The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians Under Islam
By Bat Ye'or
Associated University Presses, 1985, 4th Reprint, 1996.
433 pages. £15.00
The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam
By Bat Ye'or
Associated University Presses, 1996
522 pages. £15.00
At the present time, many people, including Prince Charles, are fascinated by Islam. There is much talk of its tolerance and basic pacifism, and the West is exhorted to learn from it.
These two academic books, with their rather esoteric titles, on the historical status of non-Muslims under Muslim rule are highly relevant to the current situation. They are major scholarly works by a Jewish woman, Bat Ye'or, born in Egypt, who started her research through an interest in the lives of her ancestors. More than half of each book consists of documents, such as extracts from chronicles, that substantiate the book's narrative section.
'dhimmi'
The expression 'dhimmi' denotes non-Muslims living under Muslim rule and means 'protected person.'. It use goes back to the Prophet Muhammad himself who in 628 made a treaty (or 'dhimma') with a group of Jews living at an oasis in Arabia, by which these Jews were permitted to continue cultivating their oasis on condition that they provided assistance to the Muslim forces and paid a tribute in money or kind. On his side, Muhammad undertook to respect their religious observances and to protect them. This 'dhimma' served as a model for all the treaties granted by the Muslim conquerors to the conquered peoples in lands outside Arabia who did not convert to Islam.
On the face of it, this arrangement may seem to indicate generosity, but it immediately prompts one to ask: 'Protected against whom?' and 'What guarantees this protected status?'. The answer to the first can only be 'against Muslims themselves' and indicates a situation of latent hostility, and the person who grants the treaty can equally well rescind it, as it was an unequal and arbitrary contract.
Disadvantage
Bat Ye'or demonstrates that in reality there was very little protection against Muslims in the same locality. As all land taken from infidels became the property of the state, dhimmis were no longer allowed to own the land that they previously possessed, though initially they were allowed to cultivate it and to pass it on to their descendants. This enabled them to pay the large and varied number of taxes to which they were subjected and which were extorted by blows, torture and death, or the enslavement of their children. They were excluded from public office, on the basis of numerous verses in the Koran. If a lawsuit arose between a dhimmi and a Muslim, the former was at a serious disadvantage because the oath of a dhimmi against a Muslim was not recognised as valid. This was particularly serious in the frequent accusations of blasphemy against Christians and Jews - an offence punishable by death. Conversely, the penalty a Muslim received for a crime was halved if his victim was a dhimmi.
In the sphere of worship, the construction of new churches and synagogues was forbidden, although restoration of pre-Islamic places of worship might be permitted. In practice, many fell into ruin. Even if forced conversions were forbidden by the Koran, dhimmis were frequently faced with the choice of payment of tribute and submission to Islamic law or massacre and enslavement. Generally, dhimmis were segregated in areas where their houses had to be inferior, shabbier and smaller than those of Muslims. Marriage and sexual relations between a dhimmi man and a Muslim woman were punishable with death, although a Muslim man could marry a Christian or Jewish woman. It was a grave offence for a dhimmi to ride a noble animal, such as a horse or camel. And various other rules designed to humiliate non-Muslims, which were enforced in individual countries, are fully documented here.
Arab-Muslim sources rarely refer to the dhimmis, as they were conveniently relegated to nothingness. And nowadays, Muslims refer to them as 'protected religious minorities', masking the fact that they were originally religious majorities, until they became minorities over time.
Tens of millions of people became dhimmis and remained so for centuries. Despite some periods when individual groups enjoyed periods of cultural prosperity in various places, non-Muslims under Muslim rule were generally marginalised and impoverished. Not until the 19th century, under European influence and pressure for human rights, were the dhimmis gradually emancipated throughout the Muslim lands. It is amazing that the conditions under which they lived for over a millennium have been largely forgotten.
Jihad
The second book, published in 1996, covers some of the same ground, but concentrates on the concept of 'jihad' or holy war against non-Muslims, which preceded their transformation into dhimmis. Jihad is an essential feature of Islam, which divides the world into the 'dar al-Islam', governed by Islamic law, and the 'dar al-harb', or lands of war, so-called because they are destined to come under Islamic jurisdiction either by 'harb' (war) or conversion of the inhabitants. Dozens of times in the Koran, war against non-Muslims is described as religious duty.
Successful 'Jihad' in history always involved destruction, ruin, massacre and deportation of urban and rural captive populations and the devastation of the countryside, followed by the introduction of Islamic law or 'shari'ah'. These features were common to the two major periods of Muslim expansion. The first was by Arabs in the 7th to 8th centuries, when they overran Arabia, Babylonia, Syria, Palestine, Armenia, Egypt, the whole of Mediterranean North Africa, Spain and southern France. These countries did not merely 'pass into Muslim hands', as a major encyclopaedia puts it: they were acquired by war, involving the sack of many notable cities. Among these were Pergamum, Aleppo, Antioch, Damascus, Tripoli, Carthage, Barcelona, Leon and Santiago de Compostela. Alexandria, the beacon of Christian culture in the 5th century, was no more than a decaying village by the 9th century. In North Africa, the number of bishoprics declined from 500 to about 40. The jihad by sea slaughtered or enslaved the populations of Cyprus, Rhodes and Crete. All this is well documented in contemporary chronicles.
The second wave of jihad was by the Ottoman Turks between the 11th and the 17th centuries, when, after years of raids and pillaging, they conquered the Balkan peninsula, including Albania and Greece (1451), Constantinople (1453), Serbia, Bosnia and the empire of Trebizond (1459-1463), Moldova and eastern Hungary. Their advance was finally checked at Vienna in 1683 and in Poland in 1687. The great Arab and Turkish conquerors used the same military tactics and the same policies of consolidating Islamic power, because they worked within a common ideology.
No democracy
Today, the governments of many Muslim countries do indeed aim to be democratic states which respect freedom of speech, freedom of conscience and the rights and worth of individuals. But other states, such as Iran, Sudan and Saudi Arabia, are applying the shari'ah law, with disastrous consequences for Christians, and their example is firing Islamic fundamentalists within the 'secular' Muslim states to press for its full implementation.
These books raise the serious question of whether Muslims generally have ever reflected critically on the mechanics of their expansion and treatment of Jews and Christians, in the way that the West has been self-critical over the crusades, the Inquisition, slavery, apartheid, colonialism, Nazism and communism.
Even more seriously, the books ask whether Islam, with its pride in its unchanging nature, can ever live peaceably with non-Muslims, if it is true to its principles. The renewed use of the term 'jihad', especially in relation to the state of Israel, raises suspicions that this remains the Islamic aim. As a notable reviewer of these books put it: 'To have an answer to these questions may be a matter of urgency in a few years time.'
Joyce Horn
University of London
Institute of Historical Research
