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.
This is important.