FrontPageMagazine.com, CA
April 11 2005
And Dhimmitude For All
By Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 11, 2005
Review: The Myth of Islamic Tolerance: How Islamic Law Treats
non-Muslims
Edited by Robert Spencer
Prometheus Books (2005)
`A thing without a name escapes understanding,’ warns preeminent
Islamic scholar Bat Ye’or of jihad and dhimmitude – the Islamic
institutions of, respectively, war and perpetual servitude imposed on
conquered non-Muslim peoples. Both, Ye’or notes in an essay entitled
`Historical Amnesia,’ are in the process of globalization.
This is not the benign economic globalization that most Westerners
laud. Islamic jihad and dhimmitude trade in every available
means – military, political, technological and intellectual. And if the
towering collection of 63 essays (including Ye’or’s) contained in the
new book The Myth of Islamic Tolerance: How Islamic Law Treats
Non-Muslims is to be believed, these specific Islamic processes are
globalizing at a disturbingly rapid pace. The book, courageously
assembled by JihadWatch director and FrontPage columnist Robert
Spencer, provides historical and contemporary profiles of jihad and
dhimmitude.
In six sections, the book delineates how Islamic ideology has
affected non-Muslims both historically and in the contemporary world.
The first three sections cover the myth vs. historical realities and
Islamic law and practice regarding non-Muslims. The last three
sections cover how the myth of Islamic tolerance has affected
contemporary geopolitics, power politics at the United Nations and,
finally, academic and public discourse. It is Ibn Warraq’s forward
and the latter 400 pages in which this book really shines. He
explains:
Islam is a totalitarian ideology that aims to control the religious,
social and political life of mankind in all its aspects; the life of
its followers without qualification; and the life of those who follow
the so-called tolerated religions to a degree that prevents their
activities from getting in the way of Islam in any way. And I mean
Islam, I do not accept some spurious distinction between Islam and
‘Islamic fundamentalism’ or Islamic terrorism’.
The September 11, 2001 murderers acted canonically. They followed
Sharia, a collection of theoretical laws and ideals `that apply in
any ideal Muslim community.’ This body of regulations, based on
divine authority, according to devout Muslims `must be accepted
without criticism, without doubts and questions.’ It sacrifices the
individual’s desires and good to those of the community.
`Expressing one’s opinion or changing one’s religion’ are punishable
by death. That apostasy is not today mentioned in the legal codes of
most Islamic countries, Warraq notes, hardly implies freedom of
religion for Muslims in those states; their penal codes are filled
with Islamic laws. The myth of Islamic tolerance is defied by the
massacre and extermination of the Zoroastrians in Iran; the million
Armenians in Turkey; the Buddhists and Hindus in India; the more than
six thousand Jews in Fez, Morocco, in 1033; hundreds of Jews killed
in Cordoba between 1010 and 1013; the entire Jewish community of
Granada in 1066; the Jews in Marrakesh in 1232; the Jews of Tetuan,
Morocco in 1790; the Jews of Baghdad in 1828; and so on ad nauseum.
Ironically, despite Islam’s immutability, the myth evolved through
the Western propensity to criticize its civilization. In 98 CE, Roman
historian Tacitus in Germania compared the noble simplicity of the
Germans with the vices of contemporary Rome. Michele do Montaigne
(1533-1592) in circa 1580 painted noble savages based on dubious
secondhand information in order to condemn his own civilization.
Later writers substituted Islam for savages to condemn Christendom
and materialism. In 1686-89, for example, Huguenot pastor Pierre
Jurieu exclaimed that Christians had spilt more blood on St.
Bartholemew’s Day than had the Saracens in all their persecutions of
Christians. Of course, Islam had claimed millions of lives – in 1399,
Taimur killed 100,000 Hindus in a single day. But during the 17th
century, and later the Enlightenment, writers perpetuated the `two
ideal prototypes, the noble savage and the wise and urbane Oriental,’
substituting Turks for Muslims, and Islamic tolerance for Turkish
tolerance.
Actually, 18th century Turkey was no interfaith utopia. In 1758, a
British ambassador noted that Sultan Mustafa III had non-Muslim
Christians and Jews executed for wearing banned clothing. In 1770,
another ambassador reported that Greeks, Armenians and Jews seen
outside their homes after dark were hanged. In 1785, a third noted
that Muslim mobs had dismantled churches after Christians had
secretly repaired them.
`The golden age of equal rights was a myth, and belief in it was a
result, more than a cause, of Jewish sympathy for Islam,’ Bernard
Lewis wrote in 1968 in the Encyclopedia of Islam. `The myth was
invented in 19th century Europe as a reproach to Christians – and taken
up by Muslims in our own time as a reproach to Jews….’
Until the late 19th century, Jews in North Africa, Yemen and other
oriental Muslim lands, were obliged to live isolated, in special
quarters, and `were constrained to wear distinctive clothing.’ They
could not carry arms (including canes), and could not give sworn
testimony in Muslim jurisdictions. Even in 1968, an Egyptian sheikh
explained at Cairo’s preeminent Islamic University of al-Azhar, `we
say to those who patronize the Jews that the latter are dhimmis,
people of obligation, who have betrayed the covenant in conformity
with which they have been accorded protection.’ The late president
Anwar el-Sadat declared in 1972, `They shall return and be as the
Koran said of them: ‘condemned to humiliation and misery’.’
Western failure to recognize this subservient condition, much less
its historical or contemporary results, has put democratic
civilization in danger. Organizations have been founded to promote
jihad and dhimmitude through the imposition of the Sharia. The
International Institute of Islamic Thought, for example, was
established in 1981 to Islamify Western history and thought.
Similarly, the Organization of Islamic Conference ruled in 1990 that
the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam – implementing the
Sharia – supersedes the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Even Arabist calls for universal mobilization of non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) are a form of jihad, as was Egyptian attorney
Fouad Abdel-Moneim Riad’s call to treat all Israeli civilians as war
criminals. The notion here – categorization and demonization of all
infidels – is fundamental to jihad. Thus when church spokesman
Archbishop Desmond Tutu supports Riad’s pronouncement, he too
supports jihad.
In this context, `Servile flattery is the ransom [paid to avoid]
economic and terrorist reprisals.’ Thus Western thinkers succumb to
jihad and dhimmitude when we refuse to identify the Turkish
perpetration of Armenian genocide, or (conversely) present
Andalusia – complete with harems, eunuchs, and Christian slaves – `as a
perfect model of multicultural societies for the West’ to emulate in
the 21st century.
The West has built historical negationism as the `cornerstone of its
economic, strategic, and security relationships with Muslim
countries.’ One sign is the increasingly hostile international
attitude towards Israel. Failing to recognize the Muslim jihad
against Israel, which `symbolizes the liberation of the Jewish people
from dhimmitude in their homeland,’ also adversely affects remnant
indigenous Christian communities throughout the Middle East. Their
dhimmitude has deteriorated since the Armenian genocide and the 1933
massacres of Christians in Iraq. Historical amnesia, Bat Ye’or warns,
allowed the decolonization of Arab Muslim nations to be accompanied
by re-introduction of jihad, dhimmitude and sharia.
Only testimony can counter the pathological trends. Thus, Walid
Phares and Bat Ye’or tackle the forgotten tragedy of the Middle
Eastern Christians – 10 to 12 million Egyptian Copts; 1.5 Lebanese
Maronites, Orthodox, Melkites and others; 7 million Anglican,
Protestant and Catholic southern Sudanese Africans; 1 million
Christian Syrians; 1 million Iraqi Assyrians, Nestorians, Chaldeans,
and Jacobites; 500,000 Iranian Persian, Armenian and Assyrian
Christians; and perhaps 100,000 Christian Arab Palestinians. Patrick
Sookhdeo and Mark Durie also cover the alarming rise of
anti-Christian persecutions in Nigeria, Sudan, Pakistan and
Indonesia. After September 11, 2001, attacks on Christians increased
precipitously.
Ironically, what caused obfuscation of minority Christians’ situation
was 19th and 20th century Christian involvement in the Arab-Islamic
jihad – against Zionism and Israel. Whereas Christian oppression in the
East is `rooted in the doctrine of jihad’ and dhimmitude, projecting
all evil onto Israel and Zionism prevented testimony and hid Eastern
Christian history and suffering.
But for decades, secretly or openly, Middle Eastern Christians have
praised the Israeli liberation model, and hoped to emulate it. The
Arab reaction has been to falsely claim the Middle East as an Arab
and Muslim region, denying the rights of all non-Arab, non-Muslim
populations, to isolate these minorities from one another and somehow
eliminate them within predominantly Arab and Muslim states.
Another arena requiring testimony is dhimmitude in Western
institutions. This is `epitomized,’ writes Mark Durie, `in the
slavish attitude adopted by Mary Robinson, UN High Commissioner for
Human Rights,’ in a 2002 statement to the Organization of the Islamic
Conference Symposium on Human Rights in Islam in Geneva. Like a
dhimmi, she affirmed the greatness and moral superiority of Islam,
implying inferiority of non-Muslim infidels, and denied any possible
voice of protest against Islamic abuses of human rights.
Not surprisingly, Islamism is growing at the UN, too. On August 5,
1990, explains David Littman, the 19 members of the Islamic
Conference of Foreign Ministers adopted the Cairo Declaration on
Human Rights in Islam (CDHRI). This document very specifically
subjugates all human rights to those accorded by Islam. [1] The CDHRI
totally contradicts the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights
(UDHR). Yet the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in
December 1997 published it, establishing its authority as a quotable
UN source. For example, the 26-member Sub-Commission on Human Rights
referred to it in the preamble of a resolution adopted on August 21,
1998. [2] That Islamic human rights is gaining ascendancy and
credence at the UN should be of concern to all Human Rights activists
and organizations.
Dhimmitude is also developing at universities and in governments
worldwide. This owes to the nearly ubiquitous influence of Edward
Said, according to Ibn Warraq, despite his `third world intellectual
terrorism.’ The tautology-filled Orientalism accuses orientalists of
somehow preparing the ground for western imperialism, but haughtily
dismisses `books and journals in Arabic (and doubtless in Japanese,
various Indian dialects, and other Oriental languages)’ revealing
`contempt for the non-European, negative attitudes toward the Orient
far greater than that of some imperialists he constantly condemns.’
Worse, Said ignores innumerable orientalists – including the German
school that created the Middle Eastern, Islamic and Arabic Studies
field – and hailed from a nation with zero imperial interests.
To break the disastrous logjam created by this trend, it is essential
to discuss the heretofore taboo subjects of jihad dhimmitude in
policy and educational forums. This book can help to turn the tide,
if only significant numbers read it.
[1]Articles 24 and 25 of the CDHRI state`All the rights and freedoms
stipulated in this Declaration are subject to the Islamic Shari’a’
and `This Islamic Shari’a is the only source of reference for the
explanation or clarification of any of the articles of this
Declaration.’
[2] The preamble expressed dismay and concern were over women’s
rights in Afghanistan, but nevertheless, stated that it was `fully
aware that the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam…
guarantees the rights of women in all fields.’