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.

[Cicero]

Bat Ye'or's book is essential reading for those who want to understand the full depth of the potential threat that Islam represents. I have added some paragraphs to the original text.

[ikanakattara]

The sad historical fact is that wherever Islam has militarily conquered an area previously Christian, within a relatively short time there are virtually no traces of Christianity left. If anyone can give a single historical counterexample, I would love to hear it.

[Cicero]

As you can see, this commentary was published about four years ago, about a book that was written earlier. But it strikes me as prophetic of our present situation. Attacks against Christians are more numerous now than those Neuhaus mentioned as having taken place back then. And the face of militant Islam is more evident than it was.

[Cicero]

Islam also managed to destroy two of the great "center" civilizations of the world, which had lasted for thousands of years before Muslims wiped them out. One was the civilization of ancient Egypt, which survived the Romans but perished under Islamic invasions. The other was the civilization known by a variety of names, but always reborn, as Mesopotamia, Babylon, Assyria, Persia. That great civilization, perhaps the first in recorded history, was also destroyed by the Arabs. In its place now are a bunch of little tinpot dictatorships.

[wideawake]

There are several million Copts left in Egypt - but they are second class citizens.

[Cicero]

Here is the brief review of the book, from the same issue of First Things:

The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude. By Bat Ye’or. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. 522 pp. $45 cloth, $19.95 paper.

Reviewed by Edward T. Oakes, S.J.

On May 20, 1997 Senator Arlen Specter and Representative Frank Wolf introduced legislation in Congress identifying as persecuted minorities the Buddhists of Tibet, the Bahais in Iran, and the Christians in China and eight Muslim countries. China’s oppression of Christians has a totalitarian rationale common to most Marxist regimes; the basis for the persecution of Christians in Muslim countries, however, is much more complicated: in part a traditional rejection of and in part a reaction to modernity. But for any reader who wants to find in one volume the immense complexity of traditional Muslim rationale for relegating Christians to second-class citizenship, this is the book. Bat Ye’or is an Egyptian scholar now living in France and whose earlier book The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians under Islam opened up for scholars a relatively neglected area of research. While not quite her coinage (as her publisher erroneously claims), "dhimmitude" is a neologism to which Ye’or gave wide circulation in France. Speaking very roughly, it refers to the second-class citizenship of Jews and Christians—the so-called "People of the Book"—living in the House of Islam. 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. Although the madness currently seizing Sudan and Algeria is not the focus of her book, one concludes Ye’or’s brilliant monograph realizing how fragile the recognition of human rights can be and how long the road will be before all the globe admits what Vatican II taught: that the right to worship God according to one’s conscience is an essential component to what it means to be a human being created by this same God—whom we all worship, however unawares.

[Cicero]

All of North Africa was Christian at the time of the late Roman Empire. St. Augustine, as you know, was Bishop of Hippo. The Copts are almost the only survivors of those ancient Christians. The rest were extinguished by various Islamic laws: for example, that a Christian woman must marry a Muslim man if he demands it, but the reverse is not permitted. Or that any Muslim who converts to another religion is subject to the death penalty. Jews and Christians can choose to become Muslims but Muslims can never become Jews or Christians as long as Muslims have the power to determine the law.

It's a kind of miracle that the Copts have survived so long. But of course all over the Middle East and North Africa the number of Christians continues to diminish. And in Egypt, recurrent massacres of Copts by Muslims are seldom punished. Somehow the perpetrators can never be found.

[Dumb_Ox]

^

[Stefan Stackhouse]

The sad historical fact is that wherever Islam has militarily conquered an area previously Christian, within a relatively short time there are virtually no traces of Christianity left. If anyone can give a single historical counterexample, I would love to hear it.

Something not widely known is that 75% of Americans of Arab descent are Christians. There is a reason why they left their native land.

[truth_seeker]

Islam also managed to destroy two of the great "center" civilizations of the world, which had lasted for thousands of years before Muslims wiped them out.

Our own civilization (arguably) dates to the Magna Carta. It has meant increased personal freedoms; it has meant increased economic freedoms; it has separated church from state; it has spread to many countries.

Islam cannot compete. It has produced no material wealth on its own. It has no living legacy of lawful, just, peaceful society.

[Cicero]

Islam cannot compete on a level playing field, but the playing field isn't level. The Soviet Union had a seventy-year history of swallowing up country after country and never relinquishing one of them. People didn't much like living there, but they didn't have much choice.

Islam does it better. They can expand, but they are very seldom driven back. Spain was one of the few exceptions, and that took hundreds of years of bloody war and sacrifice to accomplish.

The Ottoman Empire fell because it couldn't match the material attractions of the West. But the pieces it fell into continue to be as Islamic as they ever were.

[Stefan Stackhouse]

All of North Africa was Christian at the time of the late Roman Empire. St. Augustine, as you know, was Bishop of Hippo. The Copts are almost the only survivors of those ancient Christians. The rest were extinguished by various Islamic laws:

Actually, a very large number of them were "extinguished" at the point of a sword during the initial Muslim conquests. When Muslims criticize Christians for the crusades, they act as if Palestine and the Levant had been Muslim forever, or as if their conquest in the 7th century was of vacant, empty ground. The fact is that they conquered a Christian population, much of which were slaughtered. The Crusades were a counterattack. According to the Muslims, our aggression was bad, theirs was good -- a double standard.

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. Yet, if the Muslim world was to have its way (and make no mistake, almost ALL Muslims would approve of this), every single Israeli man, woman, and child would be driven into the sea and have their throats slit. And such Muslim aggression would be perfectly justifiable by their double standard.

We are seeing the same thing even now. The slaughter of over six thousand "infidels" is cause for rejoicing in the streets, while incredibly accurate precision bombing of the most carefully selected and limited set of military targets brings them out in the streets rioting.

[SwimmingUpstream]

Dear Cicero,

Here is a link to an INTERVIEW of Bat Ye'or on this subject.

Kindest Regards

[crazykatz]

bump

[independentmind]

From one of the links you provided above:

The 1992 UN decision to recognize a "multi-ethnic", "multi-religious", Muslim state in the former Yugoslavia appears to have been a compensation offered to the Islamic world for the devastating 1991 Gulf War. The destruction of Iraq's nuclear, chemical and bacteriological arsenal, as well as its economic infrastructure, appears to be "equitably" counterbalanced by NATO's massive bombing of the Bosnian Serbs, even though the two situations cannot be compared.

Very interesting. I have never seen this connection made before.

[John Locke]

All of North Africa was Christian at the time of the late Roman Empire.

All of North Africa was Pagan at the time of the early Roman Empire.

It's not just Islam that eradicates older religions; it seems to be a besetting vice of monotheism in general.

[SwimmingUpstream]

Returning a favor -- fyi (you may want to take a peak at the interview link I posted here, too).

Kindest Regards

[SwimmingUpstream]

FYI

You may want to take a peak at the interview I link in my #13.

Kindest Regards