The Muslim World
"DHIMMIS": THE PROTECTED MINORITY
by Shirley W. Madany
It was in 1953, in the seaport city of Latakia, Syria that I gradually became aware of how it felt to belong to a minority. The Christians of Latakia came from families which had a long history of subjugation and humiliation. They had known suffering first hand. I had married a "dhimmi," the Arabic name given to a member of the "protected minority." This minority included Christians and Jews. (The word "dhimmi" is pronounced as if the "dh" was the "th" in this and that.) Oh, yes, Christians had certain defined privileges which allowed them to continue to worship in their own church buildings, and have ordained ministers and priests in the Eastern Orthodox churches. They were allowed to look after certain civil affairs in their own courts, etc. But they had grown up accepting restricted freedoms. They must keep their faith to themselves. Most importantly they should never try to share Christ,as Savior,with a Muslim friend. This was against the law. Survival meant compliance. Life was relatively okay if you minded your own business. Conversion was a one-way street for the Muslim. Anyone was welcome to convert to Islam but the reverse was considered a crime punishable by death under the Law of Apostasy. As a Christian brought up in Canada, my spirit rebelled against such laws. How could one even begin to be a Christian if you could not speak boldly about the faith within you? How could you obey God's commands if this was the law of the land? It was a contradiction. "If you confess with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved." Romans 10:9. Similar conditions were faced by Peter and John as they stood before the Jewish authorities. They were told not to speak or teach at all in the name of Jesus. But Peter and John replied, 'Judge for yourselves whether it is right in God's sight to obey you rather than God. For we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard.'" Acts 4: 19,20 It is not difficult to see how this kind of "protection" would ultimately change the very personality of an entire group of people. "The dhimmi's consciousness--like that of the hostage--moves in a context of vulnerability which annuls the notion of rights and condemns him to exude gratitude for being tolerated. The dhimma is incompatible with the modern principles of inalienable and equal human rights." This quote is from an unusual new book, which has just come to our attention. THE DECLINE OF EASTERN CHRISTIANITY UNDER ISLAM: From Jihad to Dhimmitude, by Bat Ye'or, available in the USA from Associated University Presses, 440 Forsgate Drive, Cranbury, NJ 08512. It is to be hoped that these two words, both "dhimmi" and "dhimmitude" will become familiar to your ears, just as you have absorbed "jihad" and "shari'a" into your conscious vocabulary. This scholarly work, fully documented, was originally published in the French language and has just appeared in a beautiful English translation. The author spent many years producing a work which is focused on the effect which Islam has had upon the nations and peoples it has conquered. Another quote will give you an idea of the masterful way in which the author portrays more than one thousand years of history: "In the lands conquered by jihad (i.e., all the Muslim countries except Arabia), the Peoples of the Book formed majorities, among whom the Arabs of the first wave of Islamization and the Turks of the second wave were in the minority. Presumably the complex and little-known process that transformed those majorities into minorities covered some three or four centuries for each wave of Islamization. By contracting it, the expression 'religious minorities' reverses a chronological process that had spread over centuries, whose result --- the minority condition --- is taken as its starting point."
The discovery of such a book as THE DECLINE OF EASTERN CHRISTIANITY UNDER ISLAM: from Jihad to Dhimmitude, is almost akin to stumbling into a field strewn with precious gems. At a later date we shall hope to go into more detail about the contents of this book. For the moment it is enough to merely open up some of the subjects which it raises. As the author concluded, "dhimmitude" is a "historical, political, social and geographical fact." And she makes a point to single out that the Islamization of so many nations could not have taken place without the simultaneous working of two factors: "a conquering militarist minority" and the betrayals and active cooperation of ambitious renegades. From time to time one is amazed to hear of some atrocious denial of the historicity of the Holocaust. With that in mind consider a quote from a recently published book by the World Council of Churches in Geneva, Switzerland, entitled RELIGION, LAW AND SOCIETY: A Christian-Muslim Discussion. One of the Muslim speakers, Dr. Walid Saif of the University of Jordan, had the nerve to make this comment: "To my mind, even to discuss the subject under the label of 'rights of non-Muslims' is misleading and probably counterproductive, because it may imply that non-Muslims' in an Islamic state are signaled out as being a special category with a somehow different status." How many Christians on tour in the Holy Land and Egypt have discovered first hand the difficulties faced by the Egyptian Christian when he wants to make some repairs to his church building and finds he does not have permission for the most needy of improvements! Live in a Christian community in any Muslim country and see how misleading are Dr. Saif's comments . In the early days of their conquest, which the Arabs euphemistically called a "liberation," conversion to Islam was the only sure way to escape the humiliation, and the unjust taxation forced upon them by the application of shari'a law. Later on during the Ottoman occupation of Eastern Europe, the Christian population of these areas, experienced the ruthless snatching of their sons for lifetime service in that special army called the "janissaries." As the author of the book puts it: "Young Christian children abducted during "razzias"(raids), allocated within the quint of war booty, or by the "devshirme" (recruiting of Christian children), were reduced to slavery and converted to Islam. Subjected to an intense military and religious education, they constituted the Muslim power's elite troops. Blind and fanatical tools of the sultan, they became the cruelest persecutors of Christians. The janissary incarnates the quintessence of dhimmitude, brought to its perfection." The early missionaries to the Middle East were under no delusions about the debilitating effects of 400 years of Ottoman oppression. What a pity then that some missionaries in recent times, who have gone out filled with zeal to initiate some new way to open up this difficult field, have been ill equipped because of their own inadequate grasp of the long, long history of the lands to which they were going. Hence they pronounced Eastern Christians as being "stumbling blocks" to their work. They had no sympathy with these Christians who have suffered so much. They could not see that the Eastern Christian lacked the benefits of the Reformation and the true freedom of expression which the Western world has enjoyed, as a fruit of Christianity. Considering the increasing Islamic presence in the Western world, Christians need to learn some basic facts about the Islamic conquest that went on for centuries and to grasp what "dhimmitude" means. We have both a great opportunity and a challenge to present the Good News to many Muslim people who have come to live among us as economic migrants. Perhaps they can see how our Western culture (often regarded by them as Christian) allows them to have complete freedom of worship and expression. They find no obstacles in their way as they engage in da'wah missions, boldly proclaiming Islam as God's perfect religion. Is it then too much to hope that in our atmosphere of freedom we may expect some Muslims to acknowledge this dark part of their history? While the past cannot be erased, yet recognizing the terrible nature of "dhimmitude" should be the basis for building a genuine peaceful co-existence between peoples and nations in a world filled with six billion people. To ignore the past is a sure recipe for repeating its injustices and perpetuating oppressive conditions for minorities who, a millennium ago, were actually the majority in their homelands.
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