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It is standard fare in many college and university courses today to contrast the history of Christian treatment of religious minorities, particularly Jews and Muslims, with the history of Jews and Christians under Islam. According to this politically correct scenario, Christians have been brutally intolerant while Muslims have generally been quite benign (except in response to Christian provocations, from the Crusades to colonialism).
Alas, the charge of Christian intolerance has a good deal of substance, though the historical record is not as uniformly bad as it is often said to be. But what about Islamic tolerance of Jews and Christians?
Bat Ye'or (a pseudonym meaning "daughter of the Nile") is an Egyptian-born Jewish scholar. In articles and books such as The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude (Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press), she has argued that Islamic tolerance is a myth of modern origin, born of the converging interests of the Islamic states and the Western colonial powers. The actual condition of the dhimmi—that is, the indigenous Jews, Christians, and other non-Muslims under Islamic law as a result of conquest—was one of fundamental subjection that permitted only the private exercise of religion. To describe the historical reality of Jews and Christians under Islam from the seventh century to the present, she has coined the term "dhimmitude."
This revisionist history is important for its own sake, to set the record straight. But it is particularly significant, Bat Ye'or argues, at a time when many Muslim intellectuals are neither discarding their faith in favor of Western models nor accepting uncritically the dictates of Islamic traditionalists but rather are seeking a reform of Islam from within.
Michael Cromartie interviewed Bat Ye'or this spring in Washington, D.C., where she was speaking at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
You have challenged the alleged tolerance of Islamic regimes toward Christians and Jews. You say Christians and Jews were considered to be protected and given a special designation as ahl al-dhimma ("protected people"), but contrary to this theory of a protected status, the conduct of many Muslims has been brutally oppressive toward non-Muslims. Could you elaborate?
In Islamic law there is both a history of protection of Jews and Christians and a history of persecution of Jews and Christians. Because of the whole history of Judaism and Christianity, Islam has been a subject deliberately obfuscated by Western policy. When there is no real history, there is a void, and myths flourish. We now have a myth which has taken the place of history, a big myth which has covered three continents: Africa, Asia, and Europe. This myth spans not only three continents but also 13 centuries, the period of Islamic rule over the Christian world.
A myth of tolerance?
Although tolerance existed, it was counterbalanced by a system of oppression that led to the open extermination of Christian populations and the disappearance of the Eastern Christian culture. Tolerance was given to Jews and Christians only on the condition that they would accept and submit to a system of persecution and total inferiority. The governing context for such tolerance was the jihad. The two are linked and cannot be separated.
How do you define jihad?
Jihad is a religious conception that divides the world into two parts: the Muslim lands and the non-Muslims. Between the two exists a situation of perpetual conflict. This situation of war can be replaced by a temporary situation of semipeace whereby non-Muslim countries pay a tribute to the Islamic countries. But if they stop paying the tribute, the jihad resumes because jihad is the normal state of relationship between the non-Muslim and the Muslim. Jihad is often compared to the Crusades, but it actually preceded the Crusades by five centuries. It was within the context of jihad that the Christian populations and Jewish communities became subject to the Islamic law.
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