Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions about the World's Fastest-Growing Faith

by Robert Spencer

  The charter with the monks of St. Catherine's also stipulates that

  no one is to destroy a house of their religion, to damage it, or to carry anything from it to the Muslims' houses. Should anyone take any of these, he would spoil God's covenant and disobey His Prophet. Verily, they are my allies and have my secure charter against all that they hate.... Their churches are to be respected. They are neither to be prevented from repairing them nor the sacredness of their covenants.

  The pact even covers defense: "No one is to force them to travel or to oblige them to fight. The Muslims are to fight for them."

  Drs. Zahoor and Haq assert that "This charter of privileges has been honored and faithfully applied by Muslims throughout the centuries in all lands they ruled. "4

  With the Christians of Najran, a Christian town in Yemen, Muhammad concluded a similar pact. This one (although the present text is not likely to be fully reliable) includes more specifics. It forbids the removal of any bishop, priest or monk, excuses the Christians from "tithes," and dictates that "no image or cross shall be destroyed." It even declares that the Christians of Najran "shall continue to enjoy everything great and small as heretofore." Again, Dr. Zahoor claims that "Muslims have faithfully applied the terms of this treaty to their non-Muslim citizens."5

  These agreements are tolerant indeed. If Zahoor and Haq are correct in saying that Muslims have always held to them scrupulously in their relations with their Christian and Jewish minorities, then the House of Islam truly deserves its reputation for tolerance. So let's look at the record.

  Because the Muslim world expanded so quickly when its armies overwhelmed the ancient Christian communities of the Middle East, Islam had to face the problem of religious minorities early on. As with most other aspects of Islam, it developed a specific and comprehensive code of laws for the treatment of these minorities.

  Reliance of the Traveller, the legal code from the Shafi'i school of Islamic jurisprudence that broadly represents Islamic orthodoxy, sets forth these laws in detail. They include the payment by the dhimmis, or conquered non-Muslims-chiefly Jews and Christians-of the "nonMuslim poll tax," the jizya. This tax comes directly from the Qur'an, which mandates that Muslims must "fight against such of those to whom the Scriptures were given as believe neither in God nor the Last Day, who do not forbid what God and His Apostle have forbidden, and do not embrace the true Faith, until they pay tribute [jizya] out of hand and are utterly subdued" (Sura 9:29; emphasis added). The code sets the annual rate of the jizya at a minimum of one dinar, which the text explains is equivalent to 4.235 grams of gold. "The maximum is whatever both sides agree upon." Why the dhimmis would agree to anything above the minimum if they had a choice is left unexplained.

  Reliance of the Traveller adds that the jizya "is collected with leniency and politeness, and it is not levied on women, children, or the insane."6 But just as one man's tap is another man's beating, so leniency and politeness vary from culture to culture. For the collection of the jizya in practice often differed sharply from what the law books instructed. Michael the Syrian reports that under Caliph Marwan II (744-75o), leniency and politeness evidently gave way to pressing economic concerns. A contemporary writer said that "Marwan's main concern was to amass gold and his yoke bore heavily on the people of the country. His troops inflicted many evils on the men: blows, pillages, outrages on women in their husbands' presence."7 This was not a singular case. One of Marwan's successors, al-Mansur (754-775), says Michael, "raised every kind of tax on all the people in every place. He doubled every type of tribute on Christians. "8

  Bat Ye'or, the leading historian of the religious minorities under Islam, paints a grim picture of the collection of the jizya in eighthcentury Egypt:

  "They mercilessly struck honorable men and old hoary elders." These evils afflicted the whole Abbasid empire. In Lower Egypt, the Copts, crushed and ruined by taxation and subjected to torture, rebelled (832). The Arab governor ordered their villages, vines, gardens, churches, and the whole region to be burned down; those who escaped massacre were deported.'

  And Paul Fregosi expresses the Muslim perspective trenchantly: "Christianity, whether as a religious entity to be protected within the Ottoman empire or as a religious entity to be assailed outside the empire, was always first and foremost a cow to be milked. "'0

  As for politeness, the jizya had to be paid in public, in a bizarre and degrading ceremony that required the Muslim tax official to hit the dhimmi on the head or the back of the neck. This ritualized violence symbolized, of course, the subjugation of the dhimmis. The twelfthcentury Qur'anic commentator Zamakhshari, in fact, directed that the jizya should be collected "with belittlement and humiliation.""

  Is this merely ancient history? Hardly. According to Bat Ye'or, the performance of this blow "survived unchanged till the dawn of the twentieth century, being ritually performed in Arab-Muslim countries, such as Yemen and Morocco, where the Koranic tax continued to be extorted from the Jews.""

  Reliance of the Traveller also sets down that the jizya is not to be collected from women and children. But once again, reality was different: "The poll tax was extorted by torture," says Bat Ye'or. "The tax inspectors demanded gifts for themselves; widows and orphans were pillaged and despoiled."

  In theory, women, paupers, the sick, and the infirm were exempt from the poll tax; nevertheless, Armenian, Syriac, and Jewish sources provide abundant proof that the jizya was exacted from children, widows, orphans, and even the dead. A considerable number of extant documents, preserved over the centuries, testify to the persistence and endurance of these measures. In Aleppo in 1683, French Consul Chevalier Laurent d'Arvieux noted that ten-year-old Christian children paid the jizya. Here again, one finds the disparity and contradiction between the ideal in the theory and the reality of the facts. 'I

  The alternative was slavery. The seventeenth-century European traveler Jean-Baptiste Tavernier found that:

  Armenians, too poor to pay their poll tax, were condemned to slavery together with their wives and children. At Cyprus where [Tavernier] put into port in 1651, he learned that: "during the last three or four months, over four hundred Christians had become Muhammadans because they could not pay their kharaj, which is the tribute that the Grand Seigneur levies on Christians in his states." In Baghdad, in 1652, the Christians incurred such expenses "that, when they had to pay their debts or their kharaj, they were forced to sell their children to the Turks to cover it." Historical sources on collective groups, official documents, individual behavior which history has fortuitously preserved-all provide abundant evidence that the dhimmis' offspring were regarded as a reservoir of slaves for economic or political purposes.14

  Many of these abuses of the jizya were clearly against Islamic law. The laws of the jizya themselves, moreover, are still on the books, ready to be enforced wherever and whenever the Sharia is implemented. That fact should worry any non-Muslim in a country with a Muslim majority; and those who wonder why Christians fight Muslims in Nigeria or Lebanon and resist the implementation of the Sharia should take note.

  Subject People

  Steven Runciman says that Christians in the Ottoman Empire "were never allowed to forget that they were a subject people."15 Muslims seem to have invented the idea of making despised minorities wear distinctive clothing: the dhimmis were also to be "distinguished from Muslims in dress, wearing a wide cloth belt (zunnar)."16 In practice, this led to a blizzard of laws regulating clothing for Christians and Jews, and in some places Christians even had to wear a sort of modified tonsure by shaving the fronts of their heads.17 According to Philip Hitti,

  The Caliph al-Mutawakkil in 85o and 854 decreed that Christians and Jews should affix wooden images of devils to their houses, level their graves even with the ground, wear outer garments of honey color, i.e. yellow, put two honey-colored patches on the clothes of their slaves ... and ride only on mules and asses with wooden saddles marked by two pomegranate-like balls on the cantle."

  Often
the Muslim authorities buttressed these laws with others that restricted or denied altogether the dhimmis' access to public baths and other public spaces. In some places, Christians and Jews could go to the baths, but only if they wore small bells on their fingers and toes so that, even when unclothed, they could be identified and duly shunned. 'I Reliance of the Traveller also dictates that dhimmis "are not to be greeted with [the standard Muslim greeting,] `as-Salamu `alaykum' [Peace be with you]" and "must keep to the side of the street. "'o Other laws assigned distasteful duties to the dhimmis, such as the removal of dead animals and the cleaning of public toilets.

  Many of these laws remained in effect until late in the nineteenth century or even into the twentieth. They began to give way only when notions of individual human rights filtered into the House of Islam from Western colonizers and brought about a certain relaxation of the dhimmis' plight.

  The effects of such laws were manifold. A dhimmi could never blend into the crowd. He had to keep to the side of the street and could not be greeted the way ordinary people were greeted; he was an inferior, and unclean. These wretched fellows could become a target for Muslim wrath anytime, anywhere. After all, the principle behind these laws was that anyone who remained a Jew or a Christian in a Muslim milieu must be deliberately perverse, with a heart so set against Allah as to refuse to acknowledge the manifest truth and superiority of Islam. Such people were natural targets for popular resentment, and the dhimmis often were subject to random violence.

  Disquietingly, this violence was more common wherever Muslims became more fervent, for their scripture and laws reinforced hatred of Christians and Jews. Michael the Syrian writes that the Syrian rabblerouser Nut al-Din tried to curry favor among the local Muslims by being especially harsh toward Christians: "He did his utmost to harass the Christians in every way in order to be considered by Muslims as an assiduous observer of their laws."21 When Mongol armies entered Syria in 1281, "the sultan Qalawun reacted by forcing all the Christians at the service of the state to convert to Islam"-no doubt to purify the polity 22 and perhaps stave off the threat.

  Reliance of the Traveller adds to the humiliation by stipulating that dhimmis "may not build higher than or as high as Muslims' buildings." They are "forbidden to openly display wine or pork ... recite the Torah or Evangel aloud, or make public display of their funerals and feastdays." A commentator referred to in the text adds that they may not "ring church bells or display crosses." They are, furthermore, "forbidden to build new churches."23

  Not only were dhimmis forbidden to build new churches, but because they were thought to be obstinately rejecting the truths of Islam, their existing houses of worship were always under threat:

  Churches and synagogues were rarely respected. Regarded as places of perversion, they were often burned or demolished in the course of reprisals against infidels found guilty of overstepping their rights. The exterior of these buildings looked dilapidated and the extreme wretchedness of the interiors was often the consequence of looting or was intended to discourage predatory attacks. This state of decay-also an obligatory social component of the dhimmi servile status-is often mentioned in dhimmi chronicles and described by European consuls and, later, by foreign travelers.24

  These churches and synagogues were dilapidated because Muslims widely believed that, as one Islamic jurist reported, "the Prophet made this declaration: `No churches are to be built in Muslim lands, and those that have fallen into ruin shall not be repaired."'25

  This, of course, contradicts what the Prophet is supposed to have told the monks of St. Catherine's. It is unclear which tradition is authentic; for that matter, they could both be inauthentic. Muslims on both sides of this issue invoke the tradition they find most useful.

  Life in Peril

  The life of a dhimmi was cheap and tenuous. Jews and Christians lived in constant fear of harassment and persecution, particularly when the House of Islam suffered some setback that could be blamed by the aroused rabble on the impure ones in their midst. Although dhimmi status was supposed to confer the protection of the Muslim authorities, in practice this was often ignored:

  In m6x, Muslims of Mosul [in Iraq] pillaged and killed all those who did not convert to Islam. Several monks and community leaders and others from the common people recanted. The Kurds then descended from the mountains and attacked the Christians of the region, massacring many of them; they pillaged the convent of Mar Matai, only withdrawing after extorting a heavy ransom from the monks. In 1273, brigands from Ayn Tab and Birah in Syria infiltrated the region of Claudia (upper Euphrates) and led a great part of the population-women and a multitude of youthinto captivity. In 1285, a horde of about six hundred brigands-Kurds, Turks and Arab nomads-fell on Arbil, pillaging and massacring the dhimmis in the surrounding villages. After devastating the whole Mardin region, they left with a considerable booty in flocks and enslaved women and children.26

  Because of the inflexible nature of Islamic law, even minor incidents could be deadly. A typical case unfolded late in the 16oos when, according to the historian Philip Mansel, "a Greek boy was heard imitating the muezzin's call to prayer. Having thereby inadvertently made a profession of Islam, he was asked by Turkish passers-by to live as a Muslim. When he refused, he was put in prison, and finally executed-hailed by the Greeks as another martyr."27

  Nor was he the only one. Runciman recounts that "as late as the 178os a Greek boy who had been adopted by Muslims and brought up in their faith was hanged at Janina for reverting to the faith of his fathers."28 Countless Christians and Jews were arrested over the centuries for insulting Islam or the Prophet. In 744, the patriarch of Antioch, Stephen III, was accused of denouncing Islam, and his tongue was cut out.29 Some avoided this or a worse fate at the price of their faith. After the terrible massacres of Armenians in 1915 and 1916, "a small number escaped death by converting to Islam." 30

  Since non-Muslims' testimony weighed less than that of Muslims, a trumped-up accusation could mean death. Says Runciman, "Any lawsuit involving a Christian and a Muslim was heard in a Muslim court, according to Koranic law; and few Muslim judges were prepared to give a judgment in favour of an unbeliever."31 Ayub Masih, a Christian jailed in Pakistan on a charge that he mentioned Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, can testify that this situation hasn't changed.

  Preview of Genocide

  Occasionally also, Muslim authorities found it politically expedient to arouse the fury of the populace against the dhimmis, who were thought to be bringing Allah's disfavor upon the larger community. In a harbinger of the Armenian genocide that would take place twenty years later, the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid in 1895 initiated a series of bloody strikes against the restive Christian Armenians in eastern Anatolia. The Armenians had made the mistake of imbibing Western notions of human rights and beginning to question their dhimmi status.

  According to Lord Kinross, historian of the Ottoman Empire, Hamid "briefed agents, whom he sent to Armenia with specific instructions as to how they should act." Their mission was to arouse "religious fanaticism among the Moslem population," which they accomplished by telling them that "under the holy law the property of rebels might be looted by believers, encouraging Moslems to enrich themselves in the name of their faith at the expense of their Christian neighbors, and in the event of resistance, to kill them."32

  The Armenians were offered, "at the point of a bayonet, the choice between death and forcible conversion to Islam," an Ottoman practice that had been "previously renounced" in the mid-nineteenth century, "under British pressure."

  Each operation, between the bugle calls, followed a similar pattern. First into a town there came the Turkish troops, for the purpose of massacre; then came the Kurdish irregulars and tribesmen for the purpose of plunder. Finally came the holocaust, by fire and destruction, which spread, with the pursuit of fugitives and mopping-up operations, throughout the lands and villages of the surrounding province. The murderous winter of 1895 thus saw the decimation of much of the Armenian p
opulation and the devastation of their property in some twenty distinct districts of eastern Turkey. Often the massacres were timed for a Friday, when the Moslems were in their mosques and the myth was spread by the authorities that the Armenians conspired to slaughter them at prayer. Instead they were themselves slaughtered, when the Moslems emerged to forestall their design. The total number of victims was somewhere between fifty and a hundred thousand, allowing for those who died subsequently of wounds, disease, exposure, and starvation.33

  In the town of Urfa, home to a sizable Christian minority, the Armenians (after enduring a siege that dragged on for two months) asked for protection from the government. In response, the Turks slaughtered all the men in the town. One group of Armenian youths was taken to a sheikh, who "had them thrown down on their backs and held by their hands and feet. Then, in the words of an observer, he recited verses of the Koran and `cut their throats after the Mecca rite of sacrificing sheep."' A contingent of troops (along with a mob of enflamed civilians) stormed the cathedral, where a large crowd had gathered for sanctuary. Crying, "Call upon Christ to prove Himself a greater prophet than Muhammad," they murdered the men and burned the women and children alive in the cathedral.

  Eight thousand men, women and children were dead in Urfa by the time the afternoon bugle call signaled that the troops' work was done for the day.34

  The Devshirme

  Another source of the fear in which dhimmis lived in the Ottoman Empire was the notorious devshirme. Begun in the fourteenth century by Sultan Orkhan and continued until late in the seventeenth century, this was the seizure and enslavement of 20 percent of the Christian children in various predominantly Christian areas of the empire. These boys were given the choice of Islam or death and, after rigorous training, were enrolled in the janissary corps, the emperor's elite fighters. At first these unfortunate boys were torn from their homes and families only at irregular intervals-sometimes every seven years and sometimes every four-but after a time the devshirme became an annual event.35 By the time it ended, around 200,000 boys had been enslaved in this manner.36