On 11 Jun, 19:17, Salah Jafar <salahja...@gmail.com> wrote:
> If you can imagine a Muslim boot stomping on your face every minute of
> every day of your life, you can imagine what it is like to be an
> infidel ruled by Muslims. This, to Muslims, is tolerance and peaceful
> co-existance. Their victims dare not disagree on pain of death.
>
> Historically the victims of Muslim intolerance initially fell into one
> of two categories: Christians and Jews (People of the Book) and
> miscellaneous other infidels. People of the Book could avoid death or
> slavery and surreptitiously practice their faith if they paid
> protection money to their Muslim masters and allowed themselves to be
> humiliated by them. All others would have to convert to Islam or be
> slain or enslaved. That imperative was relaxed in the 13th century
> when it became clear to Muslim rulers that exterminating the entire
> Hindu population of India was impractical. Muslim subjects who were
> not People of the Book were allowed to become dhimmis (protected
> subject peoples) under the following conditions:
>
> allowed to live and work for the Islamic state under the following 20
> disabilities: (1) they are not to build any new places of worship; (2)
> they are not to repair any old places of worship which have been
> destroyed by the Muslims; (3) they are not to prevent Muslim
> travellers from staying in their places of worship; (4) they are to
> entertain for three days any Muslim who wants to stay in their homes,
> and for a longer period if the Muslim falls ill; (5) they are not to
> harbour any hostility towards the Islamic state, or give any aid and
> comfort to hostile elements; (6) they are not to prevent any one of
> them from getting converted to Islam; (7) they have to show respect
> towards every Muslim; (8) they have to allow Muslims to participate in
> their private meetings; (9) they are not to dress like Muslims; (10)
> they are not to name themselves with Muslim names; (11) they are not
> to ride on horses with saddle and bridle; (12) they are not to possess
> arms; (13) they are not to wear signet rings or seals on their
> fingers; (14) they are not to sell or drink liquor openly; (15) they
> are to wear a distinctive dress which shows their inferior status, and
> which separates them from the Muslims; (16) they are not to propagate
> their customs and usages amongst the Muslims; (17) they are not to
> build their houses in the neighbourhood of Muslims; (18) they are not
> to bring their dead near the graveyards of the Muslims; (19) they are
> not to observe their religious practices publicly, or mourn their dead
> loudly; and (20) they are not to buy Muslim slaves."
>
> Saudi sheikh Marzouq Salem al-Ghamdi concisely summarized the current
> consensus viewpoint of the major schools of Islamic jurisprudence in a
> television sermon he delivered in 2002:
>
> "If the infidels live among the Muslims, in accordance with the
> conditions set out by the Prophet -- there is nothing wrong with it
> provided they pay the jizya (tolerance tax) to the Islamic treasury.
> Other conditions are ... that they do not renovate a church or
> monastery, do not rebuild ones that were destroyed, that they feed for
> three days any Muslim who passes by their homes ... that they rise
> when a Muslim wishes to sit, that they do not imitate Muslims in dress
> or speech, nor ride horses, nor own swords, nor arm themselves with
> any kind of weapon; that they do not sell wine, do not show the cross,
> do not ring church bells, do not raise their voices during prayer,
> they shave their hair in front so as to make them easily identifiable,
> do not incite anyone against the Muslims, and do not strike a Muslim
> ... If they violate these conditions, they have not protection."
>
> There is a fiction retailed by Muslims and their infidel apologists to
> the effect that Jews were well-treated by their Muslim masters and
> that the two groups once lived together in peace and harmony. Bernard
> Lewis, a distinguished Orientalist, in 1968 took exception to that
> lie.
>
> "The golden age of equal rights was a myth, and belief in it was a
> result, more than a cause, of Jewish sympathy for Islam. The myth was
> invented in 19th-century Europe as a reproach to Christians -- and
> then taken up by Muslims in our time as a reproach to Jews ...
> European travellers to the East in the age of liberalism and
> emancipation are almost unanimous in deploring the degraded and
> precarious position of Jews in Muslim countries, and the dangers and
> humiliations to which they were subject. Jewish scholars, acquainted
> with the history of Islam and with the current situation in Islamic
> lands, can have had no illusions on this score. Vambery [1904] is
> unambiguous: "I do not know any more miserable, helpless, and pitiful
> individual on God's earth than the Jahudi in those countries."
>
> The conditions of dhimmitude spelled out in Sharia law are the minimum
> required for protection. At various times and places infidel subjects
> have been subjected to even greater abuses at the direction of local
> Muslim rulers. Islam specifies that infidel subjects must be
> humiliated and utterly subdued. Muslims in the past have been
> ingeniously cruel in finding new ways to make that so. The history and
> nature of Muslim intolerance is described in painful detail in "The
> Myth of Islamic Tolerance -- How Islamic Law Treats Non-Muslims"
> edited by Robert Spencer.
Excellent article, scholarly, and informative, I really enjoyed
reading it.
Thank you, Thank you, Thank you.
|
|