The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam:
From
Jihad to Dhimmitude
by
Bat Ye’or
A Review by Dr. Helena P. Schrader
Bat Ye’or’s book is a comprehensive and significant work,
which examines a topic far too often ignored in histories of the Middle East,
Islam and the crusades: the fate, status and experience of Christians and Jews
living under Muslim rule from the 6th to the 19th
centuries. It is based on a wealth of documentary evidence drawn from Arab,
Turkish, Armenian, Latin, Greek and Balkan sources. It includes a discussion of
the sources and a 23 page-long bibliography. It also analyzes the
historiography to date and provides an appendix of documentary evidence
supporting her principle theses, translated into English, which encompasses 175
pages of evidence.
In short, this is an eminently well-researched and meticulously
documented scholarly book rather than a polemical or popular work of history — which
perhaps explains why it has not received the prominence it is due. Another
factor contributing to the apparent neglect of this important work is that it
depicts the fate and represents the views of the victims, who are now for the most
part exterminated, forgotten and powerless, in contrast to narratives written
from Arab/Islamic or Western European perspectives. I can’t help but wonder if
the fact that Ms. Ye’or is an Egyptian, a woman, and a Jew but not a professor,
has not also contributed to her work being unjustly slighted by academics, without
anyone undertaking a serious refutation of her basic findings.
Ye’or notes that the most common terminology for Jews and
Orthodox Christians in Muslim states is as “protected minorities.” This very
term, she argues, is misleading. The Orthodox Christians were throughout most
of the 1,300 years covered in this book the majority population of the
states in which they lived. Second, they were not ‘protected’ but rather, in
the course of more than a thousand years, gradually driven to near extinction.
This book describes in great detail how that came about.
Ye’or is careful to note the acquiesce and indeed
collaboration of key elites in the conquered communities. In the beginning,
“treaties” with the ravaging nomadic tribes from the Arabian Peninsula seemed
like common sense and self-defense once the imperial powers of Byzantium and
Persia became too weak to protect the local population. Paying “tribute” seemed
like the lesser evil to hopeless defiance.
Ye’or likewise describes without apology the rivalries and
hatred between the various Christian sects and their anti-Semitism, factors
that enabled the Muslim conquerors to effectively play the groups off against
one another. She makes no secret of the religious fanaticism among some Christian monks, which undermined a sense
of solidarity among the Christian subjects of Islam. Ye’or is also quick— and
nowhere more bitter — than in pointing out that it was above all the religious
leadership that profited from the new situation. Christian and Jewish leaders
alike became the representatives of their respective communities and were made responsible
for collecting the tribute and paying their Arab masters. This gave them
greater autonomy than under the former Byzantine regime, while also offering
multiple opportunities to enrich themselves. Last but not least, Ye’or freely
acknowledges and highlights the degree to which some elites — secretaries and
translators, accountants and bankers, merchants and professionals —adapted to
the new situation and, in exchange for collaboration, were allowed to prosper —
at the expense of the vast majority of the co-religionists.
Yet Ye’or musters overwhelming and almost numbing evidence
that the vast majority of Christians and Jews living under Islamic regimes were
subjected to frequent waves of violence punctuated by periods of oppression and
humiliation. She describes how the repeated extortion of money, goods,
livestock, and even children, reduced entire populations to such destitution
that they abandoned their lands altogether and fled into the mountains to be
hunted down like outlaws and wild beasts. She describes how the repeated raids
by nomadic tribes turned entire regions into wastelands, because no crop could
be sown much less harvested. “The once-flourishing villages of the Negev had
already disappeared by about 700, and by the end of the eighth century the
population had deserted the greater part of the region stretching from south of
Gaza to Hebron, fleeing back northwards, abandoning ruined churches and
synagogues.” (102) This depopulation and desertification of once-flourishing
and densely populated regions, described in full by both Muslim and Christian
chroniclers, was the result of the massive deportation of captives — that is
the enslavement of entire populations.
Yet even during periods of comparative stability when the
caliph and/or sultan was able to exert his authority over the tribes and, out
of self-interest in the revenues derived through the exploitation of the
subject peoples, prevent outright slaughter and deportation, the situation of
the conquered non-Muslims was deplorable. The non-Muslim population enjoyed no
legal protections because their word was considered worthless in an Islamic
court. They were required by Sharia Law to live in smaller and more dilapidated
houses. They were not allowed to build houses of worship, to conduct any
religious rite or ceremony in public, and were prohibited from wearing symbols
of their religion. They were required to wear distinctive clothing and carry
proof that they had paid their taxes. They were forbidden from riding horses or
camels and from bearing arms. The Muslim
population was actively encouraged to demonstrate contempt for non-Muslims by
shoving them aside or otherwise demeaning them. And they were always just a
false-move away from being robbed and beaten by the mob (or just hooligans) or
enslaved for some alleged crime.
No, that is not the politically correct narrative that has
been popular in Western Europe and the Islamic world for the last two
centuries. But Ye’or has the evidence — the chronicles and the statistics — on
her side.
Furthermore, as she notes, the treatment of the non-Islamic inhabitants
of Dafur at the hands of the Muslim Sudanese rightly outraged the international
community — yet this treatment is identical, indeed the formulaic,
meticulously documented and theologically justified treatment of conquered
populations in Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Anatolia and the Balkans. The
descriptions of the raids, extortion, capture of children, ransom of captives,
enslavement and destruction of entire villages recorded by the UN and various
aid organizations in Dafur read exactly like the chronicles describing Arab
conquests in the Middle East in the sixth to ninth centuries. Why were Sudanese
actions in Dafur “atrocities” and the Arab conquest of the Middle East and
Balkans “enlightened”? Why are the peoples of Dafur victims and the Christians
of Egypt, Palestine and Syria “protected” and “privileged”?
Tragically, the myth of Islamic tolerance is now so deeply
embedded in modern perceptions of the medieval world that I will no doubt be
vilified and insulted for writing and publishing this review. Yet it is
precisely because this book challenges politically correct versions of history
with irrefutable evidence drawn from contemporary sources, including Arab and
Turkish sources, that this book deserves to be read and discussed — not ignored
or dismissed.
The status of Orthodox Christians in the crusader states is a recurring theme in all Dr. Schrader's novels set in the Holy Land in the Era of the Crusades:
All books are available in paperback or as ebooks on amazon and Barnes and Noble. Find out more about them at: http://www.helenapschrader.com/crusades.html
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