a persecution and destroyed many churches after the Catholicos refused his demand for gold. The persecution continued under the caliph Abd al-Malik (685–705). The Abbasid caliph al-Mahdi (775–786) noticed that the Assyrians had built new churches since the Muslim conquest, in violation of dhimmi laws; he ordered them destroyed. He apparently thought that the Christians had violated the terms of the dhimma, the contract of protection; five thousand Christians in Syria were given the choice of conversion to Islam or death. Al-Mahdi’s successor, Harun al-Rashid (786–809), ordered the destruction of still more churches. Half a century later, the caliph al-Mutawakkil (847–861) began an active persecution of the Church. Rioters and plundering mobs targeted Christians in Baghdad and its environs several times during the ninth and tenth centuries. Many of the churches destroyed and Christians victimized were Assyrian. Meanwhile, in China, a new emperor initiated a persecution so fierce that by 981 Nestorian missionaries visiting China found an utterly decimated Church. Nonetheless, the Assyrian Church continued to attract large numbers of converts among the Turks and others and maintained a presence in China; late in the thirteenth century, a Nestorian served as governor of China’s Gansu province.

Muhammad vs. Jesus

“And you will be hated by all for my name’s sake. But he who endures to the end will be saved.”

Jesus (Mark 13:13)

“There is for you an excellent example to follow in Abraham and those with him, when they said to their people: ‘We are clear of you and of whatever ye worship besides Allah: we have rejected you, and there has arisen, between us and you, enmity and hatred for ever, unless ye believe in Allah and Him alone.’”

Qur’an 60:4

Assyrians suffered again when Crusader Antioch fell to the Muslims in 1268. Many Assyrians were enslaved and their churches destroyed; an Assyrian bishop was stoned and his body displayed on the city gates as a warning to the Christians. In other attacks by Arabs, Kurds, and Mongols during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, untold numbers of Assyrians were killed or enslaved. But the worst came from the Mongol Tamerlane, a dedicated Muslim who conducted furious jihad campaigns against the Nestorians and devastated their cities and churches. It was full-blown war against the Assyrian Christians: Tamerlane offered them conversion to Islam, dhimmitude, or death. By 1400, the vast Nestorian domains were no more; Christianity had almost completely died out in Persia, Central Asia, and China.
⁷

After this, virtually all Nestorians lived as dhimmis under Muslim rule. And like the Zoroastrians, their community dwindled down to a tiny remnant under the relentless weight of this institutionalized injustice.

If the Christians in Europe had been subjected to the same fate, it is distinctly possible that the world might never have known the works of Dante Alighieri, or Michelangelo, or Leonardo da Vinci, or Mozart, or Bach. It is likely that there would never have been an El Greco, or a Giotto, or an Olivier Messaien. A community that must expend all its energy just to survive does not easily pursue art and music.

The Crusades may have made the full flowering of European civilization possible.

Chapter 14

ISLAM AND CHRISTIANITY: EQUIVALENT TRADITIONS?

“I
t’s not like a stupid Hollywood movie,” said French actress Eva Green about English director Sir Ridley Scott’s Crusades flick,
Kingdom of Heaven
.

That’s true. It’s, like, a stupid English movie.

“Muslims,” gushed the
New York Times
after an advance showing of the new blockbuster, “are portrayed as bent on coexistence until Christian extremists ruin everything. And even when the Christians are defeated, the Muslims give them safe conduct to return to Europe.” Sir Ridley, according to the
Times
, “said he hoped to demonstrate that Christians, Muslims and Jews could live together in harmony—if only fanaticism were kept at bay.” Or, as Green put it, the movie is intended to move people “to be more tolerant, more open towards the Arab people.”
¹

By now it should be clear: The idea that Muslims were “bent on coexistence” with non-Muslims until the Crusaders arrived is historically inaccurate—unless by “coexistence” Ridley Scott means the coexistence of oppressor and oppressed that was the dhimma. Both he and Eva Green make the PC motivations behind this movie clear: to show that what interferes with peaceful coexistence between Muslims and non-Muslims is “fanaticism,” not any element in a religious tradition. The film is also intended to make us intolerant racist Westerners nicer to Arabs.

Guess what?

• Most modern-day presentations of the Crusades are politically motivated, ahistorical nonsense.
  
• The problem the world faces today is not generalized “religious fundamentalism”—it is Islamic jihad.
  
• We will not be able to resist jihad without recovering pride in Western civilization.
  

But the movie is just one part of a much larger campaign to convince Westerners that Islamic civilization is equal or superior to Western civilization.

The whitewash of
Kingdom of Heaven

Kingdom of Heaven
is a classic cowboys-and-Indians story in which the Muslims are noble and heroic and the Christians are venal and violent. The script is heavy on modern-day PC clichés and fantasies of Islamic tolerance; brushing aside dhimmi laws and attitudes (of which Ridley Scott has most likely never heard), it invents a peace-and-tolerance group called the “Brotherhood of Muslims, Jews and Christians.” But of course, the Christians spoiled everything. A publicist for the film explained, “They were working together. It was a strong bond until the Knights Templar caused friction between them.” Ah yes, those nasty “Christian extremists.”

Kingdom of Heaven
was made for those who believe that all the trouble between the Islamic world and the West has been caused by Western imperialism, racism, and colonialism, and that the glorious paradigm of Islamic tolerance, which was once a beacon to the world, could be reestablished if only the wicked white men of America and Europe would be more tolerant. Ridley Scott and his team arranged advance screenings for groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations, making sure that sensitive Muslim feelings were not hurt. It is a dream movie for the PC establishment in every way except one: It isn’t true.

Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith, author of
A Short History of the Crusades
and one of the world’s leading historians of the period, called the movie “rubbish,” explaining that “it’s not historically accurate at all” as it “depicts the Muslims as sophisticated and civilised, and the Crusaders are all brutes and barbarians. It has nothing to do with reality.” Oh, and “there was never a confraternity of Muslims, Jews and Christians. That is utter nonsense.”

Bertrand Russell on Islam:

“Bolshevism combines the characteristics of the French Revolution with those of the rise of Islam. Marx has taught that Communism is fatally predestined to come about; this produces a state of mind not unlike that of the early successors of Mahommet. Among religions, Bolshevism is to be reckoned with Mohammedanism rather than with Christianity and Buddhism. Christianity and Buddhism are primarily personal religions, with mystical doctrines and a love of contemplation. Mohammedanism and Bolshevism are practical, social, unspiritual, concerned to win the empire of this world.”

Professor Jonathan Philips, author of
The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople
, also dismissed the idea of the film as a true depiction of history and took issue with its portrayal of the Crusader Knights Templar as villains: “The Templars as ‘baddies’ is only sustainable from the Muslim perspective, and ‘baddies’ is the wrong way to show it anyway. They are the biggest threat to the Muslims and many end up being killed because their sworn vocation is to defend the Holy Land.”
²
Saladin is, according to a film publicist, a “hero of the piece.” No mention, of course, is made of his massacres at Hattin, or his plans for more of the same in Jerusalem.