Dhimmitude


"The word "dhimmitude" as a historical concept, was coined by Bat Ye'or in 1983 to describe the legal and social conditions of Jews and Christians subjected to Islamic rule."
I would like to take some time to talk about dhimmitude. In the days after 9-11, I went looking for some answers. It took a while, but I finally stumbled across the writings of Bat Ye'or.

There is a reason why I make the distinction Islamic people (those who follow the teachings of Islam) and Islamists (those who seek to impose their version of Islam over everyone else). I'm indebted to Daniel Pipes for the distinction.

Most of the conventional wisdom in the West about Arab Muslims and Islam was wrong. There are a number of reasons for that which I won't go into here. After wading through quite a few papers and books that basically said that there was no way the Middle East could become anything other than a bunch of feuding repressive cultures, I decided to take a different tack. I went looking for the people who predicted the type of behavior in the Palestinian conflict, all the hostage taking, and most of the other conflicts in the Middle East. That led me to Dr. Pipes, and that in turn led me to Dr. Ye'or.

I have only one excuse about paying attention to these two. They have been mostly right so far.

I think Diana West explained it pretty well.

We need to learn a new word: dhimmitude. I've written about dhimmitude periodically, lo, these many years since September 11, but it takes time to sink in. Dhimmitude is the coinage of a brilliant historian, Bat Ye'or, whose pioneering studies of the dhimmi, populations of Jews and Christians vanquished by Islamic jihad, have led her to conclude that a common culture has existed through the centuries among the varied dhimmi populations. From Egypt and Palestine to Iraq and Syria, from Morocco and Algeria to Spain, Sicily and Greece, from Armenia and the Balkans to the Caucasus: Wherever Islam conquered, surrendering dhimmi, known to Muslims as "people of the book [the Bible]," were tolerated, allowed to practice their religion, but at a dehumanizing cost.
    
There were literal taxes (jizya) to be paid; these bought the dhimmi the right to remain non-Muslim, the price not of religious freedom, but of religious identity. Freedom was lost, sorely circumscribed by a body of Islamic law (sharia) designed to subjugate, denigrate and humiliate the dhimmi. The resulting culture of self-abnegation, self-censorship and fear shared by far-flung dhimmi is the basis of dhimmitude. The extremely distressing but highly significant fact is, dhimmitude doesn't only exist in lands where Islamic law rules.
    
This is the lesson of Cartoon Rage 2006, a cultural nuke set off by an Islamic chain reaction to those 12 cartoons of Muhammad appearing in a Danish newspaper. We have watched the Muslim meltdown with shocked attention, but there is little recognition that its poisonous fallout is fear. Fear in the State Department, which, like Islam, called the cartoons unacceptable. Fear in Whitehall, which did the same. Fear in the Vatican, which did the same. And fear in the media, which have failed, with few, few exceptions, to reprint or show the images. With only a small roll of brave journals, mainly in Europe, to salute, we have seen the proud Western tradition of a free press bow its head and submit to an Islamic law against depictions of Muhammad. That's dhimmitude.
    
Not that we admit it: We dress up our capitulation in fancy talk of "tolerance," "responsibility" and "sensitivity." We even congratulate ourselves for having the "editorial judgment" to make "pluralism" possible. "Readers were well served... without publishing the cartoons," said a Wall Street Journal spokesman. "CNN has chosen to not show the cartoons in respect for Islam," reported the cable network. On behalf of the BBC, which did show some of the cartoons on the air, a news editor subsequently apologized, adding: "We've taken a decision not to go further... in order not to gratuitously offend the significant number" of Muslim viewers worldwide. Left unmentioned is the understanding (editorial judgement?) that "gratuitous offense" leads to gratuitous violence. Hence, fear — not the inspiration of tolerance but of capitulation — and a condition of dhimmitude.

This isn't about religion. It never was. It's about political repression masking itself as religion. I've hesitated using the terms so far, but at it's root, Islamism (not Islam) is abusive behavior, and giving ground only enables the behavior.

Look beyond the trappings to the demands at the core.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Sat - February 11, 2006 at 05:30 AM  Tag


 ◊  ◊   ◊  ◊ 

Random selections from NeoWayland's library


Pagan Vigil "Because LIBERTY demands more than just black or white"
© 2005 - 2009 All Rights Reserved