tijdelijk boek

“Multi-religious prayer almost inevitably leads to false interpretations, to
indifference as to the content of what is believed or not believed, and thus to
the dissolution of real faith.” So wrote Joseph Ratzinger in 1986. Even then,
the man who would later become Pope Benedict XVI was renowned as a
singularly deep thinker on the finer points of religious belief systems—to say
nothing of the sweeping themes.
As head of the Vatican’s doctrinal office, Cardinal Ratzinger was ruminating
on the World Prayer Day for Peace, forged by his legendary papal
predecessor, Pope John Paul II.
1 Though among his closest advisers,
Ratzinger was uneasy about the pontiff’s grand gesture: taking center stage in
a spectacle of interfaith solidarity. Flanked about him were leaders of the
world’s religions. Even Shamanism took its place among Roman and Eastern
Orthodox Catholicism, Protestant sects, Judaism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism,
and, of course, Islam—all joined in an iconic, ecumenical quest for “peace.”
It was as if there were but one civilization, one single, common way of
looking at the world. It was as if there were a talismanic aura about “peace,”
such that the word connoted a universal value, impervious to inquiry about its
meaning to the variegated voices uttering it. Was this “peace” the mere
absence of war? Hadn’t the twentieth century already proved that there were
evils worse than war? Was “peace” an absence of war achieved by appeasing
malevolent oppressors? Or was it an absence of such oppressors because they
had been righteously defeated—because liberty and equal opportunity,
undergirded by the rule of law, had triumphed? Details, details. Surely a tidal
wave of banners, splaying “peace” in a Babel of tongues, would wash away
such impertinent questions.
In a nod to its host locale, the legacy of this iconic display came to be
known as the “Spirit of Assisi,” that city of deep spiritual redolence. Ah, but
deep spiritual redolence…for whom? Assisi is a holy city if you are a
Christian. To other religious traditions, it is just another dot on the map. To a
fundamentalist Muslim, it would be better understood as a coveted city than a
holy one. What makes it sacred in Roman Catholic lore, its witness to what
the faithful take to be ultimate truth, would make it anything but a place of
reverence in classical Islam.
Nevertheless, papering over these distinctions is our convention, is it not?
And nowhere is that manifested more clearly than by the cloying homage paid
by the West for things Islamic. The ostentation with which the US armed
forces revere the Koran—indeed, “the Holy Qur’an,” as our top commanders
unfailingly refer to it—borders on parody: mandating, at the Guantanamo Bay
prison camp for instance, that a copy of the book be distributed to each
detained jihadist (notwithstanding that each construes it to command war—I
suppose I should say, holy war—against the West), the said delivery carried
out by a white-gloved military guard, who must, if at all feasible, be a
Muslim.
Who cares what the Koran and the other sources of Islamic scripture—the
hadith and the authoritative biographies of Islam’s warrior prophet—actually
say? We are to regard them as “holy,” the same adjective our official lexicon
ubiquitously attaches to cities like Mecca, Medina, and Qom—even as the
word “Christmas” is purged as a modifier of “carol,” “card,” “tree,” “present,”
“party,” and “celebration.” In the West we no longer acknowledge, much less
celebrate, what distinguished us as the West.
Such distinctions, though, were the inspiration for Cardinal Ratzinger’s
clarion note of caution against multireligious prayer. Religion as cosmetic
reverence shorn of substantive content is a virtue only the postmodern, post
doctrinal West could love: its self-congratulatory elites having evolved
beyond anything so quaint as doctrine and arrived at…nihilism. Ratzinger
knew better. Doctrinal differences never lose their salience because it is
doctrine that defines a believer. To airbrush our differences—even for the
well-intentioned purpose of elevating “peace” as a transcendent value—is to
deny the essence of who we are.
Thus should multireligious prayer be a rarity, Ratzinger admonished—“to
make clear that there is no such thing…as a common concept of God or belief
in God.” Far from religion, religious relativism—oblivious of doctrinal
content, eroding real faith—is a destroyer of conviction. The philosopher
cardinal grasped, moreover, that the obverse is true: real faith has such
transcendent power that religious relativism—this “common concept of God,”
this nihilism swaddled in politically correct reverence—cannot compete.
Real faith is an ultimate claim about what constitutes the good life. It is the
antithesis of relativism, whether that relativism takes the form of an
amorphous quest for “peace,” or similarly fashionable pieties: “antiterrorism,”
“social justice,” “equality,” “freedom,” or “democracy.” Such noble ideals, we
blithely assure ourselves, could not conceivably provoke dissent among any
creed worthy of the name “religion.” Indeed, in our post-doctrinal West, such
dissent actually deprives the underlying belief system of any standing as
religion—and, therefore, of any need for us to examine the belief system or
come to terms with how broadly its convictions are held. That was the
wayward reasoning of the British government after the jihadist bombings of
July 7, 2005. Terrorism, pronounced Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, is “un
Islamic activity” simply by dint of its being terrorism. After all, Islam is a
religion, so violence perforce could not possibly be rooted in Islamic doctrine.
Q.E.D.—why tarry over what the doctrine actually says?
Well, because it matters. There is no common concept of God, and the
mush that passes for this feel-good illusion cannot obscure that real faiths
exist. They are different because they represent different claims about
ultimate truth. One cannot apprehend what those claims are, and how the
believer is apt to act on them, without studying doctrine and respecting the
divergences between faiths. Substantive differences, civilizational chasms,
and supremacist ambitions do not evaporate just because we wish to believe
everyone wants “peace.”
Real faith inspires. It has meaning and gives purpose to our lives. Real
convictions, no matter how loathsome they may seem to an unbeliever, inspire
allegiance and action. Nihilism, no matter how alluringly coifed, is a feckless
competitor. Something will always beat nothing.
To understand and elucidate the something that is the core of classical Islam
has been the mission of Andrew Bostom’s scholarship for the past decade. A
professor of medicine by education and training, Dr. Bostom has brought the
uncompromising rigor of that discipline to the study of Islamic history and
doctrine. It is the saddest of ironies that such rigor is sorely needed in an age
of jihadist supremacism.
Western elites, however, have abandoned the field—or, better, put it up for
sale to Islamic activists and their apologists. Lushly endowed by the
Wahhabist rulers of Saudi Arabia and schooled by the Salafist program of the
Muslim Brotherhood, these partisans make little secret of their dedication to
“the Islamicization of knowledge.” That’s the stated mission of the
International Institute of Islamic Thought, a Virginia-based think tank
founded by Brotherhood operatives in 1981. The goal is clear: to make Islam
appear unthreatening, to limn its detractors as irrational and racist
(“Islamophobes”), and thus to control the narrative about their doctrine even
as they pursue its hegemonic ambitions.
Dr. Bostom is one of the precious few who dare make the counter-case,
based on nothing so noxious as bigotry or dreamy as hope. In the best Western
tradition, Bostom’s quest for knowledge is rooted in reason, applied gimlet
eyed to an assemblage of evidence drawn painstakingly from the historical
record.
The contributions of this approach have already been immense: most
notably, Bostom has edited two essential compendia: The Legacy of Jihad:
Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims (2005) and The Legacy of
Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History (2008). These
collections, featuring accounts of Islam in word and deed for over a
millennium, as well as the critiques of scholars of Islam—Muslim and non
Muslim—over the centuries, put the lie to conventional wisdom. Jihad,
despite assiduous efforts to reinterpret its meaning and bleach its history,
originated as the mission to spread Islam by forcible conquest. Strains of Jew
hatred inhere in Islamic scripture and tradition—neither were they inculcated
in Muslims by shameful anti-Semitic chapters in the history of Christendom,
nor are they strictly a byproduct of Israel’s modern establishment as a nation
state in the Promised Land inhabited by Jews for many centuries before the
birth of Mohammed.
These treatises set the stage for Sharia versus Freedom—The Legacy of
Islamic Totalitarianism. The traditions of holy war and animus toward Jews
are critical to our understanding of classical Islamic doctrine. Sharia,
however, is the doctrine’s essence. It is Islam’s legal and political system. Its
establishment is the necessary precondition for a society’s Islamization, and it
is thus the objective of both violent jihad and stealthier methods of pressuring
a society’s major institutions to bend to Islamic norms. Sharia is the animating
force of classical Islam—its claim to ultimate truth. To the extent that
doctrine, preponderant among the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims, is challenged
by reformist movements within Islam, one cannot apprehend what those
tensions are about or assess how uphill is the reformer’s quest, absent an
understanding sharia and its doctrinal centrality.
As for our own challenge, preserving Western civilization and American
constitutional republicanism, Bostom’s title is aptly succinct: Sharia versus
Freedom. To borrow again from Cardinal Ratzinger, exhibiting trademark
“indifference as to the content of what is believed or not believed,” Islam’s
Western apologists depict sharia as gnomic and aspirational. It is not a
regulatory code, they assure us, but a mystic, private compass by which the
believer comes uniquely to experience the divine. Of course, when a woman
who has been sexually assaulted is sentenced by a sharia tribunal to death for
extramarital fornication, or a homosexual is similarly condemned for
consensual relations, or an apostate for renouncing Islam, the executioners
don’t hurl aspirations; they hurl stones.
In point of fact, sharia is a manifestation of bedrock convictions: that there
is no division of private belief and public conformity, no separation between
mosque and state, between the demands of the sacred law and the governance
of civil society. Sharia is authoritarian—unapologetically so. It is, to the
believer, Allah’s gift to humankind, the path divinely prescribed for human
flourishing. Consequently, it brooks no repeal or refinement by legislation—
what right does man have to change or try to improve upon the writ of his
Creator, to whom he is obliged to submit. And, as Bostom’s subtitle intimates,
sharia is “totalitarian” in the sense that it really does endeavor to control
everything—theological principles, economics and finance, domestic
relations, social interaction, crime and punishment, the use of force, even
hygiene.
Most significantly, sharia is juxtaposed to freedom because it strangles
individual liberty, the catalyst of progress. Sharia, we have noted, eschews our
fundamental premises that the people are sovereign; that they may control
their own destiny irrespective of any predetermined code; and that, while civil
society may be profoundly influenced by spirituality, it is governed by secular
laws.
Equal protection under those laws is the glue of a free, pluralistic society—
but sharia rejects it, elevating Muslims above non-Muslims and men above
women. Our basic liberties fare no better—sharia rejects freedom of
conscience (apostasy from Islam is not merely a crime but a capital offense),
freedom of speech (expression that casts Islam in an unfavorable light or sows
discord among Muslims is a transgression as grave as apostasy), freedom of
association, privacy, economic freedom, humane punishments, and the social
commitment to tolerate and even appreciate most of our differences—not
extinguish them by violence and coercion.
Sharia-compliant Islam is ascendant. In the Middle East, about 80 percent
of Muslims in Egypt and Pakistan tell pollsters they desire to live under sharia
strictures. Even in the Far East, in Indonesia, where the practice of Islam
tends to be more moderate due to its syncretism with other traditions of
worship, sharia is on the march—preferred by half the population…and
rising. Throughout the West, including in the United States, governments are
under pressure from their swelling, aggressive Muslim communities to accept
and adopt sharia standards—legitimizing them in our law and our culture,
even as their brute repression of speech degrades our capacity to assess the
wages of conferring legitimacy.
The price will be high. The “Spirit of Assisi” is a sweet-sounding invitation
to abandon our defenses and our inconvenient knowledge that convictions
matter—that liberty, equality, and the elevation of reason are not just another
way of life but a better way of life. Supremacist Muslims are a grave threat to
that better way of life because they make an unabashed claim to truth and they
are acting on it.
We cannot defend ourselves from the threat unless we see it for what it is—
unless, as Andrew Bostom puts it, we examine “sharia without camouflage.”
We cannot defeat the threat until we once again revel in what makes us
different, for it is also what makes us better.
The summer 2011 Claremont Review of Books contained a featured review
essay by Robert R. Reilly
1which discussed Bernard Lewis’s essay collection
Faith and Power,
2and the nonagenarian historian’s reflections upon the so
called Arab Spring unrest in the Middle East, particularly North Africa.
3As
distilled by Reilly, Lewis’s views reiterate what the historian described to the
Wall Street Journal’s Bari Weiss during an April 2, 2011, interview.
The failure of a young journalist
4
5such as Ms. Weiss to appreciate important
glaring and irreconcilable inconsistencies in Lewis’s narrative is concerning
but understandable. It is remarkable, and unacceptable, when a writer of some
stature
6 such as Reilly (reviewed, here
7), chairman of the Committee for
Western Civilization, and senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy
Council, blithely ignores Lewis’s extensive record of self-contradiction.
Reilly, in his essay, “Bernard Lewis and the Arab Spring,”
8
9never discusses
either Lewis’s contemporary evangelical, even hectoring appeals to “bring
them freedom” (i.e., Muslims under the authoritarian rule their systems have
always engendered), lest “they” destroy us,
10 or Lewis’s earlier sobering, 180
degree contradictory analyses of Islam as a totalitarian system devoid of a
conceptual basis for Western individual political freedom.
11 Without a
mention of this intractably confused and confusing record of pronouncements
from the early 1950s, through the present, Reilly invokes Lewis as the
ultimate clarifying sage on such developments, for whom all owe “thanks.”
12
Lewis’s legacy of intellectual and moral confusion has greatly hindered the
ability of sincere American policymakers to think clearly about Islam’s living
imperial legacy, driven by unreformed and unrepentant mainstream Islamic
doctrine. Reilly’s highly selective and celebratory presentation of Lewis’s
understandings—the man Reilly dubs the “foremost historian of the Middle
East”—is pathognomonic of the dangerous influence Lewis continues to
wield over his uncritical acolytes and supporters.
13
German scholar Karl Binswanger concluded his brilliant 1977 analysis of
the imposition of Islamic law on non-Muslims under Ottoman rule with a
valid moral critique of the “dogmatic Islamophilia” epitomized by Bernard
Lewis, and Orientalists of Lewis’s persuasion.
14
It is absolutely scientifically justifiable to call cynicism and “evil” by their names.
…We were able to confirm these rational errors because they were in a domain
which was susceptible to rational argument. This rational access is not given for
another domain. We would like to call this domain “religious,” but prefer
“dogmatic,” because it is not just a question of expressing the irrational but of
stubbornly clinging. That this domain is Islamophilic follows from the fact that
there is an attempt to present the moral aspect of an Islamic fact as ethically
valuable (not value-neutral!), even if historic (and any other) sense does not
support such an interpretation. It is understandable that the Orientalist has a
predilection for those peoples with whose history and culture he is concerned and
wishes to present them in a good light. All the same, such a process has nothing to
do with science.
…[W]homever—consciously or not—downplays or misrepresents the morally
negative aspects of the Dhimma or even distorts it into its (moral) opposite,
because he would otherwise have to partially revise his pre-conceived evaluation
of Islamic culture, he is behaving like the Marxist “researcher” who simply
demonizes every manifestation of “evil” feudalism, instead of, or without (even
therefore) investigating the functional accomplishments of feudalism. The Marxist
“researcher” acts this way, because there is no place for critical examination of his
own position in his pre-conceived conception of the world and science. For him
“scientific socialism” is a dogma. Orientalist studies must defend itself from
degenerating into an obstinate “scientific Islamophilia.” Or it will deserve the
teasing name of “orchid specialty” (obscure and unimportant specialty) and not
that of a science.
FROM DOGMATIC ISLAMOPHILIA TO
INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL CONFUSION
During several notable speeches, starting in 2003,
15 including both inaugural
and State of the Union addresses,
16 President George W. Bush repeatedly
stressed the paramount importance of promoting freedom in the Middle East.
Speaking in an almost messianic idiom, he termed such a quest
the calling of our time…the calling of our country.
17
He reiterated this theme while speaking to the American Legion on February
24, 2006, and offered the following sanguine assessment of progress:
Freedom is on the march in the broader Middle East. The hope of liberty now
reaches from Kabul to Baghdad, to Beirut, and beyond. Slowly but surely, we’re
helping to transform the broader Middle East from an arc of instability into an arc
of freedom. And as freedom reaches more people in this vital region, we’ll have
new allies in the war on terror, and new partners in the cause of moderation in the
Muslim world and in the cause of peace.
18
Despite President Bush’s uplifting rhetoric and ebullient appraisal of these
events—which epitomized American hopes and values at their quintessential
best—there was a profound, deeply troubling flaw in his—and his advisers’—
analysis which simply ignored the vast gulf between Western and Islamic
conceptions of freedom itself.
19 How did that happen?
Journalist David Warren, writing in March 2006, questioned the advice
given President Bush “on the nature of Islam” at that crucial time by not only
“the paid operatives of Washington’s Council on American-Islamic Relations,
and the happyface pseudo-scholar Karen Armstrong,” but most significantly,
one eminence grise, in particular: “the profoundly learned” Bernard Lewis.
20
All these advisers, despite their otherwise divergent viewpoints, as Warren
noted,
21 “assured him (President Bush) that Islam and modernity were
potentially compatible.” None more vehemently—or with such authority—
than the so-called “Last Orientalist,”
22 nonagenarian professor Bernard Lewis.
Arguably the most striking example of Lewis’s fervor was a lecture he
delivered July 16, 2006 (on board the ship Crystal Serenity during a Hillsdale
College cruise in the British Isles) about the transferability of Western
democracy to despotic Muslim societies, such as Iraq.
23 He concluded with
the statement, “Either we bring them freedom, or they destroy us.” This
stunning claim was published with that concluding remark as the title, “Bring
Them Freedom Or They Destroy Us,” and disseminated widely.
24
While Lewis put forth rather non sequitur, apologetic examples in support
of his concluding formulation,
25 he never elucidated the yawning gap between
Western and Islamic conceptions of freedom—hurriyya in Arabic.
26 This
latter omission was particularly striking given Professor Lewis’s contribution
to the official (Brill) Encyclopedia of Islam entry on hurriyya.
27 The materials
Lewis omits—including his own earlier writings—on hurriyya and what he
has also termed the “authoritarian or even totalitarian” essence of Islamic
societies
28—serve as an appropriate starting point for our discussion.
Hurriyya, “freedom,” is—as Ibn Arabi (d. 1240) the lionized “Greatest Sufi
Master,”
29 expressed it—“perfect slavery.”
30 And this conception is not
merely confined to the Sufis’ perhaps metaphorical understanding of the
relationship between Allah the “master” and his human “slaves.” Following
Islamic law slavishly throughout one’s life was paramount to hurriyya,
“freedom.” This earlier more concrete characterization of hurriyya’s
metaphysical meaning, whose essence Ibn Arabi reiterated, was pronounced
by the Sufi scholar al-Qushayri (d. 1072/74).
Let it be known to you that the real meaning of freedom lies in the perfection of
slavery. If the slavery of a human being in relation to God is a true one, his
freedom is relieved from the yoke of changes. Anyone who imagines that it may
be granted to a human being to give up his slavery for a moment and disregard the
commands and prohibitions of the religious law while possessing discretion and
responsibility, has divested himself of Islam. God said to his Prophet: “Worship
until certainty comes to you.” (Koran 15:99). As agreed upon by the [Koranic]
commentators, “certainty” here means the end (of life).
31
Bernard Lewis, in his Encyclopedia of Islam analysis of hurriyya, discusses
this concept in the latter phases of the Ottoman Empire, through the
contemporary era.
32After highlighting a few “cautious” or “conservative”
(Lewis’s characterization) reformers and their writings, Lewis maintains,
there is still no idea that the subjects have any right to share in the formation or
conduct of government—to political freedom, or citizenship, in the sense which
underlies the development of political thought in the West. While conservative
reformers talked of freedom under law, and some Muslim rulers even
experimented with councils and assemblies government was in fact becoming
more and not less arbitrary.
33
Lewis also makes the important point that Western colonialism ameliorated
this chronic situation:
34
During the period of British and French domination, individual freedom was never
much of an issue. Though often limited and sometimes suspended, it was on the
whole more extensive and better protected than either before or after [emphasis
added].
And Lewis concludes his entry by observing that Islamic societies forsook
even their inchoate democratic experiments,
In the final revulsion against the West, Western democracy too was rejected as a
fraud and a delusion, of no value to Muslims.
35
Elsewhere, writing contemporaneously on democratic institutions in the
Islamic Middle East, Lewis conceded that at least “equality and fraternity”
between Muslims were accepted.
36 But even here Lewis included a major
caveat with regard to “liberty,” whose Islamic formulation might never
resemble John Stuart Mill’s conception in On Liberty,
37 featuring a reference
to Alice in Wonderland
38 making plain Lewis’s assessment of the likely
superficial (at best) outcome of Muslim democratization efforts:
perhaps it may be possible to extend them beyond it [the Muslim community]
adding a redefined liberty [emphasis added], to make a new kind of democracy.
Only “the question is” as Alice remarked, “whether you can [emphasis in original]
make words mean so many different things.”
39
Western constitutional and governmental models, specifically, were
ignored,
40 and ultimately, Lewis viewed this immediate post–World War II era
of democratic experimentation by Muslim societies as an objective failure,
with the possible exception of developments, at that time, in Turkey.
41
The machinery which works well in the West may not work in other countries.
Except perhaps in Turkey, our kind of democracy appears to have failed in the
Muslim Middle East.
I turn now from the accidental to the essential factors, to those deriving from the
very nature of Islamic society, tradition, and thought. The first of these is the
authoritarianism, perhaps we may even say the totalitarianism, of the Islamic
political tradition.…Many attempts have been made to show that Islam and
democracy are identical—attempts usually based on a misunderstanding of Islam
or democracy or both. This sort of argument expresses a need of the up- rooted
Muslim intellectual who is no longer satisfied with or capable of understanding
traditional Islamic values, and who tries to justify, or rather, re-state, his inherited
faith in terms of the fashionable ideology of the day. It is an example of the
romantic and apologetic presentation of Islam that is a recognized phase in the
reaction of Muslim thought to the impact of the West.…In point of fact, except for
the early caliphate, when the anarchic individualism of tribal Arabia was still
effective, the political history of Islam is one of almost unrelieved autocracy.…[I]t
was authoritarian, often arbitrary, sometimes tyrannical. There are no parliaments
or representative assemblies of any kind, no councils or communes, no chambers
of nobility or estates, no municipalities in the history of Islam; nothing but the
sovereign power, to which the subject owed complete and unwavering obedience
as a religious duty imposed by the Holy Law. In the great days of classical Islam
this duty was only owed to the lawfully appointed caliph, as God’s vicegerent on
earth and head of the theocratic community, and then only for as long as he upheld
the law; but with the decline of the caliphate and the growth of military
dictatorship, Muslim jurists and theologians accommodated their teachings to the
changed situation and extended the religious duty of obedience to any effective
authority, however impious, however barbarous. For the last thousand years, the
political thinking of Islam has been dominated by such maxims as “tyranny is
better than anarchy” and “whose power is established, obedience to him is
incumbent.”
43
Lewis provides a classical formulation of “Islamic political quietism,” i.e.,
authoritarianism, by quoting a frequently cited passage from the Syrian jurist
Ibn Jama’a (d. 1333), who became Chief Qadi [Islamic religious judge] of
Cairo:
Forced homage. This happens when a chief seizes power by force, in a time of
civil disorders, and it becomes necessary to recognize him in order to avoid further
troubles. That he may have none of the qualifications of sovereignty, that he be
illiterate, unjust or vicious, that he be even a slave or a woman, is of no
consequence. He is a sovereign in fact, until such time as another, stronger than he,
drives him from the throne and seizes power. He will then be sovereign by the
same title, and should be recognized in order not to increase strife. Who-ever has
effective power has the right to obedience, for a government, even the worst one, is
better than anarchy, and of two evils one should choose the lesser.
44
Ibn Jama’a, Lewis reminds us, was “a pious and devout believer, putting
bluntly and sadly an unpalatable truth as he sees it.”
45 And Lewis emphasizes
that the writer is a doctor of the Holy Law and speaking in terms of the Holy Law.
When he prescribes recognition and obedience, he is laying down the duty of the
believer under the Holy Law—that is to say, he is formulating a rule the violation
of which is, in our terminology, a sin as well as a crime, involving hell-fire as well
as such anticipatory chastisement as the sovereign might see fit to impose in this
world.
46
Lewis’s analogy between Islamic and Communist totalitarianism also includes
this candid observation:
A community brought up on such doctrines will not be shocked by (Communist)
disregard of political liberty or human rights; it may even be attracted by a regime
which offers ruthless strength and efficiency in the service of a cause—anyway in
appearance—in place of the ineptitude, corruption, and cynicism which in their
mind, one may even say in their experience, are inseparable from parliamentary
government.
47
Even Lewis’s still-hopeful assessments from this period, such as his 1952
analysis “Islamic Revival in Turkey,”
Islamic Republic,”
48 or broader 1955 “The Concept of an
49 inspired by the November 2, 1953, decision of the
Constituent Assembly in Karachi, Pakistan, that the country henceforth be
known as the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, are punctuated with caveats based
upon his expressed understanding of Islam. For example, Lewis’s most
optimistic bromides regarding Turkey’s fate (in 1952) included frank language
about Islam, noting how the Turkish populace would “hopefully” achieve “a
synthesis of the best elements of the West and the East,” or “may yet”
discover “a workable compromise between Islam and modernism.”
50 And his
tenuous conclusion, contingent, ultimately, on the successful penetration of
Western ideals, was reached only after acknowledging obvious Islamic threats
to this roseate scenario:
The peasantry are still as religious as they have always been. From them there is
no question of revival—the only difference is that they can now express their
religious sentiments more openly. Perhaps one of the strongest elements
supporting their revival is the class known in Turkey as esnaf—the artisans and
small shopkeepers in the towns. These are generally very fanatical, and, like the
peasants, many of them are connected with one or another of the tarikas [Sufi
dervish orders].
…After a century of Westernization, Turkey has undergone immense changes—
greater than any outside observer had thought possible. But the deepest Islamic
roots of Turkish life and culture are still alive, and the ultimate identity of Turk and
Muslim in Turkey is still unchallenged. The resurgence of Islam after a long
interval responds to a profound national need. The occasional outbursts of the
tarikas, far more than the limited restoration of official Islam, show how powerful
are the forces stirring beneath the surface. The path that the revival will take is still
not clear. If simple reaction has its way, much of the work of the last century will
be undone, and Turkey will slip back into the darkness from which she so painfully
emerged.
51
Lewis opens his subsequent 1955 essay about the Pakistani experiment with
a self-proclaimed “Islamic Republic” by asking whether or not such a title is
indeed “a contradiction in terms,” given
the political experience and political traditions of Islam are after all almost
exclusively monarchical and authoritarian—expressed in regimes of the kind
associated in the minds of most people with the familiar terms Caliph and Sultan.
52
Once again, the body of Lewis’s essay does not shy away from
acknowledging the doctrinal and historical obstacles to the modernist Islamic
state envisioned by Pakistan’s Muslim reformers.
53
Pakistan cannot pretend to be wholly secular, since its very statehood is based on
Islam, the origin and reason of its separate existence. But how far is an Islamic
state, of the type which Pakistanis clearly wish to create, compatible with an ideal
of government that is so palpably an importation from the Western world?
He notes, candidly, for example the basic “difficulty” such an authentic
Islamic state would encounter “in securing acceptance for the unbeliever as a
brother or even as an equal fellow-citizen.”
54
Lewis contrasts the Pakistani ideal—an avowedly Islamic republic—with
other contemporary (ca. 1955) Muslim nations, which, to the extent they
adopted Western models, completely or significantly abandoned traditional
sharia (Islamic law)–based systems.
[T]he Turkish Republic is secular, deliberately following European patterns and
rejecting traditional Islamic principles of state and law. Syria and Lebanon were
formed as constitutional republics on the French model, but with Muslim citizens.
As recently as 1950, when a new draft constitution of Syria was in preparation, a
clause declaring Islam the religion of the state was abandoned after bitter disputes,
and replaced by another simply stating that the President must be a Muslim and
that the Holy Law of Islam would be the main basis of state legislation.
55
Along the way, Lewis dismisses hagiographic notions about the principle of
“elected” Muslim sovereigns, ostensibly dating from Islam’s initial four
“Rightly Guided” Caliphs, who ruled between 632 and 661, beginning in the
immediate aftermath of Muhammad’s death.
If we look at the history of Islam, we find that the elective principle remained
purely theoretical. The first Caliph after the death of Muhammad, Abu Bakr, was
chosen by a process which we may call acclamation or coup d’etat, according to
our point of view. The second, Omar, simply assumed power de facto, probably
after having been designated by his predecessor. The third, Othman, was
nominated by a committee of six, appointed by Omar on his deathbed to choose
one from among themselves as Caliph. The fourth, Ali, succeeded after a process
of revolt, murder, and civil war, which thereafter became the all too frequent
methods of determining the succession. Of the first four Caliphs, all but one died
by violence. Thereafter a dubious solution to the problem of preserving continuity
and stability was found when the Caliphate became in effect hereditary in two
successive dynasties—though the fiction of an election was maintained on each
accession.
56
Moreover, with the possible exception of Turkey, Lewis concedes that,
following the era of the French Revolution, 150 years of prior
experimentation with Western secular sovereignty and laws in many Islamic
countries, notably Egypt, had not fared well.
[T]he imported political machinery failed to work, and in its breakdown led to the
violent death or sudden displacement by other means of ministers and monarchs,
all of whom had failed to replace even the vanished Sultanate in the respect and
loyalties of the people. In Egypt a republic was proclaimed which in some respects
seems to be a return to one of the older political traditions of Islam—paternal,
authoritarian Government, resting on military force, with the support of some of
the religious leaders and teachers, and apparently, general acceptance. Perhaps that
is an Islamic Republic of a sort.
57
Although Lewis concludes on an optimistic note, even his most wishful,
self-contradictory flights of fancy are tempered by a realistic acknowledgment
of the profound challenges ahead.
An elected head of state and rule of law are familiar. It is true that the first is really
theoretical, and has never been applied in any Islamic state of high material
civilization—but if the medieval jurists were able to reduce the electorate to one,
there is no reason why their modern heirs should not extend it to universal
suffrage. The Islamic rule of law is theocratic rather than democratic, deriving
from the immutable revelation of God and not from the changing will of the people
—but the principle is admitted, and the range of interpretation is vast. Equality and
fraternity within the faith group are accepted—it may not be impossible to extend
them beyond it, and to add a redefined liberty. But much development and much
adaptation of both Islamic and democratic notions will be needed to produce a
working synthesis of the two, and if such a synthesis is in fact produced it will not
be a return to a mythical past but a new creation.
58
Lewis’s final observation from 1955 is also appropriately staid:
All Islam is now seeking new paths in politics and government—they will watch
with sympathy and interest the outcome of the Pakistan experiment.
59
Six decades after Lewis made his then cautiously hopeful observations
about Turkey and Pakistan, there is a historical record to judge—a clear,
irrefragable legacy of failed secularization efforts, accompanied by steady
grassroots and institutional re-Islamization in both countries.
60 The late P. J.
Vatikiotis (d. 1997), Emeritus Professor of Politics at the School of Oriental
and African Studies (SOAS), was a respected scholar of the Middle East,
who, contemporaneous with Lewis (a SOAS colleague), wrote extensively
about Islamic reformism throughout the twentieth century, particularly in
Egypt. Focusing outside Turkey and Pakistan on the Arab Middle East (i.e.,
Egypt, the Sudan, Syria, and Iraq), Vatikiotis wrote candidly in 1981 of how
authoritarian Islam doomed inchoate efforts at creating political systems
which upheld individual freedom in the region:
What is significant is that after a tolerably less autocratic/authoritarian political
experience during their apprenticeship for independent statehood under foreign
power tutelage, during the inter-war period, most of these states once completely
free or independent of foreign control, very quickly moved towards highly
autocratic-authoritarian patterns of rule.…One could suggest a hiatus of roughly
three years between the departure or removal of European influence and power and
overthrow of the rickety plural political systems they left behind in Syria, Egypt,
Iraq, and the Sudan by military coups d’etat.
Authoritarianism and autocracy in the Middle East may be unstable in the sense
that autocracies follow one another in frequent succession. Yet the ethos of
authoritarianism may be lasting, even permanent.…One could venture into a more
ambitious philosophical etiology by pointing out the absence of a concept of
‘natural law’ or ‘law of reason’ in the intellectual-cultural heritage of Middle
Eastern societies. After all, everything before Islam, before God revealed his
message to Muhammad, constitutes jahiliyya, or the dark age of ignorance.
Similarly, anything that deviates from the eternal truth or verities of Islamic
teaching is equally degenerative, and therefore unacceptable. That is why, by
definition, any Islamic movement which seeks to make Islam the basic principle of
the polity does not aim at innovation but at the restoration of the ideal that has
been abandoned or lost. The missing of an experience similar, or parallel, to the
Renaissance, freeing the Muslim individual from external constraints of, say,
religious authority in order to engage in a creative course measured and judged by
rational and existential human standards, may also be a relevant consideration. The
individual in the Middle East has yet to attain his independence from the wider
collectivity, or to accept the proposition that he can create a political order.
61
Unlike Vatikiotis, Bernard Lewis has ignored these obvious setbacks—and
any self-critical reappraisal of his earlier guarded optimism. Remarkably,
Lewis has become a far more dogmatic evangelist for so-called Islamic
democratization,
62 despite such failures!
Lewis’s volte-face on the merits of experiments in “Islamic democracy” has
been accompanied by his equally troubling intellectual legacy regarding three
other critical subject areas: the institution of jihad, the chronic impact of the
sharia (Islamic law) on non-Muslims vanquished by jihad, and sacralized
Islamic Jew-hatred.
When discussing key doctrinal aspects of jihad, for example, the concepts
of harbi, from Dar al Harb,
63 or jihad martyrdom,
64 Lewis’s analyses are
incomplete or frankly apologetic.
Classical Islamic jurists such as Abu Hanifa (d. 767, founder of the Hanafi
school of Islamic jurisprudence)
65 formulated the concepts Dar al Islam and
Dar al Harb (Arabic for “the House of Islam” and “the House of War”).
great Muslim polymath al-Tabari’s
66 The
67 early tenth-century “Book of Jihad”
68
includes extracts from Abu Hanifa (and his acolytes) affirming the impunity
with which noncombatant harbis—women, children, the elderly, the mentally
or physically disabled—may be killed.
Abu Hanifa and his companions said: “There is no harm in [having] night raids
and incursions.” They said: “There is no harm if Muslims enter the Territory of
War (ard al-harb) to assemble the mangonel [catapults] towards the polytheists’
fortresses and to shoot them using mangonels, even if there are among them a
woman, child, elder, idiot (matuh), blind, crippled, or someone with a permanent
disability (zamin). There is no harm in shooting polytheists in their fortresses using
mangonels even if there are among those whom we have named.
69
This discussion debunks Lewis’s (repeated) fatuous contention that Islamic
law proscribed the slaying of such persons during jihad.
70
Armand Abel, the leading twentieth-century expert on the Muslim
conception of Dar al Harb, highlights its salient features:
Together with the duty of the “war in the way of God” (or jihad), this universalistic
aspiration would lead the Muslims to see the world as being divided fundamentally
into two parts. On the one hand there was that part of the world where Islam
prevailed, where salvation had been announced, where the religion that ought to
reign was practiced; this was the Dar al Islam. On the other hand, there was the
part which still awaited the establishment of the saving religion and which
constituted, by definition, the object of the holy war. This was the Dar al Harb. The
latter, in the view of the Muslim jurists, was not populated by people who had a
natural right not to practice Islam, but rather by people destined to become
Muslims who, through impiousness and rebellion, refused to accept this great
benefit. Since they were destined sooner or later to be converted at the approach of
the victorious armies of the Prophet’s successor, or else killed for their
rebelliousness, they were the rebel subjects of the Caliph. Their kings were nothing
but odious tyrants who, by opposing the progress of the saving religion together
with their armies, were following a Satanic inspiration and rising up against the
designs of Providence. And so no respite should be granted them, no truce:
perpetual war should be their lot, waged in the course of the winter and summer
ghazu [razzias]. If the sovereign of the country thus attacked desired peace, it was
possible for him, just like for any other tributary or community, to pay the tribute
for himself and for his subjects. Thus the [Byzantine] Empress Irene [d. 803]
“purchased peace at the price of her humiliation,” according to the formula stated
in the dhimma contract itself, by paying 70,000 pounds in gold annually to the
Caliph of Baghdad. Many other princes agreed in this way to become tributaries—
often after long struggles—and to see their dominions pass from the status of dar al
Harb to that of dar al Sulh. In this way, those of their subjects who lived within the
boundaries of the territory ruled by the Caliphate were spared the uncertainty of
being exposed arbitrarily, without any guarantee, to the military operations of the
summer ghazu and the winter ghazu: indeed, anything within the reach of the
Muslim armies as they advanced, being property of impious men and rebels, was
legitimately considered their booty; their men, seized by armed soldiers, were
mercilessly consigned to the lot specified in the Koranic verse about the sword,
and their women and children were treated like things. [Emphasis added.]
71
Abel’s lucid, detailed, and evocative description of Dar al Harb contrasts
starkly with Lewis’s truncated presentation. The latter, which follows, is
woefully inadequate to convey proper understanding of the doctrinally
sanctioned threat posed to infidel nonbelligerents:
72
The unsubjugated unbeliever is by definition an enemy. He is part of the Dar al
Harb, the “House of War,” and is designated as a “harbi,” an attributive form of the
word for war.
Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, the widely revered contemporary Muslim cleric,
“spiritual” leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, head of the “European Council
for Fatwa and Research,” and popular Al-Jazeera television personality,
reiterated Abel’s formulation of Dar al Harb almost exactly in July 2003, both
in conceptual terms and with regard to Israel, specifically:
It has been determined by Islamic law that the blood and property of people of Dar
Al-Harb [the Domain of Disbelief where the battle for the domination of Islam
should be waged] is not protected…in modern war, all of society, with all its
classes and ethnic groups, is mobilized to participate in the war, to aid its
continuation, and to provide it with the material and human fuel required for it to
assure the victory of the state fighting its enemies. Every citizen in society must
take upon himself a role in the effort to provide for the battle. The entire domestic
front, including professionals, laborers, and industrialists, stands behind the
fighting army, even if it does not bear arms.
73
In fact the consensus view of orthodox Islamic jurisprudence regarding
jihad, since its formulation during the eighth and ninth centuries, through the
current era, is that non-Muslims peacefully going about their lives—from the
Khaybar farmers whom Muhammad ordered attacked in 628,
74 to those sitting
in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001—are muba’a, licit, in the
Dar al Harb. As described by the great twentieth-century scholar of Islamic
law, Joseph Schacht,
A non-Muslim who is not protected by a treaty is called harbi, “in a state of war,”
“enemy alien”; his life and property are completely unprotected by law.
75
And these innocent noncombatants can be killed, and have always been killed,
with impunity simply by virtue of being harbis during endless razzias and or
full-scale jihad campaigns that have occurred continuously since the time of
Muhammad, through the present. This is the crux of the specific
institutionalized religio-political ideology, that is, jihad, which makes
Islamdom’s borders (and the farther reaches of today’s jihadists) bloody, to
paraphrase Samuel Huntington, across the globe.
76 To validate his contention
that, “Wherever one looks along the perimeter of Islam, Muslims have
77 Huntington adduced these
problems living peaceably with their neighbors,”
hard data:
The overwhelming majority of fault line conflicts…have taken place along the
boundary looping across Eurasia and Africa that separates Muslims from non
Muslims.…Intense antagonisms and violent conflicts are pervasive between local
Muslim and non-Muslim peoples.…Muslims make up about one-fifth of the
world’s population, but in the 1990s they have been far more involved in inter
group violence than the people of any other civilization. The evidence is
overwhelming. There were, in short, three times as many inter-civilizational
conflicts involving Muslims as there were between non-Muslim civilizations.…
Muslim states also have had a high propensity to resort to violence in international
crises, employing it to resolve 76 crises out of a total of 142 in which they were
involved between 1928 and 1979.…When they did use violence, Muslim states
used high-intensity violence, resorting to full-scale war in 41 percent of the cases
where violence was used and engaging in major clashes in another 39 percent of
the cases. While Muslim states resorted to violence in 53.5 percent, violence was
used the United Kingdom in only 1.5 percent, by the United States in 17.9 percent,
and by the Soviet Union in 28.5 percent of the crises in which they were involved.
…Muslim bellicosity and violence are late-twentieth-century facts which neither
Muslims nor non-Muslims can deny.
78
Ibn Hudayl, a fourteenth-century Granadan author of an important treatise
on jihad, elucidated the allowable tactics which facilitated the violent, chaotic
jihad conquest of the Iberian peninsula, and other parts of Europe:
It is permissible to set fire to the lands of the enemy, his stores of grain, his beasts
of burden—if it is not possible for the Muslims to take possession of them—as
well as to cut down his trees, to raze his cities, in a word, to do everything that
might ruin and discourage him…[being] suited to hastening the Islamization of
that enemy or to weakening him. Indeed, all this contributes to a military triumph
over him or to forcing him to capitulate.
79
Bernard Lewis, however, fails to contextualize statements attributed to the
caliph Abu Bakr (in 632), ostensibly prohibiting such destructive actions.
80
Again, as recorded in Tabari’s early tenth-century treatise on jihad, classical
jurisprudence supports the views of Ibn Hudayl:
Abu Hanifa and his companions said: “Abu Bakr’s saying, ‘Do not ruin what has
been built, do not burn palm trees, and do not cut down fruit-bearing trees’ [is
applied] when their [enemy people’s] territory has been conquered and controlled
[by Muslims] and it has fallen into their hands. They [the Muslims] should not do
any such actions because it has become a spoil of war for the Muslims [emphasis
added]. But if the [Muslim] army combatants do not have the power to reside in
that territory and they are not able to appoint a leader over it, and they cannot
acquire it so that it becomes theirs, then they should burn their fortresses, cities,
and churches, and destroy their palm trees and [other] trees and burn them down.
And whatever of their animals and cattle they acquire [cannot take out to the
Territory of Islam], they should slaughter and burn them.”
81
These repeated attacks, indistinguishable in motivation from modern acts of
jihad terrorism, like the horrific September 11, 2001, attacks in New York and
Washington, DC, and the Madrid bombings on March 11, 2004, or those in
London on July 7, 2005, were in fact designed to sow terror.
82 The
seventeenth-century Muslim historian al-Maqqari explained that the panic
created by the Arab horsemen and sailors, at the time of the Muslim
expansion in the regions subjected to those raids and landings, facilitated their
later conquest, “Allah thus instilled such fear among the infidels that they did
not dare to go and fight the conquerors; they only approached them as
suppliants, to beg for peace.”
83
Muhammad himself was the ultimate prototype sanctioning jihad terror, as
recorded in this canonical hadith:
Narrated Abu Huraira: Allah’s Apostle said, “I have been sent with the shortest
expressions bearing the widest meanings, and I have been made victorious with
terror (cast in the hearts of the enemy).”
84
In a February 2010 moderated presentation, Bernard Lewis improperly
conflated Islam’s prohibition against suicide for melancholia with interdiction
against jihad martyrdom operations.
85 According to Islam’s seminal early
historian, al-Tabari (d. 923), during Abu Bakr’s reign as Caliph, his
commander Khalid b. al-Walid’s wrote a letter in 634 to a Persian leader in
Iraq identified as “Hurmuz,” warning of a prototypical expansionist jihad
campaign, spearheaded by Muslim warriors enamored of death.
Now then. Embrace Islam so that you may be safe, or else make a treaty of
protection for yourself and your people, for I have brought you a people who love
86
death as you love life [emphasis added].
“Martyrdom operations” have always been intimately associated with the
institution of jihad. Professor Franz Rosenthal, in a magisterial 1946 essay
(titled, “On Suicide in Islam”), observed that Islam’s foundational texts
sanctioned such acts of jihad martyrdom and held them in the highest esteem:
death as the result of “suicidal” missions and of the desire of martyrdom occurs not
infrequently, since [such] death is considered highly commendable according to
Muslim religious concepts.
87
Koran 9:111 provides an unequivocal, celebratory invocation of martyrdom
during jihad:
88
Lo! Allah hath bought from the believers their lives and their wealth because the
Garden will be theirs: they shall fight in the way of Allah and shall slay and be
slain.
Finally, the Muslim prophet Muhammad is idealized as the eternal model
for behaviors that all Muslims should emulate.
89 Nearly six decades ago (in
1956), Arthur Jeffery, a great modern scholar of Islam, reviewed Guillaume’s
magisterial English translation of Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah,
90 the oldest
and most important Muslim biography of Muhammad. Jeffery’s review
included this trenchant observation:
Years ago the late Canon Gairdner in Cairo said that the best answer to the
numerous apologetic Lives of Muhammad published in the interests of Muslim
propaganda in the West would be an unvarnished translation of the earliest Arabic
biography of the prophet.
91
W. H. T. (Canon) Gairdner, in 1915, highlighted the dilemma posed by
Islam’s sacralization of Muhammad’s timeless behavioral role model, revealed
in such pious Muslim biographical works:
As incidents in the life of an Arab conqueror, the tales of raiding, private
assassinations and public executions, perpetual enlargements of the harem, and so
forth, might be historically explicable and therefore pardonable but it is another
matter that they should be taken as a setting forth of the moral ideal for all time.
92
For example, Muhammad celebrated jihad martyrdom as the supreme act of
Islamic devotion in the most important canonical hadith collection:
Narrated Anas bin Malik: The Prophet said, “Nobody who dies and finds good
from Allah (in the Hereafter) would wish to come back to this world even if he
were given the whole world and whatever is in it, except the martyr who, on seeing
the superiority of martyrdom, would like to come back to the world and get killed
again (in Allah’s Cause).”
Narrated Abu Huraira: “The Prophet said, ‘By Him in Whose Hands my life is!
Were it not for some men amongst the believers who dislike to be left behind me
and whom I cannot provide with means of conveyance, I would certainly never
remain behind any Sariya’ (army-unit) setting out in Allah’s Cause. By Him in
Whose Hands my life is! I would love to be martyred in Allah’s Cause and then get
resurrected and then get martyred, and then get resurrected again and then get
martyred and then get resurrected again and then get martyred.”
93
Not surprisingly then, unlike scholars who specialized in the history of the
jihad conquests across Asia, Africa, and Europe—such as Moshe Gil,
Speros Vryonis,
95 Dimitar Angelov,
96 Charles Emmanuel Dufourcq,
94
97 and K.
S. Lal
98—Lewis’s rather superficial surveys
99 avoid any details of the
devastation these brutal campaigns wrought. As copiously documented by
both triumphal Muslim historians and the laments of non-Muslim chroniclers
representing the victims’ perspective, jihad depredations resulted in vast
numbers of infidels mercilessly slaughtered—including noncombatant women
and children—or enslaved, and deported; countless cities, villages, and infidel
religious and cultural sites sacked and pillaged, often accompanied by the
burning of harvest crops and massive uprooting of agricultural production
systems, causing famine; and enormous quantities of treasure and movable
goods seized as “booty.”
100
Having effectively ignored the destructive, sanguinary legacy of jihad,
Bernard Lewis has never recommended Muslim acknowledgment of this
history, combined with mea culpa–based rejection of its doctrinal basis in
Islam. Contra Lewis, historian Bat Ye’or explained in 1990 how such frank
recognition by the Muslim intelligentsia is a requisite for the emergence of
truly modern Islamic societies capable of coexisting peacefully with non
Muslims:
[T]his effort cannot succeed without a complete recasting of mentalities, the
desacralization of the historic jihad and an unbiased examination of Islamic
imperialism. Without such a process, the past will continue to poison the present
and inhibit the establishment of harmonious relationships. When all is said and
done, such self-criticism is hardly exceptional. Every scourge, such as religious
fanaticism, the crusades, the inquisition, slavery, apartheid, colonialism, Nazism
and, today, communism, are analyzed, examined, and exorcized in the West. Even
Judaism—harmless in comparison with the power of the Church and the Christian
empires—caught, in its turn, in the great modernization movement, has been
forced to break away from some traditions. It is inconceivable that Islam, which
began in Mecca and swept through three continents, should alone avoid a critical
reflection on the mechanisms of its power and expansion. The task of assessing
their history must be undertaken by the Muslims themselves.
101
The late Orientalist Maxime Rodinson (d. 2004), a contemporary of
Bernard Lewis, warned forty years ago of misguided modern scholarship
effectively “sanctifying” Islam:
Understanding has given away to apologetics pure and simple.
102
Lewis’s bowdlerized 1974 summary portrayal of the system of governance
imposed upon those indigenous non-Muslims conquered by jihad is a
distressing, ahistorical example of this apologetic genre.
103
In his seminal The Laws of Islamic Governance, al-Mawardi (d. 1058), a
renowned jurist of Baghdad, examined the regulations pertaining to the lands
and infidel populations subjugated by jihad.
104 This is the origin of the system
of dhimmitude. The native infidel, dhimmi (which derives from the words for
both pact and also guilt—guilty of religious errors), population had to
recognize Islamic ownership of their land, submit to Islamic law, and accept
payment of the Koranic poll tax (jizya), based on Koran 9:29. Al-Mawardi
notes that “[t]he enemy makes a payment in return for peace and
reconciliation.” He then distinguishes two cases: (1) Payment is made
immediately and is treated like booty, “it does, not however, prevent a jihad
being carried out against them in the future.” (2) Payment is made yearly and
will “constitute an ongoing tribute by which their security is established.”
Reconciliation and security last as long as the payment is made. If the
payment ceases, then the jihad resumes. A treaty of reconciliation may be
renewable, but must not exceed ten years.
105 This same basic formulation was
reiterated during a January 8, 1998, interview by Yusuf al-Qaradawi
confirming how jihad continues to regulate the relations between Muslims
and non-Muslims to this day.
106
The “contract of the jizya,” or dhimma encompassed other obligatory and
recommended obligations for the conquered non-Muslim “dhimmi” peoples.
Ibn Kathir’s
107 important fourteenth-century Koranic commentary describes
the essence of the Koran’s mandate in verse 9:29 for submissive tribute, or
“jizya,” under the heading, “Paying Jizya Is a Sign of Kufr [Unbelief] and
Disgrace.” He elaborates, as follows:
Allah said, “until they pay the Jizya,” if they do not choose to embrace Islam,
“with willing submission,” in defeat and subservience, “and feel themselves
subdued,” disgraced, humiliated and belittled. Therefore, Muslims are not allowed
to honor the people of Dhimma or elevate them above Muslims, for they are
miserable, disgraced, and humiliated. Muslim recorded from Abu Hurayrah that
the Prophet said, “Do not initiate the Salam to the Jews and the Christians, and if
you meet them in a road, force them to its narrowest alley.” This is why the Leader
of the faithful ‘Umar b. Al-Khattab [d. 644, the second “Rightly Guided” Caliph],
may Allah be pleased with him, demanded his well-known conditions be met by
the Christians, these conditions that ensured their continued humiliation,
degradation, and disgrace.
108
Collectively, these “obligations” formed the discriminatory system of
dhimmitude imposed upon non-Muslims—Jews, Christians, as well as
Zoroastrians, Hindus, and Buddhists—subjugated by jihad. Some of the more
salient features of dhimmitude include: the prohibition of arms for the
vanquished dhimmis, and of church bells; restrictions concerning the building
and restoration of churches, synagogues, and temples; inequality between
Muslims and non-Muslims with regard to taxes and penal law; the refusal of
dhimmi testimony by Muslim courts; a requirement that Jews, Christians, and
other non-Muslims, including Zoroastrians and Hindus, wear special clothes;
and the overall humiliation and abasement of non-Muslims. It is important to
note that these regulations and attitudes were institutionalized as permanent
features of the sacred Islamic law, or sharia.
109 The writings of the much
lionized Sufi theologian and jurist al-Ghazali (d. 1111) highlight how the
institution of dhimmitude was simply a normative and prominent feature of
the sharia:
[T]he dhimmi is obliged not to mention Allah or His Apostle.…Jews, Christians,
and Majians [Zoroastrians] must pay the jizya [poll tax on non-Muslims].…[O]n
offering up the jizya, the dhimmi must hang his head while the official takes hold
of his beard and hits [the dhimmi] on the protruberant bone beneath his ear [i.e.,
the mandible].…They are not permitted to ostentatiously display their wine or
church bells…their houses may not be higher than the Muslim’s, no matter how
low that is. The dhimmi may not ride an elegant horse or mule; he may ride a
donkey only if the saddler-work is of wood. He may not walk on the good part of
the road. They [the dhimmis] have to wear [an identifying] patch [on their
clothing], even women, and even in the [public] baths…[dhimmis] must hold their
tongue.
110
The practical consequences of such a discriminatory system were summarized
in A. S. Tritton’s 1930 The Caliphs and Their Non-Muslim Subjects, a
pioneering treatise on the status of the dhimmis:
[C]aliphs destroyed churches to obtain materials for their buildings, and the mob
was always ready to pillage churches and monasteries…dhimmis…always lived
on sufferance, exposed to the caprices of the ruler and the passions of the mob…in
later times…[t]hey were much more liable to suffer from the violence of the
crowd, and the popular fanaticism was accompanied by an increasing strictness
among the educated. The spiritual isolation of Islam was accomplished. The world
was divided into two classes, Muslims and others, and only Islam counted.…
Indeed the general feeling was that the leavings of the Muslims were good enough
for the dhimmis.
111
Yet over four decades after Tritton published this apt characterization, here is
what Lewis opined on the subject (in 1974):
The dhimma on the whole worked well [emphasis added]. The non-Muslims
managed to thrive under Muslim rule, and even to make significant contributions
to Islamic civilization. The restrictions were not onerous, and were usually less
severe in practice than in theory. As long as the non-Muslim communities accepted
and conformed to the status of tolerated subordination assigned to them, they were
not troubled.
112
The assessments of two other highly esteemed Western scholars—
Professors Ann Lambton and S. D. Goitein—who were Lewis’s
contemporaries (and colleagues), make plain that his flimsy apologetic on
“the dhimma” does not represent a consensus viewpoint.
From 1972 until 1978, the late Ann Lambton headed the Near and Middle
East Department while contributing articles and analyses for The Cambridge
History of Islam, which she coedited with Bernard Lewis. Professor Lambton
and Bernard Lewis were also both protégés of the famous School of Oriental
and Asiatic Studies Islamologist Sir Hamilton Gibb. Lambton’s obituarist,
Burzine K. Waghmar, noted (on August 1, 2008),
Lambton was unrivalled in the breadth of her scholarship, covering Persian
grammar and dialectology; medieval and early modern Islamic political thought;
Seljuq, Mongol, Safavid, Qajar and Pahlavi administration; tribal and local history;
and land tenure and agriculture. Her association with SOAS (School of Oriental
and Asiatic Studies) in London, which lasted from her time as an undergraduate in
1930 until her death as Professor Emerita, aged 96, was one of the longest and
most illustrious, and Lambton became acknowledged as the dean of Persian studies
in the West. Without hyperbole, an era has passed in Middle Eastern studies.
113
Ann Lambton wrote the following on the dhimmis, published in 1981:
As individuals, the dhimmis possessed no rights. Citizenship was limited to
Muslims; and because of the superior status of the Muslim, certain juristic
restrictions were imposed on the dhimmi. The evidence of a dhimmi was not
accepted in a law court; a Muslim could not inherit from a dhimmi nor a dhimmi
from a Muslim; a Muslim could marry a dhimmi woman, but a dhimmi could not
marry a Muslim woman; at the frontier a dhimmi merchant paid double the rate of
duty on merchandise paid by a Muslim, but only half the rate paid by a harbi; and
the blood-wit paid for a dhimmi was, except according to the Hanafis, only half or
two-thirds that paid for a Muslim’s No dhimmi was permitted to change his faith
except for Islam….
Various social restrictions were imposed upon the dhimmis such as restrictions
of dress.…Dhimmis were also forbidden to ride horses…and, according to Abu
Hanifa valuable mules. The reason for this prohibition was connected with the fact
that dhimmis were forbidden to bear arms: the horse was regarded as a “fighter for
the faith,” and received two shares in the booty if it were of Arab stock whereas its
rider received one. Dhimmis were to yield the way to Muslims. They were also
forbidden to mark their houses by distinctive signs or to build them higher than
those of Muslims. They were not to build new churches, synagogues, or
hermitages and not to scandalize Muslims by openly performing their worship or
following their distinctive customs such as drinking wine….
The humiliating regulations to which [dhimmis] were subject as regards their
dress and conduct in public were not, however, nearly so serious as their moral
subjection, the imposition of the poll tax, and their legal disabilities. They were, in
general, made to feel that they were beyond the pale. Partly as a result of this, the
Christian communities dwindled in number, vitality, and morality.…The
degradation and demoralization of the [dhimmis] had dire consequences for the
Islamic community and reacted unfavorably on Islamic political and social life.
[Emphasis added.]
114
Shlomo Dov [S. D.] Goitein (d. 1985) was a historian of Muslim-Jewish
relations whose seminal research findings were widely published, most
notably in the monumental five-volume work A Mediterranean Society: The
Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the
Cairo Geniza (1967–1993).
115 Goitein was Professor Emeritus of the Hebrew
University, scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and a
colleague of Lewis. The New York Times obituary for Professor Goitein
(published on February 10, 1985) noted, appositely, that his renowned (and
prolific) writings on Islamic culture, and Muslim-Jewish relations, were
“standard works for scholars in both fields.”
116 Here is what Goitein wrote on
the subject of non-Muslim dhimmis under Muslim rule, that is, dhimmitude,
circa 1970:
[A] great humanist and contemporary of the French Revolution, Wilhelm von
Humboldt, defined as the best state one which is least felt and restricts itself to one
task only: protection, protection against attack from outside and oppression from
within…in general, taxation [by the Muslim government] was merciless, and a
very large section of the population must have lived permanently at the starvation
level. From many Geniza letters one gets the impression that the poor were
concerned more with getting money for the payment of their taxes than for food
and clothing, for failure of payment usually induced cruel punishment.…[T]he
Muslim state was quite the opposite of the ideals propagated by Wilhelm von
Humboldt or the principles embedded in the constitution of the United States. An
Islamic state was part of or coincided with dar al-Islam, the House of Islam. Its
treasury was mal al-muslumin, the money of the Muslims. Christians and Jews
were not citizens of the state, not even second class citizens. They were outsiders
under the protection of the Muslim state, a status characterized by the term
dhimma, for which protection they had to pay a poll tax specific to them. They
were also exposed to a great number of discriminatory and humiliating laws.…As
it lies in the very nature of such restrictions, soon additional humiliations were
added, and before the second century of Islam was out, a complete body of
legislation in this matter was in existence.…In times and places in which they
became too oppressive they lead to the dwindling or even complete extinction of
the minorities [Emphasis added.]
117
Lewis’s conception of Islam’s doctrinal anti-Semitism, and its resultant
historical treatment of Jews, is a sham castle which rests on two false pillars.
These glib affirmations, which amount to nothing less than sheer denial, are
illustrated below:
In Islamic society hostility to the Jew is non-theological. It is not related to any
specific Islamic doctrine, nor to any specific circumstance in Islamic history. For
Muslims it is not part of the birth-pangs of their religion, as it is for Christians.
“dhimmi”-tude [derisively hyphenated] subservience and persecution and ill
treatment of Jews…[is a] myth.
118
There is voluminous evidence from Islam’s foundational texts of theological
Jew-hatred: virulently anti-Semitic Koranic verses whose virulence is only
amplified by the greatest classical and modern Muslim Koranic commentaries
(by Tabari [d. 923], Zamakshari [d. 1143], Baydawi [d. ~1316], Ibn Kathir
[d.1373], and Suyuti [d. 1505], to Qutb [d. 1966] and Mawdudi [d.1979]), the
six canonical hadith collections, and the most respected sira (pious Muslim
biographies of Muhammad, by Ibn Ishaq [d. 761 ]/Ibn Hisham [d. 813], Ibn
Sa’d [d. 835], Waqidi [d. 822], and Tabari). The anti-Semitic motifs in these
texts have been carefully elucidated by scholarship that dates back to Hartwig
Hirschfeld’s mid-1880s analysis of the sira and Georges Vajda’s 1937 study of
the hadith, complemented in the past two decades by Haggai Ben Shammai’s
1988 examination of the major anti-Semitic verses and themes in the Koran
and Koran exegesis, and Saul S. Friedman’s broad, straightforward
enumeration of Koranic anti-Semitism in 1989.
119 Moshe Perlmann, a
preeminent scholar of Islam’s ancient anti-Jewish polemical literature, made
this summary observation in 1964:
The Koran, of course became a mine of anti-Jewish passages. The hadith did not
lag behind. Popular preachers used and embellished such material.
120
Notwithstanding Bernard Lewis’s hollow claims, salient examples of Jew
hatred illustrating Perlmann’s remarkably compendious assessment of these
foundational Islamic sources, and their tragic application across space and
time, through the present, are summarized in the discussion that follows.
A front-page New York Times story published Saturday, January 10, 2009,
121 included extracts from the Friday sermon (of the day before) at Al Azhar
mosque pronounced by Egyptian-government-appointed cleric Sheik Eid
Abdel Hamid Youssef. Referencing well-established anti-Semitic motifs from
the Koran (citations provided below), Sheikh Youssef intoned,
Muslim brothers, God has inflicted the Muslim nation with a people whom God
has become angry at [Koran 1:7] and whom he cursed [Koran 5:78] so he made
monkeys and pigs [Koran 5:60] out of them. They killed prophets and messengers
[Koran 2:61/3:112] and sowed corruption on Earth [Koran 5:33/5:64]. They are the
most evil on Earth [5:62 /63].
122
The crux of all these allegations is a central anti-Semitic motif in the Koran
which decrees an eternal curse upon the Jews (Koran 2:61/reiterated at 3:112)
for slaying the prophets and transgressing against the will of Allah.
123 It
should be noted that Koran 3:112 is featured before the preamble to Hamas’s
foundational covenant.
124 This central motif is coupled to Koranic verses 5:60
and 5:78, which describe the Jews’ transformation into apes and swine (5:60),
or simply apes (i.e., verses 2:65 and 7:166), having been “cursed by the
tongue of David, and Jesus, Mary’s son” (5:78).
125 Muhammad himself repeats
this Koranic curse in a canonical hadith, “He [Muhammad] then recited the
verse [5:78]: ‘…curses were pronounced on those among the children of
Israel who rejected Faith, by the tongue of David and of Jesus the son of
Mary.’”
126 The related verse, 5:64, accuses the Jews of being “spreaders of
war and corruption”—a sort of ancient Koranic antecedent of The Protocols
of the Elders of Zion—invoked not only by Hamas and Hezbollah leaders, but
“moderate” Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas who cited Koran
5:64 during a January 2007 speech which urged Palestinian Muslims to end
their internecine strife, and “aim their rifles at Israel.”
127
Indeed the Koran’s overall discussion of the Jews is marked by a litany of
their sins and punishments, as if part of a divine indictment, conviction, and
punishment process. The Jews’ ultimate sin and punishment are made clear:
they are the devil’s minions (4:60) cursed by Allah, their faces will be
obliterated (4:47), and if they do not accept the true faith of Islam—the Jews
who understand their faith become Muslims (3:113)—they will be made into
apes (2:65/7:166), or apes and swine (5:60), and burn in the hellfires (4:55,
5:29, 98:6, and 58:14–19).
128
The centrality of the Jews’ permanent “abasement and humiliation,” and
being “laden with God’s anger” in the corpus of Muslim exegetic literature on
Koran 2:61/3:112 is clear. By nature deceitful and treacherous, the Jews
rejected Allah’s signs and prophets, including Isa, the Muslim Jesus.
129
Classical Koranic commentators such as Tabari (d. 923), Zamakshari (d.
1143), Baydawi (d. 1316), and Ibn Kathir (d. 1373), when discussing Koran
5:82, which includes the statement “Thou wilt surely find the most hostile of
men to the believers are the Jews,” concur on the unique animus of the Jews
toward the Muslims, which is repeatedly linked to the curse of Koran
2:61/3:112. For example, in his commentary on 5:82, Tabari writes,
130
In my opinion, [the Christians] are not like the Jews who always scheme in order
to murder the emissaries and the prophets, and who oppose God in his positive and
negative commandments, and who corrupt His scripture which He revealed in His
books.
Tabari’s classical interpretations of Koran 5:82 and 2:61, as well as his
discussion of the related verse 9:29 mandating the Jews payment of the jizya
(Koranic poll-tax), represent both anti-Semitic and more general anti-dhimmi
views that became, and remain, intrinsic to Islam to this day. Here is Tabari’s
discussion of 2:61 and its relationship to verse 9:29, which emphasizes the
purposely debasing nature of the Koranic poll tax:
“[A]basement and poverty were imposed and laid down upon them,” as when
someone says “the imam imposed the poll tax (jizya) on free non-Muslim
subjects,” or “The man imposed land tax on his slave,” meaning thereby that he
obliged him [to pay] it, or, “The commander imposed a sortie on his troops,”
meaning he made it their duty.…God commanded His believing servants not to
give them [i.e., the non-Muslim people of the scripture] security—as long as they
continued to disbelieve in Him and his Messenger—unless they paid the poll tax to
them; God said: “Fight those who believe not in God and the Last Day and do not
forbid what God and His Messenger have forbidden—such men as practice not the
religion of truth [Islam], being of those who have been given the Book [Bible]—
until they pay the poll tax, being humble” (Koran 9:29)….
The dhimmis’ [non-Muslim tributary’s] posture during the collection of the jizya
[should be lowering themselves] by walking on their hands,…reluctantly.
…Ibn Zaid said about His words “and abasement and poverty were imposed
upon them,” “‘These are the Jews of the Children of Israel.’ I said‘Are they the
Copts of Egypt?’ He said” What have the Copts of Egypt to do with this? No, by
God, they are not; but they are the Jews, the Children of Israel.…By “and slain the
prophets unrightfully” He means that they used to kill the Messengers of God
without God’s leave, denying their messages and rejecting their prophethood.
131
The Koranic curse (verses 2:61/3:112) upon the Jews for (primarily)
rejecting, even slaying, Allah’s prophets, including Isa/Jesus (or at least his
“body double” 4:157–58), is updated with perfect archetypal logic in the
canonical hadith: following the Muslims’ initial conquest of the Jewish
farming oasis of Khaybar, one of the vanquished Jewesses reportedly served
Muhammad poisoned mutton (or goat), which resulted, ultimately, in his
protracted, agonizing death. And Ibn Saad’s sira account (i.e., one of the
important early pious Muslim biographies of Muhammad) maintains that
Muhammad’s poisoning resulted from a well-coordinated Jewish
conspiracy.
132
The contemporary Iranian theocracy’s state-sanctioned Jew-hatred employs
this motif as part of its malevolent indoctrination of young-adult candidates
for national teacher-training programs. Affirming as objective, factual history
the hadith account (for example, Sahih Bukhari, vol. 3, bk. 47, no. 786) of
Muhammad’s supposed poisoning by a Jewish woman from ancient Khaybar,
Professor Eliz Sanasarian notes,
the subject became one of the questions in the ideological test for the Teachers’
Training College where students were given a multiple-choice question in order to
identify the instigator of the martyrdom of the Prophet Muhammad, the “correct”
answer being “a Jewess.”
133
It is worth recounting—as depicted in the Muslim sources—the events that
antedated Muhammad’s reputed poisoning at Khaybar.
Muhammad’s failures or incomplete successes were consistently
recompensed by murderous attacks on the Jews. The Muslim prophet-warrior
developed a penchant for assassinating individual Jews and destroying Jewish
communities—by expropriation and expulsion (Banu Quaynuqa and B.
Nadir), or massacring their men and enslaving their women and children
(Banu Qurayza).
134 Just before subduing the Medinan Jewish tribe Banu
Qurayza and orchestrating the mass execution of their adult males,
Muhammad invoked perhaps the most striking Koranic motif for the Jews’
debasement—he addressed these Jews, with hateful disparagement, as“ You
brothers of apes.”
135 Subsequently, in the case of the Khaybar Jews,
Muhammad had the male leadership killed and plundered their riches. The
terrorized Khaybar survivors—industrious Jewish farmers—became prototype
subjugated dhimmis whose productivity was extracted by the Muslims as a
form of permanent booty. (And according to the Muslim sources, even this
tenuous vassalage was arbitrarily terminated within a decade of Muhammad’s
death when Caliph Umar expelled the Jews of Khaybar.)
136
Thus Maimonides (d. 1203), the renowned Talmudist, philosopher,
astronomer, and physician, as noted by historian Salo Baron, emphasizes the
bellicose “madness” of Muhammad—Maimonides refers to Muhammad as
“Ha-Meshugga” (the madman)—and his quest for political control.
Muhammad’s mind-set, and the actions it engendered, had immediate, and
long-term tragic consequences for Jews—from his massacring up to twenty
four thousand Jews, to their chronic oppression—as described in the Islamic
sources, by Muslims themselves.
137
Muhammad’s brutal conquest and subjugation of the Medinan and Khaybar
Jews, and their subsequent expulsion by one of his companions, the (second)
“Rightly Guided” Caliph Umar, epitomize permanent, archetypal behavior
patterns Islamic law deemed appropriate to Muslim interactions with Jews.
138
Georges Vajda’s seminal analysis of the anti-Jewish motifs in the hadith
remains the definitive work on this subject.
139 Vajda concluded that according
to
the hadith, stubborn malevolence is the Jews’ defining worldly
characteristic: rejecting Muhammad and refusing to convert to Islam out of
jealousy, envy, and even selfish personal interest, lead them to acts of
treachery, in keeping with their inveterate nature: “sorcery, poisoning,
assassination held no scruples for them.”
140 These archetypes sanction
Muslim hatred toward the Jews and provide the admonition to, at best,
“subject [the Jews] to Muslim domination,” as dhimmis, treated “with
contempt,” under certain “humiliating arrangements.”
141
Last, a profound anti-Jewish motif occurring after the events recorded in the
hadith and sira, put forth in early Muslim historiography (for example, by
Tabari), is most assuredly a part of “the birth pangs” of Islam: the story of
Abd Allah b. Saba, an alleged renegade Yemenite Jew and founder of the
heterodox Shi’ite sect. He is held responsible—identified as a Jew—for
promoting the Shi’ite heresy and fomenting the rebellion and internal strife
associated with this primary breach in Islam’s “political innocence,”
culminating in the assassination of the third Rightly Guided Caliph Uthman,
and the bitter, lasting legacy of Sunni-Shi’ite sectarian strife.
142
Two particularly humiliating “vocations” that were imposed upon Jews by
their Muslim overlords in Yemen, and Morocco—where Jews formed the only
substantive non-Muslim dhimmi populations—merit elaboration.
Moroccan Jews were confined to ghettos in the major cities, such as Fez
(since the thirteenth century), called mellah(s) (salty earth), which derives
from the fact it was here that they were forced to salt the decapitated heads of
executed rebels for public exposition. This brutally imposed humiliating
practice—which could be enforced even on the Jewish Sabbath—persisted
through the late nineteenth century, as described by Eliezer Bashan:
In the 1870s, Jews were forced to salt the decapitated heads of rebels on the
Sabbath. For example, Berber tribes frequently revolted against Sultan Muhammad
XVIII. In order to force them to accept his authority, he would engage in punitive
military campaigns. Among the tribes were the Musa, located south of Marrakesh.
In 1872, the Sultan succeeded in quelling their revolt and forty-eight of their
captives were condemned to death. In October 1872, on the order of the Sultan,
they were dispatched to Rabat for beheading. Their decapitated heads were to be
exposed on the gates of the town for three days. Since the heads were to be sent to
Fez, Jewish ritual slaughterers [of livestock] were forced to salt them and hang
them for exposure on the Sabbath. Despite threats by the governor of Rabat, the
Jews refused to do so. He then ordered soldiers to enter the homes of those who
refused and drag them outside. After they were flogged, the Jews complied and
performed the task and the heads of the rebels were exposed in public.
143
Yemenite Jews had to remove human feces and other waste matter (urine
which failed to evaporate, etc.) from Muslim areas, initially in Sana’a, and
later in other communities such as Shibam, Yarim, and Dhamar. Decrees
requiring this obligation were issued in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth
century, and re-introduced in 1913. Yehuda Nini reproduces an 1874 letter
written by a Yemenite Jew to the Alliance Israelite in Paris, lamenting the
practice:
[I]t is 86 years since our forefathers suffered the cruel decree and great shame to
the nation of Israel from the east to sundown.…[F]or in the days of our fathers, 86
years ago, there arose a judge known as Qadi, and said unto the king and his
ministers who lived in that time that the Lord, Blessed be He, had only created the
Jews out of love of the other nations, to do their work and be enslaved by them at
their will, and to do the most contemptible and lowly of tasks. And of them all…
the greatest contamination of all, to clear their privies and streets and pathways of
the filthy dung and the great filth in that place and to collect all that is left of the
dung, may your Honor pardon the expression.
144
And when the Jews were perceived as having exceeded the rightful bounds of
this subjected relationship, as in mythically “tolerant” Muslim Spain, the
results were predictably tragic. The Granadan Jewish viziers Samuel Ibn
Naghrela, and his son Joseph, who protected the Jewish community, were
both assassinated between 1056 to 1066, and in the aftermath, the Jewish
population was annihilated by the local Muslims. It is estimated that up to
four thousand Jews perished in the pogrom by Muslims that accompanied the
1066 assassination. This figure equals or exceeds the number of Jews
reportedly killed by the Crusaders during their pillage of the Rhineland, some
thirty years later, at the outset of the First Crusade.
145 The inciting “rationale”
for this Granadan pogrom is made clear in the bitter anti-Jewish ode of Abu
Ishaq, a well-known Muslim jurist and poet of the times, who wrote:
Bring them down to their place and return them to the most abject station. They
used to roam around us in tatters covered with contempt, humiliation, and scorn.
They used to rummage amongst the dung heaps for a bit of a filthy rag to serve as
a shroud for a man to be buried in.…Do not consider that killing them is treachery.
Nay, it would be treachery to leave them scoffing.
146
Abu Ishaq’s rhetorical incitement to violence also included the line, “Many
a pious Muslim is in awe of the vilest infidel ape.”
147
Moshe Perlmann, in his analysis of the Muslim anti-Jewish polemic of
eleventh-century Granada, notes,
[Abu Ishaq] Elbīrī used the epithet “ape” (qird) profusely when referring to Jews.
Such indeed was the parlance.
148
The Moroccan cleric al-Maghili (d. 1505), referring to the Jews as “brothers
of apes” (just as Muhammad, the sacralized prototype, had addressed the
Banu Qurayza), who repeatedly blasphemed the Muslim prophet, and whose
overall conduct reflected their hatred of Muslims, fomented, and then
personally lead, a Muslim pogrom (in about 1490) against the Jews of the
southern Moroccan oasis of Touat, plundering and killing them en masse and
destroying their synagogue in neighboring Tamantit. An important Muslim
theologian whose writings influenced Moroccan religious attitudes toward
Jews into the twenthieth century, al-Maghili also declared in verse, “Love of
the Prophet, requires hatred of the Jews.”
149
Mordechai Hakohen (1856–1929) was a Libyan Talmudic scholar and auto
didact anthropologist who composed an ethnographic study of North African
Jewry in the early twentieth century. Hakohen describes the overall impact on
the Jews of the Muslim jihad conquest and rule of North Africa as follows:
They [also] pressed the Jews to enter the covenant of the Muslim religion. Many
Jews bravely chose death. Some of them accepted under the threat of force, but
only outwardly.…Others left the region, abandoning their wealth and property and
scattering to the ends of the earth. Many stood by their faith, but bore an iron yoke
on their necks. They lowered themselves to the dust before the Muslims, lords of
the land, and accepted a life of woe—carrying no weapons, never mounting an
animal in the presence of a Muslim, not wearing a red headdress, and following
other laws that signaled their degradation.
150
Here is but a very incomplete sampling of pogroms and mass murderous
violence against Jews living under Islamic rule, across space and time, all
resulting from the combined effects of jihadism, general anti-dhimmi, and/or
specifically anti-Semitic motifs in Islam: 6,000 Jews massacred in Fez in
1033; hundreds of Jews slaughtered in Muslim Cordoba between 1010 and
1015; 4,000 Jews killed in Muslim riots in Grenada in 1066, wiping out the
entire community; the Berber Muslim Almohad depredations of Jews (and
Christians) in Spain and North Africa between 1130 and 1232, which killed
tens of thousands, while forcibly converting thousands more, and subjecting
the forced Jewish converts to Islam to a Muslim Inquisition; the 1291
pogroms in Baghdad and its environs, which killed (at least) hundreds of
Jews; the 1465 pogrom against the Jews of Fez; the late fifteenth-century
pogrom against the Jews of the Southern Moroccan oasis town of Touat; the
1679 pogroms against, and then expulsion of, 10,000 Jews from Sana’a,
Yemen, to the unlivable, hot and dry plain of Tihama, from which only 1,000
returned alive in 1680, 90 percent having died from exposure; recurring
Muslim anti-Jewish violence—including pogroms and forced conversions—
throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, which
rendered areas of Iran (for example, Tabriz) Judenrein; the 1834 pogrom in
Safed, where raging Muslim mobs killed and grievously wounded hundreds
of Jews; the 1888 massacres of Jews in Isfahan and Shiraz, Iran; the 1910
pogrom in Shiraz; the pillage and destruction of the Casablanca, Morocco,
ghetto in 1907; the pillage of the ghetto of Fez, Morocco, in 1912; the
government-sanctioned anti-Jewish pogroms by Muslims in Turkish Eastern
Thrace during June–July 1934, which ethnically cleansed at least 3,000 Jews;
and the series of pogroms, expropriations, and finally mass expulsions of
some 900,000 Jews from Arab Muslim nations, beginning in 1941 in
Baghdad (the murderous “Farhud,” during which 600 Jews were murdered,
and at least 12,000 pillaged)—eventually involving cities and towns in Egypt,
Morocco, Libya, Syria, Aden, and Bahrain, and culminating in 1967 in
Tunisia—that accompanied the planning and creation of a Jewish state, Israel,
on a portion of the Jews’ ancestral homeland.
151
At present, the continual, monotonous invocation by Al Azhar clerics of
anti-Semitic motifs from the Koran (and other foundational Muslim texts) is
entirely consistent with the published writings and statements of Sheikh
Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi—grand imam of this preeminent Islamic
religious institution since 1996, until his death in mid-March of 2010.
153
152
Tantawi’s case illustrates the prevalence and depth of sacralized, “normative”
Jew-hatred in the contemporary Muslim world. Arguably Islam’s leading
mainstream cleric, Grand Imam Sheikh Tantawi, embodies how the living
legacy of Muslim anti-Jewish hatred and violence remains firmly rooted in
mainstream, orthodox Islamic teachings, not some aberrant vision of “radical
Islam.”
Tantawi’s doctoral thesis, Banu Israil fi al-Quran wa-al-Sunnah (Jews in
the Koran and the Traditions), was published in 1968–69 and republished in
1986. Two years after earning his doctorate, Sheikh Tantawi began teaching at
Al Azhar. In 1980 he became the head of the Tafsir [Koranic Commentary]
Department of the University of Medina, Saudi Arabia—a position he held
until 1984. Sheikh Tantawi became grand mufti of Egypt in 1986, a position
he was to hold for a decade, before serving as the grand imam of Al Azhar
beginning in 1996, for the last fourteen years of his life.
154
The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism includes extensive first-time English
translations of Tantawi’s academic magnum opus. Tantawi wrote these words
in his 700-page treatise, rationalizing Muslim Jew-hatred:
[The] Koran describes the Jews with their own particular degenerate
characteristics, i.e., killing the prophets of Allah [Koran 2:61/3:112], corrupting
His words by putting them in the wrong places, consuming the people’s wealth
frivolously, refusal to distance themselves from the evil they do, and other ugly
characteristics caused by their deep-rooted lasciviousness…only a minority of the
Jews keep their word.…[A]ll Jews are not the same. The good ones become
Muslims [Koran 3:113], the bad ones do not.
155
Tantawi was apparently rewarded for this scholarly effort by subsequently
being named grand imam of Al Azhar University. These were the expressed,
“carefully researched,” views on Jews held by the nearest Muslim equivalent
to a pope—a man who for fourteen years headed the most prestigious center
of Muslim learning in Sunni Islam, which represents some 85 to 90 percent of
the world’s Muslims.
156 And Sheikh Tantawi never mollified such
hatemongering beliefs after becoming the grand imam of Al Azhar as his
statements on “dialogue” (January 1998)
157 with Jews, the Jews as “enemies
of Allah, descendants of apes and pigs” (April 2002),
158 and the legitimacy of
homicide bombing of Jews (April 2002)
159 made clear.
Tantawi’s statements on dialogue,
160 which were issued shortly after he met
with the Israel’s chief rabbi, Israel Meir Lau, in Cairo on December 15, 1997,
provided him another opportunity to reaffirm his ongoing commitment to the
views expressed about Jews in his doctoral thesis:
[A]nyone who avoids meeting with the enemies in order to counter their dubious
claims and stick fingers into their eyes, is a coward. My stance stems from Allah’s
book [the Koran], more than one-third of which deals with the Jews.…[I] wrote a
dissertation dealing with them [the Jews], all their false claims and their
punishment by Allah. I still believe in everything written in that dissertation. [That
is, Jews in the Koran and the Traditions, cited above.]
Unfortunately, Tantawi’s anti-Semitic formulations are well-grounded in
classical, mainstream Islamic theology.
161 However, understanding and
acknowledging the Koranic origins of Islamic anti-Semitism is not a
justification for the unreformed, unrepentant modern endorsement of these
hateful motifs by Tantawi—with predictably murderous consequences. Within
days of the Netanya homicide bombing massacre on a Passover seder night,
March 27, 2002, for example, Sheikh Tantawi issued an abhorrent sanction
(April 4, 2002)
162 of so-called martyrdom operations, even when directed at
Israeli civilians.
And during November 2002 (“Tantawi: No Antisemitism,” Associated
Press, November 19, 2002), consistent with his triumphant denial, Sheikh
Tantawi made the following statement in response to criticism over the
virulently anti-Semitic Egyptian television series Horseman Without a Horse,
based on the Czarist Russia forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion:
Suppose that the series has some criticism or shows some of the Jews’ traits, this
doesn’t necessitate an uproar.…The accusation of antisemitism was invented by the
Jews as a means to pressure Arabs and Muslims to implement their schemes in the
Arab and Muslim countries, so don’t pay attention to them.
163
January 22, 2008, it was reported that Tantawi canceled what would have
been a historic visit to the Rome synagogue by the imam of Rome’s mosque
(Ala Eldin Mohammed Ismail al-Ghobash). The putative excuse for this
cancellation was Israel’s self-defensive stance—a blockade—in response to
acts of jihad terrorism (rocket barrages, attempted armed incursions)
emanating from Gaza. The Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera,
commenting aptly about these events, observed that the cancellation proved,
“even so-called Muslim moderates share the ideology of hate, violence and
death towards the Jewish state.”
164 Al Azhar, Corriere della Sera, further
argued, which constituted a “Vatican of Sunni Islam,” had in effect issued “a
kind of fatwah.” The paper concluded by noting that “What the Cairo
statement really means is that Muslim dialogue with Jews in Italy is only
possible once Israel has been eliminated.”
165
Annihilationist sentiments regarding Jews, as expressed by Hezbollah, the
Iranian regime, and incorporated permanently into the foundational 1988
Hamas Charter, are also rooted in Islamic eschatology, or end-of-times
theology. As characterized in the hadith, Muslim eschatology highlights the
Jews’ supreme hostility to Islam. Jews are described as adherents of the Dajjâl
—the Muslim equivalent of the Anti-Christ—or according to another
tradition, the Dajjâl is himself Jewish. At his appearance, other traditions
maintain that the Dajjâl will be accompanied by seventy thousand Jews from
Isfahan wrapped in their robes, and armed with polished sabers, their heads
covered with a sort of veil. When the Dajjâl is defeated, his Jewish
companions will be slaughtered— everything will deliver them up except for
the so-called gharkad tree, as per the canonical hadith included in the 1988
Hamas Charter (in article 7). Another hadith variant, which takes place in
Jerusalem, has Isa (the Muslim Jesus) leading the Arabs in a rout of the Dajjâl
and his company of seventy thousand armed Jews. And the notion of jihad
“ransom” extends even into Islamic eschatology—on the day of resurrection
the vanquished Jews will be consigned to hellfire, and this will expiate
Muslims who have sinned, sparing them from this fate.
166 Moshe Sharon
recently provided a very lucid summary of the unique features of Shi’ite
eschatology, its key point of consistency with Sunni understandings of this
doctrine, and Iranian president Ahmadinejad’s deep personal attachment to
mahdism:
Since the late ninth century, the Shi’ites have been expecting the emergence of the
hidden imam-mahdi, armed with divine power and followed by thousands of
martyrdom-seeking warriors. He is expected to conquer the world and establish
Shi’ism as its supreme religion and system of rule. His appearance would involve
terrible war and unusual bloodshed.
Ahmadinejad, as mayor of Teheran, built a spectacular boulevard through which
the mahdi would enter into the capital. There is no question that Ahmadinejad
believes he has been chosen to be the herald of the mahdi.
Shi’ite Islam differs from Sunni Islam regarding the identity of the mahdi. The
Sunni mahdi is essentially an anonymous figure; the Shi’ite mahdi is a divinely
inspired person with a real identity.
However both Shi’ites and Sunnis share one particular detail about “the coming
of the hour” and the dawning of messianic times: The Jews must all suffer a
violent death, to the last one. Both Shi’ites and Sunnis quote the famous hadith
[Sahih Muslim, Book 40, Number 6985] attributed to Muhammad: The last hour
will not come unless the Muslims fight against the Jews, and the Muslims would
kill them until the Jews hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and the stone or
the tree would say: “Muslim! Servant of Allah! Here is a Jew behind me; come
and kill him!” Not one Friday passes without this hadith being quoted in sermons
from one side of the Islamic world to the other.
167
The rise of Jewish nationalism—Zionism—has posed a predictable, if
completely unacceptable challenge to the Islamic order—jihad-imposed
chronic dhimmitude for Jews—of apocalyptic magnitude. As historian Bat
Ye’or has explained,
because divine will dooms Jews to wandering and misery, the Jewish state appears
to Muslims as an unbearable affront and a sin against Allah. Therefore it must be
destroyed by Jihad.
168
This is exactly the Islamic context in which the widespread, “resurgent” use
of Jew annihilationist apocalyptic motifs—Sunni and Shi’ite alike—would be
an anticipated, even commonplace occurrence.
Such is the state of ferment we find in the Muslim world of today. It was
epitomized by the openly expressed annihilationist sentiments of Muslim
Brotherhood “spiritual guide” Yusuf al-Qaradawi, which marked his
triumphal return to Cairo, Friday, February 18, 2011.
169 After years of exile,
his public reemergence in Egypt was sanctioned by the nation’s provisional
military rulers. Qaradawi, a vocal advocate of Islam’s Jew-hating mainstream
canon (like the late Al Azhar grand imam Tantawi), used the occasion to issue
a clarion call for the jihad reconquest of al-Aqsa mosque, that is, Jerusalem.
A message to our brothers in Palestine: I have hope that Almighty Allah, as I have
been pleased with the victory in Egypt, that He will also please me with the
conquest of the al-Aqsa Mosque, to prepare the way for me to preach in the al
Aqsa Mosque. May Allah prepare the way for us to (preach) in the al-Aqsa
Mosque in safety—not in fear, not in haste. May Allah achieve this clear conquest
for us. O sons of Palestine, I am confident that you will be victorious.
170
This pronouncement was met with thunderous applause by the millions
assembled in Tahrir Square celebrating the so-called Arab Spring.
Sadly, if predictably, Bernard Lewis in an April 2, 2011, Wall Street Journal
interview, although wary of Qaradawi, ignored the immensely popular cleric’s
mainstream, canonical jihadism and Jew-hatred.
171 But Lewis did manage to
reject his own repeated 1950s characterization of Islam as authoritarian, even
totalitarian, while burbling his now oft-repeated pieties about the putative
tolerant, antiauthoritarian “tradition” of Islam, to cast a hopeful light on the
Arab Spring:
The whole Islamic tradition is very clearly against autocratic and irresponsible
rule.…We have a much better chance of establishing…some sort of open, tolerant
society, if it’s done within their systems, according to their traditions.
172
Historian Robert Kaplan has dispassionately analyzed the views of Bernard
Lewis on Islamic Jew-hatred. Kaplan’s discussion provides broader insights
which help elucidate how Lewis may have developed the other self
contradictory or apologetic positions he has taken on Islamic authoritarianism,
jihadism, and dhimmitude. As Kaplan explains, central to Lewis’s method are
the invalid generalizations he proffers, absent any hard data, that is,
supportive facts.
Lewis puts Islam’s record regarding Jews in a favorable light mainly with the
generalizations he makes rather than the particular facts he marshals. These
generalizations, which crumble under the slightest scrutiny, are of four general
types. One holds that the least onerous version of Muslim oppression is typical of
Muslim practice.…A second type of generalization claims that the worst of the
behavior of Christians towards Jews was the norm.…A third variety of
generalization employed by Lewis claims that Muslim abuses are far less bad than
the worst imaginable abuses by non-Muslims.…A fourth type of generalization
ascribes to “human nature” rather than Islam, with no basis of evidence, the
unattractive characteristics exhibited by Muslims.
173
Kaplan describes perhaps the most egregious example of the first type of
generalization as follows:
Lewis writes “dhimmitude was a minor inconvenience Jews learned to live with…
under Muslim rule the status of dhimmi was long accepted with gratitude by
Jews.” In making this improbable claim he gives no evidence or explanation.
Could he mean that the Jews were grateful for not being killed?
174
Kaplan also demonstrates how Lewis employs a cynical manipulation of
semantics to negate the concept of anti-Semitism in Islam.
How does Lewis reach the conclusion that Antisemitism is unknown to classical
Islam? He defines Antisemitism as hatred of Jews according to Christian doctrine,
not simply hatred of Jews. In doing so he distorts the ordinary meaning of
“antisemitism” which in contemporary English means hatred of Jews.
175
Once again, it is illuminating to juxtapose Lewis’s attempt to deny the
existence of anti-Semitism in Medieval Islam with the conclusions of S. D.
Goitein, based upon the latter’s thorough philological and historical analyses
of the primary-source Geniza documents. Thus, in the specific context of the
Arab Muslim world during the high Middle Ages (circa 950–1250 CE),
Goitein’s seminal analyses revealed that the Geniza documentary record
employed the term anti-Semitism,
in order to differentiate animosity against Jews from the discrimination practiced
by Islam against non-Muslims in general. Our scrutiny of the Geniza material has
proved the existence of “antisemitism” in the time and the area considered here.
176
Goitein cites as concrete proof of his assertion that a unique strain of
Islamic Jew-hatred was extant at this time (i.e., up to a millennium ago)—
exploding Lewis’s spurious claim of its absence—the fact that letters from the
Cairo Geniza material,
have a special word for it and, most significantly, one not found in the Bible or in
Talmudic literature (nor registered in any Hebrew dictionary), but one much used
and obviously coined in the Geniza period. It is sinuth, “hatred,” a Jew-baiter
being called sone, “a hater.”
177
178
Incidents of such Muslim Jew-hatred documented by Goitein in the Geniza
record come from northern Syria (Salamiyya and al-Mar’arra), Morocco
(Fez), and Egypt (Alexandria), with references to the latter being particularly
frequent.
Three additional examples illustrate how Lewis’s Islamic apologetics—
primarily via the same spurious methods of “generalization” Kaplan identifies
—morph into frank moral confusion.
In 1937 Walter Fischel wrote a thoughtful analysis of the Mongol period
and its impact on Jews and Christians in the conquered Abbasid Caliphate.
The Mongol conquest of Baghdad (seat of the Abbasid Caliphate) in 1258
ended the domination of Islam as a state religion, and with it the system of
dhimmitude—a point Fischel makes explicitly:
the principle of tolerance for all faiths, maintained by the Il Khans [Mongol
rulers], (depriving) the [Islamic] concept of the “Protected People,” the ahl adh
Dhimma [dhimmi system]…of its former importance; with it fell the extremely
varied professional restrictions into which it had expanded, [emphasis added]…
primarily those regarding the admission of Jews and Christians to government
posts.
179
The thirteenth-century Christian chronicler Bar Hebraeus and the Iraqi
Muslim Ghazi b. al-Wasiti (fl. 1292), author of a Muslim treatise on the
dhimmis, made these concordant observations from diametrically opposed
perspectives—Bar Hebraeus as a dhimmi celebrating the changes wrought by
Mongol conquest, and al-Wasiti as a Muslim lamenting them:
[Bar Hebraeus] With the Mongols there is neither slave nor free man, neither
believer nor pagan, neither Christian nor Jew; but they regard all men as belonging
to one and the same stock.
180
[al-Wasiti] A firman of the Il Khan [Hulagu] had appeared to the effect that
everyone should have the right to profane his faith openly and his religious
connection; and that the members of one religious body should not oppose those of
another.
Fischel notes that because the Mongols abolished a system Lewis contends
never really existed (or a system Lewis ignores), the plight of the dhimmi
Jews and Christians improved substantially:
For Christians and Jews, the two groups chiefly affected by the ahl adh-Dhimma
policy, current until then, this change in constitutional and religious principles
implied a considerable amelioration of their position; whereas for the Muslims it
meant they had sunk to a depth hitherto unknown in their history.
181
Moreover, when the Mongols subsequently converted to Islam, a transition
that took place under Mongol rulers Ghazan (1295–1304) and Uljaytu (1305
1316), Fischel maintains,
The concept of the ahl adh-Dhimma once again became a basic fact in the
administration of the state, and it is characteristic that under Ghazan and his
successor Uljaytu (1305–1316) we hear of renewed enactments against the ahl
adh-Dhimma and of sumptuary laws [dress regulations, especially], as well as of
the destruction of synagogues and churches, and of the persecution of Christians
and Jews.
182
Bernard Lewis’s brief characterization of these events is selective to the
point of absurdity. He entirely ignores the imposition of dhimmitude upon the
non-Muslim minorities under the Abbasid Caliphate before the pagan Mongol
conquests, its amelioration under pagan Mongol rule (when the system of
dhimmitude was transiently abolished), or its reimposition when the Mongols
eventually converted to Islam. Neglecting all these facts, Lewis instead
perseverates on his charge of “collaboration” by the Christians and Jews with
the Mongols, before the latter converted to Islam:
The Mongol rulers found Christians and Jews—local people knowing the
languages, and the countries but not themselves Muslims—very useful
instruments, and appointed some of them to high office. Afterwards, when the
Mongols were converted to Islam, became part of the Islamic world, and adopted
Islamic attitudes, the Christians and Jews had to pay for past collaboration with the
pagan conquerors.
183
Lewis has also characterized, reductio ad absurdum, the quite brutal Ottoman
devshirme-janissary system, which, from the mid to late fourteenth, through
early eighteenth centuries, enslaved and forcibly converted to Islam an
estimated five hundred thousand to one million non-Muslim (primarily
Balkan Christian) adolescent males, as a benign form of social advancement,
jealously pined for by “ineligible” Ottoman Muslim families.
The role played by the Balkan Christian boys recruited into the Ottoman service
through the devshirme is well known. Great numbers of them entered the Ottoman
military and bureaucratic apparatus, which for a while came to be dominated by
these new recruits to the Ottoman state and the Muslim faith. This ascendancy of
Balkan Europeans into the Ottoman power structure did not pass unnoticed, and
there are many complaints from other elements, sometimes from the Caucasian
slaves who were their main competitors, and more vocally from the old and free
Muslims, who felt slighted by the preference given to the newly converted
slaves.
184
Scholars who have conducted serious, detailed studies of the devshirme
janissary system do not share such hagiographic views of this Ottoman
institution. Speros Vryonis Jr., for example, makes these deliberately
understated, but cogent observations,
[I]n discussing the devshirme we are dealing with the large numbers of Christians
who, in spite of the material advantages offered by conversion to Islam, chose to
remain members of a religious society which was denied first class citizenship.
Therefore the proposition advanced by some historians, that the Christians
welcomed the devshirme as it opened up wonderful opportunities for their
children, is inconsistent with the fact that these Christians had not chosen to
become Muslims in the first instance but had remained Christians…there is
abundant testimony to the very active dislike with which they viewed the taking of
their children. One would expect such sentiments given the strong nature of the
family bond and given also the strong attachment to Christianity of those who had
not apostacized to Islam.…First of all the Ottomans capitalized on the general
Christian fear of losing their children and used offers of devshirme exemption in
negotiations for surrender of Christian lands. Such exemptions were included in
the surrender terms granted to Jannina, Galata, the Morea, Chios, etc.…Christians
who engaged in specialized activities which were important to the Ottoman state
were likewise exempt from the tax on their children by way of recognition of the
importance of their labors for the empire.…Exemption from this tribute was
considered a privilege and not a penalty….
[T]here are other documents wherein their [i.e., the Christians’] dislike is much
more explicitly apparent. These include a series of Ottoman documents dealing
with the specific situations wherein the devshirmes themselves have escaped from
the officials responsible for collecting them.…A firman…in 1601 [regarding the
devshirme] provided the [Ottoman] officials with stern measures of enforcement, a
fact which would seem to suggest that parents were not always disposed to part
with their sons.
“[T]o enforce the command of the known and holy fetva [fatwa] of
Seyhul [Shaikh]- Islam. In accordance with this whenever some one of
the infidel parents or some other should oppose the giving up of his son
for the Janissaries, he is immediately hanged from his door-sill, his
blood being deemed unworthy.”
185
Vasiliki Papoulia highlights the continuous desperate, often-violent struggle
of the Christian populations against this forcefully imposed Ottoman levy:
It is obvious that the population strongly resented…this measure [and the levy]
could be carried out only by force. Those who refused to surrender their sons—the
healthiest, the handsomest and the most intelligent—were on the spot put to death
by hanging. Nevertheless we have examples of armed resistance. In 1565 a revolt
took place in Epirus and Albania. The inhabitants killed the recruiting officers and
the revolt was put down only after the sultan sent five hundred janissaries in
support of the local sanjak-bey. We are better informed, thanks to the historic
archives of Yerroia, about the uprising in Naousa in 1705 where the inhabitants
killed the Silahdar Ahmed Celebi and his assistants and fled to the mountains as
rebels. Some of them were later arrested and put to death.
Since there was no possibility of escaping [the levy] the population resorted to
several subterfuges. Some left their villages and fled to certain cities which
enjoyed exemption from the child levy or migrated to Venetian-held territories.
The result was a depopulation of the countryside. Others had their children marry
at an early age.…Nicephorus Angelus…states that at times the children ran away
on their own initiative, but when they heard that the authorities had arrested their
parents and were torturing them to death, returned and gave themselves up. La
Giulletiere cites the case of a young Athenian who returned from hiding in order to
save his father’s life and then chose to die himself rather than abjure his faith.
According to the evidence in Turkish sources, some parents even succeeded in
abducting their children after they had been recruited. The most successful way of
escaping recruitment was through bribery. That the latter was very widespread is
evident from the large amounts of money confiscated by the sultan from corrupt…
officials. Finally, in their desperation the parents even appealed to the Pope and the
Western powers for help.
186
Papoulia concludes: “[T]here is no doubt that this heavy burden was one of
the hardest tribulations of the Christian population.
187
Perhaps the cause of greatest disquietude—and certainly most infamous—
has been Lewis’s inexplicably evolved views on the jihad genocide of the
Armenians. His renowned The Emergence of Modern Turkey, originally
published in 1962 (reissued in 1968 and 2002), includes these
characterizations of the mass killings of the Armenians by the Turks in 1894
1896, 1909, and 1915:
(1894–96, p. 202) The Armenian participants mindful of the massacres of 1894
96, were anxious to seek the intervention of the European powers as a guarantee of
effective reforms in the Ottoman Empire [in the twentieth century].
(1909, p. 216) With suspicious simultaneity a wave of outbreaks spread across
Anatolia. Particularly bad were the events of the Adana district, which culminated
in the massacre of thousands of Armenians.…While Europe was appalled by
Turkish brutality, Muslim opinion was shocked by what seemed to them the
insolence of the Armenians and the hypocrisy of Christian Europe. The Turks
were, however, well aware of the painful effects produced by these massacres in
Europe, which had not yet forgotten the horrors of the Hamidian repression [i.e.,
the 1894–96 massacres].
(1915, p. 356) Now a desperate struggle between them [i.e., the Turks and
Armenians] began, a struggle between two nations for the possession of a single
homeland, that ended with the terrible holocaust [emphasis added] of 1915, when
a million and a half Armenians perished.
188
Thus when Lewis first wrote his authoritative history of modern Turkey, he
understood, and made explicit, that the Armenians had been massacred under
successive Ottoman governments in 1894–96 and 1909. Moreover, he
maintains that the Armenians were subjected in 1915 to a “holocaust,” during
which 1.5 million “perished.”
By 1985, however, Lewis was the most prominent signatory on a petition to
the US Congress protesting the effort to make April 24—the date the
Armenians commemorate the victims of the genocide—a nationwide
Armenian-American memorial day, which would include the mention of
man’s inhumanity to man. Both this petition drive and a simultaneous high
profile media advertisement campaign were financed by the Committee of the
Turkish Association.
189 Speros Vryonis has raised, unabashedly, the
appropriate historical questions and accompanying moral concerns regarding
Lewis’s actions:
When was Professor Lewis expressing an objective opinion: when he wrote the
book [i.e., The Emergence of Modern Turkey, 1962/68 versions], or when he
signed the political ad? To phrase it more bluntly, what shall we believe? Certainly,
the data available to him in the writing of the book were sufficiently clear and
convincing for him to proceed to these three clear and unequivocal statements [i.e.,
describing the 1894–96 and 1909 events as massacres of the Armenians by the
Turks, and the 1915 slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians by the Turks as a
holocaust]. What had changed? The subject had entered the sphere of politics, and
Prof. Lewis, along with so many other signers of the ad, had decided to take sides
where their economic, professional, personal, and emotional interests lay: with the
Turkish government, and not with history.
190
In Lewis’s revised text of The Emergence of Modern Turkey, circa 2002,
“slaughter” replaces “holocaust,” the estimate of the Armenians who
“perished” is changed from 1.5 million to “according to estimates, more than
a million,” and a concluding remark is added referring to the “unknown
number of Turks” who also died in the putative struggle for possession of a
single homeland.
191 Peter Balakian makes these germane observations:
[W]ithout any substantiation, Lewis dispenses of the Armenian Genocide in a
couple of sentences, calling it a “a struggle between two nations for the possession
of a single homeland.” Lewis never explains how an unarmed, Christian ethnic
minority in the Ottoman Empire could be fairly called a “nation,” that could
engage in a “struggle” with a world power (the Ottoman Empire) for a single
homeland. In a recent interview, “There Was No Genocide: Interview with Prof.
Bernard Lewis,” by Dalia Karpel, Ha’aretz (Jerusalem, January 23, 1998), Lewis
asserts that the massacres of the Armenians were not the result “of a deliberate
preconceived decision of the Turkish government.” These evasions are aimed at
trivializing the Armenian Genocide.
192
Furthermore, during the past decade, as Yair Auron has observed,
[when Lewis was requested]…to make available the academic research published
in recent years, which, in his professional opinion, constitute the basis for the
change from his original position to his new position that there was no state
planned or administered genocide/mass murder of the Armenians…Lewis did not
respond to this demand, even though he noted that letters to him and his reply
would be published.
193
Auron’s final assessment is apt:
Lewis’s stature [has] provided a lofty cover for the Turkish national agenda of
obfuscating academic research on the Armenian Genocide.
194
Lewis’s wildly fluctuating opinions aside, a consensus among bona fide
genocide scholars has emerged which is consistent with Professor Richard
Rubenstein’s conclusion from 1975, that the 1915 Turkish massacre of the
Armenians was
the first full-fledged attempt by a modern state to practice disciplined,
methodically organized genocide.
195
And also contra Lewis, who never placed the mass killings of the Armenians
in their Islamic religious context, Bat Ye’or reminds us why the Armenian
genocide was a jihad genocide
196 committed against a non-Muslim people
“violating” the ancient dhimma, a “breach…[that] restored to the umma [the
Muslim community] its initial right to kill the subjugated minority [the
dhimmis], [and] seize their property.” Moreover, the ultimately genocidal
massacres of the World War I era, were, she notes,
the natural outcome of a policy inherent in the politico-religious structure of
dhimmitude. This process of physically eliminating a rebel nation had already been
used against the rebel Slav and Greek Christians, rescued [i.e., during the
nineteenth century] from collective extermination by European intervention,
although sometimes reluctantly. The genocide of the Armenians was a jihad. No
rayas [non-Muslim dhimmis] took part in it. Despite the disapproval of many
Muslim Turks and Arabs, and their refusal to collaborate in the crime, these
massacres were perpetrated solely by Muslims and they alone profited from the
booty: the victims’ property, houses, and lands granted to the muhajirun, and the
allocation to them of women and child slaves. The elimination of male children
over the age of twelve was in accordance with the commandments of the jihad and
conformed to the age fixed for the payment of the jizya. The four stages of the
liquidation—deportation, enslavement, forced conversion, and massacre—
reproduced the historic conditions of the jihad carried out in the dar-al-harb from
the seventh century on. Chronicles from a variety of sources, by Muslim authors in
particular, give detailed descriptions of the organized massacres or deportation of
captives, whose sufferings in forced marches behind the armies paralleled the
Armenian experience in the twentieth century.
197
Ibn Warraq, underscoring the crucial need for a consistent application of
intellectual honesty in historical scholarship, sought to “remind Bernard
Lewis, his students, and his admirers” of the following words Lewis had
written about the “moral and professional obligation” of Western historians
and other intellectuals:
There was a time when scholars and other writers in communist eastern Europe
relied on writers and publishers in the free West to speak the truth about their
history, their culture, and their predicament. Today it is those who told the truth,
not those who concealed or denied it, who are respected and welcomed in these
countries. Historians in free countries have a moral and professional obligation not
to shirk the difficult issues and subjects that some people would place under a sort
of taboo; not to submit to voluntary censorship, but to deal with these matters
fairly, honestly, without apologetics, without polemic, and, of course, competently.
Those who enjoy freedom have a moral obligation to use that freedom for those
who do not possess it. We live in a time when great efforts have been made, and
continue to be made, to falsify the record of the past and to make history a tool of
propaganda; when governments, religious movements, political parties, and
sectional groups of every kind are busy rewriting history as they would wish it to
have been, as they would like their followers to believe that it was. All this is very
dangerous indeed, to ourselves and to others, however we may define otherness—
dangerous to our common humanity. Because, make no mistake, those who are
unwilling to confront the past will be unable to understand the present and unfit to
face the future.
198
The ironies abound—consider only Lewis’s former uncompromising
descriptions of both Communism and Islam as totalitarian ideologies,
199 or the
World War I–era Armenian massacres as a “terrible holocaust,” that is, a
genocide
200—now summarily redacted. It is apparent Lewis has fallen quite
short of the standard set by his own rhetoric.
This discussion began with Bernard Lewis’s July 2006 admonition, “Either
we bring them freedom, or they destroy us.”
201 Consistent with his
admonition, the US military, at an enormous cost of blood and treasure,
202
liberated Afghanistan and Iraq from despotic regimes. However, as facilitated
by the sharia-based Afghan and Iraqi constitutions the US military occupation
helped midwife—which have negated freedom of conscience and promoted
the persecution of non-Muslim religious minorities—“they,” that is, the
Muslim denizens of Afghanistan and Iraq, have chosen to reject the
opportunity for Western freedom “we” provided them, and transmogrified it
into “hurriyya.”
203 Far more important than mere hypocrisy—a ubiquitous
human trait—is the deleterious legacy of his own Islamic confusion Bernard
Lewis has bequeathed to Western policymaking elites, both academic and
nonacademic.