Dhimmitude Unveiled
a review by Jerry Gordon (August 2013)
Understanding Dhimmitude
by Bat Ye'or
RVP Press (June 2013)
244 pp.
the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). The OIC is seeking to impose dhimmitude on the Dar Al Harb, that is, the area of the world yet to be dominated by Islam.
The Dhimmi, about the status of Christians and Jews, the “People of the Book,” following the Jihad conquest of the Middle East, an area of the world originally composed of a predominantly Christian majority with significant minority Jewish populations. These realms were conquered and colonized by Arabs imposing a totalitarian Islamic creed. The Dhimmi presented the realities of those subjugated “protected” peoples, the Jews and Christians living as unbelievers in Dar al Islam, the realm of Islam. It ejected forever from my mind the benign view that Jews and Christians were “tolerated” under Sharia. Some critics have considered Bat Ye’or’s espousal of dhimmitude, the degradation of conquered subjects that followed in the great sweeps of Islamic Jihad, a myth. Dhimmitude was no myth. Bat Ye’or and many other recognized scholars in Europe, the UK and the US have documented its history integrated with the Shariah laws of Islam for over 13 centuries.
Christian Solidarity International which is vitally concerned with alleviating the persecution of minority Christians in African and Middle Eastern Countries. An early advocate of Bat Ye’or’s dhimmitude concept was Dr. Walid Phares, noted author and commentator on the threat of Jihadist Islam to the West. Others who have supported Bat Ye'or and given her forums to discuss the dhimmitude status of Christian minorities in Muslim lands here in the US are Nina Shea and Paul Marshall of the Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom and Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), Co-Chairman of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission. Principal interpreters and proponents of Bat Ye’or’s counter jihadist Weltanschauung have been Hebrew University Professors and specialists in Islamic History and Middle East minorities, Raphael Israeli and Mordechai Nisan (see his Front Page Magazine review of her latest book), American scholars Robert Spencer and Dr. Andrew Bostom, Professor Johannes J.G. Jansen, retired Professor and commentator on contemporary Islamic thought in the Netherlands, Dr. Mark Durie in Australia and noted Koranic scholar and ex-Muslim, Ibn Warraq. Bat Ye’or has received commendation for her scholarship from the late Jacques Ellul of the University of Bordeaux. In the UK she has had the sponsorship of Baroness Caroline Cox of Queensbury and Dr. Patrick Sookdheo, director of the Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity and International Director of the Barnabas Fund, because of their valued common stands drawing attention to persecuted Christian minorities in Muslim lands. Noted historian Sir Martin Gilbert has commended the Littmans for their vigorous advocacy of the plight of Jews and Christians under Islam.
Poland’s King John III Sobieski and the Hapsburg Emperor’s brother in law, Charles Sixtus of Lorraine on September 11, 1683. Relief of Balkan lands, Bulgaria and Greece under Ottoman control took nearly two hundred years until completed in the 1870’s. Under Ottoman rule, Christian communities were forced to make and annual human tribute of their children. Their conversion to Islam under the devshirme system was accommodated by local Christian clerics. The non-Muslim subjects in the Ottoman empire were dispossessed of lands, had limited legal rights, and were subject to razzias following rebellions in Greece, the Balkans and Armenian provinces. The worst excesses were the episodes of genocide committed against the Armenians in the 1890’s and during the First World War. The latter allegedly may have been spoken of as a precedent by Hitler, an admirer of Jihadist Islam, for the Final Solution that murdered six million European Jewish men, women and children during the Shoah.
The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians Under Islam). That led to a series of books depicting how Islamic Jihad infiltrated, overthrew and subjugated indigenous peoples in pre-Islamic lands. Those who survived rape, pillage and murder, and did not convert, lived in perpetual fear for their lives, avoided only by payment of the jizya, the onerous poll tax that saved them from death. Those seminal works by Bat Ye’or on dhimmitude also included: The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude: Seventh-Twentieth Century (1996), Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide.(2001). Then in 2005, she enlarged her vision to document Jihadist Islam in a new guise infiltrating Europe unnoticed by the elites of the European Commission and later the EU, Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, In 2011, she published Europe, Globalization and The Coming Universal Caliphate that discussed European infiltration by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a virtual global Caliphate of the Muslim Ummah, headquartered in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The OIC is prominently known in the West for its objective seeking to impose blasphemy codes negating any criticism of Islam.
The concept of jihad implies that all Laws which are not Islamic laws have no legitimacy and that governments ruling in the dar al-Harb for no legitimacy.
It is through the Christian patriarchs and the Jewish Community leaders that the Islamic Government imposed its authority, making them instruments of control and oppression over Christian and Jewish populations. Therefore it was the dhimmi peoples who collaborated, unwittingly, in the deification of the Islamic civilization. There was a strong alliance between Arab Muslim invading troops and the local Arab Christian tribes and Middle Eastern Churches. Some members of the Christian clergy not only welcomed the Muslim armies, but surrendered cities to them. supported by Dexter Van Zile, Christian Media Analyst at CAMERA, the Middle East media watch dog, in his criticism of the leadership of the National and World Council of Churches and, at the extreme, Naim Ateek of the Sabeel Center of Liberation Theology in Jerusalem. Ateek has perpetrated the ultimate convergence of dhimmitude and replacement theology. Van Zile noted the perfidy of Ateek in our 2012 interview: In 2005, I discovered statements he made at the beginning of the Second Intifada that made it clear that he was using imagery from the New Testament to incite enmity towards the Jewish state. Ateek compared Israeli officials to modern day Herods. . . . He also said that the Israeli Crucifixion System is operating daily in the occupied territories. interview with her, she says: said: The West Speaks.
To comment on this review, please click here.
here.
If you have enjoyed this article and want to read more by Jerry Gordon, please click here.
Jerry Gordon is a also regular contributor to our community blog. To read his entries, please click here.