Free The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam by Robert Spencer

dhimmis. In his book Defence of the Muslim Lands he discusses various categories of jihad. In accordance with traditional Islamic theology, he explains that offensive jihad is an obligation of the Islamic community, and adds, “And the Ulama [Muslim scholars] have mentioned that this type of jihad is for maintaining the payment of Jizya.” 11
     
    PC Myth: Historically the dhimma wasn’t so bad
     
    But in practice, it couldn’t really have been like that, could it? Islamic apologist Stephen Schwartz, a convert to Islam, argues that in reality, dhimmitude wasn’t all that bad and maintains that its horrors have been exaggerated: “The dhimma is now held out by a demagogic element in the West as a terrifying symbol of Islamic domination.” 12 And it is certainly true that no law is ever universally enforced with uniform zeal and thoroughness. In the ninth century, Theodosius, the patriarch of Jerusalem, wrote that the Muslims “are just and do us no wrong nor show us any violence.” 13 But the legal status of the Christians and Jews was still precarious at best. Historian A. S. Tritton notes:
     
At one moment the dhimmi appears as a persecuted worm who is entirely negligible, and the next complaint is made of his pernicious influence on the Muslims around him. Laws were made, observed for a time, and then forgotten till something brought them to the remembrance of the authorities…. One feels that if events had been governed by logic, Islam would have swallowed up the subject religions; but they survive, vigorous though battered. 14
     
    Battered, indeed. The humiliations took various forms, but they were almost always present. Historian Philip Hitti notes one notorious example from the ninth century: “The Caliph al-Mutawakkil in 850 and 854 decreed that Christians and Jews should affix wooden images of devils to their houses, level their graves even with the ground, wear outer garments of honey color, i.e. yellow, put two honey-colored patches on the clothes of their slaves,…and ride only on mules and asses with wooden saddles marked by two pomegranate-like balls on the cantle.” 15
    Later, Christians in the Ottoman Empire, according to historian Steven Runciman, “were never allowed to forget that they were a subject people.” 16 This extended to the appropriation of their holy places by the conquering people: When the Turks took Constantinople in 1453, according to Hoca Sa’deddin, tutor of the sixteenth-century Sultans Murad III and Mehmed III, “churches which were within the city were emptied of their vile idols and cleansed from the filthy and idolatrous impurities and by the defacement of their images and the erection of Islamic prayer niches and pulpits…many monasteries and chapels became the envy of the gardens of Paradise.” 17
    In the fourteenth century, the pioneering sociologist Ibn Khaldun explained the options for Christians: “It is [for them to choose between] conversion to Islam, payment of the poll tax, or death.” 18
     
    Taxpayer woes
     
    Paying the special tax on non-Muslims, the jizya, wasn’t as easy as filling out a 1040. The Syrian orthodox patriarch of Antioch, chronicler Michael the Syrian (1126–1199), recorded how crushing this burden was for the Christians in the time of the Caliph Marwan II (744–750):
     
Marwan’s main concern was to amass gold and his yoke bore heavily on the people of the country. His troops inflicted many evils on the men: blows, pillages, outrages on women in their husbands’ presence. 19
     
    Marwan was not alone. One of his successors, al-Mansur (754–775), according to Michael, “raised every kind of tax on all the people in every place. He doubled every type of tribute on Christians.” 20
    Payment of the jizya often took place in a peculiar and demeaning ceremony in which the Muslim tax official hit the dhimmi on the head or back of the neck. Tritton explained, “The dhimmi has to be made to feel that he is an inferior person when he