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

[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?