Muslim spokesmen in the United States have worked hard to present a vision of Islam as benign, open, and accepting—worlds away from the fanatical intransigence of Osama bin Laden and his ilk. PC watchdogs, both Muslim and non-Muslim, have virtually ruled out any dissent from the idea that Islam is peaceful, benign, and tolerant to a degree that will present no problem whatsoever for Western societies. They depict Islam as akin to Judaism and Christianity and, like them, liable to be “hijacked” (through no fault of its own) by “extremists.” Most Americans today accept this as axiomatic—and many would consider rejecting it an act of “racism,” despite the fact that Islam is not a race and most Muslims in the world today are not members of the ethnic group with which they are most often identified, the Arabs.
Guess what?
· Islamic law mandates second-class status for Jews, Christians, and other non-Muslims in Islamic societies.
· These laws have never been abrogated or revised by any Islamic authority.
· The idea that Jews fared better in Islamic lands than in Christian Europe is false.
But there’s just one problem with the common view: It isn’t true. We’ve already seen how thoroughly Islam is a religion of war; it is also, profoundly, a religion of intolerance.
PC Myth: Islam is a tolerant faith
Jews and Christians, goes the PC line, lived in harmony with Muslims during the era of the great Islamic empires of the past. When jihad terrorists bombed Madrid on March 11, 2004, commentators unctuously reminded the world that when Muslims ruled Spain, it was a beacon of tolerance where Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived together in peace and harmony. When jihadists bombed synagogues in Istanbul on November 15, 2003, the commentators intoned that the bombings were particularly heartbreaking in a city that for so long had known tranquility among Muslims, Jews, and Christians.
This unquestionable dogma of Islamic tolerance has important political implications. It discourages anti-terrorism investigators in Europe and America from monitoring activity in mosques. It helps perpetuate the mistaken notion that Islamic terrorism comes from political grievances and socioeconomic imbalances. European governments with rapidly growing Muslim populations use it to reassure themselves that in old Al-Andalus, Islamic hegemony wasn’t all that bad. European and American politicians and religious leaders woo the growing Islamic communities in their nations, trying to win their political support and assuming that they will assimilate easily and become peaceful, active participants in the political process. Why not? Islam is tolerant and teaches pluralism. What could be a better foundation for participation in Western democracy?
The idea of a tolerant Islam has even been taken up at the United Nations. The Turkish daily Zaman reported in March 2005 that at a UN seminar, “Confronting Islamophobia: Education for Tolerance and Understanding,” “the tolerance that Ottomans showed to people of different religions was held up as an example to be adopted even today” and was lauded as a “social model in which different religions and nations lived under the same roof for hundreds of years.”1
It doesn’t seem to have come up at the UN that when the different religions lived under the same roof, one was the master and the others lived as despised inferiors.
The dhimma
The Qur’an calls Jews and Christians “People of the Book;” Islamic law calls them dhimmis, which means “protected” or “guilty” people—the Arabic word means both. They are “protected” because, as People of the Book, they have received genuine revelations (“the Book”) from Allah and thus differ in status from out-and-out pagans and idolaters like Hindus and Buddhists. (Historically, the latter two groups have been treated even worse by Islamic conquerors, although as a practical matter their Muslim masters ultimately awarded them dhimmi status.) Jews and Christians are “guilty” because they have not only rejected Muhammad as a prophet, but have also distorted the legitimate revelations they received from Allah. Because of that guilt, Islamic law dictates that Jews and Christians may live in Islamic states, but not as equals with Muslims. One Muslim jurist explained that the caliph must “make jihad against those who resist Islam after having been called to it until they submit or accept to live as a protected dhimmi-community—so that Allah’s rights, may He be exalted, ‘be made uppermost above all [other] religion’ (Qur’an 9:33).”2 While Jews, Christians, and other non-Muslims are allowed to practice their religions, they must do so under severely restrictive conditions that remind them of their second-class status at every turn.
This lower status was first articulated by Umar ibn al-Khattab, who was caliph from 634 to 644. According to the Qur’anic commentary of Ibn Kathir, the Christians making this pact with Umar pledged:
We made a condition on ourselves that we will neither erect in our areas a monastery, church, or a sanctuary for a monk, nor restore any place of worship that needs restoration nor use any of them for the purpose of enmity against Muslims.3
This, of course, allowed Islamic authorities to seize churches whenever they wanted. Since testimony of Christians was discounted and disallowed in many cases, it was often enough for a Muslim simply to charge that a church was being used to foment “enmity against Muslims” and then seize it.
The Christians’ agreement with the caliph Umar continues: “We will not prevent any Muslim from resting in our churches whether they come by day or night…. Those Muslims who come as guests will enjoy boarding and food for three days.”4 The agreement also mandates a number of humiliating regulations to make sure that the dhimmis “feel themselves subdued” in accordance with Qur’an 9:29. The Christians promised:
We will not…prevent any of our fellows from embracing Islam, if they choose to do so. We will respect Muslims, move from the places we sit in if they choose to sit in them. We will not imitate their clothing, caps, turbans, sandals, hairstyles, speech, nicknames and title names, or ride on saddles, hang swords on the shoulders, collect weapons of any kind or carry these weapons…. We will not encrypt our stamps in Arabic, or sell liquor. We will have the front of our hair cut, wear our customary clothes wherever we are, wear belts around our waist, refrain from erecting crosses on the outside of our churches and demonstrating them and our books in public in Muslim fairways and markets. We will not sound the bells in our churches, except discreetly, or raise our voices while reciting our holy books inside our churches in the presence of Muslims.
After these and other rules are fully laid out, the agreement concludes: “These are the conditions that we set against ourselves and followers of our religion in return for safety and protection. If we break any of these promises that we set for your benefit against ourselves, then our Dhimmah(promise of protection) is broken and you are allowed to do with us what you are allowed of people of defiance and rebellion.”5
All this is still part of the Sharia today. “The subject peoples,” according to a contemporary manual of Islamic law, must “pay the non-Muslim poll tax (jizya)” and “are distinguished from Muslims in dress, wearing a wide cloth belt (zunnar); are not greeted with ‘as-Salamu ‘alaykum’ [the traditional Muslim greeting “Peace be with you”]; must keep to the side of the street; may not build higher than or as high as the Muslims’ buildings, though if they acquire a tall house, it is not razed; are forbidden to openly display wine or pork…recite the Torah or Evangel aloud, or make public display of their funerals or feast days; and are forbidden to build new churches.”6 If they violate these terms, the law further stipulates that they can be killed or sold into slavery at the discretion of the Muslim leader.
Dhimmis were also strictly forbidden, on pain of death, to proselytize among Muslims—a prohibition accompanied by a similar death sentence for Muslims who left Islam. Both of these, along with the other provisions of dhimmitude, remain part of Islamic law today.
These laws largely governed the relations between Muslims and non-Muslims in Islamic states for centuries, until Western pressure brought to bear on the weakened Ottoman Empire in the mid-nineteenth century led to the emancipation of the dhimmis. Here and there they were relaxed or ignored for various periods, but they always remained on the books, ready to be enforced again by any ruler with the will to do so.
And from the charter of the Islamic Resistance Movement, better known as Hamas, comes a keen awareness of how to manipulate the myth of Islamic tolerance: “Under the shadow of Islam, it is possible for the members of the three religions: Islam, Christianity and Judaism to coexist in safety and security. Safety and security can only prevail under the shadow of Islam, and recent and ancient history is the best witness to that effect…. Islam accords his rights to everyone who has rights and averts aggression against the rights of others.”7 Hamas doesn’t exactly spell out the deprivation of rights entailed by living “under the shadow of Islam,” however.
Just Like Today: Muslim leaders call for restoration of the dhimma
Sure, Jews and Christians lived as dhimmis in the old Islamic empires, but that’s a relic of the past, right? No Muslims want to reinstitute dhimmi status for them today, do they? Of course they do. Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad, a controversial pro-Osama Muslim leader in Great Britain, wrote in October 2002 that even though there was no caliph in the Islamic world today, that didn’t mean Muslims could simply kill unbelievers. He affirmed that they must still be offered the choice to live subject to the Muslims: “We cannot simply say that because we have no Khilafah [caliphate] we can just go ahead and kill any non-Muslim, rather, we must still fulfill their Dhimmah.”8
Likewise, Sheikh Yussef Salameh, the Palestinian Authority’s undersecretary for religious endowment, in May 1999 “praised the idea that Christians should become dhimmis under Muslim rule, and such suggestions have become more common since the second intifada began in October 2000.”9
In a recent Friday sermon at a mosque in Mecca, Sheikh Marzouq Salem Al-Ghamdi spelled out the Sharia’s injunctions for dhimmis:
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 Jizya to the Islamic treasury. Other conditions are…that they do not renovate a church or a 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 and 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, that 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 no protection.10
Sheikh Abdullah Azzam (1941–1989), one of the founders of al Qaeda, also assumes that the Islamic state he fought to restore would collect the jizya from dhimmis. In his book Defence of the Muslim Lands he discusses various categories of jihad. In accordance with traditional Islamic theology, he explains that offensive jihad is an obligation of the Islamic community, and adds, “And the Ulama [Muslim scholars] have mentioned that this type of jihad is for maintaining the payment of Jizya.”11
PC Myth: Historically the dhimma wasn’t so bad
But in practice, it couldn’t really have been like that, could it? Islamic apologist Stephen Schwartz, a convert to Islam, argues that in reality, dhimmitude wasn’t all that bad and maintains that its horrors have been exaggerated: “The dhimma is now held out by a demagogic element in the West as a terrifying symbol of Islamic domination.”12 And it is certainly true that no law is ever universally enforced with uniform zeal and thoroughness. In the ninth century, Theodosius, the patriarch of Jerusalem, wrote that the Muslims “are just and do us no wrong nor show us any violence.”13 But the legal status of the Christians and Jews was still precarious at best. Historian A. S. Tritton notes:
At one moment the dhimmi appears as a persecuted worm who is entirely negligible, and the next complaint is made of his pernicious influence on the Muslims around him. Laws were made, observed for a time, and then forgotten till something brought them to the remembrance of the authorities…. One feels that if events had been governed by logic, Islam would have swallowed up the subject religions; but they survive, vigorous though battered.14
Battered, indeed. The humiliations took various forms, but they were almost always present. Historian Philip Hitti notes one notorious example from the ninth century: “The Caliph al-Mutawakkil in 850 and 854 decreed that Christians and Jews should affix wooden images of devils to their houses, level their graves even with the ground, wear outer garments of honey color, i.e. yellow, put two honey-colored patches on the clothes of their slaves,…and ride only on mules and asses with wooden saddles marked by two pomegranate-like balls on the cantle.”15
Later, Christians in the Ottoman Empire, according to historian Steven Runciman, “were never allowed to forget that they were a subject people.”16 This extended to the appropriation of their holy places by the conquering people: When the Turks took Constantinople in 1453, according to Hoca Sa’deddin, 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.”17
In the fourteenth century, the pioneering sociologist Ibn Khaldun explained the options for Christians: “It is [for them to choose between] conversion to Islam, payment of the poll tax, or death.”18
Taxpayer woes
Paying the special tax on non-Muslims, the jizya, wasn’t as easy as filling out a 1040. The Syrian orthodox patriarch of Antioch, chronicler Michael the Syrian (1126–1199), recorded how crushing this burden was for the Christians in the time of the Caliph Marwan II (744–750):
Marwan’s main concern was to amass gold and his yoke bore heavily on the people of the country. His troops inflicted many evils on the men: blows, pillages, outrages on women in their husbands’ presence.19
Marwan was not alone. One of his successors, al-Mansur (754–775), according to Michael, “raised every kind of tax on all the people in every place. He doubled every type of tribute on Christians.”20
Payment of the jizya often took place in a peculiar and demeaning ceremony in which the Muslim tax official hit the dhimmi on the head or back of the neck. Tritton explained, “The dhimmi has to be made to feel that he is an inferior person when he pays, he is not to be treated with honour.”21 This ensured that the dhimmi felt “subdued,” as commanded by Qur’an 9:29. The twelfth-century Qur’anic commentator Zamakhshari even directed that the jizya should be collected “with belittlement and humiliation.”22 The thirteenth-century Shafi’i jurist an-Nawawi directed that “the infidel who wishes to pay his poll tax must be treated with disdain by the collector: the collector remains seated and the infidel remains standing in front of him, his head bowed and his back bent. The infidel personally must place the money on the scales, while the collector holds him by the beard, and strikes him on both cheeks.”23
According to historian Bat Ye’or, this blow as part of the payment process “survived unchanged till the dawn of the twentieth century, being ritually performed in Arab-Muslim countries, such as Yemen and Morocco, where the Koranic tax continued to be extorted from the Jews.”24
Non-Muslims often converted to Islam to avoid this tax: This is how the vast Christian populations of North Africa and the Middle East ultimately became tiny, demoralized minorities. According to the seventeenth-century European traveler Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, in Cyprus in 1651 “over four hundred Christians had become Muhammadans because they could not pay their kharaj [a land tax that was also levied on non-Muslims, sometimes synonymous with the jizya], which is the tribute that the Grand Seigneur levies on Christians in his states.” The following year in Baghdad, when Christians “had to pay their debts or their kharaj, they were forced to sell their children to the Turks to cover it.”25
In other instances, however, conversion to Islam was forbidden for dhimmis—it would destroy the tax base.26
Pushing too hard
Eventually, all this oppression provoked a reaction. Historian Apostolos E. Vacalopoulos describes an instructive set of circumstances surrounding Greece’s early nineteenth century struggle for independence:
The Revolution of 1821 is no more than the last great phase of the resistance of the Greeks to Ottoman domination; it was a relentless, undeclared war, which had begun already in the first years of servitude. The brutality of an autocratic regime, which was characterized by economic spoliation, intellectual decay and cultural retrogression, was sure to provoke opposition. Restrictions of all kinds, unlawful taxation, forced labor, persecutions, violence, imprisonment, death, abductions of girls and boys and their confinement to Turkish harems, and various deeds of wantonness and lust, along with numerous less offensive excesses—all these were a constant challenge to the instinct of survival and they defied every sense of human decency. The Greeks bitterly resented all insults and humiliations, and their anguish and frustration pushed them into the arms of rebellion. There was no exaggeration in the statement made by one of the beys of Arta, when he sought to explain the ferocity of the struggle. He said: ‘We have wronged the rayas [dhimmis] (i.e. our Christian subjects) and destroyed both their wealth and honor; they became desperate and took up arms. This is just the beginning and will finally lead to the destruction of our empire.’ The sufferings of the Greeks under Ottoman rule were therefore the basic cause of the insurrection; a psychological incentive was provided by the very nature of the circumstances.27
Today the jihadist terrorists complain that the West has destroyed their wealth and honor; however, as they continue to commit acts of violence against innocent people—as they did on September 11 and in many other attacks—this complaint will ring increasingly hollow. It is even possible that these continued acts of violence will eventually give rise to a stronger and more forthright resistance to Islamization than we have seen.
PC Myth: Jews had it better in Muslim lands than in Christian Europe
PC spokesmen assert every day that even if the dhimma really did subject Jews and Christians to ongoing and institutionalized discrimination and harassment, it certainly wasn’t as bad as the way Jews were treated in Christian Europe. Historian Paul Johnson explains: “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.”28
Certainly in terms of legal restrictions, the Muslim laws were much harsher for Jews than those of Christendom. In 1272, Pope Gregory X repeated what Pope Gregory I first affirmed in 598: Jews “ought not to suffer any disadvantage in those [privileges] which have been granted them.” Gregory X also repeated earlier papal decrees forbidding forced conversions (as does Islamic law) and commanding that “no Christian shall presume to seize, imprison, wound, torture, mutilate, kill, or inflict violence on them; furthermore, no one shall presume, except by judicial action of the authorities of the country, to change the good customs in the land where they live for the purpose of taking their money or goods from them or from others.”
Muhammad vs. Jesus
“And he sent messengers ahead of him, who went and entered a village of the Samaritans, to make ready for him; but the people would not receive him, because his face was set toward Jerusalem. And when his disciples James and John saw it, they said, ‘Lord, do you want us to bid fire come down from heaven and consume them?’ But he turned and rebuked them.”
Luke 9:52–55
“Narrated Ibn Abbas: When the Verse: ‘And warn your tribe (O Muhammad) of near-kindred (and your chosen group from among them)’ [Qur’an 26:214] was revealed, Allah’s Messenger went out, and when he had ascended As-Safa mountain, he shouted, ‘Ya Sabahah!’29 The people said, ‘Who is that?’ Then they gathered around him, whereupon he said, ‘Do you see? If I inform you that cavalrymen are proceeding up the side of this mountain, will you believe me?’ They said, ‘We have never heard you telling a lie.’ Then he said, ‘I am a plain warner to you of a coming severe punishment.’ Abu Lahab said, ‘May you perish! You gathered us only for this reason?’ Then Abu Lahab went away. So the Surat Al-Masad: ‘Perish the two hands of Abu Lahab!’ was revealed.”30Surat Al-Masad is the Qur’an’s 111th sura: “May the hands of Abu Lahab perish! May he himself perish! Nothing shall his wealth and gains avail him. He shall be burnt in a flaming fire, and his wife, laden with faggots, shall have a rope of fibre around her neck!”
Qur’an 111:1–5
So far this is similar to the Islamic “protection” of the subject peoples. But then Gregory adds, “In addition, no one shall disturb them in any way during the celebration of their festivals, whether by day or by night, with clubs or stones or anything else.” This is clearly distinct from the Sharia prohibitions of dhimmis celebrating their religious festivals in public. Also, in view of the fact that a Jew’s testimony was not admissible against a Christian, the pope also forbids Christians to testify against Jews—while the Sharia forbids a dhimmi from testifying against a Muslim, but has no problem with a Muslim testifying against a dhimmi.31
This is not to say that there weren’t abuses. Protections of the Jews, such as those enunciated by Gregory X, were often honored in the breach. But it was no accident that by the dawn of the modern age, the great majority of Jews lived in the West, not within the confines of Islam. The reasons for this may be because in Christian lands there was the idea, however imperfect, of the equality of dignity and rights for all people—an idea that contradicted the Qur’an and Islamic theology and never took root in the Islamic world.
PC Myth: Dhimmitude is a thing of the past
But surely all this is a question of history, isn’t it? Islamic apologists have maintained that no one is calling for restoration of the dhimma today. We have already seen that that is not true. Also false is the widespread assumption that dhimmitude is not found in the Islamic world today. Since Sharia is not fully in place anywhere except Saudi Arabia (where non-Muslims are not allowed to practice their religions at all) and Iran, the laws of the dhimma are not fully in effect in the Islamic world. However, elements of them remain on the books in every Muslim country. Nowhere in the Islamic world today do non-Muslims enjoy full equality of rights with Muslims.
A few recent and representative incidents from Egypt:
Apostasy—leaving the faith—is a capital offense in Islamic law. Egyptian officials arrested twenty-two Christians, many of them former Muslims who had secretly converted to Christianity, in October 2003. They were questioned and tortured; authorities suspected that several of them were trying to bring other Muslims to Christianity.32
In December 2003, the Brethren Church of Assiout was demolished, with official permission, so that church members could build a new structure. But before they could do so, their building license was revoked—recalling the dhimmi prohibition against building new churches or repairing old ones.33
On November 25, 2003, Boulos Farid Rezek-Allah Awad, a Coptic Christian married to a Christian convert from Islam, was arrested while attempting to leave the country and held for twelve hours. When an Egyptian security police officer asked him about his wife, Rezek-Allah told him that she had already left Egypt. Perhaps mindful of the death penalty for apostates, the officer responded, “I’ll bring her back and cut her into pieces in front of you.”34 Several months later, however, Rezek-Allah was allowed to leave Egypt and settle in Canada.35
Three Books You’re Not Supposed To Read
The Dhimmi: Jews and Christian Under Islam (1985), The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude (1996), and Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide (2001), written by Bat Ye’or and published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Ye’or is the pioneering scholar of the dhimma. Each book is full of primary source documents that bring the harsh realities of dhimmitude home and give the lie to Islamic apologists and whitewashers who try to explain it away.
From Pakistan:
In November 2003, Pakistani police arrested Anwar Masih, a Christian, on a charge of blasphemy. According to the Daily Times of Pakistan, Masih began discussing Islam with a Muslim neighbor, Naseer. “During the discussion, the sub-inspector said, Masih got angry and blasphemed. Naseer related the discussion to two other neighbours of his mother, Attaullah and Younas Salfi. The three subsequently gathered other locals and pelted stones at Masih’s house, on which police reached the scene and taking no notice of the attack on his home, arrested Masih.”36
The following month, a church in the Pakistani village of Dajkot was attacked during a prayer service by a mob of Muslims shouting, “You infidels, stop praying and accept Islam!” According to the Pakistan Christian Post, the mob “entered the church and started beating the worshipers. The Muslim attackers desecrated the Holy Bible and broke every thing in the church.” However, the police “refused to lodge any report,” and at the local hospital, Muslim doctors ignored the injured Christians at the direction of an influential local Muslim.37
In May 2004, another Christian charged with blasphemy, Samuel Masih, was beaten to death with a hammer by a Muslim policeman as he lay in a hospital bed suffering from tuberculosis.38
And from Kuwait:
Hussein Qambar Ali, a Kuwaiti, converted from Islam to Christianity in the 1990s. Even though the Kuwaiti constitution guarantees the freedom of religion and says nothing about the traditional Islamic prohibition on conversion to another faith, he was arrested and tried for apostasy. During his trial, a prosecutor declared that the Sharia took precedence over Kuwait’s secular legal code: “With grief I have to say that our criminal law does not include a penalty for apostasy. The fact is that the legislature, in our humble opinion, cannot enforce a penalty for apostasy any more or less than what our Allah and his messenger have decreed. The ones who will make the decision about his apostasy are: our Book, the Sunna, the agreement of the prophets and their legislation given by Allah.”39
PC Myth: Islam values pre-Islamic cultures in Muslim countries
Islam doesn’t just denigrate and devalue non-Muslims, but also leads Muslims to denigrate and devalue the pre-Islamic cultures of their own countries. “In 637 A.D.,” notes the Nobel Prize–winning author V. S. Naipaul, “just five years after the death of the Prophet, the Arabs began to overrun Persia, and all Persia’s great past, the past before Islam, was declared a time of blackness.”40
There was nothing unusual in that. It is a scene that has been repeated throughout the history of Islam. Islamic theology so devalues non-believers that there is no room in Islamic culture for any generosity toward their achievements. Muslims call the age before any country adopted Islam the time of jahiliyya, or ignorance. Naipaul explains that “the time before Islam is a time of blackness: that is part of Muslim theology. History has to serve theology.” An example of this is how Pakistanis denigrated the famous archaeological site at Mohenjo Daro, seeing its value only as a chance to preach Islam:
A featured letter in Dawn offered its own ideas for the site. Verses from the Koran, the writer said, should be engraved and set up in Mohenjo-Daro in “appropriate places”: “Say (unto them, O Mohammed):
Travel in the land and see the nature of the sequel for the guilty…
Say (O Mohammed, to the disbelievers): Travel in the land and see the nature of the consequence for those who were before you.
Most of them were idolaters.”41
Just Like Today: Muslims devalue ancient sites of other religions
Muslims in Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus attempted to turn the fourth-century monastery of San Makar into a hotel. In Libya, the daffy Colonel Qaddafi turned Tripoli’s Catholic cathedral into a mosque. And in Afghanistan, of course, the Taliban government dynamited the famous Buddhas of Bamiyan in March 2001. Could the Christian monuments of Europe possibly suffer the same fate?
If the warriors of jihad, who are as energized today as they have been at any time during the last millennium, get their way, they certainly could. Edward Gibbon, author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, observed that if the eighth-century Muslim incursion into France had been successful, “perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.”42
That day may be yet to come.