The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam From Jihad to Dhimmitude Chapter 9

The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam From Jihad to Dhimmitude

By:  Bat Ye’or

Forward by Jacques Ellul

CHAPTER 9

Characters of Dhimmitude (Page 221-222)

Dhimmitude can be defined as the totality of the characteristics developed in the long term by collectivities subjected, on their own homeland, to the laws and ideology imported through jihad.  Dhimmitude represents a collective situation and is expressed by a specific mentality.  It affects the political, economic, cultural, sociological, and psychological domains – all these aspects being interdependent and interactive.  However, dhimmitude is primarily apparent as a dynamic process of interaction and not as a passive phenomenon; it is a combination of activity, collaboration, and fusion between separate groups; consequently, it is determined by the structures emanating from the conquering group as much as by the structures of the subjected group.

FACTORS IN THE RULING GROUP

IMPOSING DHIMMITUDE (Pages 221-222)

Jihad is the only war of an everlasting and universal offensive nature attached to a religious system.  Innumerable peoples have waged as cruel, or even crueler, offensive or defensive religious wars, but the aims of these wars remained limited in time or circumscribed in space.

The jihad represents the means to compel by force the targeted populations to enter into dhimmitude.  Dhimmitude remains an irreducible and specific structure, linked to a particular ideological and political order.  Dhimmitude emanates from the jihad and the shari’a.

Circumstantial political factors can abolish dhimmitude, but its archetype will not necessarily be destroyed, since it is located in ideology, legal texts, and collective perceptions.

THE REALM OF DHIMMITUDE (Pages 222-223)

It is characterized by three factors:  (1) a general character:  it affects any human group victimized by jihad, irrespective of ethnic or social particularisms; (2) it covers a vast, almost unlimited geographical extent:  tens of millions of human beings became dhimmis; and (3) its durability:  it is perpetuated for centuries.

Dhimmitude possesses a general and overall character of unicity.  It embraces a multitude of heterogeneous and varied elements but within a system of fixed and stable relativities.  It forms a conceptual schema, a general framework within which diverse interactive phenomena determine the specific evolution of each group.

THE REALM OF DHIMMITUDE  (continued) (Pages 222-223)

Dhimmitude had progressed and was established through diverse processes.  They had similar structures for survival, which were more or less effective in the long term, depending either on circumstantial factors (temporal) of constant factors (geographical).  Legal nature of dhimmitude appears, codified and prescribed by innumerable fatwas and compulsory ordinances.

STRUCTURES WITHIN THE TARGETED GROUPS

CONDUCIVE TO DHIMMITUDE (Pages223-224)

The renewal of this hierarchy represented the supremacy of dhimmis forces, allied with Islamic authorities, in the conflicts which tore the communities apart, through religious or national schisms.

The endogenous structures of dhimmitude are rooted in short-term political aims, financial interests, and the primacy of profit and personal ambition at the expense of the community and its long-term interests.  Differences of behavior can be noted among the populations reduced to dhimmitude.

THE COMMUNITIES:

ORGANIZATION WITHIN DHIMMITUDE (Pages 224-226)

A geographical, demographic, political, and economic order affected the organization and development of these groups.  At the community level, the cohesion of the group resulted from a solid structuration which bound all the individuals by a feeling of collective responsibility which, moreover, the Muslim authorities recognized.

Although supplied by the tribute from the conquered peoples, the Islamic treasure only covered the needs of the umma;  the Christian and Jewish communities had to finance their own needs.  This fiscal burden encouraged the trend toward Islam.  The religious establishment, responsible for preserving sacred scholarship, maintained the identity and cohesion of the group which it guided through the twists and turns of history.  Moral strength, fed by religious faith, helped to overcome hardship.

In addition to religious bonds, the millet strengthened the solidarity of family, social, and professional relationships.  It guaranteed the rights of the individual and ensured his protection.  The various organs of the millet and their connections with Islamic institutions provided a protective framework for the dhimmis.

The Role of the Notables (Pages 226-227)

They became-through the privileges attached to their positions-the agents of oppression and its mainstay.  The better they served the empire, the richer they grew, and the more they strengthened their hold over their community.

The Role of the Notables (continued) (Pages 226-227)

The notables could control the finances of the empire by the volume of tribute which they levied on their own people.  The extent of the tribute depended on the demography of the dhimmis and their commercial activities.  The extent o f tribute and taxation, correlated with the demographic size of the dhimmi population, determined the power and prestige of the notables in the sultan’s eyes.

Patronage and “Golden Age” (Pages 227-231)

The dhimmis’ role as intermediaries in north-south exchanges and their contacts with Christendom’s enabled the notables to be both patrons of their community and the agents of evolution.

***In Jewish historiography the term “Golden Age” is applied to those ephemeral and circumstantial periods when high-ranking dhimmi officials acted as the patrons of their community and attracted intellectuals fleeing from regions devastated by anarchy.***

The Islamo-Christain symbiosis was much more generalized, deep-seated, and vital at all social levels.  While caliphs or dissident leaders enlarged their empire and their power, the Christians-protected by their patrons, their renegades or their slaves-maintained their culture.

The Umayyad period, which was both the incubation period of dhimmi society and that of Islamic civilization is also the period of the greatest Islamo-Christian symbiosis.  This multifaceted symbiosis was integrated into the convergence of the caliphs’ interests and that of the sedentary populations and their common efforts to maintain and preserve the economic structures. 

In addition to this economic and administrative cooperation, without which the Arab stated could not have been built, a cultural symbiosis occurred.  The situation prior to the Arab conquest explains its strength and prodigious richness.

In Egypt, the revolts of the Copts and the anarchy which followed the accession of the Abbasids (750) had destroyed the church.  The brightest jewel in the crown of early Christianity and champion of Jacobite resistance at the time of its splendor, the Coptic patriarchate at the beginning of the ninth century was crippled by poverty, debt, and ignorance.

The Islamic-Judeo-Christian Cultural Current (Pages 231-235)

Parallel with the theological current specific to each community, a field of Islamic-Judeo-Christian interaction developed, integrated into all the economic, administrative, legal, political, and cultural life.  It consisted of making available to the Arabs the sum of knowledge, which had both nourished and stimulated the expansion of their cultures.  This work necessitated the invention of new words and the forging of the Arabic language and grammar into new conceptual molds, not only philosophic, scientific and literary, but also administrative, economic, political, and diplomatic.

The Islamic-Judeo-Christian Cultural Current (continued) (Pages 231-235)

***The first known scientific work in Arabic was treatise on medicine written in Greek by Ahrun, a Christian priest from Alexandria, and translated from Syriac into Arabic in 683 by Masarjawayh, a Jewish doctor from Basra (Iraq).  In Babylonia, under the first Abbasids, medicine was still taught in Aramaic.  Yuhanna b. Masawahy (777-857), a Jacobite physician, translator, and ophthalmologist, wrote the first treatise on ophthalmology in Arabic.***

***This vast undertaking of transmitting knowledge by incorporation it into the Arabic language reached its apogee under the first Abbasids, whose court-under Iranian influence-strove to reproduce the splendors of Khosroes.  This was the period of translations (750-850), encouraged by al-Ma’mun, who created a library-translation office (Bayt al-Hikma) in 830, where works were translated into Arabic from Sanskrit.  Persian, Aramaic, and Greek.  Until the eleventh century, state education was given in semipublic institutions, but primarily in mosques, the main educational centers where libraries were installed.***

This intellectual movement constituted a “brain drain” from the communities by the Islamization of intellectuals anxious to retain favorable conditions for study.  Multiple reasons led to the conversion of dhimmi scholars, such as easier access to knowledge and endowments or the jealously and frustration of Muslim rivals.  Persecution, pressures, and threats could be exercised by caliphs wishing to obtain the conversion of a scholar, who would thereby enhance the prestige of Islam and confirm its superiority over the infidel’s civilizations.

***Islamic-Perso-Christian integration and fusion took place in harems.  Architecture and the arts have preserved the memory of the anonymous mass of captives.***

Three centuries after the first Arab invasions, the decline of Christianity was particularly apparent in North Africa where the number of bishoprics diminished from five hundred to about forty.

Historians view the period 950-1050 as the culmination of the penetration process by pastoral and nomadic peoples.  This process had been active from the pre-Islamic period and expanded with the Arab conquest, although the caliphs, flanked by indigenous converts, strove to restrain it.  Yet the dynamic of Islamic strength, based on slave militias to whom the caliph became hostage, destroyed authority and accelerated a political and demographic transformation.

The dhimmi cultures shaped other conceptual molds, enabling Islam to build its greatness on foundations which the dhimmi elites had created before they themselves disappeared in contempt and oblivion.  Consequently, these three centuries of symbiosis and golden age appear as the swan song of a brilliant moment in human history.

THE DHIMMI SYDROME (Pages 235-236)

***Inequality and prejudice develop particular behavior patterns in every society, and dhimmi society was no exception to this general rule.***

***The dhimmi syndrome represents a collection of mental attitudes and behaviors linked to dhimmitude and common to the different groups which express them with greater or lesser intensity depending on circumstances.*** 

The basic components of the dhimmi syndrome lie in the combined psychological effects of vulnerability and humiliation.  Reduced in extreme cases to a precarious survival, evaluated in monetary terms, the dhimmi perceives himself and accepts himself as s dehumanized being.

Dissymmetrical Relationship:  Oppression – Gratitude (Page 236)

If they are fixed in religion, they endure.  In the case of the dhimmi this dissymmetry which affected all social relationships determined the same psychological conditioning that is found in other medieval societies.  However, two factors are specific to dhimmitude.  The protection tribute paid by the conquered subject is no ordinary tax.  It reduces his human rights to a sum of money, whose payment is accompanied by humiliations.

***Another basic element of dehumanization follows from the conqueror’s inalienable right over the life of the conquered.  In exchange for various services, these tribes protected monasteries and refrained from pillaging them.***

It follows that the safety and fundamental rights of the human being are not inalienable rights, but a protection from a hostile environment constantly repurchased by money and submission.  As a result, the dhimmi’s consciousness-like that of the hostage-moves in a context of vulnerability which annuls the notion of rights and condemns him to exude gratitude for being tolerated.

Manageability of the Dhimmi (Pages 236-239)

Vulnerability  is integrated into dhimmitude, since the dhimmi, conquered by war and defenseless, is reduced to perpetually repurchasing his life.

Ideological condition grafts itself onto vulnerability.  The janissaries provide the most perfect example of this situation.  Subjected to an intense military and religious education, they constituted the Muslim power’s elite troops (devshirme).  The janissary incarnates the quintessence of dhimmitude, brought to its perfection.

As for corruption, it permitted the purchase of the dhimmi leader’s collaboration at a time when their people, being still the majority, needed to be treated with circumspection.  Corruption was the crucial factor in the decline of the conquered peoples.

THE EXCLUSION AND CONSEALMENT OF HISTORY (Pages 239-240)

***The collective identity of groups is generally structured by a historical consciousness made up of reference data.  This data rooted in geography and duration, enable groups to locate themselves in the universe and build their cohesion throughout centuries.***

***The annihilation of a community transfers its cultural heritage-civilization, arts, and sciences-to the dominating group.  The umma claims a monopoly of culture:  the dhimmis’ languages are banned, relegated to the liturgy; their monuments, testimony to their civilization’s greatness are destroyed or Islamized.***

***In no area should the infidel triumph over the Muslim, as theological dogma has confirmed Muslim superiority from the early Islamic conquests.  The irreplaceable skills and higher qualifications for certain dhimmis being a source of humiliation to those around them, forced them to convert.***

The Islamization of culture included the Islamization of geography.  The refusal of a dhimmi testimony against a Muslim determines behavior patterns and reveals the psychology of both groups.  The dhimmi group, stripped of its means of defense, is placed in a hostage situation at the mercy of unfounded accusations.  This constant and degrading vulnerability engenders servility, flattery, and corruption.

In the dominating group, this refusal of testimony by the suppression of speech-the distinctive sign of humanity-reflects a denial of rights.  This mutilated speech, this rejected testimony, is transposed from the individual to the group and is perpetuated in time.  This process of obliteration-what Vidiadhar S. Naipaul calls “killing history” – continues to function in our days.