The Twin Myths of Eurabia

The Twin Myths of Eurabia

Brussels Journal, Belgium
July 23 2006

>From the desk of Fjordman on Sun, 2006-07-23 19:27

Bat Ye’or is the most informed contemporary scholar of the unique
Islamic institution of dhimmitude, the repressive and humiliating
apartheid system imposed upon those non-Muslims (i.e., dhimmis)
subjugated by Jihad. Sir Jadunath Sarkar, the pre-eminent historian
of Mughal India, wrote the following in 1920 regarding the impact
of centuries of Jihad and dhimmitude on the indigenous Hindus of the
Indian subcontinent:

"The conversion of the entire population to Islam and the extinction
of every form of dissent is the ideal of the Muslim State. If any
infidel is suffered to exist in the community, it is as a necessary
evil, and for a transitional period only. Political and social
disabilities must be imposed on him, and bribes offered to him from
the public funds, to hasten the day of his spiritual enlightenment
and the addition of his name to the roll of true believers." "A
non-Muslim therefore cannot be a citizen of the State; he is a member
of a depressed class; his status is a modified form of slavery. He
lives under a contract (zimma, or ‘dhimma’) with the State: for the
life and property grudgingly spared to him by the commander of the
faithful he must undergo political and social disabilities, and pay
a commutation money. In short, his continued existence in the State
after the conquest of his country by the Muslims is conditional upon
his person and property made subservient to the cause of Islam."

According to Bat Ye’or, Eurabia is essentially a political project
for a demographic and cultural symbiosis between Europe and the Arab
Muslim world, a new extended Mediterranean "continent" made possible
by EU authorities through deliberately favoring Muslim immigration,
promoting Multiculturalism and the dissemination of Arab and Islamic
culture in Europe. In the essay Andalusian Myth, Eurabian Reality,
co-authored with Andrew G. Bostom, editor of the comprehensive book
The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims,
Bat Ye’or dispels one of the founding myths of Eurabia: that of the
alleged "tolerance" of medieval Spain under Islamic rule.

During the completion of the new Granada Mosque, which was marked
by celebratory announcements July 10, 2003 of a "return of Islam
to Spain," disconcerting statements were made by European Muslim
leaders. Specifically, the keynote speaker at this conference, Umar
Ibrahim Vadillo, a Spanish Muslim leader, encouraged Muslims to cause
an economic collapse of Western economies (by ceasing to use Western
currencies, and switching to gold dinars), while the German Muslim
leader Abu Bakr Rieger told Muslim attendees to avoid adapting their
Islamic religious practices to accommodate European (i.e., Western
Enlightenment?) values.

Bat Ye’or and Andrew Bostom state that: "We believe that reiterating
these ahistorical, roseate claims about Muslim Spain abets the
contemporary Islamist agenda, and retards the evolution of a liberal,
reformed ‘Euro-Islam’ fully compatible with post-Enlightenment
Western values." "Iberia [Spain] was conquered in 710-716 AD by
Arab tribes originating from northern, central and southern Arabia.
Massive Berber and Arab immigration, and the colonization of the
Iberian peninsula, followed the conquest. Most churches were converted
into mosques. Although the conquest had been planned and conducted
jointly with a strong faction of royal Iberian Christian dissidents,
including a bishop, it proceeded as a classical jihad with massive
pillages, enslavement, deportations and killings."

"In the regions under stable Islamic control, Jews and Christians
were tolerated as dhimmis – like elsewhere in other Islamic lands –
and could not build new churches or synagogues nor restore the old
ones. Segregated in special quarters, they had to wear discriminatory
clothing. Subjected to heavy taxes, the Christian peasantry formed
a servile class attached to the Arab domains; many abandoned their
land and fled to the towns. Harsh reprisals with mutilations and
crucifixions would sanction the Mozarab (Christian dhimmis) calls
for help from the Christian kings."

The humiliating status imposed on the dhimmis and the confiscation of
their land provoked many revolts, punished by massacres, as in Toledo
(761, 784-86, 797), Saragossa from 781 to 881, Cordova (805), Merida
(805-813, 828), and yet again in Toledo (811-819). The insurgents
were crucified, as prescribed in the Koran 5:33.

According to Bat Ye’or and Bostom, "Feuding was endemic in the
Andalusian cities between the different sectors of the population:
Arab and Berber colonizers, Iberian Muslim converts (Muwalladun) and
Christian dhimmis (Mozarabs). There were rarely periods of peace in
the Amirate of Cordova (756-912), nor later." "Al-Andalus represented
the land of jihad par excellence. Every year, sometimes twice a
year, raiding expeditions were sent to ravage the Christian Spanish
kingdoms to the north, the Basque regions, or France and the Rhone
valley, bringing back booty and slaves. Andalusian corsairs attacked
and invaded along the Sicilian and Italian coasts, even as far as
the Aegean Islands, looting and burning as they went. Thousands of
people were deported to slavery in Andalusia, where the caliph kept
a militia of tens of thousand of Christian slaves brought from all
parts of Christian Europe (the Saqaliba), and a harem filled with
captured Christian women. Society was sharply divided along ethnic
and religious lines, with the Arab tribes at the top of the hierarchy,
followed by the Berbers who were never recognized as equals, despite
their Islamization; lower in the scale came the mullawadun converts
and, at the very bottom, the dhimmi Christians and Jews."

Richard Fletcher observed in Moorish Spain that "Moorish Spain was
not a tolerant and enlightened society even in its most cultivated
epoch." A prominent Andalusian jurist, Ibn Hazm of Cordoba (d. 1064),
wrote that Allah has established the infidels’ ownership of their
property merely to provide booty for Muslims. Ibn Abdun forbade
the selling of scientific books to dhimmis, under the pretext that
they translated them and attributed them to their co-religionists
and bishops.

Bat Ye’or and Bostom state that: "The Muslim Berber Almohads in
Spain and North Africa (1130-1232) wreaked enormous destruction
on both the Jewish and Christian populations. This devastation –
massacre, captivity, and forced conversion – was described by the
Jewish chronicler Abraham Ibn Daud, and the poet Abraham Ibn Ezra.
Suspicious of the sincerity of the Jewish converts to Islam, Muslim
‘inquisitors’ (i.e., antedating their Christian Spanish counterparts
by three centuries) removed the children from such families, placing
them in the care of Muslim educators."

"The socio-political history of Andalusia was characterized by a
particularly oppressive dhimmitude that is completely incompatible with
modern notions of equality between individuals, regardless of religious
faith. At the dawn of the 21st century, we must insist that Muslims
in the West adopt post-Enlightenment societal standards of equality,
not ‘tolerance,’ abandoning forever their hagiography of the brutal,
discriminatory standards practiced by the classical Maliki jurists of
‘enlightened’ Andalusia."

Some modern Spaniards, however, seem to have forgotten the painful
lessons inflicted by an Islamic occupation that ended as late as
1492. Every year, in a tradition that goes back to the 16th century,
Spanish villages still celebrate the Reconquista, the liberation
from the Moors (as the Muslims were locally called) during "Moros
y Cristianos" festivals in which effigies of the prophet Muhammad –
the so-called "la Mahoma" – are mocked, thrown out of windows, and
burned. After the 2004 Madrid train bombings which killed 192 people,
the village of Bocairent near Valencia decided to discontinue the
century old tradition of mocking and burning effigies of Muhammad.
Bocairent did not want to risk becoming the target of suicide bombers.

The Socialist government of PM Zapatero gained power after the
bombings. Mr Zapatero’s first act after winning the general election
was to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq. He then turned on the Church,
which he viewed as part of the "old Spain." The government drew up
plans to finance the teaching of Islam in state-run schools and to
give funds to mosques on the grounds that it would create greater
understanding of the country’s one million Muslims. Spain’s leading
archbishop, Cardinal Antonio María Rouco, denounced the Socialist
government, saying its policies were taking the country back to
medieval times, when Muslim invaders swept across the Straits of
Gibraltar. "Some people wish to place us in the year 711," Cardinal
Rouco said. "It seems as if we are meant to wipe ourselves out of
history."

These days, we also hear claims that we in the West owe so much to
Muslims because Muslim Spain preserved and passed on Greek knowledge
to the West, without which there would have been no Renaissance. The
funny thing is, nobody seems to ask the Greeks about how good Muslims
have been at preserving their cultural heritage. They might disagree.

The classical and Greek heritage did not die when the Western Roman
Empire collapsed, it continued in the Eastern Roman Empire, later known
as the Byzantine Empire, as it was more Greek than Roman. It lived
on there uninterruptedly until the 15th century when it was finally
destroyed by, well, Turkish Muslims. The Byzantine Empire upheld the
unbroken succession of Roman emperors for a thousand years after the
fall of the Western Roman Empire. The Byzantines played a crucial
part in the transmitting the classical and Greco-Roman heritage to
Renaissance Italy, especially after the Ottoman Muslim conquest and
the many Greek scholars fleeing to the West.

The Greeks bore the brunt of the Jihad for more than a thousand
years. Muslims wiped out Greek communities all over the Eastern
Mediterranean for centuries, a process that continued in countries
such as "Turkey," the formerly Greek-dominated region of Anatolia,
and Egypt even after WW2. If this is how Muslims "preserve Greek
heritage," I hope they will never be in a position to "preserve" mine.

Robert Spencer describes how on Tuesday, May 29, 1453, the armies of
the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II entered Constantinople, breaking through
the defenses of a vastly outnumbered and indomitably courageous
Byzantine force. Historian Steven Runciman notes what happened next:
The Muslim soldiers "slew everyone that they met in the streets, men,
women, and children without discrimination. The blood ran in rivers
down the steep streets from the heights of Petra toward the Golden
Horn. But soon the lust for slaughter was assuaged. The soldiers
realized that captives and precious objects would bring them greater
profit." It has come to be known as Black Tuesday, the Last Day of
the World.

The jihadists also entered the Hagia Sophia, which for nearly a
thousand years had been the grandest church in Christendom. Muslim
men then killed the elderly and weak and led the rest off into
slavery. Once the Muslims had thoroughly subdued Constantinople,
they set out to Islamize it. According to the Muslim chronicler Hoca
Sa’deddin, "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."

One of the worst burdens on the dhimmi population in the Ottoman Empire
was devshirmeh, the forced collection of young boys from Christian
Greeks, Croats, Bulgarians, Serbs and Albanians to build a slave army
of Janissaries. Vasiliki Papoulia highlights the continuous desperate,
often violent struggle of the Christian populations against this
brutally imposed Ottoman levy:

"It is obvious that the population strongly resented […] this
measure [and the levy] could be carried out only by force. Those who
refused to surrender their sons – the healthiest, the handsomest
and the most intelligent – were on the spot put to death by
hanging. Nevertheless we have examples of armed resistance. Since
there was no possibility of escaping [the levy] the population
resorted to several subterfuges. Some left their villages and fled
to certain cities which enjoyed exemption from the child levy or
migrated to Venetian-held territories. The result was a depopulation
of the countryside."

Andrew Bostom describes how John Quincy Adams, diplomat and 19th
century President of the United States, understood Jihad well, and
had lots of sympathy with the Greeks, who, along with the Serbs,
were the first to revolt against Turkish Muslim rule:

"If ever insurrection was holy in the eyes of God, such was that
of the Greeks against their Mahometan oppressors. Yet for six long
years, they were suffered to be overwhelmed by the whole mass of the
Ottoman power; cheered only by the sympathies of all the civilized
world, but without a finger raised to sustain or relieve them by the
Christian governments of Europe; while the sword of extermination,
instinct with the spirit of the Koran, was passing in merciless
horror over the classical regions of Greece, the birth-place of
philosophy, of poetry, of eloquence, of all the arts that embellish,
and all the sciences that dignify the human character. The monarchs
of Austria, of France, and England, inflexibly persisted in seeing
in the Greeks, only revolted subjects against a lawful sovereign. The
ferocious Turk eagerly seized upon this absurd concession, and while
sweeping with his besom of destruction over the Grecian provinces,
answered every insinuation of interest in behalf of that suffering
people, by assertions of the unqualified rights of sovereignty,
and by triumphantly retorting upon the legitimates of Europe, the
consequences naturally flowing from their own perverted maxims."

The gradual loss of supremacy over their non-Muslim subjects and the
Islamic anger this sparked culminated in the outright Jihadist genocide
of the Christian Armenians in the early 20th century, a crime Turks are
greatly reluctant to acknowledge even today. Serious riots broke out
in Istanbul on the night of September 6, 1955, which led to looting in
Greek neighborhoods and the destruction of many of the city’s churches
and synagogues. More than 5,000 shops belonging to the Greek minority
were looted by an emotional crowd of several thousand people. The
Turkish Pogrom resulted not only from "fervid chauvinism, or even
[from] the economic resentment of many impoverished rioters, but [from]
the profound religious fanaticism in many segments of Turkish society."

Ultranationalist Turks in 2005 attacked an exhibit in Istanbul of rare
photographs of the violent anti-Greek incidents that occurred 50 years
earlier, ripping photos off the walls, shouting "Turkey is Turkish and
will stay that way." "I’m merely defending my country," one militant
said. Turkey is officially 99 percent Muslim. 4,000 Greek Orthodox
faithful live primarily in Istanbul. Known as Constantinople under
Greece’s last great empire, Istanbul remains the seat of the Eastern
Orthodox patriarchate, the highest authority in the Orthodox world.

We often hear that "Islamic culture" was superior to Western culture
in the Middle Ages, and that Westerners owe much of our technological
progress to Muslims. If we say that the "Middle East" and the Eastern
Mediterranean were culturally and economically superior to Europe in
the Middle Ages, then this is true. However, this had been the case
for thousands of years before Islam entered into history. The oldest
civilizations know to mankind originated in a belt stretching from
today’s Egypt via Syria, Lebanon, Iran and Iraq to Pakistan. It is
not a coincidence that the first European civilizations began in
countries that were geographically close to the Middle East: The
island of Crete, later mainland Greece and the Balkans, then Rome.
Even in the Roman Empire, the Eastern part of the empire was stronger
and more urbanized than its Northern and Western regions, which is
one of the reasons why the Eastern half proved much more durable
while the Western half collapsed in the 5th century.

When the Arab Muslims, a collection of backward, nomadic warrior
tribes who did not even have a fully developed script, conquered
Egypt, Syria and Iran, they took control over some of the world’s
largest centres of accumulated knowledge. To say that "Muslims" or
"Islamic culture" created the civilizations of the Middle East can be
compared to an illiterate person storming into the planet’s largest
library, killing all the librarians and then claiming to have written
all the books there. The cultural superiority of the Middle East in
relations to Europe did not begin with Islam’s entry into the area.
In fact, it ended with it. One of the great riddles of history is
how this once-dynamic region could become the world’s number one
problem spot. It so happens that this decline coincides with the
region’s Islamization, although some would claim that it had already
started before this. Islam’s much-vaunted "Golden Age" was in reality
just the twilight of the conquered pre-Islamic cultures, an echo of
times passed.

It is true that no civilization exists in a vacuum. Modern Western
civilization owes much to Egyptians, Persians, Sumerians, Byzantines,
Assyrians, Jews, Indians and Chinese. We owe little, if anything
to Islam.

The esteemed F.A. Hayek, in his classic The Road to Serfdom, can
have fresh lessons for us even today. According to him, "The most
effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they
are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as
those which they, or at least the best among them, have always held,
but which were not properly understood or recognised before." "The
most efficient technique to this end is to use the old words but
change their meaning. Few traits of totalitarian regimes are at
the same time so confusing to the superficial observer and yet so
characteristic of the whole intellectual climate as the complete
perversion of language, the change of the meaning of words by which he
ideals of the new regimes are expressed." "Gradually, as this process
continues, the whole language becomes despoiled, words become empty
shells deprived of any definite meaning, as capable of denoting one
thing as its opposite and used solely for the emotional associations
which still adhere to them." "With all the fatalistic belief of every
pseudo-historian since Hegel and Marx this development is represented
as inevitable: ‘We know the direction in which the world is moving,
and we must bow to it or perish.’"

Isn’t this exactly what is happening in the West now, with
Multiculturalism and Muslim immigration? A massive rewriting of our
history, and a perversion of language?

The European Commission proposed the controversial idea of a
Eurovision-style singing event in all member states to celebrate
the European Union’s 50th "birthday," the 50th anniversary of the
1957 Treaty of Rome. Commissioner Margot Wallstrom was lobbying
for big-style birthday celebrations to "highlight the benefits that
European integration has brought to its citizens." Diplomats said the
idea had sparked feelings of disgust among new member states, which
were reminded of "Stalinist times" when people were forced to sing.
Brussels also intended to spend around ~@300,000 on the appointment
of 50 citizen "ambassadors," dubbed the "Faces of Europe," who were
supposed to "tell their story" throughout the year on what the EU
means to them in their daily life. Germany will in any case go ahead
with its own idea to let thousands of its bakeries bake 50 sorts of
cakes with recipes from all 25 member states.

Tariq Ramadan, the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood,
the most important Islamist movement of the 20th century, is a
resident of Geneva, Switzerland. He is the author of a dozen books,
among them To Be a European Muslim, translated into 14 languages. The
EU Parliament consults him as an expert voice of "moderate Islam."

Mr Ramadan says decadent Europe will give way to an Islamized Europe.
The 21st century, he says, will see a second role reversal between
Islam and the West: "The West will begin its new decline, and the
Arab-Islamic world its renewal" and ascent to seven centuries of
world domination after seven centuries of decline. "Only Islam can
achieve the synthesis between Christianity and humanism, and fill
the spiritual void that afflicts the West." All good people are
implicitly Muslims, he maintains, "because true humanism is founded
in Koranic revelations."

Muslim identity is the only true source of universality, proclaims
Tariq Ramadan. "It will fill the spiritual void that afflicts the
West." In a clash with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somalian-born Dutch MP and
critic of Islam, Ramadan said it was wrong to suggest that Muslims
were in Europe to proselytize, and wrong to say that Europe had a
Judeo-Christian past. "Islam is a European religion. The Muslims
came here after the first and second world wars to rebuild Europe,
not to colonise." Again, according to F.A. Hayek, "The Nazi leader who
described the National-Socialist revolution as a counter-Renaissance
spoke more truly than he probably knew. It was the decisive step in the
destruction of that civilisation which modern man had built up from
the age of the Renaissance and which was above all an individualist
civilisation. Individualism has a bad name today and the term has come
to be connected with egotism and selfishness. But the individualism
of which we speak in contrast to socialism and all other forms of
collectivism has no necessary connection with these."

"The essential features of that individualism which, from elements
provided by Christianity and the philosophy of classical antiquity,
was first fully developed during the Renaissance and has since grown
and spread into what we know as Western European civilisation – the
respect for the individual man qua man, that is the recognition of
his own views and tastes." "From the commercial cities of Northern
Italy the new view of life spread with commerce to the west and north,
through France and the south-west of Germany to the Low Countries and
the British Isles, taking firm root wherever there was no despotic
political power to stifle it."

In sharp contrast to the Islamic world, "During the whole of this
modern period of European history the general direction of social
development was one of freeing the individual from the ties which had
bound him to the customary or prescribed ways in the pursuit of his
ordinary activities." "Perhaps the greatest result of the unchaining
of individual energies was the marvellous growth of science which
followed the march of individual liberty from Italy to England and
beyond." "Only since industrial freedom opened the path to the free use
of new knowledge, only since everything could be tried – if somebody
could be found to back it at his own risk – and, it should be added, as
often as not from outside the authorities officially entrusted with the
cultivation of learning, has science made the great strides which in
the last hundred and fifty years have changed the face of the world."

If this was all caused by the introduction of "Islamic science," how
come none of it took place in Islamic lands? It is patently absurd to
claim that Islam, perhaps the most anti-individualistic creed on earth,
was somehow responsible for triggering the individual brilliance of
Renaissance men such as Leonardo da Vinci, not to mention the grossly
un-Islamic, figurative art of Michelangelo. So why is this assertion
repeated, again and again?

The roots of Western civilization are primarily Judeo-Christian and
Greco-Roman. If you want to create a new entity, Eurabia, encompassing
Europe, Turkey and the Arab world, you need first to establish that
this cultural entity isn’t "new" at all, but has always existed. The
way to do this is to establish that Islam is a natural and integral
part of Western civilization. You need to imprint in the minds of the
people that yes, Muslims and Christians can indeed live peacefully
together, as we did in the glorious days of Andalusia. Not only can
we live with Muslims, we actually owe Muslims gratitude for helping
us create the scientific achievements of the modern West. Thus we
have the twin foundational myths of Eurabia. This is why French
President Jacques Chirac can claim that "Islam has contributed just
as much to Western civilization as Christianity," thus echoing Tariq
Ramadan. Muslims believe that all people are born as Muslims. Jews
and Christians share the same message as Muslims. If they disagree on
something, this is because Jews or Christians have "misinterpreted"
or "perverted" the true, Islamic message. All good things are
essentially Islamic, as Mr Ramadan points out. It is thus an illusion
to claim that there is such as thing as a separate, "Judeo-Christian"
civilization. All Western achievements are Islamic, as they are the
result of a civilization Muslims gave to us. Muslims should thus feel
no gratitude for enjoying the benefits of the West, they are merely
enjoying the legitimate benefits of their own civilization. In fact,
Westerners should feel gratitude towards Muslims.

It is a time-tested Islamic tradition: If you cannot show significant
historical achievements of your own, you can always steal somebody
else’s.

The EU elites see themselves as Julius Caesar or Octavian, but end
up being Brutus, stabbing their own peoples in the back. They want
to recreate the Roman Empire on both sides of the Mediterranean,
bound together by some vague references to a "shared Greek heritage."
Instead, they are creating a civilizational breakdown across much of
Western Europe as the barbarians are overrunning the continent. The
EU wants to recreate the Roman Empire and ends up creating the second
fall of Rome.

It has been said that those who do not have a history also do not have
a future. If so, maybe the reverse is true as well. Westerners have
lost sense of much of our own cultural heritage. We have forgotten
who we once were. Perhaps if we start reclaiming our past, we will
discover that we have also gained a future, as an added bonus.

–Boundary_(ID_Ng5nwOz0gGIR5w6daYU7ag)–