The tragedy of this, strangely enough, is in the eye of the beholder. Some families actually hoped that their sons would be chosen for the janissaries, for this at least was a way out of the miserable life of the dhimmi and a chance to advance in Ottoman society. Nevertheless, historian Godfrey Goodwin paints an inescapably grim, if romanticized, picture of how these young Christians were recruited:
Whatever ambitions families might or might not have, it was an unhappy day when the troops trudged into the village, hungry and thirsty. The priest was ready with his baptismal rolls and so were the boys with their fathers; in theory mothers and sisters were left to weep at home. Then each of the recruits had to be examined both physically and mentally... Once the selection process was completed, the roll was drawn up in duplicate.... Now was the time for tears and some farewells must have been poignant but the boys tramped the dusty roads side by side with friends and all had the excitement of starting out on an adventure. They could dream of promotion and fortune while the peasants returned to their fields, doubtless to weep longer than their sons.37
Threats, uncertainty, enslavement, high taxes, humiliation, persecution-all this ultimately had its desired effect: in not too long a period, the once-vibrant Christian majorities in the lands of Muslim conquest became despised and cowering minorities.
The Islamicization of One City
The transformation of Constantinople after its conquest in 1453 is a case in point. Prior to this, it had been the center of Eastern Christianity and the second city of all Christendom, the chief rival to Rome in splendor and authority. Its Hagia Sophia cathedral, built by Emperor Justinian in the sixth century, was the grandest and most celebrated church in Christendom until the construction of St. Peter's in the Vatican.
But the Muslim conquerors, much like the Taliban who blew up Afghanistan's towering Buddhist statues in 2001, treated the city's wealth of beauty as an unclean thing. According to Hoca Sa'deddin, the tutor of the sixteenth-century sultans Murad III and Mehmed III, "churches which were within the city were emptied of their vile idols and cleansed from the filthy and idolatrous impurities and by the defacement of their images and the erection of Islamic prayer niches and pulpits many monasteries and chapels became the envy of the gardens of Paradise."38
Philip Mansel reveals the extent of this "cleansing":
The repeated transformation of churches (in all forty-two) into mosques asserted the supremacy of Islam. They led to the plastering-over of Christian mosaics and frescos, the expulsion of icons and the insertion of an oval prayer niche facing south-east to Mecca to the right of the former high altar facing south to Jerusalem. In the 1490s the late Byzantine church of St Saviour in Chora, with its incomparable mosaics of the life of Christ, became the Kariye Cami [Mosque]. In Galata in 1545 the cathedral of St Michael was torn down and replaced by the han [a guest house or hotel] of the Rustem Pasha. In 1586 the seat of the Patriarch himself, the resplendent church of the Pammacaristos, was taken, on the excuse that, when Mehmed II had visited the Patriarch Gennadios, he had prayed there. It was renamed Fethiye Cami, the Mosque of Victory, since the empire had just conquered Azerbaijan.39
Mansel adds that the patriarch of Constantinople relocated to a small church in the Phanar district of the city. His headquarters are still there today. "Low, and without a visible dome, the mother church of Orthodox Christianity is smaller than most English churches.... The contrast with the glory of the sultans' mosques in Constantinople and of the Catholic counterpart, St Peter's in Rome, is remarkable.""
The de-Christianization of Istanbul has only accelerated in secular Turkey. The city had a population nearly 50 percent Christian as recently as 1914, just before the secularists took power, but is now 99.99 percent Muslim." Islamic rule was better for Christians than the hegemony of Turkish nationalism. While Islam mandated coexistence (within the limits we have seen) with the Christian population, Turkish nationalists evidently feel themselves bound by no such strictures as they endeavor to perfect their Turkish state.
Score Sheets
So, is Bernard Lewis right? Did Muslims treat Christians and Jews better than Christians treated Muslims and Jews? It is difficult to compare such things. Indeed, how can it be done? By a casualty count? An estimate of lost earnings? A survey of the psychological damage inflicted on the victims? By tallying up the killings, exiles, forced conversions, humiliations and the like? On those scores, both sides have a lot to answer for. But this much is clear: the conventional wisdom that religious minorities had a better quality of life in the House of Islam than in Christendom is at least open to question.
Historian Paul Johnson identifies a disparity between theory on the one hand and economic and social necessity on the other:
In theory ... the status of the Jewish dhimmi under Moslem rule was worse than under the Christians, since their right to practise their religion, and even their right to live, might be arbitrarily removed at any time. In practice, however, the Arab warriors who conquered half the civilized world so rapidly in the seventh and eighth centuries had no wish to exterminate literate and industrious Jewish communities who provided them with reliable tax incomes and served them in innumerable ways.42
Both Christians in Christendom and Muslims in the House of Islam at times saw unbelievers as having forfeited all human rights and persisting in deliberate rejection of the truth-a willful obstinacy that deserved punishment. Christian mistreatment of religious minorities was based partly on crude theological reasoning-that Jews were killers of Christ, and so on. But such ideas were subsequently rejected and stigmatized among Christians. Today, in Christianity generally-Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant-the idea of the universal dignity of all people, unbelievers as well as believers, has taken firm root. Indeed, that idea has been one of the Church's great gifts to secular society, and one of the singular discoveries of the West. In Islam, by contrast, the theory about infidels has not changed, and it can always cause more pain for human beings when given the opportunity.
By many accounts, Jews had it better in Muslim countries than in Christian ones during the Middle Ages. Yet by the dawn of the modern age, the great majority of Jews lived in the West, not within the confines of Islam. One reason for this is that while Christian teachings about human rights ultimately eased the plight of religious minorities in the West, the hardening of Muslim attitudes toward infidels created the opposite situation in Islamic lands.
This hardening became evident in the House of Islam at the end of the colonial period. In 1962, when the French colonists left and Islam became the state religion of Algeria, numerous churches were converted to mosques. But this wasn't simply a matter of the occupation of abandoned real estate. New laws forbade Christians to practice their religion openly. Muslims showed that they meant business in 1978, when the Roman Catholic episcopal vicar of Algiers, Monsignor Gaston Jaquier, was murdered-"probably," according to Aid to the Church in Need, "for no other reason than that he had gone out openly wearing his pectoral cross."43
Likewise in Tunisia, "in the early 1950s, half of the inhabitants of Tunis were Catholics, but with the declaration of independence some z8o,ooo Tunisian Catholics were expelled. Today there are no more than a tenth of this number and most of the churches are closed or not in use."44
What is the situation today? In Islamic states, non-Muslims are still despised, hemmed in by discriminatory laws, and in peril of their lives.
V. S. Naipaul was told by an Iranian Baha'i he met on an airplane during his travels through the world of Islam, "These Muslims are a strange people. They have an old mentality. Very old mentality. They are very bad to minorities."45 In his account of the Iranian revolution, Amir Taheri tells about how a young Ayatollah Khomeini tried unsuccessfully to begin a persecution of the Baha'is. Taheri says matter-of-factly, "The Baha'is are considered a heretical sect by the mullahs, and could thus be automatically punished by death."46
At the same time, Muslims may sometimes call upon the principle of toleration when
it's expedient. Naipaul encountered a man who, while in London, won the right for his daughter to wear Muslim dress to school instead of the school uniform. Naipaul relates, "The law provided for freedom of religion, he said. He meant the law of England, the other man's law."47 In other words, Western values can be used when convenient, if not honored in practice.
Today, Christians are enslaved in Sudan and harassed (by means of the Sharia) in Pakistan. That's just the tip of the iceberg; there are hundreds of similar cases all over the Muslim world. It is worthwhile to recount at least some of them, for these stories have been widely ignored in the mainstream Western media.
The Fate of Infidels Today
Perhaps worst off are converts from Islam to Christianity, for virtually all Muslim legal authorities agree that anyone who renounces Islam deserves to die. The Prophet himself decrees death for "the one who turns renegade from Islam (apostate) and leaves the group of Muslims."48
All the major collections of hadiths agree that the Prophet said something like this, and it has been a cornerstone of Islamic law from the beginning. Says Reliance of the Traveller: "when a person who has reached puberty and is sane voluntarily apostatizes from Islam, he deserves to be killed." Although the right to kill an apostate is reserved in Muslim law to the leader of the community and other Muslims can be punished for taking this duty upon themselves, a Muslim who kills an apostate need pay no indemnity and perform no expiatory acts (as he must in other kinds of murder cases under classic Islamic law).49
Some Muslims still manage to become Christians. One of these is the Sudanese Al-Faki Kuku Hassan, whom news reports describe as "a former Muslim sheikh who converted to Christianity in 1995." Hassan was arrested for apostasy in March 1998 and held, despite international protests, until his declining health (he suffered a stroke in spring zoos) led to his release on May 31, 2001.50
Muhammad Sallam, an Egyptian convert to Christianity, was arrested in 1989 and tortured; he was arrested again in 1998 and spirited away to an unknown destination. Two other converts to Christianity, Dr. Abdul-Rahman Muhammad Abdul-Ghaffar and Abdul Hamid Beshan Abd El Mohzen, were held in solitary confinement for extended periods in the late 198os. A female convert from Islam, Sherin Saleh, was married shortly after her conversion, only to have her marriage annulled by the government under the Islamic law forbidding a Muslim woman to marry a Christian man.51
In Kuwait, Hussein Ali Qambar converted from Islam to Christianity, and then was "denounced in secret, for apostasy, by his wife and radical Islamic family, after he had received baptism in 1995." An Islamic court condemned him to die, although he seems later to have returned to Islam, thus nullifying the death sentence. However, Professor Anh Nga Longva of the University of Bergen, Norway, visited Kuwait in 1997 and found passions running high over the Qambar case:
I found a surprisingly strong consensus across the liberal/islamist divide. Practically everyone agreed that Qambar's conversion was a serious crime and as is the case with all crimes, it had to be punished. They also agreed that depriving him of all his civil rights was an adequate punishment. The only topic which gave rise to some disagreement and a subdued sense of unease within some circles was the question of the death penalty.
Intriguingly, Longva reports that those who were indignant over Qambar's conversion invoked the same Qur'anic verse he would have used to argue that Qambar was within his rights to become a Christian: "Those who opposed [the death penalty for Qambar] based their position on the Qur'anic verse (2:257) that says `no compulsion is there in religion.' But more often than not, the same verse was quoted in front of me to show that precisely because Islam is such a tolerant religion, there are no possible excuses for apostasy." Longva quotes the disquieting summation of a Kuwaiti jurist: "We always remind those who want to convert to Islam that they enter through a door but that there is no way out.""
In Morocco, authorities jailed Christian converts as well as a Salvadoran Baptist musician, Gilberto Orellana, who was accused of converting a Muslim to Christianity.53
Even in relatively tolerant Jordan, where freedom of religion is guaranteed by the constitution, "Muslims who convert to other religions suffer discrimination both socially and on the part of the authorities, since the government does not fully recognise the legality of such conversions and considers the converts to be still Muslims, subject to the Sharia, according to which they are apostates and could have their property confiscated and many of their rights denied them."54 Christians who are not converts from Islam don't have it much easier.
Saudi Arabia, the holy land of Islam, has been especially harsh on religious minorities. Even foreigners must submit to draconian religious laws:
In 1979, when the Muslims requested the intervention of a special French unit into the Kaaba, against a group of Islamic fundamentalists who were opposed to the government, the soldiers of the intervention force of the French national police (GIGN-Groupe d'intervention de la Gendarmerie nationale) were obliged to undergo a rapid ceremony of conversion to Islam. Even the Red Cross was obliged, during the course of the Gulf war, to drive around without the symbol of the Cross and not to display its banner."
Adds former U.S. Foreign Service officer Tim Hunter, who served in Saudi Arabia from 1993 to 1995, "On occasion they beat, even tortured, Americans in Jeddah for as little as possessing a photograph with a Star of David in the background or singing Christmas carols.... The Muttawa [Saudi religious police] chained, beat and cast clergy into medievalstyle dungeons." 56
Amnesty International reports that an Indian named George Joseph, who was working in Saudi Arabia, "was reportedly arrested outside his home in May [woo] as he returned from a Catholic service with a religious cassette tape."57 Christians are, after all, "forbidden to reside in the Hijaz, meaning the area and towns around Mecca, Medina, and Yamama, for more than three days," says Reliance of the Traveller.58 This prohibition goes all the way back to the second caliph, cUmar (634-644), one of the Companions of the Prophet.59 It is often interpreted as pertaining to the whole of Saudi Arabia. So the Saudi authorities were on firm legal ground when they held Joseph incommunicado, beat him, and ultimately deported him.
Maybe Joseph got off easy. The Saudis still hold at least eight foreign nationals, ignoring all inquiries from their governments about their status. All were employees in good standing at Saudi companies, but they committed the crime of holding Christian worship services in private homes. Their fate remains unclear .60
In Egypt, Coptic Christians, who officially make up 6 percent of the population but who claim a substantially larger percentage, live in constant peril from Muslim militants. The ordeal of Suhir Shihata Gouda exemplifies the experience of Egyptian Christians.
Suhir ... was kidnapped on February 25th [19991 by a group of Muslims who forced her to marry a Muslim man, Saed Sadek Mahmoud. After Suhir failed to return home from school, her distraught father rushed to Abu-Tisht police station to report the incident, but instead of assisting him, a police officer began assaulting Suhir's father, Shihata Gouda Abdul- Noor, beating and cursing him. Three days later, Suhir's father and brother returned to the police station to ask for help and they were subjected to the same abuse, as a result of which the father had to be admitted to hospital for treatment.
Suhir herself managed to escape, but was recaptured "and beaten for running away and is currently under heavy guard." Her Muslim "husband" accompanied a mob to her father's house. There the mob threatened to kill all the Christian men in Suhir's home village and carry off all the women if her family took legal action 61 (In Pakistan, a fourteen-year-old girl named Gloria Bibi suffered much the same fate: she was kidnapped in 1996 "by a young Muslim who forced her to convert to Islam before marrying her.")62
Bishop Wissa of Egypt's Coptic Orthodox Church painted a grim picture in an interview with the Protestant organization Prayer for the Persecuted Church in May 2000:
One man in his 2os was in the field working when he was approached by armed Muslims. He was ask
ed to renounce Christianity and to verbally say the two statements of faith that would convert him to Islam. When he refused and did the sign of the cross, he was shot in the head and killed.
Another young man had a tattoo on his arm of St. George and the Virgin Mary. They also asked him to renounce his faith. When he refused, they cut off his arm that had the Christian tattoos and chopped it up. They finished him off with their daggers and then burned his body.
A 17-year-old boy, who is a deacon at the church, was going to look for his sister in the fields. He too was asked to renounce his faith, and when he refused, he was shot. After they killed him, they asked the young girl to lay next to her brother and they killed her right there.
The Egyptian government, caught between the Sharia and the laws of a secular republic (Egypt is currently, after all, an 'Arab Republic," not an "Islamic Republic"), could not entirely ignore these acts of murder. They compensated each of the families of these victims with eight hundred dollars.
The father of another victim, however, got nothing. His son was on his way to school when Muslim militants stopped the school bus on which he was riding and ordered the Christians to separate from the Muslims. They demanded that the boy renounce his faith. When he refused, says Bishop Wissa, "they killed him with an axe, and then they drove over his body with their car." Authorities called the death a vehicular accident and denied the father compensation-just as they did previously when Muslim militants destroyed his shop.63
Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions about the World's Fastest-Growing Faith Page 19
