It is not a Reformation that Islam needs

This extends a comment I made here.



The process of local cultures invading Christianity has also occurred in Islam. The Sufi traditions were full of that. But the effect is far more limited in Islam than in Chrisitianity, as Islamic reformers come through periodically and "purify" Islam by returning to the texts. When people say "Islam needs a Reformation" it shows they understand neither Islam nor the Reformation. Getting rid of "pagan" accretions and going back to the original texts WAS precisely what the Reformation was about and occurs in Islam regularly.

As Mark Durie points out about the Protestant Reformation:

Throughout the whole medieval period the idea of reformation (reformatio) was prestigious, and many reform movements chased after this ideal. Reformation meant going back to one's roots, and just about everyone agreed that this was a Good Thing. For medieval Christians, a reformed Christianity meant being more Christ-like, more apostolic, and more Pauline. …
The European Reformation - so often invoked in comparisons with Islam today - was driven by a desire to re-form Christianity a second time, taking it back to its roots. It sought to move ahead by going backwards. Its inner logic had nothing to do with the modern idea of progress or the Darwinian concept of 'evolution'. The Reformation was not a 'progressive' movement in the modern sense, but one which sought to 'regress', renewing the example of Christ and his apostles.
This is why Luther and other reformers encouraged believers to read their Bibles for themselves, in their own native tongue. Luther regarded it as the duty of every Christian to be constantly renewing their own faith from the original sources.

What Islam lacks is not Protestant belief in the primacy of scripture—on the contrary, Islam holds to that more strongly than the most fervid Protestant—but the Orthodox/Catholic notion of scripture as a product of the Church (the body of believers) and the world, as the direction creation of God, trumping Scriptures, as the indirect creation of God.

Conversely, Islam entirely lacks the Protestant notion of final interpreting authority residing in the believers and their consciences. Instead, it has a more "Catholic/Orthodox" view of final interpreting authority residing in the scholars, the ulema.

To put it another way, Islam combines the worst features of the Christian traditions (textual literalism and trumping clerical authority) and lacks the best features (this-world-based reasoning and individual conscience: the modern Western synthesis).

It is precisely because modern Western civilisation has largely dropped the authority of scripture and of priests while marrying Protestant notions of governance to Catholic/Orthodox notions of reasoning-grounded-in-this-world being not merely a but the source of truth, that the gap between Western civilisation and Islam is, in crucial respects, wider than it was between Christendom and Islam. At the same time, the capacity of Western examples and ideas has—due to communication and transport technology—to intrude into Islam greatly magnified.

Clash of civilisations (and other frictions) anyone?

This gap also makes it harder for Muslims to integrate into Western society: particularly if multiculturalist welfarism operates to systematically undermine any incentive to do so. As the work of Danish psychologist Nicolai Sennels (long interview here, another here and another here) brings out rather starkly:

A French survey in Le Figaro showed that only 14 percent of the country's estimated five million Muslims see themselves as "more French than Muslim." Research (pdf) made by the German Ministry of Interior shows that only 12 percent of Muslims living in Germany see themselves as more German than Muslim. A Danish survey published by the pro-Muslim pro-democratic organization Democratic Muslims led by the Danish PM and Muslim Naser Khader showed that only 14 percent of Muslims living in Denmark could identify themselves as "Democratic and Danish."

A major sign of the failure of such integration in Europe is that younger generations of Muslims are generally more committed to their Muslim identity—one typically manifested against the surrounding Western societies—than their parents.

A poll published in February 2006 of British Muslims found that 40% supported the introduction of Shar’ia in parts of the UK while 41% opposed that: a December 2006 poll found support for Shar’ia was much stronger among British Muslims aged 16-24 [37%] than those over 55 [15%].) The latter poll also found that British Muslims over 55 were more likely to agree (56%) than to disagree (28%) that people in their area were more religious than 10 years ago. While those aged 16-24 were significantly more likely to rate religion as the most important thing in their life (90%) than those over 55 (76%); much more likely to support Muslim women wearing veils (74% to 28%), more likely to support making homosexuality illegal (71% to 50%), to think apostasy should be punished by death (36% to 19%), to support polygamy for Muslim men (52% to 18%), to think a Muslim woman should not marry without consent of her guardian (57% to 33%) and to admire organizations such as al-Qaeda that fight against the West (13% to 3%). (It is worth noting that 80% of 16-24 year old and 92% of over 55 British Muslims in the poll disagreed that al-Qaeda was to be admired.)

What generates these differences is not the lack of a Reformation, the lack of going back to Scriptures, but precisely the process of doing exactly that, of seeing the Qur’an, the hadith and the life of Muhammad as the source of moral knowledge and guidance. Of going back to the “roots” of Islam, precisely as the Reformation sought to do with Christianity.

Consider the comments of a prominent American Muslim, quoted here:

Dr. Ingrid Mattson, the woman who was invited by Hussein Obama to represent Muslims in the interfaith prayer of the Democrats Presidential convention, and who is the president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), when asked whether Wahhabism is an extreme right wing sect of Islam, responded:

No it’s not true to characterize ‘Wahhabism’ that way. This is not a sect. It is the name of a reform movement that began 200 years ago to rid Islamic societies of cultural practices and rigid interpretation that had acquired over the centuries. It really was analogous to the European protestant reformation.

Mark Durie again:

Australian Muslim Waleed Aly was entirely correct when he said Islam has already had its Reformation, and the outcome has been Islamic radicalism:

"Still, Western calls for an Islamic Reformation grow predictably and irrepressibly stronger, while those familiar with the Islamic tradition easily observe that radical and terrorist groups such as al-Qa'ida and the Taliban, cannot be cured by Reformation for the very simple fact that they are the Reformation." [People like us: how arrogance is dividing Islam and the West, p.xv].

For those today whose world view is shaped by the ideal of progress, and look out upon Islam peering through the frame of Western assumptions about 'backwardness', 'progress' and 'evolution', Waleed Aly's insight can be difficult to grasp. Yet it is essential that it be understood and appreciated.
In today's world, if what is needed is more moderate manifestation of Islam, then the very last thing that could ever accomplish this would be an Islamic Reformation.

When Westerners say “Islam needs a Reformation”, what they typically mean is that they want Islam to go through an Enlightenment, to turn into something like post-Enlightenment Western religion. But they typically forget what Europe went through that “tamed” religion and religious claims. Worse, they fail to understand that the strands in Christianity that the modern Western synthesis is based on are absent from Islam. Worse still, they often lack any serious commitment to the virtues of the (sceptical) Enlightenment, and to (sceptical) Enlightenment values, while opposing the creation of serious incentives to encourage Muslim integration and Islamic adjustment.

They typically suffer under the cognitive flaws that George Santayana found in Bertrand Russell, of whom Santayana wrote:

His outlook was universal, but his presuppositions were insular.

It is a great foolishness, to burble on about the values of different cultures and then not take cultural (indeed, civilisational) differences seriously, as if somehow your particular presuppositions are some incipient human universal, just waiting to burst forth in all folk. As if you are not a product of specific history, while others are products of very different histories: differences that cannot be simply assumed to be inherently reconcilable. It is one thing to think a variety of cognitive perspectives aid decision-making (which, up to a point at least, the evidence is they do): it is another to presume they all embody some deep, ultimately conforming, unity.

It is not a Reformation that Islam lacks: Islam is experiencing an imported modernity while lacking much of what modernity grew out of in the West, making modernity an even more alien experience. Islam is the other universalist civilization, and operates on very different premises. Those different premises need to be taken seriously: to be not either wished away or treated as immutable features of human reality. For they matter to the extent that people act on them, so it is how people think about them that drives their significance.

As Muslim apostate Ali Sina points out, the difference between the Reformation in Christianity and Reformation in Islam is that there are some very real differences in the messages of the Gospels, New Testament and life of Jesus compared to the Qur’an, the hadith and the life of Muhammad:

What is the essence of the reformation in Islam? The essence of the Wahhabi belief is that man is not free but a slave of Allah. People are Ibad. (slaves)
This is diametrically a different discourse from the discourse of Protestantism and here is the essential difference between Christianity and Islam.
On the surface, there are many similarities between Christianity and Islam. Both believe in a God, both rely on an intermediary between man and God, both faiths are eschatological - have a hell, a heaven and an afterlife, etc. However, in their core, they are very different, in fact opposite to one another. The reformatio of both these faiths took the same road, but seaking [sic] the origin of their faith, they went opposite directions. Islam is not a continuation of Christianity, as Muhammad and Muhammadns claim, but it is an anti Christian belief in its core. Christianity advocates freedom of man, Islam, his slavery. One brings the message of liberation, the other, of submission.

(Ali Sina also argues there is not such thing as moderate Islam, only Muslims who do not wish to buy the whole package.)

I understand the temptation to try and “re-imagine” Islam, but such “re-imagining” is potentially disastrous if it is based on wishful thinking rather than accurate understanding.

ADDENDA Mark Durie has a post on the problems of reformation in Islam, particularly for women.

Eclectic useful links

A post to put some links: it will get added to over time.

John Kilcullen on medieval natural rights. Page of links to a wide range of his publications.
Jonathan Haidt’s home page.
Structured procrastination essays.
Wikipedia.

Books and Writers
Amazon.
The book depository.
Links to collected writings of Lorna Salzman.

Economics and public policy
About the lack of a common analytical language in monetary economics.
The Agenda website.
Chicago economist John Cochrane’s recent pieces page.
John H. Bishop's publications on education and learning.

Film and TV
IMDB.
Box office mojo.
Pierre Rehov’s documentaries.
Battlestar Galactica wiki

Health
The water cure.
Whole health source blog.
Is there such a thing as fat free eating? From the free the animal blog.
About the connection between the flexibility of your body and the flexibility of your arteries.
About stress and health. About “ultra wellness”.

History
The cliodynamics website (Peter Turchin).
The crusades encyclopedia. Entry on Karen Armstrong.
Michael Z Williamson on bows.

Religion
Biblegateway.
Mark Durie’s website.
Raymond Ibrahim on Islam’s doctrine of deception.

Queer
The Encyclopedia of Homosexuality.
Prof. Joan Roughgarden on Nature Abhors a Category
The gay and Christian website.
The God-the-exterminator nativity story from The Golden Legend.
Vatican on homosexuals as metaphysically deformed.
Burning alive participants in same-sex marriage ceremony in C16th Rome.

Vic Info
Victorian weather forecasts.
Vipassana meditation courses.

Web
Free file hosting made simple.

Economic history

The virtue of incoherence

A recent report on housing found that:

immigration was ''the most significant driver of underlying demand for additional housing stock''.

Housing land and development regulation has created a serious housing shortage and consequent inflation of housing prices that hits low income earners hardest. In the time Victoria’s population has gone up 30%, no new major dams have been built. No new power stations have been built.

But if you are against immigration, you are racist. If you do not want to help low income people, you are heartless. While if you are in favour of allowing landowners to build houses in response to demand, of building new power stations, of building a new dam, you are an “environmental vandal”.

This is a completely incoherent set of policies. Yet, you have to be “on board” with all of them to be one of the virtuous, to be a “good person”. [Since they all celebrate "good intentions" and "good intentions" maketh one virtuous: worrying about actual consequences, not so much.]

But, far from the incoherence being a difficulty, it is an advantage. A feature, not a bug.

How can it be an advantage? Because of its value as a status marker.

It is very simple. If you notice and question the incoherence, you are showing that something is more important to you than being a “good person”, being one of the conspicuously compassionate, the ostentatiously virtuous. If something is more important than that, then you are not reliable. In particular, you are demonstrating that something is more important than you than supporting the mutual status game.

Which makes you very “unreliable” indeed.

For if these policies can be legitimately questioned, then they are not reliable status markers. Your failure to “play the game” undermines the value of these status markers as common assets. So you have to be cast out of the realm of the “properly moral” in order to preserve the value of these public positions as status markers.

Conversely, by “buying” the incoherence—particularly by seeing anyone who raises the incoherence as morally retrograde—you are compromising your intellectual consistency, even your intellectual honesty. That makes you even more of a “co-conspirator” than you would be by simply agreeing.

I once read comments by an ex-communist that, on joining the Party, he had declared himself willing to give everything up for the Party except his once-a-week music recitals. Years later, he found out that the Party had marked him down as not fully reliable, as he had demonstrated something mattered more to him than the Party and the Cause.

Accepting incoherence in display virtue works similarly. Moreover, a shared morally compromising or taboo-breaking act can be very binding. It marks you off from others and creates a bigger gulf to step over to change. So much so, that changing your beliefs can be, in effect, a change of identity, making it that much harder to change, thereby protecting the power of the markers of membership.

For many decades after the consolidation of the Leninist regime, in academic, intellectual, literary and artistic circles in the West, if you stated the truth—that the Soviet regime was murderous and oppressive, that it killed wholesale to violently extract a surplus from workers and peasants, that it had revived slavery with its labour camp system—you were something of a pariah. It was not the relatively small number of people who told complete bollocks about the virtues of the Soviet regime who were the problem. It was the much larger number who felt that to seriously attack the Soviet regime put you on the “wrong side of history” who allowed such support for the Soviet regime to have resonance in academic, literary, artistic and cultural circles and awkward truths against the Soviet Union to lack them. For to accept and promulgate such awkward truths and their profoundly negative moral implications about the Soviet regime declared you to be someone who was not morally and intellectually kosher. In other words, that you were not, in an important sense, a “good person”. It was a sign of being intellectually and morally serious that you “understood” that.

Even more insidious was the notion that it was not even acknowledging some of those truths that was the issue: it was drawing the negative moral implications which really marked you out as morally and intellectually "not kosher". To failing to keep to the requisite intellectual taboos to be one of the virtuous.

It was that sense of being one of the moral-cognitive elite required you to accept that making those criticisms showed a lack of “soundness” that shielded the Soviet regime in Western intellectual, literary, artistic and cultural circles.

The markers change, but the pattern of behaviour continues. For the sense of virtue being sold thereby is so re-assuring in its sense of shared identity, with all its consoling sense of moral and intellectual superiority.

Hence the virtue of incoherence: it really does make a sense of mutual “soundness”—of shared moral and intellectual superiority—the most important thing, so all the stronger and better protected.

The enduring appeal of Marxism

Reading Helen Epstein’s essay on Meles Zenawi’s dictatorial regime in Ethiopia, one is treated to a double dose of what an utter moral disaster Marxism has been.

The first is recalling Mengistu’s appalling regime and the collectivisation famine it created, aggravated by its food-denial strategy against its opponents. (Epstein identifies the second factor but not the first.)

The second is the way Epstein’s account makes it quite clear that Zenawi’s policies of control flow quite directly from his schooling in Marxist politics. She writes:

During the early 1970s, when Meles was a medical student in Addis Ababa, he joined a Marxist study group that eventually became the TPLF. Meles’s military performance was undistinguished, but he had a talent for speech-making, and was appointed head of the TPLF’s political wing. In the training courses he ran for recruits, he celebrated Stalin’s achievement in modernizing Russia, but didn’t dwell on the blood that was shed in the process.

In 1985, Meles founded a unit within the TPLF known as the Marxist-Leninist League of Tigray, which was guided by the Leninist principle of “Democratic Centralism.” In pursuit of revolutionary socialist goals, the peasants were to be mobilized by a “vanguard elite,” which would exert total ideological and economic control over society. But after taking office in 1991, Meles downplayed his Marxist past and even enrolled in a correspondence course in business administration at Britain’s Open University. In discussions with US officials and journalists, he indicated that his Marxism extended to antifeudalism, equality, land reform, and teaching farming skills to women, but not to the nationalization of private enterprises or one-party rule.

At first, Meles’s government allowed a degree of press freedom, multiparty democracy, and privatization of some state-owned enterprises. But as rigged elections and arrests of journalists continued, some observers wondered whether Meles’s political change of heart was genuine. In official English-language documents written for the World Bank and other agencies, his government expressed a commitment to human rights and democracy: but Ethiopian-language documents intended for internal government or EPRDF consumption told a different story. These documents outlined a policy known as “Revolutionary Democracy”—essentially the same Leninist program that Meles taught to his TPLF cadres in the 1980s, involving top-down decision-making, regular sessions of “self-criticism,” and single-party rule for generations. Revolutionary Democracy would be promoted through the gradual EPRDF takeover of all organs of “propaganda,” including schools, the civil service, the press, and religious institutions. “When ‘Revolutionary Democracy’ permeates the entire [Ethiopian] society,” Meles wrote in 2001,

individuals will start to think alike and all persons will cease having their own independent outlook. In this order, individual thinking becomes simply part of collective thinking because the individual will not be in a position to reflect on concepts that have not been prescribed by “Revolutionary Democracy.”

Consistent with this aim, the EPRDF has used World Bank funds to purge much of the senior civil service of opposition supporters and replaced the independent Ethiopian Teachers Association with a party-affiliated body. Meles concedes that a Leninist economic program would not be possible as long as Ethiopia is dependent on foreign aid from capitalist countries, but his government still controls all land and telecommunications, and much of the banking and rural credit sectors. According to the World Bank, roughly half of the rest of the national economy is accounted for by companies held by an EPRDF-affiliated business group called the Endowment Fund for the Rehabilitation of Tigray (EFFORT). EFFORT’s freight transport, construction, pharmaceutical, and cement firms receive lucrative foreign aid contracts and highly favorable terms on loans from government banks. Ethiopia is not a typical African kleptocracy, and there is no evidence that Meles personally benefits from these businesses. Rather, they are part of a rigid system of control that aid agency officials, beguiled by Meles’s apparently pro-Western exterior, have only recently begun to recognize.

People frequently attempt to differentiate Leninism from Marxism, but Leninism is simply a way of operationalising Marxism. The notion that history has a goal, that this goal is morally trumping, that people are to be graded according to whether they are facilitators or barriers to this goal, that people suffer from mass delusions which the “enlightened” overcome, that large sections of humanity are dispensable, all come straight from Marxism and are all profoundly tyrannical in their implications.

Bu such views are also convenient, since they justify massive concentration of power and provide grounds to de-legitimise opposition. As Epstein’s concluding paragraph expresses:

The Western Renaissance helped to democratize “the word” so that all of us could speak of our own individual struggles, and this added new meaning and urgency to the alleviation of the suffering of others. The problem with foreign aid in Ethiopia is that both the Ethiopian government and its donors see the people of this country not as individuals with distinct needs, talents, and rights but as an undifferentiated mass, to be mobilized, decentralized, vaccinated, given primary education and pit latrines, and freed from the legacy of feudalism, imperialism, and backwardness. It is this rigid focus on the “backward masses,” rather than the unique human person, that typically justifies appalling cruelty in the name of social progress.

The notion that the history of Marxism does not reveal its logic is a deeply contemptible evasion.

The persistence of Marxism in the West is a function of its persistence in academe. Without that, it would wither and die. [Given the grotesque failures of the attempts to base societies on Marxist thought.] Why does it persistent in academe? Because Marxism satisfies three deep cognitive wants for academics:

(1) It is a complex theoretical system. There is nothing that establishes one’s bona fides as a Very Clever Person more than mastering a complex theoretical system: the denser and more jargon-heavy the prose, the better. And Marx’s writings have plenty of dense, jargon-heavy prose.

(2) It is a system of grand intent. If one lives the life of the mind, then the grander one’s intellectual projects, the grander one’s cognitive sense of self: Marxism not only “explains” human history and society, it “reveals” the final end point of human and social transformation. What could be grander than such a project?

(3) It completely de-legitimises commerce. Under Marxism, the only legitimate economic role is to supply labour. All commerce is de-legitimised and all those engaged in it—including all those people who have far more wealth and organisational significance than academics—are de-legitimised, reduced to “exploiters” who are but immoral dust beneath the heels of academics in no way “polluted” by vulgar commerce.

We can see the strength of these factors from the way they manifest in the typical attitudes of academics (particularly humanities academics) way beyond belief in Marxism (though, often, a form of decayed “vulgar Marxism” still lurks in putatively non-Marxian manifestations). Marxism simply hits these notes in a more sophisticated and coherent way than the alternatives, which are often left with a fairly superficial re-glossing of Marxian perspectives, due to the lack of a powerful alternative that is as well grounded in academic cognitive preferences.

[Marxism is a deeply flawed system of thought: for example, Marx's labour theory of value is false and Marx's notion of "exploitation" rests on playing games with the concept of 'labour'.]

Marxism is of historical interest because it has been so profoundly influential in modern history. Its continuing appeal is of sociological interest. But it is not a philosophy worthy of any moral respect and its persistence in academe is a sign of social pathology, not of intellectual or moral health.

ADDENDA: This post has been amended to add the bits in [].

Sex-scandal in an online world

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Illegal immigration

Illegal immigration pushes a lot of people’s buttons negatively because:
(1) it establishes that they, as voters and citizens—unless they are happy with open borders—have no say over who comes to live in their country; and
(2) treating it as a non-issue not merely tolerates, but rewards, foreigners for breaking the law.

These are both perfectly reasonable responses. What cries out for explanation is not that illegal immigration upsets people, but that a lot of people are tone-deaf to the perfectly understandable ways in which it “pushes people’s buttons”.

A key reason for this “tone deafness” is that, if you are in favour of an expansive immigration policy, tolerating illegal immigration allows your preferred policy to get through without the tedious constraints of democratic processes. Acknowledging the reasonableness of much of the opposition to illegal immigration makes this end-run around democratic processes explicit. It is much better to find reasons to discount this anger—thereby “justifying” one’s revealed contempt for your fellow citizens having a say—than to leave that contempt “naked”. Hence the continuing efforts to diagnose angst over illegal immigration as being morally retrograde—a manifestation of racism or some other form of “lack of compassion”.

Angst over illegal immigration can exist completely independently of attitudes to immigration in general. Being dismissive of such angst is, however, likely to be associated with a strongly pro-immigration view: as, indeed, we observe.

But there is an even more basic level of differentiation. The above concerns about illegal immigration are based on a strong notion of the polity having a legitimate corporate existence. That is, the country’s laws—and the processes by which they are made—have a strong legitimacy that extends to the right to regulate borders.

If you have a weak or negative view of the country’s corporate legitimacy, then such concerns will also not resonate.

Hence libertarians—if they do not accept any strong right to regulate entry—are likely to be dismissive of concerns over illegal immigration. Arguments of the “if wetbacks were greenbacks” variety will resonate with them.

Immigration and rights in the abstract and the specific
As I put in a comment here, I do not agree with this view.
Read More...
After all, do we agree that people have the right to their property? That owning a house means you can say who can use it or not?

I assume yes.

Do we agree that people have a right to form common associations for common purposes?

I assume yes.

Do we grant the state is a legitimate entity?

If one is not some sort of anarchist, then yes.

Then a state has legitimacy to set and enforce rules, including rules of residency. What those rules should be, grounds for much debate. Just like rules concerning foreign trade. But the legitimacy of making them is fine. Particularly for public goods and externalities. Both of which apply to immigration, as that extends the number of people covered by the country’s public goods and imposes negative externalities on existing residents. (It may also—depending on the rules in operation—affect the provision of national club goods, such as taxpayer-paid welfare and social services.)

People may have rights in the abstract but we are not beings in the abstract. That is, we all exist in a web of particular connections. Unless those particular connections have some legitimacy, then we lack legitimacy as specific (rather than abstract) persons. Property rights in the abstract have no substance unless they apply to property in the particular. Voting rights in the abstract have no substance unless they can be exercised over specific matters. A polity is not merely a set of formal institutional structures, it is—if it is to be resilient and functional—also a structure of embracing some sense of common identity and broad patterns of behaviour and norms. It is foolish to think that there is nothing that needs to be socialized into to keep the society functional and resilient.

The “if wetbacks were greenbacks” style arguments miss the point that extra people generate a range of costs and benefits in a way extra capital does not. Adding to the national stock of capital has an upward pressure on wages and living standards. Adding to the national stock of people puts downward pressure on average living standards and on the relative price of labour (it puts upward pressure on the relative price of capital, hence owners of various types of capital—including human capital—tend to be pro-immigration). It also creates crowding, levels of social trust, crime, health, cultural change and voting power issues.

Issues that affect people more negatively the less capital they have. That the benefits of immigration tend to be greater for those up the socio-economic ladder and the costs greater for those down the socio-economic ladder makes the tendency of those who are typically net-beneficiaries to morally sneer at the concern from the more vulnerable about immigration particularly unedifying.

It is all very well to say there are benefits to immigration, but there is no guarantee these will compensate specific people for the externalities they experience. Moreover, unchosen costs are not usually held to be compensated for by unchosen benefits. Particularly if one does not necessarily match the other.

The notion that there is some general right of entry strikes me as a non-starter: a problem of fuzzy thinking, not of substance.

Regarding the interests of migrants—given it clearly does generally greatly benefit migrants to move to countries such as the Anglosphere countries—we may well decide that some people have particular claims on our consideration: hence refugee programs and rules about asylum seekers. But unless we can vote on specific rules (directly or indirectly), then our vote has no power. Which is a key issue with illegal immigration: it denies citizens the right to have a say about their own society (as noted above) if they want something other than an expansive immigration policy.

Legitimacy and diversity
Those with a negative view of the legitimacy of the polity will be even less likely to see the reasonableness of concern over illegal immigration. For then the current citizens become arbitrary beneficiaries of injustice: and who are such to deny “untainted” people the right to become … new arbitrary beneficiaries of injustice, one presumes.

This may be foolish of progressives on a couple of grounds. First, migrants from non-Western countries are unlikely to be socially liberal. Second, increasing social diversity runs the risk of decreasing social empathy, undermining the sense of the welfare state as a common enterprise. The Scandinavian model of a strong welfare state was a model developed in largely mono-cultural societies, where it is comparatively easy to sustain a sense of a common enterprise, there are good lines of communication between officials and citizens and chances of miscommunication and dysfunctional effects are greatly reduced.

Conversely, the Anglosphere societies—which have always been more culturally diverse—have tended to develop a looser “liberal” model of the state precisely because, I would argue, they were more culturally diverse: a looser public policy model coped better with diversity. Trying to drive their public policy model more in a “Scandinavian” direction is a fairly doomed exercise. Indeed, as the Scandinavian countries become more culturally diverse themselves, they will find (indeed, are finding) that the “Scandinavian model” comes under increasing stress.

There is a reason that economic liberalism developed in the Danubian Monarchy (the reductio ad absurdem of culturally diverse polities)—in the form of Austrian economics—and the United Kingdom (of English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish)—notably Manchester liberalism—and developed further in the country of E Pluribus Unum. Cultural diversity encourages the notion that people will want divergent things, and this is fine.

But if attitudes to illegal immigration are based on deep differences about the corporate identity of the polity and its level and ambit of legitimacy, they are not going to be easily resolved. What is not legitimate is to deny that there are perfectly reasonable grounds for people to have angst about illegal immigration.

ADDENDA This post has been edited to extend some points, clarify the argument and reduce repetition.

The Christian origins of dhimmitude

A dhimmi is a non-Muslim “person of the book” who is treated as a legal inferior under Shar’ia. In other words, a person denied equality before the law based on a categorisation derived from religious considerations.

So, what is a modern Christian term for a “dhimmi”?

Try ‘homosexual’.

In much of the Western world (though a shrinking proportion thereof), as a gay man, I am a person denied equality before the law based on a categorisation derived from religious considerations. I am the Christian (or, if you prefer, a Judaeo-Christian) version of a dhimmi [but see the clarification below] in the sense that it is perfectly obvious that the reasons for the denial of legal equality, and the opposition to the achievement of legal equality, for the same-sex oriented are derived from religion. From the notion that to give such people legal equality is offensive to God and against God’s purposes.

In the words of Baptist pastor Daniel Y. Yearey:

Homosexuality denies the sovereignty of God. Genesis 1:27 says God created man in His own image. In God there are no disorders or confusion. He created male and female for distinct purposes. Homosexuality says we can be independent of God's direction and design.

He could be Sayyid Qutb, discoursing on Western offenses against the trumping sovereignty of God.

This is not some cute rhetorical pairing. It is clear, when you go into the history, that the Muslim concept of dhimmi is built from preceding Christian practice. But not against the same-sex active—there the traditional Christian position was extermination: the movement of the same-sex attracted towards [and now beyond] mere “dhimmitude” represents a major social advance—but against another “people of the book”.

For the traditional Christian word for “dhimmi” was ‘Jew’.

Dhimmitude in Islam
In an article at Pajamasmedia, Andrew Bostom describes the state of dhimmitude in Islam in the following terms:

The “contract of the jizya,” or “dhimma,” encompassed other obligatory and recommended obligations for the conquered non-Muslim “dhimmi” peoples. Collectively, these “obligations” formed the discriminatory system of dhimmitude imposed upon non-Muslims — Jews and Christians, as well as Zoroastrians, Hindus, and Buddhists — subjugated by jihad. Some of the more salient features of dhimmitude include:

– The prohibition of arms for the vanquished dhimmis
– The prohibition of church bells
– Restrictions concerning the building and restoration of churches, synagogues, and temples
– Inequality between Muslims and non-Muslims with regard to taxes and penal law
– The refusal of dhimmi testimony by Muslim courts
– A requirement that Jews, Christians, and other non-Muslims, including Zoroastrians and Hindus, wear special clothes
– The overall humiliation and abasement of non-Muslims

It is important to note that these regulations and attitudes were institutionalized as permanent features of the sacred Islamic law, or Shari’a. The writings of the much lionized Sufi theologian and jurist al-Ghazali (d. 1111) highlight how the institution of dhimmitude was simply a normative and prominent feature of the Shari’a:

The dhimmi is obliged not to mention Allah or His Apostle. … Jews, Christians, and Majians must pay the jizya [poll tax on non-Muslims]. … On offering up the jizya, the dhimmi must hang his head while the official takes hold of his beard and hits [the dhimmi] on the protruberant bone beneath his ear [i.e., the mandible]. … They are not permitted to ostentatiously display their wine or church bells. … Their houses may not be higher than the Muslim’s, no matter how low that is. The dhimmi may not ride an elegant horse or mule; he may ride a donkey only if the saddle-work is of wood. He may not walk on the good part of the road. They [the dhimmis] have to wear [an identifying] patch [on their clothing], even women, and even in the [public] baths. … [Dhimmis] must hold their tongue.

The practical consequences of such a discriminatory system were summarized by S.D. Goitein in 1970 (emphasis mine):

Taxation [by the Muslim government] was merciless, and a very large section of the population must have lived permanently at the starvation level. From many Geniza letters one gets the impression that the poor were concerned more with getting money for the payment of their taxes than for food and clothing, for failure of payment usually induced cruel punishment. … The Muslim state was quite the opposite of the ideals … embedded in the constitution of the United States. An Islamic state was part of or coincided with dar al-Islam, the House of Islam. Its treasury was … the money of the Muslims. Christians and Jews were not citizens of the state, not even second class citizens. They were outsiders under the protection of the Muslim state, a status characterized by the term dhimma … They were also exposed to a great number of discriminatory and humiliating laws. … As it lies in the very nature of such restrictions, soon additional humiliations were added, and before the second century of Islam was out, a complete body of legislation in this matter was in existence. … In times and places in which they became too oppressive they lead to the dwindling or even complete extinction of the minorities.

There is some tendency in some circles to downplay the nature and role of dhimmi and dhimmitude. It is certainly true that the level of oppression of dhimmis varied from place to place and over time. Muslim rule, for example, tended to be more tolerant when Muslims were a thin ruling minority and become less tolerant the smaller proportion that non-Muslims were of the population. (In other words, there was some tendency for the level of intolerance to vary according to the costs of intolerance: a pattern one also sees in Latin Christendom.) Nevertheless, subordination of non-believers to believers is fundamental to the religious jurisprudence of Islam.

There is also some tendency for Christians to see dhimmitude as a mark of the inferiority of Islam to Christianity. Christians can cite texts such as love thy neighbour as they self, turn the other cheek, render unto Caesar and statements by Christian authorities such as Pope Paul III’s Sublimus Dei of 1537.

Christian practices of degradation
All very well, but, if one examines traditional Christian jurisprudence consigning Jews to a reviled, secondary legal status, it is clear that the same measures that Andrew Bostom lists above were applied against Jews by Christian polities. For the trouble with Christian self-congratulation is that the basic precepts of dhimmitude—apart from the requirement for distinguishing special clothing (which the Christian Church later adopted as a fine idea)—are extensions and regularisations of the laws and Church decrees of the Christian Roman Empire against Jews.
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In Part Three (Constantine, Augustine and the Jews) of his Constantine’s Sword James Carroll examines what the Christianising of the Roman Empire meant for Jews and St Augustine of Hippo’s role in enunciating a theology that permitted the Jews to survive, but not to thrive with their conversion to Christianity being the ultimate aim. Which expresses quite well the aim of Islamic jurisprudence for Jews, Christians and other “peoples of the book”.

In his Anguish of the Jews, Flannery identifies the fourth century, the Constantinian century, as the crucial (and disastrous) century for Christian attitudes to the Jews. With the Christianizing of the empire, Judaism lost ground badly:

… its privileges were largely withdrawn, its proselytism was outlawed, and in 425 the patriarchate was abolished (p.47).

The centre of Jewish scholarship moved to Babylonia, in Rome’s great rival the Sassanid Empire. Within the Empire:

…the choice for Judaism was plain: either continue a losing and perilous competition or retire into the world of the Talmud. The rabbinate opted for the latter alternative, considering it the price of survival (p.48).

So, in considering Christian complaints about Muslim bars on conversion, it is well to remember that Christians did it to Jews first.

St Augustine’s notion of Jews as a “witness people”, witnesses “for the salvation of the nation but not their own” gave them a space within Christian framings of the human society, if a degraded one. St Augustine’s notion that obligation to love still applies to Jews was clearly more formal than substantive while his holding that Christians should still seek to lead them to Christ’s salvation just increases the similarity to the later Islamic notion of the dhimmi.

Various Christian Councils passed anti-Jewish decisions: forbidding Jewish-Christian marriage (unless preceded by conversion to Christianity); joint celebration of Passover; forbidding Christians to keep the Jewish Sabbath, receive gifts or bread from Jewish festivals (Anguish p.55). The Roman state was torn between its Christianisation and the previous precedent of tolerating Judaism. So it was legal in the Empire, with a range of legal consequences from that. But Christianity was clearly preferred: Jewish proselytising and conversion to Judaism was banned; converts to Judaism became intestate but Jewish parents could not disinherit their children who converted to Christianity; Jews were banned from circumcising slaves or buying Christian slaves, which had the effect of driving them out of various trades and occupations (since uncircumcised slaves brought with them the burden of ritual impurity). Construction and repair of synagogues was regulated. Jews were barred from public office. The Jewish patriarchate was abolished. The language of law often incorporated denigration of Jews and Judaism (Pp57-8).

This religious and legal tension was reflected in popular violence from both sides, with the 414 massacre and flight of the Jewish community in Alexandria after Jews had killed some Christians being the worst outbreak (Pp59ff). Attacks on synagogues were frequent.

Flannery identifies that:

… the principal source of Christian antisemitism was the Church’s theological anti-Judaism. It is apparent that there exists a certain level of theological negation or polemical intensity which, when reached, produces an effect that is no longer purely theological or polemical: ideological opposition has turned to hatred and stereotype—the life-blood of antisemitsm (Pp62-63)

Again, a point which is extendable. Though it was still better to be a Jew than a heretic (p.64). Flannery concludes that:

Christian antisemitism was rooted, finally, in the survival of a vibrant and often defiant Judaism. The refusal of the Synagogue to join the Church stood forth as a serious challenge to the Christian apologia, a scandal to the Christian faithful, and a source of worry to their pastors, alarmed by the Judaizing tendencies within their flock. Antisemitism thus was not rooted only in Christian doctrine but also in a pastoral zeal which resorted to every and any means to find … “a therapy for the Jewish disease” (p.65).

That both faiths claim exclusive election by the One True God gave them plenty to argue over: since monotheism encourages the view that not only is there a single truth, but that there is a single correct view of what is. But that Jews and Christians had a common history made Jews preferable to Christians than pagans (or heretics, since they were taken to be explicit, directly threatening, “deniers” of Christian truth).

With the collapse of the Western Empire, Jews entered a period of highly variable fortunes. In the Eastern Empire, the legal persecution of the Jews continued and tightened: they could not own a Christian slave, their property rights were narrowed, they were barred from public functions (except the decurionate) and practising law, they could not testify against Christians. Justinian’s laws even regulated the internal practices of the Jewish religion (p.68). Jewish resistance was at times violent and Jews became regular collaborators with the Empire’s enemies (Pp69-70).

In the West, Pope Leo III may have proclaimed Karl-lo-magne “Imperator”, “Commander of Romans”, but “Big Karl” ran a Germanic empire and Germanic law did not distinguish Jews from Christians. Affronted by this, the Catholic Church waged a relentless campaign against Jews having legal equality with Christians (i.e. the true believers, the true Israel) that was ultimately successful. Centuries of proselytising against Jews as “Christ-killers” and enemies of God’s purposes bore fruit, with increasing popular Jew-hatred. Over time, the laws against Jews became more and more restrictive. In 1215, the Lateran Council decreed that Jews (and Muslims) had to wear special clothing to distinguish them from Jews, bring Christian legal practise even more in line with the Muslim legal practice; the two religions learning from each other in their persecution of Jews (and each other).

As far as the Church was concerned, those who remained Jews were forever guilty of refusing to abandon their faith. Exactly the Muslim attitude to dhimmis

After their conquests, the Muslims, of course, also applied these rules against Christians. Since Christendom was generally in territorial retreat, the issue of Christian treatment of Muslim minorities rarely arose. Where it did, Christian treatment of Muslims mirrored Muslim treatment of Christians: if anything, it was worse, since the Muslim minorities of Sicily and Spain were harried into non-existence culminating in expulsion.

Treatment of pagans was comparable in the two dominant monotheisms. Islam’s single generation extirpation of paganism in Arabia was broadly matched by Karl-lo-magne’s brutal suppression of Saxon paganism. As Ramsay MacMullen sets out in his Christianity & Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries the Christian Roman Empire squeezed paganism even more than it did the Jews: suffering similar bars on public office as Jews, pagans were also forbidden to teach, their public places of worship were banned and, from 472, even having a private place of pagan worship on your property made it liable to confiscation. Paganism was not to survive even as a degraded “witness people” that the Jews were permitted to be.

Reading Mark Durie on the psychological effects of dhimmitude on dhimmis, there is a strong overlap of the effects of the legal and social degradation of Jews in Christendom as described by Flannery, Trachtenberg and others. But, why would similar treatment on similar grounds not have similar effects?

The pattern in Christendom was for restrictions on Jews to tend to get worse. Showing one’s contempt for the “enemies of Christ” was a path to virtue, so laws tended to become more and more restrictive. Indeed, the legal restrictions on Jews prior to the Enlightenment were generally harsher than they had been in medieval times—that was particularly true for Jews in the Papal States which kept the ghetto laws going (reinstating them after Napoleon abolished them) until stripped of its territories by Garibaldi. But whether against pagans, Jews, Protestants, Orthodox or queers, the Catholic Church has been a firm opponent of equality before the law, wanting to legally rank people by their belief and/or deny them legal institutional recognition, on the grounds of fulfilling God’s purposes, yielding only when forced to and putting up bitter resistance all the way. As it continues to do in the case of homosexuals.

Since law in Christendom was man-made (even canon law) it could change over time. Islam had “God’s law”, so there was far less scope for evolution in law. Rather, there was a pattern of harsher enforcement over time as dhimmi communities shrank, and so became more vulnerable and the costs of intolerance fell.

Theological subversions
If history and practice fails to distinguish Islam and Christendom for legal degradation on the grounds of belief—indeed, it is clear Islam learnt from Christendom, who then returned the favour—there is clear difference in basic theology.

In the case of Christendom, the entire structure rested on subverting the second principle of Christianity. It has always been possible to appeal to the Gospels to argue against such treatment.

The situation is very different in Islam. There is no equivalent in Islam remotely similar to Sublimus Dei, for example. The subordination of non-believers is built into the structure of Islam in the way it is not for Christianity. Christian priests, seeking authority as “gatekeepers of righteousness” policing the moral community, saying who is in and who is out, have had to develop ways of subverting the second principle of Christianity. They have proved very adept at it (citing rebellion against God’s purposes, claiming betrayal of one’s humanity, or not being proper forms of the human—various ways of stripping people of the status of being moral neighbours): nevertheless, the subversion is required.

By contrast, the entire structure of Islam is set up to create “gatekeepers of righteousness”. Muhammad himself is the ultimate example of that. The violent subordination of dhimmis comes directly from the words and example of the Prophet himself. It is not inequality but equality before the law that requires subversion of the basic logic of Islam.

Dhimmitude is how one avoids the consequences of jihad: those consequences being the killing of men, the enslaving of women and children, the confiscation of property. The dhimma is a pactum subjectionis where one subordinates oneself and alienates oneself from honour, and any authority in the wider society, for as long as one fails to “revert” to Islam ('revert' rather than 'convert' since Islam claims to be—and to have always been—the one true religion of Allah). As the sovereignty of Allah is universal, the world belongs to Him and His people, the umma, the community of believers, the Muslims.

Brutality and subordination
To seek equality is to break the dhimma pact. It is quite clear that the massacre of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire and the Armenian genocide was in part motivated by the legal equality insisted on by the Western Powers being taken to have breached the dhimma pact and so deprived dhimmis of its protection. The jizya tax was a compensation for not taking the dhimmi’s head: no tax, no acceptance of subordination, no “right” to keep one’s unbelieving head.

That dhimmitude is intimately tied to jihad and built into the basic structure of Islam makes Islam rather different from Christianity. Even here, however, one must be careful at pushing the difference. The analogy between the legal treatment of the same-sex oriented in the modern West and the Islamic dhimmitude easily covers the connection to jihad, given the traditional Christian response to same-sex activity was homicidal anathematisation. The tradition of the legal and social degradation of the same-sex oriented was established by great brutality, maintained by brutality and is now collapsing precisely because the brutality is being withdrawn (indeed, actively anathematised by law). In defending the denial of legal equality to the same-sex oriented, people are defending a tradition of brutality. Yes, the brutality was erratic, but that was also a feature of Christian treatment of Jews and Muslim treatment of dhimmis—the Hamidian massacres of Armenians had their equivalents in the pogroms against the Jews in Romanov Russia, for example.

Let us leave aside the burnings alive and the throwing to the dogs to be eaten alive. Consider the case of Jans Jansz cited by Norton. In 1741, Jan Jansz aged 17, was convicted in Amsterdam of sodomy. As a result of the authorities performing their “Christian” duty he spent the rest of his life—fifty-seven years—in solitary confinement in his cell.

It is a great hypocrisy for Christians (and Jews) to beat their breasts about how awful the Islamic notion of dhimmitude is and then be outraged by homosexuals seeking equality before the law. Dhimmitude is every bit as based on longstanding tradition and scriptural basis as is the legal degradation of the same-sex attracted: whether that degradation is in the form of brutal, public judicial murder or, in the words of philosopher Richard Mohr:

… sodomy laws are the chief systematic way that society as a whole tells gays they are scum.

Or denial of legal standing for their relationships. It is every bit as much a denial of legal equality and demand for moral degradation on the grounds of fulfilling God’s purposes.

The famous comment by Jesus on motes and beams (or specks and planks) comes to mind.

The crushing burden of the divine
In the words of William Beckford (quoted by Norton) on a 1816 hanging of a “sodomite” (since Regency England hanged “sodomites” at about the same rate as contemporary Iran does):

I should like to know what kind of deity they fancy they are placating with these shocking human sacrifices.

What sort of deity? One whose moral authority is so transcendent that it is absolutely trumping.

So trumping, it licences contempt and repression—to the point of slaughter—against the vulnerable. For the reason why contempt for Jews and queers have been so vicious is that historically they each have been small minorities, hence religious “gatekeepers of righteousness” have been able to sell “effortless virtue” against them at very little risk to the overwhelming majority while the authority of God “took away” any moral cost—indeed, “reversed” the moral cost.

Which is why monotheism has such a vicious record of slaughter and repression: because the authority of the transcendent One God is so absolutely trumping.*

Just as slaughter and repression have flowed in our time from secular philosophies that have claimed equally totally trumping moral authority: the Aryan race, the completion of history. But to claim their problem was their Godlessness is to show a highly selective historical amnesia.

On the contrary, their problem was exactly the same—belief in an utterly trumping moral authority that permitted casting people out of the moral community by category, categories that did not flow from any actual trespass they had personally committed against their fellow humans or the content of their character. On the contrary, membership of the category was taken to be the most salient feature of their “moral character”, against which there was no appeal while they remained in that category.

Utterly trumping moral authorities that created a “right” to deny people protection of the web of morality. A denial not grounded in moral reciprocity, not grounded in respect for human agency, but due to morally trumping transcendent purposes that created, and put them into, categories of people who, it was deemed, should not exist. On grounds which fundamentally denied moral reciprocity and respect for human agency.

The most distinctive role for God in moral discourse is to justify stripping vulnerable categories of people of their moral protections. The second principle of Christianity is, and has always been, urgently required to protect from the misuse of the first. The problem with Islam is precisely that its conception of the authority of God is so overwhelming and unchecked.

And while “love God” is not the same commandment as “submit to Allah”, in practice submission to God and God’s purposes (and to clerical authority as speaking for God) is precisely what subverting the second principle of Christianity invokes.

It is not surprising, therefore, that subverting the second principle of Christianity creates outcomes that both resemble those in Islam and provided models that Islam could and did use.

CLARIFICATION On reflection, there is a problem with the dhimmi/homosexual analogy which also applies to the cases of Catholic opposition to confessional equality before the law [hence my striking through some sections above]. That problem is that—leaving aside the issue of treatment of Jews, where the dhimmitude analogy holds prior to Jewish emancipation—Western legal systems had a functional equality that did not apply in Islam. That is, witnesses were witnesses, ownership was ownership, crimes were crimes. In the basic functioning of the law, there was (and is) no differentiation. Unlike Shar'ia, where inequality pervades the most basic operation of law.

To take the example of the Habsburg monarchy (and Venetian Republic) treatment of their Orthodox subjects, the Catholic Church constantly put pressure on to undermine or deny any separate institutional existence to the Orthodox Church. In that sense, the treatment was worse than under Shar'ia, which permitted full corporate identity. But—and it is a big "but"—in other respects, Orthodox subjects of both polities had the same legal standing as any other subjects. In that respect, the treatment was much better than under Shar'ia and helped account for the loyalty of their Orthodox subjects to the Habsburg Monarchy and the Serene Republic.

So, homosexual relationships may be (depending on the polity) denied any legal standing or simple legal equality but, apart from that (which still can blight lives in all sorts of ways), homosexuals have equal standing in the law.

If one goes back to when homosexual acts were illegal, the matter becomes trickier because criminialising such a basic aspect of people's lives created a pervasive vulnerability that massively undermined their legal standing. The classic example was Alan Turing being robbed by a confederate of a "trick" and, when he complained to the police, being done for indecency rather than being treated as a victim of a crime. There was also such matters as censorhip of posted material, use of obscenity laws to block positive public representations of homosexuals, and so forth.

The point about Christian decrees and laws against Jews feeding into the dhimmitude system stands but the analogy with the contemporary situation of homosexuals in countries without full equality in family law is an extremely partial one. Which just shows how easy it can be to be tripped up by basic differences in presumptions.

ADDENDA This post has also been edited slightly in the main body to improve clarity.

* It is also why monotheism—particularly the more it stresses scriptural revelation hence attention to the direct voice of God—tends to be hostile to the pleasures, distractions and achievements of this world: they get in the way of connecting to, and “respecting”, the overwhelming authority of God’s transcendence.

The Third Choice 3

This is the third and concluding part of my review of Rev. Dr. Mark Durie’s The Third Choice: Islam, Dhimmitude and Freedom, a book on treatment of non-Muslims in Islam. The Rev. Dr Durie is a former academic (linguistics) and Anglican (Episcopalian) preacher. The previous two parts are here and here.


The pact of subjection
Durie then takes us through the doctrine and history of the dhimmi, those who lived under the third choice, the dhimma pact. He starts by noting that Mosaic law requires the Israelites to treat the aliens amongst them well, a point reiterated by Jesus in his parable of the good Samaritan (Pp 117-8):

In contrast to the Biblical principle of compassion for the alien, the traditional Islamic attitude to non-believers living under Islamic rule is based on non-reciprocity, the superiority of the Umma and the necessity to discriminate accordingly between Muslims and non-Muslims. Non-Muslims are to be tolerated, but only as inferiors to Muslims (p.118).

There are two types of submission in Islam: the submission of the believer to Allah and surrender of the defeated non-believer. The final stage of the call to Allah (da’wa) is the conversion or submission of all mankind to Islam (Pp119-20).

Jihad is the:

… struggle to impose the supremacy of Islam throughout the world, and to establish the Dar al-Islam, or house of Islam, which is the region where Islam rules (p.119).

The notion that the “inner jihad” of strengthening one’s own submission to Allah is somehow a substitute for “outer jihad”, extending the territory of Islam, of the submission to Allah, is a theological and historical nonsense. That jihad as fighting until the entire world submits to Islam is fundamental to mainstream Islamic theology Durie can establish from various Muslim authorities past and present, including a former Chief Justice of Saudi Arabia (who died in 1981) and the response of the current Saudi Grand Mufti to Pope Benedict’s Regensburg Speech (Pp119-121).

Durie notes various contemporary Muslim citations of Khaybar (including Hezbollah’s “Khaybar” rocket). Khaybar was the first example of the dhimma or ‘covenant of liability’. Based on Muhammad’s (by definition exemplary) actions here and towards the conquered Jewish farmers of Fadak, Tayma and Wadi-l Qura, the institution of dhimma was developed in Shar’ia:

According to the laws of jihad, the alternatives to the dhimma were conversion, slavery or death. … The dhimma pact fixed the legal, social and economic place of non-Muslims in the Islamic state. In return, the people of the pact, known as dhimmis, were required to pay tribute (jizya) and other taxes, including a land tax (kharaj), in perpetuity to the Muslim Community (the Umma), and to adopt a position of humbl and grateful servitude to it (p.123).

Jizya was a head tax levied on every non-Muslim male in recognition of their defeated status. At first applying only to Jews and Christians (paganism being forcibly extirpated in Arabia) it was later extended to Zoroastrians (declared by the Shafi’i school to be ‘people of the book’) and then to pagan Hindus (in accord with the Hanafi school of Islam) (Pp123-4).

Durie takes us carefully through the implications of the phrase in verse Q9:29:

until they pay the jizya out of hand (’an yadin) and are humbled (saghirun).

Taking us through a series of Islamic authorities and scholars of Islam, Durie establishes that the jizya is compensation paid by the conquered non-believer for not having his head and property taken, part of the logic being the world and everything in it “really” belongs to those who submit to Allah, the Muslims.

… taking jizya from dhimmis is an act of liberation, in which Muslims receive back in compensation what was rightfully theirs as Allah’s servants (p.126).

The word itself means ‘compensation’ or ‘reparations’, as a series of Islamic authorities state (p.127). Those who are liable for the tax are the same as those who can be killed in the course of jihad (p.128). Though practice did not necessarily obey the restrictions of theory. Either way, failure to pay jizya means that jihad could be restarted (p.129).

The phrase ‘out of hand’ (’an yadin) has been interpreted as meaning it is a gift for living, that it be given submissively or that it must be paid in person (p.130). Islamic jurists have used the expression of being humbled or belittled (saghirun) to strongly associate jizya with belittlement. So payment of jizya was often associated with ritual expression invoking the beheading that the payment was avoiding, such that striking on the neck remains a deeply insulting gesture in Arab culture to this day (p.131). Other gestures or ritual symbols used for the same purpose—reaching back into pre-Islamic Arabic practice—was cutting the forelock or the wearing of neck-seals, though neck striking was more common and continued until the C20th (Pp132ff). The jizya thus becomes a blood oath or pact who ritualised payment establishes the humiliation of the dhimmi, as it is intended to (Pp140-1).

But humiliation of the dhimmi was a central and pervasive feature of Shar’ia: it was very much an intended feature and openly stated by Muslim jurists to be such. The aim and the effect was to squeeze out other religious communities and promote conversion to Islam. There were restrictions on:
• conversion,
• marriage,
• worship and practice of faith,
• on opposition to Muslims,
• exercise of authority,
• on housing, public appearance, status and behaviour.
As well there were also:
• imposed vulnerability and legal disability,
• requirements to render assistance and loyalty to Muslims,
• prohibition on critiquing Islam.
All of which Durie takes the reader through (Pp141ff).

The structure of laws took centuries to evolve (p.147) but to a fairly clear inner logic of humiliation and subordination. It is fairly clear that some were adapted from the Code of Justinian of 534. As Durie notes:

It is one of history’s bitter ironies that a legal system designed to oppress Jews and heretics came to be turned back against Christians by their Muslim conquerors (p.147).

And in reverse: when the Normans conquered they reversed the system they found and applied it to Muslims some of which was then applied by the later Spanish rulers or Sicily to the New World (Pp147).

There are passages from the Qur’an which are used to justify the dhimmi system along with many hadith. The problem with the latter is that it is not always clear which came first, aspects of the dhimmi regulations or the justifying hadith since some hadith were clearly developed to provide convenient justifications in the early centuries of Islam before the first compilations were written (Pp148-9). After all, the compilations carefully state the provenance of hadith precisely because of the problems of authenticity.

There were injunctions from Muhammad and the early Caliphs to protect dhimmis but these were significantly vitiated by the structure of the dhimmi laws and their consequences. Dhimmis were particularly vulnerable in times of conflict between Muslims or between Muslims and non-Muslims: a repeated pattern in history which incorporates the Armenian genocide and violence against Christians in present-day Iraq (Pp149ff).

Added to all this is a pervasive spiritual hostility, with cursing dhimmis a widespread historical pattern in Islamic societies. As Durie notes:

It is a crushing psychological and spiritual burden to live from generation to generation under a culture of curses and withholding of blessings (p.153).

Generations of queer folk cannot but agree with him.

In practice
Durie then moves on to what he calls The Lived Reality. He starts with a quote from an Islamic cleric objecting strongly to President Bush II claiming that Islam is peace:

I am astonished by President Bush when he claims there is nothing in the Quran that justifies violence in the name of Islam.
Is he some kind of Islamic scholar?
Has he ever actually read the Quran (p.155).

The dhimma pact is one that operates to end a past war but always operates under the shadow of a future one—if the dhimmis break any part of the pact. At which point, in accordance with the sunna (example) of Muhammad, the men can be slaughtered, the women and children enslaved and their property confiscated. Moreover, jihad against dhimmis who have broken the dhimma pact is a personal obligation on all Muslims. Indeed, this can extend even to anticipated breaches of the pact, remembering that the Qur’an categories unbelievers as oath-breakers. There is thus a long history of massacres of dhimmis (Pp155ff).
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Durie notes that the Armenian genocide followed a (recent and continuing) history of massacres and coincided both with war against Christian enemies and breaching the dhimma pact by aspiring to equal treatment. For a key element of the dhimma pact is that it is communal: both in structure and in implications if broken. This led to continuing concern to do nothing to provoke Muslim hostility since one individual being held to have broken the pact could provoke communal reprisals: a continuing pattern in our time. For, as Durie notes:

It must be emphasized that there need not be actual dhimmi laws in place for reprisals to be enacted which accord with the pattern of the dhimma pact. The dhimma is not merely a legal construct: it is a religious institution which informs and influences the culture and behaviour of whole societies, whether the political authorities uphold the dhimma or not. This was repeatedly demonstrated throughout the Muslim world after the Ottomans officially revoked the dhimma, and the principle continues to be shown today in the enforcement of many dhimma conditions against non-Muslims in Islamic nations (p.161).

Durie cites a Muslim attack on Taiba, a Christian Palestinian village in September 2005 as a contemporary manifestations of these patterns.

Durie goes through various features of the lived reality of dhimmitude including:
• abduction of children,
• rape and abduction of dhimmi women,
• seizure of property
with plenty of C20th examples (Pp161ff).

The actual burden of jizya taxation could be crushing. In the C8th in Egypt, jizya taxes were 1-3 months wages for labourers compared to the tax rate of about one week’s wages for Muslims: remembering that the money went to the benefit of the Muslim community: this without considering all the other taxes and contributions also levied. Since jizya was often levied on whole villages, if one family converted that increased the burden on other families, creating cascading mass conversions (Pp167ff).

Durie examines the more recent pattern of concealment and denial of this historical record by both Muslim and non-Muslim commentators, the former often doing so to defend the dogma of Muslim superiority (Pp169ff).

The impact of the dhimma system was severe. Some dhimmi communities simply disappeared, others declined to shadows of their former selves (p.179). Some of the other effects are more subtle: such as the psychological effect on both dhimmis and Muslims. The latter having a sense of superiority and mastery that inhibits understanding (Pp179ff). Durie examines the tendency of dhimmis to imitate Muslims to “fit in”: to the extent of defending Islam (Pp181ff).

The decline and retreat of Muslim power and the rise of Western power was reflected in a slow process of the retreat from the dhimma system, which reached a peak with the Western imperial occupation of the much of the Islamic world in the C20th. While there are no states currently imposing jizya taxation, there are Muslims who advocated its reinstatement, there have been examples of Muslims levying such taxes on their Christian neighbours and aspects of dhimmitude are beginning to return in the Muslim world (Pp184ff).

Durie points out that about 200million Christians around the world are subject to religious persecution, with Islam being by far the largest source of persecution: a persecution that extends to other religious, including other versions of Islam. With the trend, particularly for Christians in Muslim countries, tending to get worse over the last half-century (Pp187-8).

The patterns of persecution tracks quite closely the dhimma regulations (p.189). There is also advocacy for returning to the dhimma: for example by Sayyid Qutb. The Iranian Revolution moved non-Muslims into legal dhimmi status and there are reports of jizya payments being extorted from Christian and other non-Muslim communities across the Islamic world (Pp189ff).

There has been a growing tendency for Sharia to be re-introduced as the basis for law in Muslim countries. This is then followed by increased discrimination against non-Muslims, examples of which Durie sets out at some length (Pp194ff).

Durie then examines what he calls the dhimmis mimetic tendency. For example, the way Christian Arabs were prominent in promoting Arab nationalism—which has since become a vehicle for Islamization. He cites Edward Said’s Orientalism as a prime example:

By levelling the charge of ‘racism’ against generations of Western scholars of Islam, Said has intimidated many researchers into silence. By blaming the problems of the Arab world on ‘orientalism’—the wicked West’s allegedly racist perspective on the East—he made it very difficult for non-Muslims to critique Islamic theology. By demonizing the West, and silencing a whole generation of Western critics of Islam, Said has ‘encouraged Islamic fundamentalists’ (p.202).

The silly, indeed offensive, term ‘Islamophobia’ does much the same.

Accepting dhimmitude
Dhimmis being banned from criticising Islam has expanded into a pattern of silence and denial where non-Muslims are afraid to speak up to avoid hostile attention, scholarship and local leaders gloss over or deny the problems while “street-level” intimidation is a fact of life (Pp202ff). There is also a history of Western scholarship obfusticating the situation of dhimmis and the implications of the dhimma for a wide range of reasons. The result is:

A regime of silence has descended over the subject of the history of dhimmi peoples. Today many who write and speak about Islam, if they refer to the dhimma, will describe it in glowing terms which are nothing but misleading, and which do not accurately reflect fourteen hundred years of Islamic thought and practice on this subject, let alone the suffering of millions of non-Muslims (p.210).

One wonders if pointing out that the dhimmi regulations are clearly substantively based on anti-Jewish laws of the Christian Roman Empire might change perspectives?

Durie analyses Western responses to Islam has often displaying the patterns of dhimmitude:

The requirement that non-Muslims—at least those that are not enemies—embrace dhimmitude, and affirm, appease and serve Islam, greatly limits the repertoire that Christians can have towards it (p.210).

And non-Christians too. Either way, gross injustices are either passed over, or seem somehow excusable (p.211). The speech of Western leaders shows dhmmitude patterns. In one particularly telling example, he cites excerpts from a speech by Mary Robinson, UN High Commissioner on Human Rights, that display the classic dhimmitude patterns of gratitude, praise and denial of criticism. The UN more generally tends to buy into such patterns, the term ‘Islamophobia’ being a particularly useful weapon (Pp211ff).

There is a pattern of “Islamizing” history, playing down Muslim aggression and persecution while playing up Western indebtedness to Islam for the transmission of Greek learning. There have also been some privileging of Islam and Muslim communities in policy and the implementation of law in the West (Pp216ff). (All of which is, of course, particularly distressing to refugees from Muslim persecution.)

While Durie makes some powerful points, his history betrays him a bit here. Christianisation had disrupted the transmission and development of Greek science well before the Muslim conquests, which were not, contra Durie’s citing of the Pirenne thesis, in any way responsible for the Dark Ages.

His analysis does raise questions of how things are construed. So when the Episcopalian primate in the US talked of the US as being a ‘superservant’ rather than a ‘superpower’, that played straight into Muslim attitudes of the proper role of dhimmis, so his speech was much relayed in the Muslim world (Pp220-1). Similarly, Western aid to the Muslim world could be construed as a form of jizya (Pp213-4).

Durie argues that the patterns of dhimmitude are not a healthy way for the West to interact with Islam, for either party:

Dhimmitude is also bad for Muslims, for many reasons. It feeds a widespread pattern of Muslims claiming the role of victim, while blaming others for problems they themselves have responsibility for (p.223).

The destruction of any sense of responsibility damages the social and economic development of the Muslim world.

If one side has a structure requiring subordination of outsiders built into its religious worldview that the other side is ignorant of, or otherwise ignores, then there is a real risk that such a framework will become imposed on interactions between them (p.223). Hence the “truth empowerment” that Durie is seeking to provide.

Struggling against dhimmitude
Durie concludes with a short chapter A Way Forward. He starts with an excellent example of mutual miscomprehension: an interfaith service held in Boston shortly after 9/11. The way the event was construed by the Episcopalian minister was utterly different from that of the presiding Musim cleric, who completely interpreted it in terms of Islamic theology of dhimmi gratitude and acceptance of the key points of Islam and Islam’s superiority (Pp226-7). The same cleric, in another letter, noted with satisfaction that the rate of conversion to Islam in the West had doubled since 9/11, reports with satisfaction alleged signs of deteriorating Jewish-Christian relations, cites Jewish interest in interfaith dialogue as being motivated by fear of the implications of Christian-Muslim dialogue and all this as a sign of the humiliation of non-Muslims unless they are under the Muslim covenant of protection (Pp227-9).

The only way out, Durie argues, is the path of truthful engagement—one where truth and love anchor each other—so that both Muslim and non-Muslim can avoid the patterns of the dhimma (Pp231-3). Which still leaves the awkward question of how much that can be done within Islam and how many Muslims have enough reasons or incentives to follow that path. The latter, of course, is affected by what incentives the West generates to follow one alternative over the other.

On the former point, Michael J. Totten made an instructive comment:

One reason non-Arab Muslims tend to be more moderate is because they have non-Arab cultural traditions which clash with the religion. Islam takes up a much smaller psychological and cultural space outside Arab lands.

Engagement with Malay or Bengali Islam (or a post-mullahocray Iran) might well be a lot easier than Arab Islam.

Durie’s analysis of the burden of Islam fits in very well with the comments of a son of a founder of Hamas who converted to Christianity and spied for Israel:

"The problem is not in Muslims," he continues. "The problem is with their God. They need to be liberated from their God. He is their biggest enemy. It has been 1,400 years they have been lied to."

Salvation in Christianity is about love for God and loving treatment of others. Success (falah) in Islam is about submitting to God and treating others according to their submission status. Love is about personal agency and respecting the other person-as-a-person. Submission is about the negation of agency; about status and social role. The former seeks to build a web of moral reciprocity, the latter a structure of hierarchal order. The former sees proper authority as something that is attentive to people, the latter as something people are attentive to. They are profoundly different ways of looking at the world, with very different consequences.

I have read a great deal about Islam, but no book has been as clear in setting out its basic structure as Mark Durie’s The Third Choice.