Informal Book Review of "The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude"

First Things ^ | August/September 1997 | Richard John Neuhaus / Bat Ye'or

[Cicero]

Shortly before his death, the French writer André Malraux said, "The twenty-first century will be religious or it will not be at all." Many might take that as unqualifiedly good news, but I think that is a mistake. Religion is as riddled through and through with the capacity for evil as any other dimension of human life. For many reasons, Christianity is more favorably situated at the edge of the third millennium than its chief culture-forming rival, Islam.

Recently, Vatican officials, among others, have noted an increasingly violent encounter between Islam and Christianity. Last year a Catholic bishop was slain in the Philippines, and so far this year there have been new Muslim attacks against Christians in Uganda, Pakistan, Egypt, and Indonesia. Jesuit Father Thomas Michel, a student of Islam, observes, "Previously, I think we had this unexamined idea of [Muslim-Christian] dialogue that ties in with a historical optimism that things were going to continue to get better. Now I think we understand that dialogue has got to be carried on in the worst of situations, at all times."

Bat Ye’or, a French scholar born in Egypt, has published a sobering account of Christian-Muslim relations through the centuries, The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press). (See notice in Briefly Noted.) In the foreword, noted French Protestant scholar Jacques Ellul writes, "The world, as Bat Ye’or brilliantly shows, is divided into two regions: the dar al-Islam and the dar al-harb; in other words, the ‘domain of Islam’ and the ‘domain of war.’"

Jihad and dhimmitude (the subjection of non-Muslims) is, he writes, a permanent institution of Islam, and the West is all too slow in awakening to the fact that the current phase of Muslim aggression has been going on for some years.

The dialogue that Fr. Michel rightly sees as an undeniable imperative for Christians must be conducted within the context of conflict depicted with such stark realism by Bat Ye’or and other scholars.

[Romulus]

We see the same double standard at work today. Jews reclaiming the homeland that was theirs long before there ever were any "Palestinians" are evil Zionist aggressors.

Hundreds of thousands of those Palestinians were Christians, direct descendants of the first Christians in history, who had dwelt in the same land for 2,000 years. It was not the horrors of dhimmitude that finally drove them from their ancestral land.

[Romulus]

What strikes one after reading this vastly informative book is how much the conditions of this dhimmitude varied among countries, rulers, and eras, and how much the encounter with Western modernity has added a new element of ambivalence, almost schizophrenia, in Muslim jurisprudence—sometimes leading to emancipation and sometimes to a violence and hatred unknown to the past, as in present-day Algeria.

This is important.

[Aquinasfan]

It's time to wake up and smell the feces. Are you listening Oprah Nation?