February 4, 2013
Dhimmitude:
Historical Consequences of Jihad
Islamic
conquests resulted in a multitude of second-class citizens known as Dhimmis and
a state of mind called ‘dhimmitude’. It is characterized by victims of Jihad
going into denial and flatter their tormentors.
Book review
by Navaratna S. Rajaram (N. S. Rajaram)
Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide by
Bat Ye’or, translated from the French by Miriam Kochan and David Littman.
2002.FarleighDickinsonUniversity Press, Associated Universities
Press,Cranbury,NJ,USA and Gazelle Book Services,Lancaster,England. 528 pages.
Price $60 (HB), $19.95 (PB).
Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide by Bat Ye’or, translated from the French by Miriam Kochan and David Littman. 2002.FarleighDickinsonUniversity Press, Associated Universities Press,Cranbury,NJ,USA and GazelleBook Services,Lancaster,England. 528 pages. Price $60 (HB), $19.95 (PB).
Dhimmi civilization
Islam,
we are told is a ‘complete and completed system,’ ordained by God and conveyed
to humanity by His Final Prophet Muhammad. The Word of God (The Quran) and the
Acts of Muhammad (The Hadits) lay down the rules—sacred as well as secular—for
all people and for all times. These are binding on believers as well as
non-believers. This may appear strange until one recognizes that the ultimate
goal of Islam is to bring the whole world under its sway. The instrument for
achieving world domination is Jihad, and the legal code for ruling the Islamic
lands (Dar ul-Islam) is the Sharia— loosely translated as the Islamic legal
canon.
The
Sharia treats some non-Muslims living in Dar ul-Islam as dhimmis (‘protected
flock’), whereby they are granted limited protection as second-class citizens
under debilitating conditions. Islam and Dhimmitude by the Egypt born
Bat Ye’or (‘Daughter of the Nile’) is a masterly study of the state of
the Jews and Christians as Dhimmis, and the peculiar ‘Dhimmi Civilization’ that
it gave rise to. (This may be compared to the ‘Slave Civilization’ in the
United States before the Civil War.)
Status
of Dhimmis
Jihad
and its threat to peace are widely recognized today, thanks in part to the
September 11 attacks on the New YorkWorldTradeCenterand the Pentagon, though
several Indian scholars drawing upon their country’s historical experience with
Islam have long been highlighting its dangers. The goal of Jihad is to bring
countries under non-Muslim rule (Dar ul-Harb) under Islamic rule (Dar
ul-Islam). Recognizing that a newly conquered land is bound to have a
substantial non-Muslim population, the Sharia provides for laws to govern them.
They essentially become dhimmis.
At
first, it was meant only for ‘People of the Book’— or Jews and Christians, soon
including Zoroastrians because Iran was rapidly conquered by the Arabs.
Somewhat later, when Islamic rule came to parts of India, Hindus were given
grudging recognition as dhimmis though, as idolaters, they were not
entitled to it. But expediencies of politics and governance forced Islamic
rulers of India to bend the rules of Sharia against the blandishments of the
clergy.
This
brings up an interesting issue: the idolatrous Hindus whose choice under Sharia
was limited to ‘Islam or death,’ were much more successful in resisting the
onslaught of Islam than the ‘protected’ Jews and Christians. Even the
Zoroastrians of Persia, then a great empire ruled by the Sassanids, had to
migrate to Hindu India to keep their faith alive. Hindus and Hinduism proved
much more resilient than these ‘Religions of the Book’ and their adherents.
Hindus never stopped fighting the imposition of Islam and finally defeated it
though at great cost in terms of both land and people. It is a battle that
still rages. It accounts also for the extraordinary hatred of Hindu India borne
by Muslim ‘leaders’ in India and Pakistan— for it is a living reminder of
Islam’s failure. All this suggests that one is better off having Islam as enemy
than ‘protector’. The protector inevitably turns predator and eventually
consumes its protected flock.
This
point, that dhimmitude emasculates the dhimmi population by
sapping its will to fight, would have been brought more clearly into focus had
the author included India in her study, which she has not. To her credit she
recognizes the limitation by noting: “I realize that my study of dhimmitude
remains incomplete because it is limited to Jews and Christians. It should be
supplemented by the dhimmitude of the Zoroastrians, located in an inferior
category, and that of Buddhists and Hindus, considered as idolaters. A few
books on this subject have been published in India. The picture they paint is
similar to that in regions west of the Indian subcontinent.” (p 23)
Bar Ye'Or (real name Giselle Littman)
Bar Ye'Or (real name Giselle Littman)
The last statement ignores the struggles waged against Islamic imperialism in India from Vijayanagar and Shivaji to the Sikhs, to the ultimate overthrow of Islamic rule. (This is intended not as a criticism of the book, but to point out that such a study can be a fertile field for Indian scholars.)
Within
the scope of her study, i.e., limited to the lands west of the Indian
subcontinent, the author is original, comprehensive and profound. In her words,
“Like a giant jigsaw puzzle scattered over the world, the different elements of
the diversified dhimmi civilization should be collected to show an
evaluation and a comparative analysis of regional particularisms in order to
produce a better understanding of the whole. I have tried to gather the
specific data of dhimmitude in different sectors of life. This analytical
inventory throughout time and space may confuse the reader, but it is essential
for framing the world of dhimmitude.” (p 23) Resolving the occasional confusion
is amply repaid by the author’s scholarship and insights. [Sic: Also, it
reads better in the French original than in translation where occasionally the
English turns turgid. But on the whole it is an admirable translation. NSR]
In
the process the author explores and exposes areas of knowledge that are
regarded as taboo by academics and even world leaders. This taboo should be
seen as part of the dhimmi attitude internalized by non-Muslims— that one
should accept Islam and Muslims on their own claims, even when they act like a
state within a state in non-Muslim lands. Muslim minorities in countries as far
apart as India, Great Britain and the United States have largely succeeded in
imposing the Sharia view on national institutions, especially education. “The
Islamic conception of a jihad spreading peacefully without bloodshed is
repeated and taught in Western universities. This interpretation feeds an ideal
vision of Islamic society and nourishes the nostalgic desire for its future
restoration.” (p 313) Many Western academics have made a profitable career
propagating this view, followed in their footsteps by their Indian
counterparts.
The
author summarizes the underlying principles of the West’s dhimmitude in the
following words: (1) Historical negationism consisting of suppressing in a page
or a paragraph, one thousand years of jihad which is presented as a
peaceful conquest, generally welcomed by the vanquished populations. (2) The
omission of Christian and, in particular, Muslim sources describing the methods
of conquest: pillage, enslavement, deportation, massacres and so on. (3) The mythical
historical version of “centuries” of “peaceful coexistence,” masking the
process which transformed majorities into minorities, constantly at risk of
extinction. (4) An obligatory self-incrimination for the Crusades, the
Inquisition, imperialism, colonialism, Israel and other intrusions into the dar
al-Islam. (5) Servile criticism of the rational tools of historical
knowledge, created by earlier European Orientalists and historians. (pp 315-16)
All
this will seem familiar to Indian observers. One of the more disagreeable facts
that the author brings to light is the collusion of Christian organizations,
including the Greek Orthodox Church, and now the Vatican and the Church of
England, in conditioning the West for dhimmitude. They have in effect accepted the
legitimacy of dhimmitude in return for security and profit. As the author
observes: “The dhimmi Churches developed an Arabized interpretation of
the Gospels, combining traditional anti-Judaism with the psychological
conditioning of dhimmitude… This Islamization of the Jewish sources of
Christianity, disseminated through dhimmi church networks, popularized the
Islamic version of the Arab origins of Christianity.” (pp 320 – 21)
Dhimmitude
in India
All
this will seem familiar to Indians, as when a leading Indian politician
attributed the advaita propounded by Sri Shankaracharya to Koranic
inspiration! [Sic: This was the late President K.R. Narayanan. NSR]
There are other parallels as well. Pope John Paul II, during his visit to Egypt
and Jerusalem, respectfully attended Muslim service without saying a word about
the horrors inflicted on Coptic Christians. Likewise in India, he took the
Indian Government to task for mainly imaginary atrocities against Christian
minorities, while maintaining stony silence over the daily massacre of
Christians in Islamic countries like Pakistan and Indonesia.
Dhimmi Minister- Sushil Kumar Shinde
Dhimmi Minister- Sushil Kumar Shinde
This
was taken a sordid step further by Church ‘leaders’ in India when they colluded
with Muslim fundamentalist organizations like the Pakistan-based
Deen-dar-Anjuman in engineering Church bombings with the sole purpose of
discrediting the Indian Government. They seem driven by their hatred of the
‘heathen’ Hinduism as much as their Western counterparts are by historic
anti-Judaism. This will prove self-destructive, for as the author observes: “…
any delegitimization of Israel by Western political currents reinforces
delegitimization of the West. If Israel ought not to exist by de jure, the
same reasoning must apply to Europe, America, and any other place in the world;
…Thus the history and ideology of dhimmitude has tied Jews and Christians into
an indissoluble bond.” (p 313) One many add Hindus, Buddhists and every
other non-Muslim people to the group.
Christian
cowardice
This
indicates that Christian organizations, beleaguered by declining fortunes in
their homelands in the West, are prepared to go to any length just to survive
for the moment. The Church lives in constant fear of losing Rome to Islam
as it lost Jerusalem to the Arabs in the first millennium and Constantinople to
the Ottoman Turks in the second. This existential fear is not helped by the
presence of Islamic armies in Kosovo, a hundred miles from Trieste on the
Italian border, aided and abetted by NATO and the US with their lopsided
priorities. In the long run, this dhimmi state of mind poses a greater threat
to the world than Islamic warriors. And as a state of mind rather than anything
physical (like Jihad), it is also harder to combat.
That
this is not just of historical interest but of profound contemporary
significance is clear from the general policy of appeasing Islamic sentiments
being followed by the West. On this the author observes: “Today, the United
States and Europe compete for the favor of the Muslim world by once again
abandoning the victimized peoples to its mercies. The Gulf War against Saddam
Hussein on the question of oil interests (1991) was redeemed by the destruction
of Yugoslavia and the creation of new centers of Islamist influence in the
heart of the Balkans… The war to annihilate Serbia was intended to punish the
crimes of Milosevic and his regime, but the media campaigns endeavored to calm
the anti-Westernism in the Muslim world and of Muslim immigrants in Europe. It
also helped to gain forgiveness for the war on Iraq by a strong pro-Muslim
counterbalancing policy in the Balkans.” (p 338)
India
a dhimmi government?
Even
the terrorist state of Pakistan has gained from the West’s dhimmi mentality.
Had India been a small country instead of a major power occupying a strategic
position, she might have shared the fate of Serbia to ‘redeem’ the destruction
of the Taliban in Afghanistan. But there is no room for complacency here, based
on the naïve belief that the West will follow a moral course.
[Sic:
The intellectually vacant UPA Government has chosen the
appeasement path: it has tried to ‘redeem’ the arrest of Mumbai bombers and
other terrorists by arresting innocent Hindus in the name of ‘Saffron Terror’.
It is dhimmitude, not sense of loyalty to truth that makes Sonia Gandhi and
Manmohan Singh stay tongue-tied about Jihad. It was again dhimmitude that made
Rahul Gandhi lobby the U.S. Ambassador in favor of Taliban and Lashkar E Taiba
while holding up Hindu organizations as greater threats to security. The UPA
establishment is for all practical a dhimmi institution. No better evidence is
needed see this than Sushilkumar Shinde’s bizarre conduct. NSR]
All
told, Bat Ye’or’s concept of dhimmitude is an inspired insight that sheds light
on how whole nations may be manipulated by fear and greed. Or as Brigadier
Malik of Pakistan put in his seminal The Quranic Concept of War (sponsored
by General Zia ul Haq, the Founding Father of Talibanism): “Once a condition of
terror into the opponent’s heart is obtained, hardly anything is left to be
achieved… Terror is not a means of imposing decision upon the enemy; it is the
decision we wish to impose upon him.”
Dhimmitude
is nothing but negationist accommodation rooted in fear. Indian scholars should
follow Bat Ye’or’s example and launch a study of dhimmitude using the vast body
of literature left behind by the Muslim conquerors. The dangers of failing to
confront the truth are manifold. As Gibbon wrote of the Greeks— by valueing
security more than freedom, they ended up losing both, freedom and security.
_________
Dr. N.S. Rajaram is a scientist interested in history
and philosophy of science. He is the Contributing Editor of FOLKS.
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