David Warren: Bowing to Islam?

Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis
by Bat Ye’or
Fairleigh Dickinson. 384 pp. $49.50

For the past 30 years, the Jewish scholar Bat Ye’or, born in Egypt but long resident in Geneva, has been developing formidable credentials as a chronicler of “dhimmitude,” a term with which she is closely associated. Constructed from the Arabic dhimmi, the word characterizes the submissive status of peoples conquered by Islam but allowed to live. Sometimes at the edges and sometimes in the face of an academic world that has become increasingly politically correct, Bat Ye’or (a Hebrew pen name meaning “daughter of the Nile”) has been challenging myths about the history of Islamic civilization by examining the actual record of Islam’s encounters with Christianity and Judaism in the West, Hinduism and other religions in the East.

Most of Bat Ye’or’s writing career has been conducted in French. It began with Les Juifs en Egypte (1971), a comprehensive study of the historical fate of the Jews in Egypt. The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians Under Islam, published in 1985 and still in print in several languages, was an expansion and enlargement of an original French study of the oppression, reduction, and, in many cases, destruction of European societies that fell under Muslim conquest. The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam (1996) shows the same systematic process at work in the Ottoman empire.

It is worth underlining the word “systematic.” Bat Ye’or has made it her business to document the similarity in the modes employed from one cultural location to another, especially the peculiar “ratcheting method” by which, over time, a subject group is pressured to convert to Islam — in order toescape oppressive taxation, dispossession, enslavement, or periodic massacre. What makes her writings the bolder is her insistence — she is hardly shy about quoting or citing references to the Qur’an and hadiths — that the oppression of minorities under Islam is not a product of historical accident and circumstances. Indeed, she argues, sometimes with stridency, it is intrinsic to the religion, which everywhere insists not only upon the subjugation of all non-Islamic peoples but upon their humiliation.

Although seldom in direct conflict with the facts provided by most mainstream histories, hers is a radically different account, focusing on conditions that more conventional (or politic) historians pass over lightly. In particular, Bat Ye’or explodes the myth of “al-Andalus” — the supposedly glorious civilization of medieval Islamic Spain in which Muslim, Jewish, and Christian poets, artists, scholars, and philosophers flourished in a kind of fraternal paradise of multiculturalism. In the case of Jews and Christians alike, according to Bat Ye’or, life in Muslim Spain was in fact made livable only for those who could materially advance the interests of rulers, which is to say the expansion of Islam.

Like this?:

Saudi Arabia - Conversion by a Muslim to another religion is punishable by death. Bibles are illegal. Churches are illegal.

Yemen - Bans proselytizing by non-Muslims and forbids conversions. The Government does not allow the building of new non-Muslim places of worship.

Kuwait - Registration and licensing of religious groups. Members of religions not sanctioned in the Koran may not build places of worship. Prohibits organized religious education for religions other than Islam.

Egypt - Islam is the official state religion and primary source of legislation. Accordingly, religious practices that conflict with Islamic law are prohibited. Muslims may face legal problems if they convert to another faith. Requires non-Muslims to obtain what is now a presidential decree to build a place of worship.

Algeria - The law prohibits public assembly for purposes of practicing a faith other than Islam. Non-Islamic proselytizing is illegal, and the Government restricts the importation of non-Islamic literature for distribution.

Jordan - Has the death penalty for any Muslim selling land to a Jew.

A pretty straightforward and informative review considering by a Canadian reviewer for a left-wing intellectual publication. But he pulls back in the latter half with some superficial criticisms of the book's argument.

And he fails to mention the really critical problems: abortion, the disappearance of marriage, tiny rates of reproduction, loss of heart and direction by religionless Europeans, continuing immigration from Muslim countries.

It's not just a question of whether the Europeans will choose to become dhimmis, as the reviewer assumes. They are already on their way, unless they make a violent 180 degree course change, start marrying and having children, and send the Muslim immigrants back where they came from, which would violate all their political illusions. Otherwise they will fall further and further behind Muslim population growth every year, until it is too late to do anything.

"...that the oppression of minorities under Islam is not a product of historical accident and circumstances... it is intrinsic to the religion, which everywhere insists not only upon the subjugation of all non-Islamic peoples but upon their humiliation."

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That's Islam! Coming to America! Don't say you weren't warned... over and over and over.

Cicero wrote: A pretty straightforward and informative review considering by a Canadian reviewer for a left-wing intellectual publication.

Commentary isn't left wing, it's conservative.

In addition to Warren, it's contributors include Victor Davis Hanson, Norman Podhoretz, Robert Bork, William Bennett, Daniel Pipes, William F. Buckley and numerous other conservative and neo-conservative writers.

It's one of the few publications on the Net which I pay for.

David Warren reviews Bat Ye’or's book Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis and makes some interesting comments .
There are also some interesting readers' reviews on the Amazon page.

David Warren PING!

Let me know if you want in or out

And he fails to mention the really critical problems: abortion, the disappearance of marriage, tiny rates of reproduction, loss of heart and direction by religionless Europeans, continuing immigration from Muslim countries.

Actually, Warren does mention many of these things, either directly (immigration) or indirectly (abortion, disappearance of marriage, low fertility, loss of heart/direction all stem from the "decay of institutional Christianity").

It's not just a question of whether the Europeans will choose to become dhimmis, as the reviewer assumes. They are already on their way, unless they make a violent 180 degree course change, start marrying and having children, and send the Muslim immigrants back where they came from, which would violate all their political illusions.

In his latest book "Beyond Baghdad" Ralph Peters has a chapter called Hidden Unities, in which he disscusses this, and much much more. You might want to take a look at it.
"Hidden Unities" can also be found on the web in PDF format.
Suffice it to say he has a different take on this from what is found around here.

Thanks for the ping. One of the points Bat Ye'or makes (bearing in mind I haven't read all her books) is that dhimmitude isn't what it used to be, and that what it used to be wasn't really what it was cracked up to be. That said, there were historical instances where it was better to be a Jew under Islam than under Christianity. But we're not living then, and Islam now seems (to me, at least) to have shed some of its Turkish cosmopolitanism and returned to its Arab inflexibility. One can argue doctrine and the Qur'an all day long, but the practice is what is important.

Yes, and the most strict and anti-Other strain of Islam -- Wahabism -- is the most active here and everywhere.

What I value in Bat Ye'or writing is that she exposes hidden mechanism of European surrender. As David Warren points out: "There is, for instance, no single “appeasement czar” to whom we can look for authoritative pronouncements. There is no discrete building or department to which we can go to collect press releases. It is an affair not of legislation or of discernible political activity but of seminars and conferences and policy meetings and blathering “directives.” In the absence of political bricks and mortar, the argument about what the beast is up to and how far it has advanced inevitably develops a paranoid flavor."

Without her documenting this process it is too easy to dismiss it as another wild conspiracy theory. But Europe indeed made a strategic decision to accommodate Arabs. They thought that they can outsmart them. Does not look like to me...

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