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THE CULTURE OF ISLAM
An HIR Series
Historical and Investigative Research
- 14 October 2007
by Francisco Gil-White
http://www.hirhome.com/islam/culture02.htm
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2
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Dhimmitude and
slavery
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The fates of non-Muslims (and Muslims, too)
in
Islamic society
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As Islam continues to encroach upon the West, and as
Westerners continue to not defend themselves from the growth of Islam, we can
open a window into what our (fast approaching) future will be like, by
considering what the oppressive conditions of non-Muslims, and even of most
Muslims, in Islamic society traditionally have been, and continue to be.
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Table of Contents
( hyperlinked < )
< Short Preface
< Dhimmitude
< Slavery
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Short Preface
In the previous
piece in this series, we have seen the influential
medieval Muslim jurist Ibn Hazm explaining that jihad is a terrorist, even
genocidal, war against infidels. However, Muslim armies did not always murder
or enslave everybody who refused conversion to Islam. Especially in the cases
of Jews and Christians -- for supposedly having a common ancestry with Islam
-- Muslims would allow some infidels to live and continue with their faiths,
so long as these infidels accepted a contract, called dhimma, which
turned them into the semi-slaves of the Muslims. Such semi-slaves were called
dhimmis, or ‘people of protection.’ Their life was the condition of dhimmitude,
a term coined by the scholar
Bat Ye'or.
I will consider first the traditional condition of dhimmitude,
and then the reality of modern outright slavery in today's Muslim states.
Dhimmitude
___________
Muslims consider the Qur’an (Koran), their holy
book, to be the word of God (Allah), and this book speaks clearly on the
question of the ‘people of protection.’ I will quote here a few Quranic
passages on Christians and Jews so that readers can get a general feeling for
how they are perceived:
“Allah has cursed them [Jews] for their Unbelief;
and but few of them will believe” (4.46); “(Both) the Jews and the Christians
say: ‘We are sons of Allah, and his beloved.’ Say: ‘Why then does He punish
you for your sins? ...’ ” (5.18); “...the Jews [are] men who will listen to
any lie... it is not Allah's will to purify their hearts. For them there is
disgrace in this world, and in the Hereafter a heavy punishment” (5.41); “O
ye who believe! take not the Jews and the Christians for your friends and
protectors: They are but friends and protectors to each other. And he amongst
you that turns to them (for friendship) is of them [i.e. an infidel]” (5.51);
“The Jews say: ‘Allah's hand is tied up.’ Be their hands tied up and be they
accursed for the (blasphemy) they utter... [T]he revelation that comes to
them from Allah increases in most of them their obstinate rebellion and
blasphemy. Amongst them we have placed enmity and hatred till the Day of
Judgment. ...[T]hey (ever) strive to do mischief on earth. And Allah loves
not those who do mischief” (5.64); “Allah’s curse be on them [Christians and
Jews]: how they are deluded away from the Truth!” (9.30); “Allah let their
hearts [of Jews] go wrong. For Allah guides not those who are rebellious
transgressors” (61.5); “Say: ‘O ye that stand on Judaism! If ye think that ye
are friends to Allah, to the exclusion of (other) men, then express your
desire for Death, if ye are truthful!’” (62.6).
If dhimmis have been cursed by Allah, as the
Qur’an repeatedly says, then it will be pious to oppress them. The dhimmi
may not bear arms. He generally has no rights to property. He may not erect
new houses of worship nor may he restore the old ones. He may not testify in
court. He must wear special, distinctive clothing. His house may not be
taller than a Muslim’s house, however low a Muslim’s house may be. He may not
ride a horse or an elegant mule. He may ride on a donkey only if the saddle
is made of wood. He may not walk on the good side of the road. He must remain
quiet whenever prudent.[1]
Often the restrictions are considerably more severe.
In the treatise Lightning Bolts Against the Jews, al Majlisi, perhaps
the most influential Muslim cleric in the Savafid Shi’ite theocracy in
Persia, made a list of the laws concerning the dhimmis that recall the
revulsion towards blacks that white racists in the United States once openly
and officially expressed. It’s as if the Jews and other dhimmis were
composed of an entirely alien and polluting substance.
“And, that
they [the dhimmis] should not enter the pool while a Muslim is bathing
at the public baths. ...It is also incumbent upon Muslims that they should
not accept from them victuals with which they had come into contact, such as
distillates, which cannot be purified. If something can be purified, such as
clothes, if they are dry, they can be accepted, they are clean. But if they
[the dhimmis] had come into contact with those clothes in moisture
they should be rinsed with water after being obtained. ...It would also be
better if the ruler of the Muslims would establish that all infidels could
not move out of their homes on days when it rains or snows because they would
make Muslims impure.”[2]
Andrew Bostom, a scholar of Islam, explains that in
the Laws of Islamic Governance the Muslim jurist al Mawardi (d. 1058)
detailed how the non-Muslim subjugated population “had to recognize Islamic
ownership of the land, submit to Islamic law, and accept payment of the poll
tax (jizya).” Bostom says there is a “critical connection between jihad
and the payment of the jizya because, as Al Mawardi says, “the enemy
makes the payment in return for peace and reconciliation.” Al Mawardi adds
that if the dhimmis pay the jizya annually it will “constitute
an ongoing tribute by which their security is established.” But security is
never conceived of as a permanent arrangement: “a treaty of reconciliation,”
Bostom explains, “may be renewable, but must not exceed ten years.” And he
points out, with emphasis: “if the payment ceases, then the jihad resumes.”
By way of conclusion, Bostom cites the opinion of the Arab lexicographer E.W.
Lane on the meaning of the word jizya: the imposition of this tax is “as
though it were compensation [from the dhimmis] for not being slain.”[3]
An obvious parallel is to gangsters in many Western
cities. These extort their victims at gunpoint, explaining that the
alternative is death, and so the income they perceive is called, with irony,
‘protection money,’ and their business is called a ‘protection racket.’ You
pay the gangster so that he will protect you from himself. It is in this
sense, too, that dhimmis are ‘people of protection.’
For Muslims it is important that the payment of the jizya
be done in the most humiliating manner possible. An Nawawi, a Shafi’ite
jurist from the 13th century, explained it like this:
“The infidel
who wishes to pay his poll tax must be treated with disdain by the collector:
the collector remains seated and the infidel remains standing in front of
him, his head bowed and his back bent. The infidel personally must place the
money on the scales, while the collector holds him by the beard, and strikes him
on both cheeks.”[4]
The jizya was a poll tax, and Bostom explains
that every head was counted: “it was demanded from children, widows,
orphans, and even the dead.” Says An Nawawi: “Our religion compels the poll
tax to be paid by dying people, the old, even in a state of incapacity, the
blind, monks, workers, and the poor, incapable of practicing a trade. As for
people who seem to be insolvent at the end of the year, the sum of the poll
tax remains a debt to their account until they should become solvent.” Such
fiscal oppression would naturally produce resistance, and therefore the “tax
collectors were accompanied by soldiers.” They were also accompanied by
inspectors, auditors, and money changers, and they were all “paid, fed, and
lodged for several days at the taxpayer’s expense.”[5]
For Westerners -- who hear all the time that Islam is the
religion of peace, tolerance, and
compassion, and also that the violence of
Muslims is a ‘fundamentalist’ distortion against the true Islamic teaching
and tradition -- it will be instructive to read the chronicle of Ghevond, an
Armenian Christian writing in the 8th century under Abbasid rule:
“One saw...
horrible scenes of every sort of torture; nor did [they] forget to tax the
dead; the multitude of orphans and widows suffered the same cruelty; priests
and ministers at the holy sanctuary were forced by the vile punishments of
flogging and whipping to disclose the names of the dead and their parents; in
short the whole population of the country, smitten with enormous taxes, after
having paid large sums of zuze [silver coins], also had to wear a lead seal
around their necks... as for the lower classes of the population, it had been
exposed to different sorts of torture: some suffered flagellation for being
unable to pay exorbitant taxes; others were hanged on gibbets, or crushed
under presses; and others were stripped of their clothing and thrown into
lakes in the depths of an extremely cold winter: and soldiers spaced out on
the banks prevented them clambering ashore and forced them to perish
wretchedly.”[6]
Now, one commonly hears, even from Jews, that in
Muslim lands Jews used to live relatively well. What accounts for such
statements? In part they result from the propaganda about Islam that comes at
us from every direction (examined in the
previous piece), and which assures us that Islam is
the ‘religion of peace’ and that Jews and Christians were ‘people of
protection’ or ‘protected peoples’ in Muslim lands, phrases that an ignorant
public interprets literally.
There is also the following phenomenon, which Ibn
Warraq highlights:
In an
important essay, ‘The pro-Islamic Jews,’ [the scholar of Islam] Bernard Lewis
recounts how the romantic cult of Spain reaching its peak in Victor Hugo's Hernani
influenced Jews who now nourished the illusion that they ‘had flourished
in Muslim Spain, had been driven from Christian Spain, and had found refuge
in Muslim Turkey.’ But, as Lewis points out, ‘The golden age of equal rights
[in Spain] was a myth, and belief in it was a result, more than a cause, of
Jewish sympathy for Islam. The myth was invented by Jews in
nineteenth-century Europe as a reproach to Christians.’ ”[6a]
Ibn Warraq goes on to point out that “Something of
the myth of the Golden Age of Spain persists to this day,” because European
politicians and the European media, especially, will “invite only those
scholars who believe in the myth of Islamic tolerance.” As a result, says
Warraq, this myth has become something of an orthodoxy among Western students
of Islam. The consequence is that “there are a number of scholars writing in
the West whose works are widely read, respected, and influential but who, for
various reasons, wish to play down the history of the dhimmis,
including the Armenian genocide [carried out by the Ottoman Turks], and the
periodic but persistent massacres of not only Jews and Christians, but the
oft-neglected Hindus, Zoroastrians, and Buddhists, living under Islam.”
Then there is the myth about the Ottoman Empire,
which supposedly treated Jews well. Towards the end, in modern times, the
condition of Jews in Istanbul and areas close to Europe did improve because
the Ottoman Empire was dying and the modern Christian states, getting stronger
all the time, could exert pressure to protect the rights of Christian
communities in the empire, with benefits accruing also to the Jews. It is
true, also, that in earlier times the Ottoman Sultan Mejmet II was relatively
tolerant, and Bayezid II received many Jews who had been expelled from Spain.
But this does not change the fact of the wholesale destruction of Jewish
communities during the Ottoman jihad that conquered Bizantium, nor
does it erase the outbursts of oppression under the same Bayezid II and Selim
I, though Jewish writers in the 16th c. may have wanted to forget all that.[7] It is absurd to propose that
the Ottomans were always tolerant, because a few rulers were (sometimes) less
repressive, just as it is absurd to propose that the Polish population of the
first half of the 20th c. was not antisemitic because earlier the Polish
kings had allowed many Jews to settle in Polish lands and had been tolerant. One fact does not erase the other.
Another important effect distorting modern
perceptions is that, in North Africa, and also in Syria and Lebanon, right
before the Jews were expelled from Arab lands -- an expulsion motivated by
the successful Israeli War of Independence of 1948 -- the Jews had been doing
relatively well, and this is the memory that those who left these lands took
with them, transmitting it also to their descendants. But these improved
conditions for Jews were a consequence of French interventions in the 19th c.
and in the early 20th. The French conquest of Algeria, for example, happened
in 1830, and “in 1870 the Jews, as a class, were given full rights of
citizenship.” This continued the policies of the French Revolution of 1789,
which had fully emancipated the French Jews, followed by Napoleon Bonaparte’s
emancipations in the rest of Europe. The same author I just quoted, writing
in 1909, commented concerning the Jews of Morocco that they favored
France because “France gave them freedom and security and citizenship in
Algeria, and the Jews of Morocco look for the time when French control of
that country will give them the same benefits.”[8] It is difficult to argue that
the Jews in the Muslim countries of North Africa were doing well if they
lacked liberty, security, and citizenship -- that is to say, if they were dhimmis.
And this oppression was not a question of Ottoman rule versus not
because Morocco (but not Algeria) had managed to stay independent of the
Ottomans.
As for 'Palestine,' conditions for Jews there were
never good, even with the arrival of the British. To see what Jewish life in
'Palestine' was like, consult:
Was Arab
anti-Jewish racism in the first half of the 20th c. fundamentally different
from the European variety?; from UNDERSTANDING THE PALESTINIAN MOVEMENT; Historical
and Investigative Research; 22 April 2006; by Francisco Gil-White.
http://www.hirhome.com/israel/pal_mov.htm
Slavery
_______
Many people believe slavery has disappeared in the
modern world but this is not true, and certainly not in the case of Muslim
societies.
In 1964, in a short article that appeared in International
Migration Digest titled “Forced Migration: The Slave Trade Still
Flourishes,” the author wrote that,
“Slavery
countenanced by law or custom may be found today in Africa, Asia, and Asia
Minor. Specific sites include Aden, Kuwait, Muscat, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia
(which has announced its ‘termination,’ but whether that means that their
500,000 old slaves are freed or no new ones may be purchased is not clear),
parts of the Sudan, and Yemen.”[9]
The list of states where slavery was practised as
late as 1964 is a list of Muslim states.
Aharon Layish, writing in the Journal of the
American Oriental Society stated in 1987 that:
“Slavery and
concubinage, firmly anchored in the shari'a and in reality, were
abolished in 1962, mainly in deference to world opinion. ...At the same time
it appears that slavery, and especially concubinage, have not yet completely
disappeared”[10]
I must confess to not having the slightest idea what
Layish means by slavery and concubinage being “firmly anchored... in
reality.” But it is interesting that in 1987, 25 years after the supposed
abolition of slavery in Saudi Arabia, scholars of this country conceded the
point in print that slavery there had not ended. The admission is quite
significant because, as mentioned above, Western scholars of Muslim countries
in recent times tend to be quite deferential to these countries and work hard
to diminish the impression that there is anything wrong with them. Layish's
article is in fact a defense of the view that Saudi Arabia is becoming more
moderate! Given this bias, one is entitled to wonder if perhaps Layish has
distorted matters when he states that in Saudi Arabia “slavery, and
especially concubinage, have not yet completely disappeared.” Perhaps the
truth is that these abuses remain rampant.
Of course, it is possible that Layish can claim,
strictly speaking, to be stating matters correctly because he is referring to
outright, official slavery, and not to other forms of slavery that are
not ‘on the books,’ so to speak. In this connection it
is important that a very large population of foreign workers, including many
non-Muslims, live as ‘guest-workers’ in the Muslim oil-producing countries of
the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula. In 1982, Myron Weiner wrote in Population
and Development Review that “In the five small oil-producing states that
line the Persian Gulf -- Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates,
and Oman -- two thirds of the labor force is imported.”[11] Two thirds. Astounding: already in 1982 there were more foreigners than
nationals. And yet matters have become more extreme. Eight years later Frans
Schuurman & Raouf Salib would write in Social Scientist that in
the United Arab Emirates the proportion of foreign workers was now almost 3/4
of the population. But this was not the most extreme case. “Of the 250,000
inhabitants in Qatar 75 per cent is non-Qatari, with an even higher figure
(86 per cent) for foreign participation in the economically active
population.” It is only in the context of such comparisons that Saudi Arabia
is a bit less shocking: “In the whole of Saudi Arabia 30 per cent of the
population is of foreign origin,” wrote Schuurman and Salib, whereas in some
cities, like Jeddah, “52 per cent are foreigners.” And here is the key point:
the same authors explain that “labor migrants in many [Arab] countries are
denied the same services and rights as the national population, e.g. there is
no juridical protection whatsoever, there is discrimination and the housing
conditions in many instances are very bad.”[12]
A small aristocracy ruling a mass of oppressed
foreigners. This is the time-worn Islamic model, following a Muslim conquest.
Now it happens through the importation of foreign workers.
A 2003 article in The Middle East Report didn't
mince too many words on this question. Focusing on Saudi Arabia, they wrote:
“Augmenting
anxieties generated by economic futility and the specter of total social
disarray is the authoritarian regime itself, long at the vanguard of the
world's oppressive governments. Religious minorities are marginalized. The
Shi'a, who live mostly in the oil-rich eastern province of al-Hasa and make
up between 10-20 percent of the population, have been ruthlessly oppressed. The
monarchy's record on women's rights and most other measures of human rights
is worse than abysmal, as documented by Human Rights Watch, the State
Department and others. Foreign laborers toil in virtual slavery,
subordinate to vague labor laws that allow their unlimited exploitation.
Arrest without formal charge is frequent, the torture of criminal and
political prisoners is common, and due process is mythical. Forced
confessions fill the police records, while capital and corporal punishments
are handed out with frightening regularity. The top-heavy regime is corrupt
and cruel, and maintains domestic order through fear and the threat of
violence.”[13]
(emphasis added)
The above portrayal of Saudi Arabia, note, is based
on the assertions of Human Rights Watch, which has been shown to be a NATO
lapdog,[14]
and from the State Department, the foreign relations ministry of the United
States, which has a close alliance with the Saudi regime. In other words,
these are hardly hostile sources.
Consider the following statements from the US State
Department, made in early 2007:
“Saudi Arabia
is a destination country for men and women trafficked for the purposes of
involuntary servitude and, to a lesser extent, commercial sexual
exploitation. Men and women from Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Nepal,
Pakistan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Kenya, and Ethiopia
voluntarily travel to Saudi Arabia as domestic servants or other low-skilled
laborers, but subsequently face conditions of involuntary servitude,
including withholding of passports and other restrictions on movement,
non-payment of wages, threats, and physical or sexual abuse. Women from
Yemen, Morocco, Pakistan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Tajikistan were also trafficked
into Saudi Arabia for commercial sexual exploitation; others were reportedly
kidnapped and forced into prostitution after running away from abusive
employers. In addition, Saudi Arabia is a destination country for Nigerian,
Yemeni, Pakistani, Afghan, Chadian, and Sudanese children trafficked for
involuntary servitude as forced beggars and as street vendors.
The Government of Saudi Arabia does not fully comply with the minimum
standards for the elimination of trafficking and is not making significant
efforts to do so. Saudi Arabia is placed on Tier 3 for a third consecutive
year. The government failed to enact a comprehensive criminal
anti-trafficking law, and, despite evidence of widespread trafficking abuses,
did not significantly increase the number of prosecutions of these crimes
committed against foreign domestic workers. The government similarly did not
take law enforcement action against trafficking for commercial sexual
exploitation in Saudi Arabia, or take any steps to provide victims of sex
trafficking with protection. Saudi Arabia also continues to lack a victim
identification procedure to identify and refer victims to protective
services.”[15]
I must point out that this oppression is carried out
against a large population of Muslims as well as non-Muslims. This,
too, is traditional. Islam is a predatory ideology that oppresses everybody
except for the tiny aristocracy at the top. The oppression against Muslim
women, half the population, is already infamous. But a good many men fare
poorly, as well. The French scholar of Islam Clement Huart wrote in 1907 --
long before the present wave of pro-Muslim political correctness in the West
-- that a Muslim conquering state, when considering persons in the conquered
population, applies the following rule: “The status of slave is presumed
until the contrary is proved... Conversion to Islam does not alter that
status since it is legal to own a Muslim slave.”[16]
Now you have a good window into the future of the
West, if present trends continue.
The following piece in this series will examine the
growth of Islam in Western countries (much of it subsidized by Saudi Arabia),
the policies of Western ruling classes, and the reaction of Western citizenries.
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Footnotes and Further Reading
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