Review of Islam and Dhimmitude: where civilizations collide. Bat Ye'or. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. 2002.

Mark Durie

The West has some awareness of jihad, but it comprehends little of its intended outcome, dhimmitude. The recommended antidote to this ignorance is a careful read of Bat Ye'or's latest book.

Bat Ye'or (a pseudonym) is the foremost historian of dhimmis, the non-Muslim indigenous peoples living in territory which has been conquered by Islam and is made subject to Islamic shari'a. In her most recent book, Islam and Dhimmitude: where civilizations collide, she documents the social, political, economic and religious consequences of the history of dhimmitude and documents its implications relations between faiths and civilizations in this new century.

Bat Ye'or points out that dhimmitude is founded upon Islamic replacement theology. The Qur'an regards Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Jesus' disciples as followers of Islam: "Islam is considered as the 'True Judaism' and the 'True Christianity'." (Islam and Dhimmitude p.375) This theological grid permits Jewish and Christian dhimmis to live on in the Dar al-Islam ('house of Islam ') as 'tolerated' adherents of what are regarded as debased forms of Islam.

Bat Ye'or ('daughter of the Nile') is herself of Egyptian Jewish dhimmi background. Her life-long explorations of the world of dhimmitude began as a study of the history of her own people in Egypt. This opened a doorway for her into the world of Eastern Christian peoples conquered by Islam, with their agonized past and precarious present as hard-pressed minorities in their own ancestral lands. They include Copts, Greeks, Maronites, Persians, Albanians, Armenians, Slavs and Syrians.

So what does it mean to be a non-Muslim living under Islam? Based upon the precedent of Muhammad's treatment of the conquered Jewish farmers of Khaybar in Arabia, the institution of the dhimma or 'pact of protection' was established to provide a legal status for the peoples conquered by jihad. According to the laws of jihad, the alternatives to the dhimma were conversion, slavery or death. The dhimma fixed the legal, social and economic place of non-Muslims in the Islamic state. In return, the people of the pact, or dhimmis, were required to pay tribute (jizya) in perpetuity to the Muslim Community (Umma), and to adopt a position of humble and grateful servitude to it, as enshined in the verse 9:29 of the Qur'an:

Fight against those who do not believe in Allah . of those who have been given the Book [i.e. Jews and Christians], until they pay the jizya [tribute] readily and are humbled.

This divine revelation defines the inseparable link between jihad and dhimmitude. A powerful symbolic expression of the jihad-dhimmitude nexus, which defined the horizon of the dhimmi's world, was annual jizya payment ritual. Here is a poignant fifteenth century description of this event by the Moroccan jurist al-Maghili:

On the day of payment they [the dhimmis] shall be assembled in a public place . They should be standing there waiting in the lowest and dirtiest place. The acting officials representing the law shall be placed above them and shall adopt a threatening attitude so that it seems to them, as well as to the others, that our object is to degrade them by pretending to take their possessions. They will realize that we are doing them a favor in accepting from them the jizya and letting them go free. They then shall be dragged one by one for the exacting of payment. When paying the dhimmi will receive a blow and will be throne aside so that he will think that he has escaped the sword through this. This is the way that the friends of the Lord, of the first and last generations, will act toward their infidel enemies, for might belongs to Allah, to His Apostle, and to the Believers (Islam and Dhimmitude p.70)

Historical sources show that this enacted ritual of military subjugation continued to be practiced in Morocco right up to the beginning of the twentieth century, more than thirteen centuries after initial jihad conquest.

Bat Ye'or shows how during the 19th and early 20th centuries, under the influence of the Great Powers, the lot of the dhimmis improved considerably. However dhimmitude is now returning with a vengeance all across the Islamic world, a trend which Bat Ye'or documents in disturbing detail. Islam and Dhimmitude advances her earlier work by exposing the mechanisms of concealment that nevertheless continue to make dhimmitude a taboo subject, hidden behind such terms such as 'peaceful coexistence' and 'Islamic golden age'.

Islam and Dhimmitude unveils a sad history of dispossession and decline of dhimmi communities. Like sexism and racism, dhimmitude is not only manifested in legal and social structures, but in a psychology of inferiority, a will to serve, which the dominated community adopts in self-preservation. Hanging over the head of each dhimmi community is the threat that they might be considered to have broken their dhimma pact, in which case jihad conditions could be restored. Bat Ye'or argues that the genocide of Armenian Christians - officially denied by Turkey to this day - was a retaliatory response to a perceived breach of the dhimma in the form of the Armenian's will to self-determination.

One recurrent theme of dhimmitude is the setting against each other of dhimmi communities. Bat Ye'or argues that the terrifying example of the Armenian genocide, as well as the still recent memory of massacres such as that of Damascus Christians in 1860, motivated some Middle Eastern Christians in the early twentieth century to nurture anti-semitism as an strategy of self-protection. Christians became enemies of the Jews, yet without succeeding in becoming the friends of the Muslims.

Bat Ye'or sets the politics of European-Arab-Israeli relations into the framework of dhimmitude, and produces some startling results. The policies of European nations towards the Arab world, she argues, demonstrate the features of gratitude and humble service which define the dhimmi mentality.

Bat Ye'or concludes that the study of dhimmitude also has great importance for Jewish-Christian rapprochement. A fundamental principle of dhimmitude is that it 'constitutes a global condition, not solely of Jews but common to Jews and Christians alike'. (p. 348). Therefore Jews cannot remain indifferent to the sufferings of dhimmi Christians such as the Copts of Egypt, the Pakistani Christians, and the southern Sudanese, nor to the theological and political mechanisms that generate and conceal their suffering, for these are the same mechanisms which help fuel the jihad against Israel.

Bat Ye'or argues that dhimmitude provides the key to understanding some crucial historical links between Islamic and Christian anti-semitism. For example the infamous anti-Jewish legislation of the Greek Church Fathers passed into Islam, in the enlarged context the dhimma, so that after jihad conquest these same regulations were turned back against Greek Christian dhimmis. In its turn the medieval church borrowed back from Islam mechanisms of discrimination against the Jews, such as differentiated clothing, which had been first introduced as a condition of the dhimma. In the light of the history of dhimmitude in Andalusia, the Spanish inquisition against Jews and Muslims could be regarded as a repetition of the less well known Moorish inquisition against Jews and Christians a few centuries earlier, of which Maimonaides' forced conversion to Islam and flight to Egypt was but one manifestation.

Bat Ye'or calls for Christians and Jews to take up common cause in exposing dhimmitude, and its evil twin jihad, as a shared aspect of their history. Since Islam treats Judaism and Christianity in the same terms, reconciliation between Christianity and Islam can only be via Judaism:

Islam . places Judaism and Christianity in an identical position. . It is this Judeo-Christian bonding which, paradoxically, makes it impossible for Christians to achieve a reconciliation with Islam against Israel - reconciliation can only succeed via Israel and with Israel. However reconciliation with Israel involves rejecting the theologies of substitution, abandonment of jihad, and liberation from dhimmitude. (p.376)

In the face of the most virulent expressions of anti-Semitic hatred in the present-day Arab press, and of the continuing sufferings of Christian communities around the world under the joint impact of jihad and dhimmitude, is it not time for Christians and Jews to make common cause in rejecting Islamic replacement theology? Is not this the logical next step after repudiation of Christian supersessionism towards Judaism?

Bat Ye'or's important book sets a challenging agenda for interfaith theological dialogue in the twenty first century.

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Dr Mark Durie is an Anglican Minister at St Hilary's Kew, and a former head of Linguistics and Language Studies at the University of Melbourne. He has written several books on the language and culture of the Acehnese, a Muslim people group in Indonesia.