Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide

by Bat Ye'or

Book Overview

In this study of the legal and social condition of Jews and Christians subjected to Islamic rule (the dhimmis), Bat Ye'or examines various religious and historical sources, using the new term 'dhimmitude' to describe their common history and legal status. Some of the laws derive from the special status institutionalized by the Church Fathers for Jews; once Islamized, these laws were incorporated into Muslim jurisprudence applicable for Christians...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1611472369
• ISBN13: 9781611472363
• Release Date: December 2001
• Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
• Length: 528 Pages
• Weight: 1.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.0" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

An eyopening account dispels myths

It is a dominant theme of the literature on the Jewish Diaspora that Jews in Muslim lands were treated better than Jews among Christians. It is repeated like a mantra, every student of Jewish history or of Islamic studies must learn it and repeat it, until it becomes myth. This excellent study is one of the few to challenge this dominat view. Today academics encourage the propoganda that Islam is 'more tolerant' than Christianity. However here we are given a small taste of that 'tolerance'. Dhimmi is a word meaning 'protected'. However just as the Nazis created concentration camps to 'protect' the Jews the word itself can be used in many ways. This book analyzes the experience of Jews in Muslim lands. Some have accused this work of 'only' concentrating on the negative aspects of Muslim-Jewish relations, however this is just the point, a litany of works have focused on this subject in Europe, it time that the dust be taken from the truth about Islamic nations. Partly the problem rests on lack of sources and literature, this book begins to fill this essential gap. A second way to analyze the question of which Jews were 'better off' is to see the end result. If Muslim lands were 'better' to the Jews then why did the Jews of Europe become free and wealthy? Why were there more Jews in Europe than muslim lands despite persecution, endless forced conversion and murder due to claims that Jews created the black death? Jews numbered 12 million in Christian lands while they numbered only a million in Muslim ones in 1930. By 1945 the numbers were 6 million and 1 million. By 1967 the numbers were 8 million and 50,000. Seth J. Frantzman

Stupendous, an absolute must

As an American Catholic living and working in Istanbul, I experienced many shocks of recognition while reading this book, even here in secular Turkey. For example, any crticism, no matter how small, of any aspect of Turkish culture, no matter how insignificant-seeming, is perceived as blasphemy, if not of Islam, then of the great Turkish culture. I read the history books at school and am appalled not so much by the many inconsistencies therein, but more by fellow foreigners' propensity to espouse them, verbatim no less, as well. After all none of us wants to be perceived as intolerant, even if it means being tolerant of intolerance. With the situation like this in Turkey, I can only imagine how much worse it is the farther east, and deeper into the 'heart' of 'Islamiyet', one moves. This book gives me a very good idea, and it is none too appealing.

Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide

This is a fascinating and historically accurate account of the age old hatred and persecution of Christians and Jews as ordered by the Koran, and Islamic Sharia law.After reading this book, one understands current world events better, e.g.: suicide murderers, massacre of Christian Sudanese, massacres of Christians in the Phillipines and in Indonesia, bombing of churches in Pakistan, and the massacre of Americans at the world trade center Sept. 11th 2001.This book is a must read for people interested in understanding the Arab mindset, and it's origins.

Denying the Legacy of Dhimmitude at Our Peril

Previously I forwarded a review of this book by Raphael Israeli, PhD, published in the 1/11/02 edition of The Jerusalem Post. The following is my own review:V. S. Naipaul, the Nobel laureate writer, depicts in both "Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey", and "Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples" how Islam attempts to erase the pre-Islamic history of conquered, indigenous peoples. Indeed, in awarding its 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature to Mr. Naipaul, the Nobel Committee , credited the author "for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories". Bat Ye'or's thirty years of scholarship on "dhimmitude", the religious, cultural, and political fate of non-Muslims, in particular Christians and Jews, living under Islamic rule, is a seminal effort to recapture this specific suppressed history. In her current work, "Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide", the author bravely elucidates how doctrinal patterns of subjugation of the dhimmi peoples (i.e., Christians and Jews) initiated during the Arab and Turkish waves of Islamic conquest, the jihad-dhimmitude continuum, are of immediate relevance to contemporary historical trends and specific events. Ye'or's unique prism reveals striking, poignant hypocrises. For example, she compares the paucity of Western press coverage of the brutal ongoing, 20-year jihad waged by the Islamist Khartoum government against thousands of black African Christian and Animist inhabitants of the southern Sudan, to the ceaseless, exaggerated reporting of the so-called al Aqsa intifada: "None of the Christian or animist children deliberately enslaved, converted to Islam by force, mutilated, obliged to flee, or killed had his photograph blown up in the Western press. And none of them was mentioned, nor their fate pitied. But Muhammad al-Dura, a Muslim Palestinian child- accidentally killed in a crossfire exchange between Palestinians who initiated it, and Israelis- became the most well known child victim on the globe. He was an effective banner for antisemitic and revengeful frustration against Israel- for the million and a half Jewish children deliberately rounded up, deported, and killed in Europe sixty years earlier. The serious Geneva daily, Le Temps, chose this tragedy as the 'photograph of the year' (December 30, 2000)." This disturbing, graphic juxtaposition captures the books two key thematic elements: the violent, living legacy of jihad and dhimmi suppression in the Sudanese example, impossible to distinguish in its theological and juridicial underpinnings from the jihad of the Arab (634 to 750 C.E.) and Turkish (1021 to 1683 C.E.) waves of Islamization; and the notion of a "dhimmitude of the West", particularly evident in Europe, as manifested by official Church and/or European press silence regarding the blatant Islamist persecution of a Christian minority in the Sudan, or the rising tide of antis

A key to understanding Islam in the 21st century

Bat Ye'or, historian of the dhimmi (non-Muslim) peoples under Islam, has written a blockbuster. This is essential reading for anyone interested in Western-Muslim relations in the new century. It debunks a thousand myths, and takes the mask of a whole world of evidence which has previously been shut tight to outside inspection. After overviewing the history of dhimmitude - the condition of living as a non-Muslim under Islam - and its sister institution of jihad, Ye'or discusses a whole raft of implications of dhimmitude for the modern world. Along the way she throws light on the Balkans, the Israel-Palestinian conflict, persecution of non-Muslims under the Shari'a, the rise of Islamism and Arabism, the doctrine of Western guilt and Muslim sense of victimization -- this is a wonderful expose of a story which has been hidden for far too long. Although this book is deeply disturbing, its scholarship, thorough documentation and overwhelming human interest makes for compelling reading. Will the 21st century be marked by unceasing religious conflicts? Or is there a way forward out of the cycles of violence, and the layers of hatred built up by history? Read this book to discover what part of the answer must involve! Or just read to understand Islam and the institution of jihad better. This is the book that sets September 11 into its proper context of 1400 years of history.