
By: RIC CARTER
Re: Islam Unbound & Uncovered

From: WELCOME 1997! <odin@netline.net>
Subject: PNEWS: A Review: "Islam Unbound & Uncovered"

[*********PNEWS CONFERENCES************]
From: elazar <keabram@ibm.net>

[Posted here in compliance with the FAIR USE DOCTRINE for educational
purposes. Not for commercial use. PNEWS recommends the
Jerusalem Post as an excellent and credible source of current information
and opinion about the Middle-East. Jerusalem Post January 2, 1997
Jerusalem Post Literary Supplement]

A...... "Religion Of War"

The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam: From Jihad
to Dhimmitude, by: Bat Ye'or. Translated from the French by
Miriam Kochan and David Littman. London, Associated
University Presses, and Cranbury, NJ, Fairleigh Dickinson
University Press. 522pp. Price not stated.

A Review by..... Dr. Mordechai Nisan

The examination of Muslim/non-Muslim relations in
Middle Eastern history since Islam's appearance is
a vast, complex, and controversial undertaking. The
subject has drawn the attention of Bernard Lewis,
Norman Stillman, Daniel Pipes, and other historians,
whose researches have opened up new vistas to probe
the problematical and precarious lives of Jews in Arab
lands. In the same domain of study, but from the Christian
perspective, scholars who represent their own national
minority communities have made valuable contributions:
Walid Phares writing on the Lebanese Christian Maronite
collapse, Vahakn Dadrian probing the Armenian genocide,
and Selim Naguib exposing the persecution of the Copts
in Egypt.

From another angle, the scholarly interpretation persists
concerning the "Golden Age" of (mythical or historical)
Muslim-Jewish symbiotic cultural flourishing in the
Middle Ages, this under the tolerant disposition of
magnanimous Islam toward its Eastern neighbors. The
recent study by Mark Cohen (Under Crescent And
Cross) argues this view, an interpretation that cannot be
bypassed, nor one that can be accepted as the ultimate
and complete validation of history.

This new book by Bat Ye'or, a sequel to her 1985 work
(The Dhimmi), is a bold exposition of Christian decline
under Islam in the Middle East, and fits the category of
revisionist historical scholarship. Its 10 chapters of
narrative history and 175 pages of documents comprise a
challenging discourse that weaves together the doctrine of
Islamic jihad and the tale of Muslim conquest, culminating
in the diminution, subjugation, emasculation, conversion,
massacre, and deportation of the indigenous Christians
who came under the rule of Muhammad's faithful.

The record of history is stark and cruel in describing the
slaughter and enslavement of Christians, from Syria to
Sardinia, from Bagdad to Bosnia, from Arabia to Andalusia.
The "sword of Islam" served the Muslims - first the Arabs,
later the Turks and Persians - in the unfolding drama of
conquest and rule. Churches were turned into mosques
and free peoples were demoted into oblivion as wide
stretches of Central Asia, the Orient, North Africa, and the
Balkans were absorbed into dar el-Islam (the realm of Islam)
from the 7th century to the 17th.

Dhimmitude is the Arabic-root term to identify the dehuman-
ized condition of Christians and Jews under the humiliating
domination of Moslem power. It signifies the obligation to
pay tribute, suffer indignities to person and property, and
submit to plunder and precariousness. Meanwhile, Islam
developed its cultural ambience and civilizational treasures,
as Bat Ye'or writes, "in the midst of conquered peoples,
feeding off their vigor and on the dying, bloodless body of
dhimmitude."

The novelty of this book (and of its predecessor) lies in
the rigorous conception of dhimmitude as the natural
consequence of the overarching and permanent structure
of mind and practice inherent within doctrinaire jihadic
Islam. Bat Ye'or has grasped that the underlying foundation
of war and the undying spirit of conquest are central
motifs in Islam. Some 13 percent of the Middle East
population were still Christian a century ago. Today only
some 2 percent are adherents of any Church.

Muslims see it as imperative to overwhelm non-Muslims
wherever and whenever possibile. Dhimmi nationalisms,
like the Greek and Slavic struggles in the 19th century,
certainly the Armenian effort snuffed by the Turks and the
Jewish one battered by the Arabs in the 20th century, are
considered blasphemous violations of the Pact of
`Umar/dhimma that catalyze a renewal of the jihad against
the rebellious native populations of history.

The thesis of jihad-dhimmitude is a compelling equation
of the parameters of power, with the denial of Christian
equality constituting a formidable ingredient highlighting
Muslim superiority. It is something that the Christians
of Bethlehem feel in these days of Hamas-style Islamic
fundamentalism, while the Muslims arrogate to themselves
the mantle of Palestinian authenticity and leadership.

Certainly the Jews of Israel should not expect, were their
political stamina to falter and their state to decay, that
anything but a dismal and unbearable dhimmi fate would
be their tragic lot, and end, in Palestine.

Bat Ye'or, an Egyptian Jewess long resident in Switzerland,
touches on the sad anomaly of the defeated and distraught
Christians submitting to Muslim power in the Middle East,
but also internalizing the base dhimmi mind-set in the lands
of the Christian West. There the psychology as opposed
to the policy of dhimmitude has helped forge a mechanism
of defeatism and opportunism, in particular in Europe.
Submission to oil-rich Arabs and trepidation in the face of
Muslim terrorism have turned the once confident West
into an appendage of Muslim expansion, placing the infidels
in dar el-harb (the realm of war).

It is the goal of world conquest propelled by a religion of war
that is the essence of the Islamic enterprise whenever feasible,
while always remaining the heart of the conviction and aspira-
tion of the "Muslim nation." Muslims may have been grieving
for their victimized condition since the early 19th century,
subject to the indignities of Western penetration, colonialism,
racism, and imperalism; but this image conceals the
reality of an ethic of jihad against the unfortunate Christians
in the past and against the pliant frightened West of today.

Bat Ye'or has painted a gloomy and threatening picture of
dhimmi capitulation to the forces of Muslim and Arab power in
Egypt and the Sudan, in Lebanon and Iraq. And yet the
political discourse of our times fosters obfuscation rather
elucidation of Muslim discrimination and persecution of
Christians, while excoriating past Western aggression and its
lingering guilt-ridden crimes, like American intervention in
Iraq and the Persian Gulf.

When Bernard Lewis wrote a small eye-opening account of
Race and Color in Islam in 1970, it was ignored due to its
independent and politically incorrect, though scholarly,
exposition. Bat Ye'or's The Decline of Eastern Christianity
under Islam, appearing a quarter of a century later, will
hopefully earn its due consideration and recognition, for
it is definitely a courageous work and scholarly work.

Truth may be disturbing, but, as Max Weber pointed out,
the role of the teacher is to present uncomfortable facts.

Elazar

==============================================
"A "PACIFIST," WHO LETS EVIL RUN
RAMPANT, IS AN ENEMY OF ULTIMATE PEACE... tho peaceful"
[YaaKov Fogelman, Jerusalem]
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