Free The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam by Robert Spencer Page A

pays, he is not to be treated with honour.” 21 This ensured that the dhimmi felt “subdued,” as commanded by Qur’an 9:29. The twelfth-century Qur’anic commentator Zamakhshari even directed that the jizya should be collected “with belittlement and humiliation.” 22 The thirteenth-century Shafi’i jurist an-Nawawi directed that “the infidel who wishes to pay his poll tax must be treated with disdain by the collector: the collector remains seated and the infidel remains standing in front of him, his head bowed and his back bent. The infidel personally must place the money on the scales, while the collector holds him by the beard, and strikes him on both cheeks.” 23
    According to historian Bat Ye’or, this blow as part of the payment process “survived unchanged till the dawn of the twentieth century, being ritually performed in Arab-Muslim countries, such as Yemen and Morocco, where the Koranic tax continued to be extorted from the Jews.” 24
    Non-Muslims often converted to Islam to avoid this tax: This is how the vast Christian populations of North Africa and the Middle East ultimately became tiny, demoralized minorities. According to the seventeenth-century European traveler Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, in Cyprus in 1651 “over four hundred Christians had become Muhammadans because they could not pay their kharaj [a land tax that was also levied on non-Muslims, sometimes synonymous with the jizya], which is the tribute that the Grand Seigneur levies on Christians in his states.” The following year in Baghdad, when Christians “had to pay their debts or their kharaj, they were forced to sell their children to the Turks to cover it.” 25
    In other instances, however, conversion to Islam was forbidden for dhimmis—it would destroy the tax base. 26
     
    Pushing too hard
     
    Eventually, all this oppression provoked a reaction. Historian Apostolos E. Vacalopoulos describes an instructive set of circumstances surrounding Greece’s early nineteenth century struggle for independence:
     
The Revolution of 1821 is no more than the last great phase of the resistance of the Greeks to Ottoman domination; it was a relentless, undeclared war, which had begun already in the first years of servitude. The brutality of an autocratic regime, which was characterized by economic spoliation, intellectual decay and cultural retrogression, was sure to provoke opposition. Restrictions of all kinds, unlawful taxation, forced labor, persecutions, violence, imprisonment, death, abductions of girls and boys and their confinement to Turkish harems, and various deeds of wantonness and lust, along with numerous less offensive excesses—all these were a constant challenge to the instinct of survival and they defied every sense of human decency. The Greeks bitterly resented all insults and humiliations, and their anguish and frustration pushed them into the arms of rebellion. There was no exaggeration in the statement made by one of the beys of Arta, when he sought to explain the ferocity of the struggle. He said: ‘We have wronged the rayas [dhimmis] (i.e. our Christian subjects) and destroyed both their wealth and honor; they became desperate and took up arms. This is just the beginning and will finally lead to the destruction of our empire.’ The sufferings of the Greeks under Ottoman rule were therefore the basic cause of the insurrection; a psychological incentive was provided by the very nature of the circumstances. 27
     
    Today the jihadist terrorists complain that the West has destroyed their wealth and honor; however, as they continue to commit acts of violence against innocent people—as they did on September 11 and in many other attacks—this complaint will ring increasingly hollow. It is even possible that these continued acts of violence will eventually give rise to a stronger and more forthright resistance to Islamization than we have seen.
     
    PC Myth: Jews had it better in Muslim lands than in Christian