With the codification of jizya, the havoc gave way to systematic collection—punctuated by only occasional eruptions of violent rapine—and Christians settled in for centuries of slow bleeding. Juridical opinions concerning the amount of money dhimmis were to pay varied, from the minimal one dinar to sums that were ruinous for previously thriving, now impoverished non-Muslim communities. Institutionalized jizya—financial extortion—was another factor, on top of legal discrimination and physical persecution, which compelled nearly half of the then-Christian world to convert to Islam, while impoverishing most of the rest. Despite what apologists for Islam now teach in classrooms in the West, primary sources provide abundant proof that the jizya was sometimes “exacted from children, widows, orphans, and even the dead.”121 In fact at least one school of Muslim law, the Shafi‘i, asserts, “Our religion compels the poll tax to be paid by dying people, the old, even in a state of incapacity, the blind, monks, workers, and the poor, incapable of practicing a trade.”122
Much of this financial fleecing came to an end thanks to Western intervention. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, one Muslim region after another abolished the jizya and gave non-Muslims newfound rights—originally to appease Western powers, later in emulation of the victorious West. The Ottoman Empire’s Hatt-i Humayun decree of 1856 abolished the jizya in many Ottoman-ruled territories. Elsewhere in the Muslim world, the jizya was gradually abolished wherever Western powers were present.
Today, however, as Muslims reclaim their Islamic heritage—to the approval and encouragement of the West, now under the spell of “multiculturalism”—both aspects of jizya have returned: ransom money must once again be systematically collected from Christians, as the Koran and Sharia law command, or else it is taken by force and bloodshed. Violent depredations on Christians have made a dramatic comeback now that Muslims are once again emulating the earliest years of Islam. As they wage jihad to overthrow secular governments, they see Christian minorities as “milk camels” that must pay for their existence by being milked dry.
Consider the words of Sheikh Abu Ishaq al-Huwaini, spoken several years ago, on what the Muslim world can do to overcome its economic problems. The sheikh justified the forced conversion and enslavement of non-Muslims—and held out the jizya as an enticement to Muslims to participate:If only we can conduct a jihadist invasion at least once a year or if possible twice or three times, then many people on earth would become Muslims. And if anyone prevents our dawa [invitation to conversion] or stands in our way, then we must kill or take them as hostage and confiscate their wealth, women and children. Such battles will fill the pockets of the Mujahid [holy warrior] who can return home with 3 or 4 slaves, 3 or 4 women and 3 or 4 children. This can be a profitable business if you multiply each head by 300 or 400 dirham. This can be like financial shelter whereby a jihadist, in time of financial need, can always sell one of these heads.123
Spotlight on Iraq
Recent events in Iraq demonstrate what happens to Christian minorities once the jihad is let loose. After Saddam Hussein was overthrown by U.S. forces and a provisional government established, jihadis saw their opportunity and made a putsch for power—unleashing a virulent jihad in Mesopotamia in the name of creating an Islamic emirate. In the context of this new jihad, the paradigm of the earliest years of Islam—when the original Muslim conquerors were consolidating power and building empire with the blood of innocent non-Muslim populations—has returned. As jihadis seek to empower themselves, the lives of Christian minorities who do not pay jizya is forfeit. The only way they can redeem themselves is through ransom money—jizya, which, as seen above, simply means “compensation” for their lives.
Attacks on Christians began on the heels of Saddam’s fall when jihadis launched a coordinated bombing campaign on Baghdad’s churches in the summer of 2004. Among other atrocities committed since then, beheading and crucifying Christians124 are not infrequent occurrences. Threats such as “you Christian dogs, leave or die” are typical.125 Jihadis call the church an “obscene nest of pagans” and threaten to “exterminate Iraqi Christians.”126 Though Christians make up less than 5 percent of Iraq’s population, they are nearly 40 percent of the refugees fleeing Iraq. 127 Moreover, according to a December 2009 report by Aswat al-Iraq (“Voices of Iraq”), 1,960 Christians were targeted and killed since 2003, the “property of at least 500,000 Christians were taken away and 200,000 Christians were forced to pay extortion money, while dozens others were kidnapped and then released for ransom.”
A 2007 AP report summarizes the situation of Iraq’s Christians in the context of jizya and plunder:Despite the chaos and sectarian violence raging across Baghdad, Farouq Mansour felt relatively safe as a Christian living in a multiethnic neighborhood in the capital. Then, two months ago, al-Qaida gunmen kidnapped him and demanded that his family convert to Islam or pay a $30,000 ransom. Two weeks later, he paid up, was released and immediately fled to Syria, joining a mass exodus of Iraq’s increasingly threatened Christian minority. “There is no future for us in Iraq,” Mansour said.... In the recent violence, residents of the Baghdad neighborhood of Dora said gunmen knocked on the doors of Christian families, demanding they either pay jizya—a special tax traditionally levied on non-Muslims—or leave. The jizya has not been imposed in Muslim nations in about 100 years [during the colonial era]. . . . In the northern city of Mosul, men began knocking on doors last month, demanding that Christian families pay a $3,000 tax that would be used to fight the U.S.-led forces, local residents said. Some paid; others fled.128
The AP report also alludes to the collective punishment of Iraq’s Christians in response to the American invasion: “some Islamic insurgents call Christians ‘crusaders’ whose real loyalty lies with U.S. troops.” Christian persecution increased “after Pope Benedict XVI made comments perceived to be anti-Islam. Church bombings spiked and a priest in the northern city of Mosul was kidnapped and later found beheaded.... Many churches are now nearly empty, with many of their faithful either gone or too scared to attend.”
The report also explains how “Criminal gangs made use of the situation and they started to kidnap Christians and demand ransom. It is a coalition between terrorists and criminals.” Compare this trend to the aforementioned “dark side of forced conversion to Islam” in Pakistan, which “involves the criminal elements who are engaged in rape and abduction and then justify their heinous crimes by forcing the victims to convert to Islam. The Muslim fundamentalists are happy to offer these criminals shelter and use the excuse that they are providing a great service to their sacred cause of increasing the population of Muslims,” according to the Asian Human Rights Commission.
Today, despite the fact that the majority of Iraq’s indigenous Christians have fled their homeland, jihadis are still trying “to milk the camel until it gives no more milk, and until it milks blood,” in the words of Muslim Caliph Suliman Abdul Malik. In May 2011, a Christian youth was abducted and, when his family could not come up with the exorbitant ransom, his Islamic captors beheaded him. “The murder was meant to intimidate Christians so that in the future they will more readily pay ransom demands,” said a source.129 Christians cannot expect much help from the authorities. As one Iraqi Christian man put it in December 2010, “Contacting the authorities forces us to identify ourselves, and we aren’t certain that some of the people threatening us aren’t the people in the government offices that are supposed to be protecting us.”130
Non-jizya-paying Christians are not merely to be plundered of their money or their lives, but of their loved ones as well, including wives and children. In December 2012, for example, Ayatollah Ahmad al-Hassani al-Baghdadi issued a fatwa on TV, calling Christians “polytheists” and “friends of the Zionists,” and adding that “their women and girls may legitimately be regarded wives of Muslims.”131
Finally, Iraq’s few remaining Christians are, as is to be expected, being plundered of their faith as well. An October 2011 report titled “the double lives of Iraq’
s Christian children” tells of their suffering—“If the children say they believe in Jesus, they face beatings and scorn from their teachers”—as well as the struggle of their parents: “‘The first years of my faith,’ says a father, ‘I brought so many people to church, because I was motivated, so excited.... Now I don’t encourage anyone to be a Christian, because in my experience it is very hard.’”132 Indeed, as we have seen, since the seventh century—with a brief respite from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century—it has been “very hard” for Christians to be Christian virtually anywhere in the Islamic world, which is precisely why, over the course of fourteen centuries, Christians in Islamic countries—who originally made half of the world’s Christian population—largely converted to Islam.
Spotlight on Syria
In an ironic twist of fate, large-scale Christian persecution has now come to Syria, which only recently was a primary place of asylum for Christians fleeing the persecution in Iraq. Because jihadis are involved in trying to overthrow the rule of Bashar Assad—with U.S. support—the same exact pattern of persecution experienced by Iraq’s Christians has come to Syria’s Christians as well. As one top official of the Russian Orthodox Church put it, “We are deeply worried by what is going on in Syria, where radical forces are trying to come to power with the help of Western powers . . . Where they come to power, Christian communities become the first victims” [emphasis added].133
Thousands of Syrian Christians have fled their homes; entire regions and towns where Christians have lived for centuries, since before Islam came into being, have now been emptied as the Islamist-led opposition intentionally targets Christians—kidnapping, plundering, and beheading at will. In August 2012 a car bomb was detonated in the Christian area of Jaramana, a suburb of Damascus, as “a crowd of faithful, families, elderly people, women and children, were heading to the cemetery to bury two young people. The two had died a day earlier, on August 27, also victims of an IED [improvised explosive device]. As the crowd, after the funeral, was accompanying the deceased to the burial, a taxi exploded causing 12 deaths [according to other sources, twenty-seven], including 5 children, and injuring more than 50 people.” Further, “a family of Armenian Christians was found murdered, and all members of the family horribly decapitated.”134
In October 2012 the last Christian in the city of Homs—which had had a Christian population of some 80,000 before jihadi insurgents began targeting them—was murdered.135 As one teenage Syrian girl had put it earlier,We left because they were trying to kill us. . . . They wanted to kill us because we were Christians. They were calling us Kaffirs [infidels], even little children saying these things. Those who were our neighbors turned against us. At the end, when we ran away, we went through balconies. We did not even dare go out on the street in front of our house. I’ve kept in touch with the few Christian friends left back home, but I cannot speak to my Muslim friends any more. I feel very sorry about that.136
In August 2012, another Christian girl who escaped only after several of her family were killed, said, “They [Muslim clerics] sermonized on Fridays in the mosques that it was a sacred duty to drive us [Christians] away.... Christians had to pay bribes to the jihadists repeatedly in order to avoid getting killed.” After making the sign of the cross, her grandmother added, “Anyone who believes in this cross suffers.”137
Indeed, earlier in 2012 it was reported that “Al-Faruq Battalion, which is affiliated with the opposition Free Syrian Army (FSA), is imposing jizya (an extra tax imposed on non-Muslims living under Muslim rule) on Christians in Homs Governorate” and that “armed men . . . threaten to kidnap or kill them or members of their families if they refuse to comply”138—precisely what has been taking place in next-door Iraq, and precisely what took place over many centuries under Islam.
Compare what is happening to the Christians of Iraq and Syria today to the ceaseless extortion of Christians throughout the centuries:Nomadic tribes and all the rebels and heads of bands . . . satisfied their needs by pillage and ransoming dhimmis. . . . The chronicles indicate that [Christians] were subject to pillage and violence from rebel or uncontrollable Arab clans.... Whether it be in Armenia, Mesopotamia [Iraq], the Syro-Palestinian region, Egypt, Anatolia [modern-day Turkey], or Spain, details about this endless booty seized from dhimmi villagers fill the chroniclers’ pages. . . .139
In Syria today, even those trying to flee the plunder-jihad are not immune. A September 2012 report discussed how Christians fleeing to the Lebanese border are being targeted, kidnapped, and in some cases murdered for ransom money. In one instance, “armed gangs,” taking advantage of the chaos of the war, held 280 people hostage. Many of those kidnapped are later found slaughtered or beheaded on the road. 140
A January 2012 report from Barnabas Aid, “Christians in Syria Targeted in Series of Kidnappings and Killings; 100 Dead,” tells how “children were being especially targeted by the kidnappers, who, if they do not receive the ransom demanded, kill the victim.” In one instance, kidnappers videotaped a Christian boy as they murdered him in an attempt to frame the government for the atrocity.141 A Christian man “was cut into pieces and thrown in a river” and another “was found hanged with numerous injuries.”142
In October 2012, armed groups from the opposition kidnapped a Greek Orthodox priest, Father Fadi Jamil Haddad. Days later his body, which showed evidence of gruesome torture—with “his eyes gouged out”—was found dumped near the place he was abducted. Earlier “the kidnappers had asked the priest’s family and his church a ransom of 50 million Syrian pounds (over 550 thousand euros)”—a sum that was impossible to raise. A source quoted by Agenzia Fides condemned this “terrible practice, present for months in this dirty war, of kidnapping and then killing innocent civilians.”143
In November 2012 more Christians were kidnapped. Two of the victims were young men for whom the kidnappers demanded $100,000 USD in ransom, per man. A third victim was a seventeen-year-old girl who was taken by four men after they beat her sixteen-year-old brother unconscious. The Assyrian International News Agency reported, “Violence against Assyrians has sharply risen in the last 12 months, much of it perpetrated by the rebel militia, especially by the Jihadist elements of the rebels.”144
Right around Christmastime in 2012, Islamic rebels beheaded Andrei Arbashe, a thirty-eight-year-old Christian man, and fed his body to dogs. According to Sister Agnes-Mariam, mother superior of the Monastery of St. James the Mutilated, the man’s headless corpse was found by the side of the road, surrounded by hungry dogs. He had recently married and was soon to be a father: “His only crime was his brother criticized the rebels, accused them of acting like bandits, which is what they are.” The nun added, “The free and democratic world is supporting extremists. . . . They want to impose Sharia Law and create an Islamic state in Syria.... More than 200 families were driven out in the night. People are afraid. Everywhere the deaths squads stop civilians, abduct them and ask for ransom, sometimes they kill them. ”145
Also in December 2012, Tim Marshall, a Western reporter who was granted the opportunity to interview jihadi rebel fighters captured by the army, had a very telling—or as he called it, “surreal”—conversation with them, touching on the idea that non-Muslims must either pay jizya or convert to Islam. Marshall asked the four jihadis about the future of Syria’s Christian minorities, andAhmed, Basah, and Hamid Hassan all agreed—Christians could only live there if they either converted, or paid the “Jizyah”—special tax levied on non-Muslims in previous centuries in the Middle East. If not said Bahar, they could be killed. When asked why, the answer was, to them, quite simple—because the Prophet Muhammad said so. I was then invited to become a Muslim. The conversation verged on the surreal. There we were talking in a quite friendly manner, with the occasional joke, about killing people because they wouldn’t pay the Jizyah, which critics regard as effectively obtaining money through menaces. The interview ended with Ahmed volunteering that eventually Muslims must reclaim Andalusia in Spa
in for the Islamic Caliphate. His logic, that it was justified because Spain used to be under Islam, was somewhat undermined when he went on to say that Islam should move on to bring the UK under its control and indeed, eventually, the whole world. Rebel fighters want an end to President Assad’s regime. This was a rare first-hand glimpse into the jihadi mindset. . . . As the men left to go back to their cells, we shook hands. Two of them were still trying to convert me, asking me, with a smile, to say the Shahada ‘La ilaha il Allah’—there is no God but Allah.146
Spotlight on Egypt
Iraq and Syria are seeing the return of the violence of the chaotic years of early Islam, when plundering Christians of their money and lives was commonplace. This phenomenon has also returned to Egypt and Pakistan, where oppressing Christians is a way of life.
In September 2011 Abu Shadi, a Salfi leader, announced that Egypt’s Christians “must either convert to Islam, pay jizya, or prepare for war.” Weeks earlier, in June 2011, a priest had narrowly escaped being “killed at the hands of the Salafis because of his refusal to pay them jizya money.... [T]he church’s priest had declared that the Copts would not pay jizya, in any way, shape, or form. This is what caused the Salafis to want to banish him from the region, so they could collect jizya from the Copts.”147
Nor are calls for jizya limited to Salafi radicals. Earlier, in 2009, Dr. Amani Tawfiq, a female professor at Egypt’s Mansoura University, said, “If Egypt wants to slowly but surely get out of its economic situation and address poverty in the country, the Jizya has to be imposed on the Copts.”148 In September 2011, Dr. Mohamed Saad Katatni, the secretary general of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, reportedly said that “Copts would not pay jizya now,” implying that the idea of collecting tribute from subdued “dhimmi” Christians is very much alive among the Brotherhood, only dormant till a more opportune moment.149
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