Towards the end of his life the great French philosopher René Girard, declared: “We have to think about time in such a way that the Battle of Poitiers and the Crusades are much closer to us than the French Revolution and the industrialization of the Second Empire.” I paid little attention to Islam until 1979 when the Iranian revolution launched an unending series of attacks on the West. I certainly knew, as an historian, of the importance of the Battle Tours in 732 A.D., the First. Crusade’s recovery of the Holy Land in 1099, the defense of Vienna in 1683 and the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. In all these momentous encounters Christian warriors repulsed Islamic invaders. Yet, for whatever reasons, I had assumed the wars with Islam had ended. Then came the Iranian revolution and unending Islamist attacks on Israel and the West. It became increasingly apparent to me that Samuel P. Huntington rightly discerned the state of the world in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, wherein he argued that the coming conflicts would take place for cultural reasons. We live in a “multipolar, multi-civilizational world” where conflicts ensue following religious revivals. Soon thereafter came 9/11!
On that day we all awakened to the severity of the Islamic threat, and one of the world’s most highly-acclaimed journalists, Oriana Fallaci, living in New York when the terrorists attacked the World Trade Towers, delivered a rhetorical bombast. Her lengthy essay was released in an English translation—The Rage and The Pride (New York: Rizzoli, c. 2002). What she wanted readers to realize is that the attack on America was simply a small segment of a large-scale attack upon the West. There is a world-wide Jihad—what she calls a “reverse crusade”— taking place, and the terrorists who murder innocent women and children are supported by literally millions of “extremist” Muslims who fully endorse their attacks. Fallaci had interviewed both Yasar Arafat, the Palestinian who trained large numbers of terrorists, and the Iranian Ayatolla Khomeini. She understood the fanatical hatred that sustains radical Muslims. The words of an Islamic cleric, attending an “inter-faith” meeting at the Vatican in 1999, summed up their strategy: “By means of your democracy we shall invade you,” he said; “by means of our religion we shall dominate you” (p. 98). Sadly enough, Fallaci had little hope that Europeans would regain their courage and resist the Muslim assault. She had to flee her native Florence because local authorities refused to enforce even minimal restrictions on the Muslims who demand social services while trashing the city. She asserted that “the suicide of Europe” (p. 185) was visibly transpiring. Islam is in fact deeply antagonistic to Christianity. Multitudes of Muslims today hate the West while suicidal terrorists act out their animosities and elicit applause from millions of their supporters.
Refusing to remain silent while Muslims advance their cause—Islamic jihad—Bat Ye’or (an Egyptian scholar living in Switzerland writing under a pseudonym to help shelter her from the violence automatically addressed toward writers who dare criticize Islam) has, for decades, explored the somber reality of dhimmitude—the status of non-Muslims in Islamic societies. She showed how Christians suffered under Islamic rule in The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, c. 1996). She disproved many of the assumptions regarding Islam. Too many historians, many of them subsidized by Arab regimes, have provided misleading “interpretations relating to the dhimmis, which were either tendentious or combined with facts with apologetics and fantasy.” There is today an alliance between left-wing intellectuals and Muslims misleading the public. But the truth needs telling, for Jihad is a sacred duty for the faithful. Unlike the “spiritual” combat imagined by some pro-Islamic writers, jihad advocates “a real military war of conquest” followed by an iron-handed “dhimmitude,” the reduction of conquered peoples to Islamic law. Muslims divide the world into two—and only two—realms: the “domain of Islam” and “the domain of war” (p. 19). At times, strategy dictates tactical concessions and “peaceful” interludes. But ultimately, Muslims are committed to conquer and control as much of the globe as possible.
With Bat Ye’or’s treatise, we enter into a carefully crafted description of what actually happened to non-Muslim peoples under the yoke of Islam—a subject heretofore distinguished by a paucity of reliable studies. She meticulously defined jihad, noting that it may be waged through both overt war and more covert means: “proselytism, propaganda, and corruption” (p. 40). Anything necessary for Muslims to conquer and control lands and non-Muslim peoples finds justification as jihad. Thus motivated, Muslims established an enormous empire by the 800 A.D., established rather frequently by warriors who were brutal and booty-hungry pillagers, driven more by greed than holy zeal.
So too, when Muslims ruled a region, reducing all non-Muslims to dhimmitude, they exploited and oppressed (especially through onerous, discriminatory taxation) their subjects. Forcibly occupying highly-civilized realms such as Egypt, Muslim rulers slowly and surely reduced them to wastelands, economically and culturally depressed shadows of ancient glory. Everywhere the Muslims went, there resulted “the agricultural decline, the abandonment of villages and fields, and the gradual desertification of provinces—densely populated and fertile during the pre-Islamic period” (p. 102). Lands under Muslim rule were “administered by Islamic law for the benefit of Muslims and their descendents” (p. 70). They impoverished conquered peoples, and even the much-vaunted “Islamic civilization” was second-hand, sucked out of dying corpses, not created. “Islamic literature, science, art, philosophy, and jurisprudence,” Bat Ye’or says, “were born and developed not in Arabia, within an exclusively Arab and Muslim population, but in the midst of conquered peoples, feeding off their vigor and on the dying, bloodless body of dhimmitude” (p. 128).
Theoretically, Jews and Christians had religious freedom, but in fact “at no period in history was it respected” (p. 88). Theoretically, conversions to Islam were to be voluntary. In fact, massacres, torture, slavery and intimidation punctuated the process. In Spain, two centuries after occupation, “Seville and its surrounding areas were drenched in blood by the massacre of thousands of Spaniards—Christians and Jews. To understand the much-maligned Christian Crusades, one must see them as defensive, just wars designed to relieve the suffering of oppressed and enslaved believers. Centuries later, the 1915 “tenocide of the Armenians” showed the same jihadist mentality at work. In short, Bat Ye’or says, “irrefutable historical and archaeological sources confirm” that the “process of Islamization” in conquered lands “was perhaps the greatest plundering enterprise in history” (p. 101).
Reading Bat Ye’or’s book certainly sobers one! She supports her presentation with extensive footnotes and 175 pages of illustrative documents, finding little admirable about Islam. The weight of the evidence, the factual refutation of Arabophile histories, persuades one that the terrorists operating in the world today are hardly an aberration of Islam!
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In Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, c. 2002), Bat Ye’or, provided historical documentation—ample appendices, notes, and bibliography—telling what happens to people whose lands fall prey to the sword of Islam. She certainly brings a relentlessly critical, indeed hostile, approach to her subject, but she demonstrated a mastery of her sources and provides ample documentation for her assertions. The story of dhimmitude began in Medina, as soon as Mohammed seized control of the settlement in 622 A.D. He and the Jews of Khaybar made an agreement (a dhimma) whereby Jews were allowed to continue farming “their lands, but only as tenants; he demanded delivery of half their harvest and reserved the right to drive them out when he wished” (p. 37). In return, he promised to provide military protection. Thus was established the pattern of dhimmitude that endures to this day: first there is a jihadist conquest, then taking booty and seizing land, and finally the abject subservience of all unbelievers to Islamic rule. Dhimmi were forbidden to bear arms or own land or ride horses, and they were forced to wear distinctive clothing and pay extortionate taxes. They were driven from the sacred soil of Arabia and were often reduced to slavery. Indeed, Christian slaves, in places of influence, often mitigated the harsher aspects of dhimmitude. Though Jews and Christians were technically “free” to worship, it was a tightly limited freedom, and in time great numbers of churches and synagogues’ were simply demolished.
Bat Ye’or traced the pattern established in the 7th century as it was sustained over the next millennium. At times the dhimmi managed to live in a somewhat satisfactory accord with their Muslim masters. At other times there were intense persecutions (indeed genocidal attacks such as took place in Armenia a century ago) That made it almost intolerable for Jews and Christians to survive under Islamic rule. “The Armenian tragedy,” she concludes,” is not an unique phenomenon; it belongs to an immense historical cycle of dhimmitude that still operates—in Lebanon, Sudan, in the war against Israel, and in other Muslim-Christian conflicts. This cycle has its own characteristics, linked to the principles and values of the civilizations of jihad” (p. 374). Following WWI, and the instability that ensued as a result of Europe’s policies, Arab nationalism (often attuned to Nazi propaganda) became both intense and vitriolic, especially regarding the Jews. “Anti-Zionist terrorism was merely the modern version of jihad” (p. 173). Nearly one million Jews were removed from Muslim lands in the Middle East following the founding of Israel in 1948.
More than historically important, jihad, dhimmitude and shari’a are essential, unchanging components of Islam. In southern Sudan in the 1980s some two million (largely Christian) people perished. “Abduction, slavery, and forced Islamization of children . . . are similar to those mentioned in the historical records relating to jihad” (p. 206). (Sadly enough, when details regarding slavery in Sudan came to light, neither the U.N., the Vatican, nor the World Council of Churches, dared criticize the Islamists ruling the country!) To Bat Ye’or, “for all modern Islamists, the aim of jihad will always remain the expansion of Islam—by war or by persuasion—over the entire world, and the establishment worldwide of shari’a, the law of Allah. The concept of dar al-harb embraces all non-Muslim countries; they constitute the empire of Evil and ignorance, the jahiliyya—the Arabic word used for the ‘paganism’ that preceded Islam. It is the religious duty of Muslims to replace it with the empire of Good and of True Faith, which is Islam” (p. 218).
Quite important in assisting jihad are the Europeans and Americans who champion the Muslim (and particularly the Palestinian) cause. For some French politicians, the reason is economic, since Middle East oil sustains the modern industrial system. For others, especially professors in prestigious Western universities who are committed to “multiculturalism” and tolerance, siding with Islam is a mark of modern secularism. In the process, they rewrite history in much the same fashion as Stalinists updated school textbooks to fit the Party line. To an alarming extent the West has legitimized dhimmitude, establishing “at all levels a dissymmetry in respect of human rights, freedom of the press, of opinion and religion, as well as of democratic rights. The reason is that dhimmitude is not recognized as a crucially important page of world history. Hence the West has adopted the Islamic view of history, where dhimmi nations had no history, no culture, no existence. Indeed, dhimmi peoples have neither a cause nor history. They do not have the right to claim any reparations for the centuries of exile, deportations, spoilations, massacres and persecution. They do not even have the right to speak of this” (p. 398).
But speak of this Bat Ye’or does!
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In 2005 Bat Ye’or published, Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, c. 2005) describing what’s taking place right now, particularly among the bureaucratic elites who increasingly control Europe. She challenges readers to look clearly at the documents—many included as appendices to the text—that challenge the stories told by the largely pro-Islamic culture czars (the journalists and professors and politicians) in both Europe and America. She’s clearly partisan in her presentation, finding little of value in Islam. But she’s an enormously well-informed partisan, and her facts and perspective simply cannot be ignored by anyone seriously concerned with world affairs. “This book,” she said, delineating her thesis, “describes Europe’s evolution from a Judeo-Christian civilization, with important post-Enlightenment secular elements, into a post-Judeo-Christian civilization that is subservient to the ideology of jihad and the Islamic powers that propagate it. The new European civilization in the making can be called a ‘civilization of dhimmitude.’ The term dhimmitude comes from the Arabic word ‘dhimmi.’ It refers to subjugated, non-Muslim individuals or people that accept the restrictive and humiliating subordination to an ascendant Islamic power to avoid enslavement or death. The entire Muslim world as we know it today is a product of this 1,3000 year-old jihad dynamic, whereby once thriving non-Muslim majority civilizations have been reduced to a state of dysfunctional dhimmitude. Many have been completely Islamized and have disappeared. Others remain as fossilized relics of the past, unable to evolve” (p. 9).
“For well over a millennium,” Bat Ye’or continued, “following the seventh-century Muslim military offensives against Byzantium, European powers instinctively resisted jihad—militarily when necessary—to protect their independence. The response of the post-Judeo-Christian Europe of the late twentieth century has been radically different. Europe, as reflected by the institutions of the EU, has abandoned resistance for dhimmitude, and independence for integration with the Islamic world of North Africa and the Middle East. The three most apparent symptoms of this fundamental change in European policy are officially sponsored anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism/anti-Zionism and ‘Palestinianism’” (p. 10). The targets may change, but Muslim objectives and strategies remain constant: “Hostage taking, ritual throat slitting, the killing of infidels and Muslim apostates are lawful, carefully described, and highly praised jihad tactics recorded, over the centuries, in countless legal treatises on jihad” (p. 159).
The French have pioneered the current process of accommodation. Charles de Gaulle, whose pride was injured by his exclusion from the Yalta Conference as WWII ended, and who witnessed the demise of France’s colonial empire, determined to create a French-led alliance of Mediterranean states that would effectively counteract the growth of American power. His successors hoped France would become the “protector of Islam and Palestinians against America and Israel. They hoped that a pro-French Islam would facilitate the quiet control of former colonies within the French orbit and spread French culture,” ultimately establishing “an enormous market” that would restore France’s former glory (p. 148). The unsuccessful Egyptian-Syrian assault on Israel and the Arab oil embargo in 1973 accelerated such developments. Europeans abruptly began discussing and defending the “Palestinian people,” a new name for Arabs living in the disputed region between Israel and Jordan. The nation of Israel, which had enjoyed Europe’s support for 25 years, suddenly became the bete noir of the Middle East. Hungry for oil, Europe began to support the Muslim dictators who supplied it. Needing workers during that era of economic expansion, immigrants from North Africa and Turkey were encouraged to relocate.
In the midst of all this, innumerable conferences were held and papers published as part of the EAD (“Europe-Arab Dialogue”) regarding the new coalition. Bat Ye’or seems to have read every report of every such conference, and she takes seriously their wording, for they seem to have slowly shaped EU policies. At such gatherings, attended by Arab and European elites, impressive words were uttered regarding human rights, religious rights, women’s rights, workers’ rights, etc. And the Muslim workers flooding Europe have enjoyed such “rights.” Still more: they have secured special privileges and protections under the auspices of the increasingly powerful European Union. This was, of course, a one-way process. Arabs, for instance, demand absolute respect for Islam in European lands but continue to persecute Jews and Christians wherever Islam (with its Shari’a) reigns. Muslims even insist that Islam rather than Christianity be recognized as the primary “civilization”—indeed “the spiritual and scientific fountainhead of Europe” (p. 98). Robin Cook, the British Foreign Secretary, actually said that “Islamic art, science and philosophy,” along with Greek and Roman culture, had helped shape England (p. 172)! A fantasyland of Muslim rule in Medieval Spain—“the Andalusian utopia”—is routinely cited as evidence of past Islamic tolerance and educational sophistication. And, as the recent draft of a EU constitution indicates, Muslim influence grows. Arab delegates to various EAD sessions ever demand that Europe’s schools and textbooks favorably portray Muslims and Islamic history, whereas Jews and Christians are routinely demonized by Muslim educators. “Through the ‘Diaglogue,’’ Bat Ye’or insists, “Arab League politicians and economists have gained a firm ascendancy over Europe’s policy and economy” (p. 123).
Multiplied billions of dollars have been extorted from Europe, sent as “aid” and “development funds” to Muslim countries—the dar al-islam world ruled by Shari’a. “The huge sums that the EU pays to Arab Mediterranean countries and the Palestinians amount to another tribute exacted for its security within the dar al-sulh [i.e. the subservient state of dhimmitude]. Europe thereby put off the threat of a jihad aimed at the dar al-harb [the world Muslims are obligated to attack and control] by opting for appeasement and collusion with international terrorism—while blaming the increased world tensions on Israel and America so as to preserve its dar al-sulh position of subordinate collaboration, if not surrender, to the Islamists” (p. 77). By supporting the economic and cultural policies Arabs demand, Europeans have, Bat Ye’or thinks, surrendered their lands and traditions. By surrendering, they have become dhimmis, for “dhimmis do not fight. Dhimmitude is based on peaceful surrender, subjection, tribute, and praise” (p. 204).
When President Bush fought back, following the 9/11 attacks, subduing the Taliban in Afghanistan and invading Iraq, “the Anti-Americanism that had been simmering for years among European Arobophiles, neo-Nazis, Communists, and leftists in general” (p. 227) boiled over. In a profound sense, Bat Ye’or says, such Anti-Americanism thrives in “cowardly or impotent societies, which have chosen surrender through fear of conflict” (p. 242). It’s the resentment of the weak regarding the strong, “an intellectual totalitarianism disguised as a virtue for states which have entrusted their security to those who threaten them” (p. 242). Still more: “By implicitly enlisting in the Arab-Islamic jihad against Israel—under labels such as ‘peace and justice for Palestinians’—Europe has effectively jettisoned its values and undermined the roots of its own civilization. It even struck a blow against worldwide Christianity, abandoning the Christians in Lebanon to massacres by Palestinians (1975-83), those of Sudan to jihad and slavery, and the Christians of the Islamic world to the persecutions mandated by the dhimma system” (p. 115). Despite this, however, “the EU is implicitly abetting a worldwide subversion of Western values and freedoms, while attempting to protect itself from Islamic terrorism by denying that it even exists, or blaming it on scapegoats” (p. 227).
In short: with precious oil and prolific immigrants the Muslims have moved to impose a state of dhimmitude upon Europe. Jihad is succeeding as Islam extends its sway—though oil has replaced the sword as the weapon of choice and immigrants rather than warriors serve of agents of occupation! There’s a war going on in Europe, and Europeans have closed their eyes to preserve an “illusion of peace” (p. 252), much as they did while National Socialism and Communism devoured the continent in the 20th century.