The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam From Jihad to Dhimmitude
By: Bat Ye’or
Forward by Jacques Ellul
CHAPTER 1
The Pre-Islamic Orient
THE ORIGIN OF JIHAD
Islam integrated specific local cultural elements from the customs of the nomadic or semi sedentary tribes which populated the Hijaz. These tribes formed the militant nucleus of the Islamic community and by war ensure that its resources and its followers constantly expanded.
Gradually relationships with non-Muslims were determined in the course of the ambushes, battles, stratagems, and truces, which formed the Holy war’s booty of tactics, required to secure the expansion of Islam.
Fay – the religious principle, laden with consequences for the future, whereby the collective property of the umma was constituted by the former property confiscated from the vanquished non-Muslims
Muslims jurisconsults subsequently derived the status of the tributaries from the treaty concluded between Muhammad and the Jews who farmed the Khaybar oasis. Within the framework of the present study, the tributaries are the Jews and Christians-referred to as “Peoples of the Book” the Bible and the Persian Zoroastrians.
In this treaty, Muhammad had confirmed the Jews of Khaybar in the possession of their land, the ownership of which passed to the Muslims and booty (fay). The Jews retained their religion and possessions on condition that they hand over half their harvests to the Muslims. However, this status was not permanent as Muhammad reserved the right to abrogate it at random.
The umma continued to grow and increased it wealth by raids on caravans and oases populated by Jews, Christians, or pagans in Arabia, and the furthermost Syro-Palestinian deserts (629-32).
By the time the Prophet died (632) nearly all the tribes of the Hijaz had rallied to Islam, idolatry had been vanquished in Arabia, and the Peoples of the Book, Jews and Christians, were paying tribute to the Muslims. The Prophet’s successor, Abu Bakr, suppressed the revolt (ridda) of the Bedouins and forced them to adopt Islam and pay the legal tax (zakat). After unifying the peninsula, he carried the war (jihad) beyond Arabia. The Jihad provided non-Muslims with an alternative: conversion or tribute; refusal forced the Muslims to fight them till victory. Arab idolaters had to choose between death or conversion; as for Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians, if they paid tribute and accepted the conditions of conquest, they could buy back their right to life, freedom of worship, and security of property.
The Era of Conquests
THE FIRST WAVE OF ISLAMIZATION(632-750)
Under the first four caliphs-Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, and Ali-and under their Umayyad successors, the Arab conquest spread over land and sea.
After the Abbasid revolt (750), the caliphs-harassed by religious and dynastic schisms and by the Byzantine armies-contented themselves with sending their troops to pillage, sack, and carry off booty from across their frontiers with Anatolia and Armenia.
These confrontations between Muslims and Byzantines in the central Mediterranean aimed at ensuring Islamic naval supremacy, while still offering to adventurers opportunities for gaining vast booty.
The disintegration of the Persian and Byzantine empires and the collapse of their defenses made it possible for the nomadic tribes, united by Islam, to invade the countryside, enlisting valuable assistance for their razzias from among those Arabs settled on the margins of Mesopotamia and Syria, who were familiar with the topography of these regions.
After the death of the Prophet, the caliph Abu Bakr organized the invasion of Syria which Muhammad has already envisaged.
Consequently, the whole Gaza region up to Cesarea was sacked and devastated in the campaign of 634. Four thousand Jewish, Christians, and Samaritan peasants who defended their land were massacred.
In Syria, the Ghassanides and Monophysite Arabs sided with the Muslims. Sophronius, in his sermon on the Day of Epiphany 636, bewailed the destruction of churches and monasteries, the sacked towns, the fields laid waste, the villages burned down by the nomads who were overrunning the country.
Country areas, particularly the plains and valleys populated with hamlets and villages, were ravaged by Bedouins who set fire to crops, massacred and carried off the peasantry and their cattle, and left nothing but ruins. Townspeople were in a different position. Protected by their walls, they could defend themselves or negotiate the conditions of their surrender on payment of tribute to the Bedouin chiefs.
Although some disparities appeared in respect of the towns, the majority of the villages fell into the category of conquest without treaty. According to the strategy of jihad, the absence of a treaty allowed the massacre or enslavement of the conquered population and the division of their property.
THE FIRST WAVE OF ISLAMIZATION (632-750)
Whatever the land, country, or people vanquished, this pattern invariants recurred in the two cycles of Islamization: the Arab and the Turkish.
The conquest of Mesopotamia took place between 635 and 642. Like the conquest of Syria, it seems to have been a joint operation between the Muslim armies and Arabs already settled in the region.
It seems that the devastation caused by the Muslim invasion and the departure of the Byzantine troops took place amidst the confusion of Egyptian Civil War, with old scores being settled by Christian renegades and among Momophysite Copts and Orthodox Greeks.
“The Taiyaye” [Arabs] grew rich, increased and overran (the lands) which they took from the Romans [Byzantines] and which were given over to pillage.
“After the surrender of Damascus: for the Taiyaye [The Arabs] were the great rod of God’s/Allah’s wrath.”
In 642 they (the Arabs) took the town of Dvin and annihilated the population by the sword. Then “the Ishamaelites returned by the route whence they had come, carrying off in their wake a multitude of captives to the number of thirty-five thousand.”
Cyprus was sacked and pillaged (649), after which Mu’awiya turned toward Constanita (Salamis), its capital, where he established his rule by a “great massacre.”
Tripoli was ransacked in 643; Carthage was entirely razed to the ground and most of its inhabitants killed. The Arabs put the Maghreb to fire and sword, and it took them more than a century to restore peace there by crushing the Berber resistance.
In the course of the Umayyad’s last attempt to take Constantinople (717), the Arab army commanded by Maslama carried out a pincer movement by land and sea and laid waste to the whole region around the capital.
Ghazwa – seasonal raids – in winter, spring, summer, and autumn
The emigration of the Turkoman nomads renewed the jihad. In the eleventh century, “The empire of the Turks had been extended to Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine[…] Turks and Arabs were mixed together like a single people.”
THE FIRST WAVE OF ISLAMIZATION (632-750) (continued)
For centuries after its conquest in 712, Spain became the terrain par excellence for the jihad in the West of the dar al-islam.
Calls to jihad attracted the fanaticized hordes in the ribats (monastery-fortresses) spanning the Islamo-Spanish frontiers. The invasions by the Almoravides and the Almohades (eleventh to thirteenth centuries), Berber dynasties from the Maghreb, reactivated the jihad.
This general picture of destruction, ruin, massacre, and deportation of urban and rural captive populations was common to all the conquered territories in Asia, Africa, and Europe. The Arabs, stirred by their profound belief and the conviction of belonging to an elite nation superior to all others (Koran 3:106), put them into practice, feeling that they were thereby fulfilling a religious duty and executing the will of Allah.
It must be stressed, however, that massacre or slavery of the vanquished peoples, burning, pillage, destruction, and the claiming of tribute were the common practices during the periods under consideration of every army whether Greek, Latin, or Slav.
THE SECOND WAVE OF ISLAMIZATION
Despite the ongoing jihad in Spain, the Mediterranean and Asia Minor, the Arab Empire, although fragmented, seemed to have reached its limits by the tenth century. In these territories, the once predominant and powerful Christendom and the important Jewish communities were already much diminished.
Whether Arabic or Turkish, the Muslim state had been founded by nomads. Consequently, nomadism, jihad, and Islamization appear as the three related poles of the human geography and the ethic evolution of the conquered lands.
The defeat of the Byzantine army at the battle of Manzikert (1071) opened eastern Anatolia to Seljuk bands who, from 1021, had devastated Armenia. They ravaged the region, annexed it to the caliphate, and emigrated to Syria. Such was the commencement of the exodus of the Turks to Coele-Syria and the coast of Palestine.
In the thirteenth century the Mongol advance brought fresh waves of Turkish nomads into Anatolia. From his fief of Bithynia, Osman Ghazi (1299-1326), chief of a tribe of Oghuz Turks and founder of the Ottoman Empire, threw his armed bands against the Christian provinces.
THE SECOND WAVE OF ISLAMIZATION (continued)
The Turkish jihad is well documented by a considerable quantity of varied sources: Greek, Latin, Serbian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Arabic and Turkish. This second cycle of Islamization encompassed a span of five centuries during a more recent period, from the eleventh to the seventhteen centuries, it expanded over a territory adjoining Europe – Anatolia and the Balkans – advancing as far as Vienna (1683).
The battle waged by the ghazis reconciled religious faith, lust for booty, and capture of non-Muslims destined for enslavement or ransoming. Jihad, which had Islamized Anatolia, was pursued by the Ottomans in Bulgaria (1308 – 11), southern Thrace – with continued raids launched after 1326 – in southern Macedonia and along the Greek coast.
Possessing an intrepid army and remarkable statesmen, the Ottomans were able to take advantage of the lack of unity and economic rivalries in the Christian camp. The final conquest of the Balkan peninsula was undertaken from 1451 by Mehemed II and his successors. Constantinople was encircled and fell in 1453; Serbia was conquered in 1459; then Bosnia and the Empire of Trebizond in 1463, and Herzegovina in 1483.
The great Arab and Turkish conquerors used the same military tactics and the same policies of consolidating Islamic power. This continuity resulted from the fact that the conquests took place within the framework of the common ideology of jihad and the administrative and juridical apparatus of the sharia’s – a uniformity that defines time, since it adapts itself to diverse lands and peoples, being intergrated into the internal coherence of a political theology.
In the course of their military operations, the Turks applied to the conquered populations the rules of jihad, which had been structured four centuries earlier by the Arabs and enshrined in Islamic religious law.
More than any other people, the Turks love war and pillage. They show it in their relations among themselves, what then is the lot of Christians?
THE EMERGENCE AND CONSOLIDATION OF THE MUSLIM STATE
According to recent theories already mentioned above, it would appear that the process of the Arabo-Islamic invasion of the lands bordering Arabia-Palestine, Syria and Iraq – extended over a period of time, taking place at two levels during the crucial phase of conquest. The first level, mentioned in the sources, refers to the nomadic invasion, pillage, and destruction. The second applies to the negotiations which took place between the Arab chiefs and representatives of the populations from towns or provinces, impatient to be rid of the invaders who were flooding the countryside, their numbers augmented by the local Arabs residents.
THE EMERGENCE AND CONSOLIDATION OF THE MUSLIM STATE (continued)
In return for payment of tribute, these representatives, civil governors or religious leaders, such as patriarchs and bishops-obtained the security of life, property, and civil and religious institutions for the vanquished populations.
Islam, to most people, appeared as another Jewish or Christian heresy among others, which emerged in those troubled times of religious wars. As for jihad, contemporaries assimilated it to the familiar razzias by the nomads who usually withdrew to the desert carrying off their booty.
One consequence of the disappearance of Byzantine or Persian political power was to reinforce over the peoples subject to Islam the supremacy of their respective religious hierarchies, which henceforth combined temporal and spiritual powers.
It therefore became imperative to consolidate Islamic politico-military domination by a demographic increase in Arab numbers and by Muslims legislation to stabilize the situation-the legislative power complementing, reinforcing and structuring the politico-military power by a collection of measures which were adopted gradually. These two phases, which roughly correspond to the period of Arabization under the Umayyads and of Islamization under the Abbasids, definitively ensured the Arab-Muslim hold on the conquered lands and populations.
This Arabization had disastrous effects on the native populations, as the confiscation of lands by the invaders and the appropriation of houses and villages did not take place without plundering and abuse.
ADMINISTRATION OF THE CONQUERED TERRITORIES
The overlapping of the phases of conquest, of the Arabization and of the consolidation of Muslims power, gives an anarchical and violent character to this period, when nowhere homogeneous or linear. The problem concerned the booty related to the lands, the native populations, and their property. Motivated by greed, the nomadic tribes demanded that is be shared out immediately and the conquered people enslaved, as at the time of the Prophet. However, the redistribution of power within the Qurayshite clan where the caravan merchant bourgeoisie of Mecca was prominent replaced these practices by the concept of an Islamic state monopoly on the bulk of the war booty which was then conceded in the form of domains (igta) or allowance (ata) to the Arab tribes. Anxious to impose this administrative and fiscal policy on the tribes, the authorities turned to the Koran and conferred a normative value on the Prophet’s decision.
ADMINISTRATION OF THE CONQUERED TERRITORIES (continued)
An immense collection was gradually built up, recording words on deeds attributed to Muhammad. These Sayings (hadith), handed down by a line of transmitters (isnad), became the basis of Tradition (Sunna), which was interpreted and codified around the end of the ninth century by the four principal schools of orthodox Muslim law (Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’I and Hanbali). These four legal codes laid the foundation of the Shari’a.
Jurists of the Abbasid period drew their inspiration from the Koran and the Traditions in order to formulate the status of the dhimmis, the native non-Muslim inhabitants who had negotiated their rights by treaties concerning their lands, which had become a part of the dar al-Islam. Some Arab chroniclers attribute this status, also known as the Pact of Umar to Umar Ibn al-Khattab (634-44), others to Umar b. Abd al-Aziz (717-20).
Jizya (poll tax on non-Muslims)
Kharaj (tax in kind or in money on their land)
Fay (state property)
This law of conquest determined the fiscal category of the land (tithe or kharaj) and governed the status of its inhabitants. The jurisconsults of the Middle Ages attributed this classification to the second caliph, Umar Ibn al-Khattab.
The Prophet has confiscated the property of the Banu Nadhir trive and pronounced it fay in order to administer it for the benefit of the umma. As for the Jews of the Khaybar oasis, the Prophet exempted them from slavery on payment of tribute levied on their harvests.
The conquered People of the Book, having negotiated their surrender, were thereby protected from slavery or massacre by the Islamic state. Security of life, property, and faith was guaranteed by the state which would refrain from intervening in their affairs. These people formed the fay (booty) of the umma which, as it belonged to the collectivity, would consequently be excluded from the distribution to individuals and would be administered by the caliph.
It was in this way that the specific sociopolitical and religious category of “protégés or dhimmis was formed. Thus, Umar would have introduced a juridical distinction into the laws of war on conquered populations between human booty, divided individually according to the manner of conquest, on the one hand, and the dhimmis, a collective booty liable to tribute, on the other.
ADMINISTRATION OF THE CONQUERED TERRITORIES (continued)
The policy of Arab colonization, already initiated under Umar Ibn al-Khattab emigration and stabilization of the nomads in the conquered countries, grants to tribes and Arabization of the administration – prepared the ground for the next phase: Islamization.
The spread of these foreigners, invested with politico-military power-either by the state or by rebellions-confined the non-Muslim native inhabitants to a role of economic producers. This function was all the more important since the increased military power of Constantinople dried up a primary source of the wealth of the Arab-Muslim state: booty and slaves.
This period (eighth to the tenth centuries) coincided with the iconoclastic crisis which tore the Christian world apart and which revived Byzantine religious intolerance of both Monophysites and Jews.
Despite a literary, philosophical, and economic flowering in Spain, Egypt, and Mesopotamia, which will be discussed later, this was the beginning of the long decline and descent of the People of the Book into the world of dhimmitude of which they were both agents and victims.
The same relationships between nomads and settled populations appeared in the second cycle of Islamization under the Turks from the eleventh century. By then, however, the dogma had already been formulated and the juridical and governmental institutions fixed during what is called the classical period of Arab-Islamic civilization. Consequently, the juridical and governmental organs of the Turkish emirates, later absorbed into the Ottoman state, developed quickly in the conquered lands of Anatolia.
Discord among the Christian princes permitted the Turkish armies to help the rival factions and gain familiarity with the topography of their lands, where they devastated the countryside and seized strategic stronghold. These military camps became centers of intensive Islamization, with the construction of mosques served by a large contingent of qadis and ulama, who flocked from the Arab provinces.
A Turcophile party which nourished pessimism, preached the inevitability of the triumph of Islam, and spoke highly of the economic advantage that Muslim markets offered.
Lastly, the effects of the psychological element of fear in furthering the Islamization of the conquered lands cannot be emphasized too strongly. The population fled before the instability created by the spread of nomads, who set ambushes, killed or ransomed villages, and carried off women and children. This fear encouraged surrender, betrayal, corruption, and abandonment of invaded lands by the native inhabitants.
ADMINISTRATION OF THE CONQUERED TERRITORIES (continued)
The symbiotic relationship between Islam and Christianity, which was created on the lands taken as booty after the conquest-or in anticipation of and in a desire for conquest-was the motive force throughout history behind the permanent Islamization process of Christendom. All the peoples of Anatolia and Europe who preserved their religion after the Ottoman conquest during the second wave of Islamization fell into the category of dhimmis, generally called rayas in the Ottoman Empire. Their social status had already been defined at the time of the political organization of the Arab conquests and later codified in the shari’a.
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