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THE MYTH OF ISLAMIC TOLERANCE   by Robert Spencer

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This enlightening collection of essays by some of the world's leading authorities on Islamic social history focuses on the per- vasive legal and cultural oppression of non- Muslim in Islamic societies. The authors of these in-depth but accessible articles explode the widely diffused myth, promulgated by Muslim advocacy groups, of a largely tolerant, pluralistic Islam. In fact, the contribution lay bare the tyrannical legal superstructure that has treated non-Muslims in Muslim societies as oppressed and humiliated tributaries, and they show the devastating effects of these discriminatory attitudes and practices in both past and contemporary global conflicts. The insightful chapters presented in The Myth of Islamic Tolerance show how the legally mandated subjugation of non-Muslims under Islamic law stems from the Muslim concept of jihad -- the spread of Islam through conquest. Historically, the Arab Muslim conquerors overran vast territories

containing diverse non-Muslim populations. Many of these conquered people surrendered to Muslim domination under a special treaty called dhimma in Arabic. As such, these non Muslim indigenous populations, mainly Christians and Jews, were then classified under Islamic law as dhimmis (meaning “protected"). Although protected may sound benign, this classification in fact referred, most importantly, to "protection" from the resumption of the jihad against non- Muslims. The authors maintain that under- lying this religious caste system is a cultur- ally ingrained contempt for outsiders that still characterizes much of the Islamic world today and is a primary catalyst for jihad terrorism, Jihadist - martyrdom bombers, and a Nazi-like racist anti-Semitism taught in school systems and propagated via the media. Included one Ibn Warraq writing about Edward Said and the "intellectual turbans" he has placed on today's academic estab -lishment, forestalling honest discussion about Islamic tolerance; Bat Ye' or on the devastating  effects  of  the  dhimma,  the

system that actually defines the relationship between Muslims and non Muslims in Islamic states; Walidl Phares on the little-noted oppression of Middle Eastern Christians; and much more -- including a devastating series of articles by UN expert David G. Litman on the advancement of Islamic intolerance at the United Nations and other provocative topics usually ignored by Muslim apologists. This hard-hitting and absorbing assessment of Islamic teachings and practices regarding non-Muslim minorities uncovers a significant human rights scandal that rarely receives any mention either in academic circles or in the mainstream press.   ROBERT SPENCER is a freelance writer, the director of Jihad Watch, and an adjunct fellow of  the Free Congress Foundation. His previous books include Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West; Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions about the World's Fastest Growing Faith; and Inside Islam: A Guide for Catholics.

"...A collection of documents devastating to PC myth and multi-culturalists wishful thinking. Anyone concerned about the dangers of politically motivated distortions of Islamic theology and history should not miss this explosive and enlightening volume."  JEFFREY RUBIN,    Editor, Conservative Book Club

  THE MYTH OF ISLAMIC TOLERANCE  By Robert Spencer  
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"Like Christians, Muslims respect and revere Jesus. Islam teaches that Jesus is one of the greatest of God's prophets and messengers to humankind. Like Christians, every day, over 1.3 billion Muslims strive to live by his teachings of love, peace, and forgiveness. Those teachings, which have become universal values, remind us that all of us, Christians. Muslims. Jews, and all others have mom in common than we think." So read an advertisement that the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) placed in California newspapers in March 2004. For such ostensible attempts to promote harmony and cooperation between Christians and Muslims, CAIR has, despite the arrests of three of its officials on terror related charges in 2002 and 2003,1 maintained a reputation as a neutral civil rights organization dedicated to helping Muslims find a place within American secular society. This ad campaign was just one part of larger efforts by Muslims, particularly in Western countries, to present a vision of Islam that is different from Osama bin Laden's -- benign where his is lethal, open told accepting where his is fanatical and intransigent, The council and its allies have succeeded in virtually ruling out of polite society any idea of Islam except one that insists it is a religion that Western non-Muslim need not fear and must not despise. Their presentation of Islam as another of the world's great religions, closely akin to Judaism and Christianity and, like them, liable to be "hijacked" through no fault of its own by "extremists" who commit violence in its name. is one that is accepted as axiomatic by most Americans - to do otherwisewould be regarded in many circles as tantamount to committing the cardinal American sin 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 me most often identified, the Arabs. As a result, in America today millions of people, including many in influential sectors of the government and media, believe in Islam. Not that they believe in Allah and his prophet Muhammad, but they nonetheless have something akin to religious faith in an idea of Islam itself. This faith consists of various assumptions that have emanated from academia, the media, the State Department, groups like CAIR, and even from the president of the United States and that have by now become unquestioned assumptions held by millions. A cornerstone of this secular faith in is that Islam is a tolerant faith. Jews and Christians, we are told, lived in harmony with Muslims during the era of the great Islamic empires of the past. When radical Muslims bombed Madrid on March 11, 2004, commentators reminded us that when Muslims ruled Spain, it was a beacon of tolerance and the envy of Europe. When radicals bombed synagogues in Istanbul on November 15, 2003, we were told that such bombings were particularly heartbreaking in a city that for so long had known peace and harmony between Muslims, Jews, and Christians.

The dogma of Islamic tolerance has important political implications. Sclerotic European states eyeing the rapid growth of their Muslim populations console themselves with tales of old al-Andalus. reassuring one mother that Islamic hegemony not only wasn't all that bad it was a veritable golden age. Investigators in Europe and America me discouraged from monitoring activity in mosques. After all, goes the dogma, terrorism isn’t an Islamic problem, Islam is a supremely tolerant faith. No. terrorism is a problem of political grievances or socioeconomic imbalances. If Islam has anything at all to do with it, it is only a tool of unscrupulous religious leaders, who probably don't even really believe in Islam at all, who use religious language to excite and manipulate the uneducated masses. European and American politicians and religious leaders make careful overtures to growing Islamic communities, which they assume will -- with a few exceptions -- assimilate at least to the extent of becoming peaceful and active participants in the political process. Why not? Islam is a tolerant faith. In the face of its general acceptance and the opprobrium that awaits those who decline to toe the line, it seems churlish at best (if not a manifestation of more sinister intent) to challenge the idea of Islamic tolerance. But it is precisely because of these and other political uses to which the idea is put that the challenge must be made. The dogma of Islamic tolerance has become a potent political and cultural weapon; accordingly, it cannot and must not be out of bounds to examine the truth of this dogma.

 
Mein Jihad

If this dogma is false, its destructive power will be very great. Europeans and Americans will find themselves in the position of having encouraged millions of Muslims to come to their shores to live as equals, only to find that Islam doesn't accept a position as just one among a community of disparate religions but must struggle to make itself supreme. As Bat Ye’or the great historian of dhimmitude, the institutionalized oppression of non-Muslims (dhimmis: "protected" or "guilty" people) under Islam, puts it:

The civilization of dhimmitude does not develop all at once. It is a long process that involves many elements and a specific mental conditioning. It happens when peoples replace history by myths, when they fight to uphold these destructive myths, more than their own values because they are confused by having transformed lies into truth. They hold to those myths as if they were the only guarantee for their survival, when, in fact, they are the path to destruction. Terrorized by the evidence and teaching of history, those peoples prefer to destroy it rather than to farce it. They replace history with childish tales, thus living in amnesia. inventing moral justification for their own self-destruction.²

If that is indeed the case, the political implications will be as manifold and complex as those that follow from the assumption that Islam is tolerant. Either way, the investigation is of the utmost urgency. In this book are gathered a good number of the groundbreaking historical investigations of Bat Ye’or, who pioneered the study of dhimmitude as a distinct phenomenon of Islamic history, theology, and law. Other essays delve into attendant matters: the fearless and erudite former Muslim Ibn Warraq examines the real legacy of enormously influential academic Edward Said. Said, of course, was a pioneer in his own right, tarring generations of careful scholars of the Islamic world as racists and imperialists (or as Said would have had it, "Orientalists”) and elevating the myth of Islamic tolerance to the dogmatic level in American and European universities. Mark Dime explores the teachings of Islam on issues of tolerance and peaceful coexistence as well as a number of related matters in his witness statement from the trial of two Christian preachers in Australia. The panthers were sued rather intolerably, by a Muslim group for allegedly defaming Islam and thereby violating Australia's newly minted hate crime laws. Their daring and creative defense was to have recourse to the Islamic writings themselves, which Durie surveys brilliantly here. […]  

Why I Am Not a Muslim, by Ibn Warraq Raised in the Muslim faith, Warraq came to reject religion and now spends his time lecturing and writing. He recently authored a piece "Islam, The Middle East and Fascism" which critiques the Islamic Holy Book, the Qur'an.	The Quest for the Historical Muhammad  by Ibn Warraq Publishers Weekly: "... Warraq has provided a highly readable critical survey of the literature of this quest..."	1949 - In Bertrand Russell's lecture, Am I an Atheist or an Agnostic? under the section, Proof of God, he says, "...  None of us would seriously consider the possibility that all the gods of Homer really exist... I think that all of us  would say in regard to those gods that we were atheists. In regard to the Christian God, I should, I think, take exactly the same line." Note; this lecture can be found in his book, Bertrand Russell on God and Religion, edited by Al Seckel. It is essay # 5 in part one.
Book:   "Why I am not a Christian"

HISTORY AS POLITICS: THE USES OF THE MYTH OF ISLAMIC TOLERANCE The myth of Islamic tolerance was from its inception a political creation. Ibn Warraq surveys its origins with magnificent precision and directness in the foreword to this volume. And according to Bat Ye'or. it gained great currency because of nineteenth-century European political machinations in the Balkans: "Curiously, this myth started in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 19[h century. It alleges that Turkish rate over Christians in its European provinces was just and lawful. Than the Cimarron regime, being Islamic, was naturally 'tolerant' and well disposed toward its Christian subjects; that its justice was fair. and that safety for life and goods, was guaranteed to Christians by Islamic laws. Ottoman rule was brandished as the most suitable regime to rule Christmas of the Balkans." The European politicians' interest in propagating the myth of Islamic tolerance stemmed from the geopolitical realities of the day. "This theory," Bat Ye'or continues, ‘was advanced by European politicians in order to safe guard the balance of power in Europe. and in order to block the Russian advance towards the Mediterranean. To justify the maintenance of the Turkish yoke on the Slavs, this yoke had to be presented to the public opinion as a just government. The Ottoman Empire was painted by Turkophiles as a model for a multi-ethnic, multi-religious empire." Of course, reality was considerably different. Non-Muslims in the Ottoman Balkan regions were subject to substantially the same regulations for dhimmis that prevailed elsewhere in the Islamic world and were dictated by the Sharia. These laws are outlined by Samuel Shahid and Bat Ye’or in several essays later in this book. Exceptions to the harsh inequalities mandated by these laws only proved the rule, for they generally resulted form periods of laxity. These were all too often followed by Islamic revivals that featured a reassertion of harsh Sharia strictures, boding ill for non-Muslum populations. For instance, in 1758 the British ambassador to the Sublime Porte noted that laws mandating that dhimmis must dress in a manner distinct from the dress of Muslims and in a way that demonstrated their inferior status, were being enforced with a new rigor -- a rigor that sprang from the deep religious convictions of Sultan Mustafa III: "The order against Christians & Jews Dress, except in modest Cloaths, browns blacks ... & as to caps & boots is most rigorously executed in a Manner unknown before, which alarms most all those who are not Mahometans. & makes them apprehend the utmost Rigour; it seems however but natural, when it is considered. that it comes from a self-denying religious Prince."⁶ The imposition of a dress code may seem to be a small matter in those days before Hitler-imposed Star of David badges on German Jews, but, as Shahid and Bat Ye'or demonstrate in their essays in this volume, the dress requirements were just the most visible element of a detailed system of regulations designed to ensure that dhimmi Jews and Christians would feel themselves subdued," as commanded in the Qur'an (sura 9:29). By no stretch of the imagination does all this bespeak the atmosphere of openness, Mutuality, and tolerance that is suggested by modern purveyors of the myth. This is especially true in light of the penalties: the same British official wrote that a Jew had been beheaded after being caught in clothes that violated the orders.

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In 1860 Consul James Zohrab wrote a report from Sarajevo to the British ambassador to the Porte, Henry Bulwer, that sounds as if it could have been filed in the last ten years. "The hatred of the Christians toward the Bosniak Mussulmans." he tells Butwer, "is intense." Some might imagine today that this hatred was a consequence of Christian intransigence and fundamentalism and a refusal to respond with any generosity to the proffered hand of Islamic tolerance. But that was not actually the case. "During a period of nearly 300 years," Zohrab explains. the Christians "were subjected to much oppression and cruelty. For them no other law but the caprice of their masters existed."7 Testimony like this made it difficult for the myth of Islamic tolerance to gain acceptance among any who cared to consult the historical record. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, indefatigable scholars of Islam such in Sir William Muir, David S. Margoliouth, Thomas Patrick Hughes. Arthur Jeffrey, and many others. while not specifically investigating the plight of the dhimmis, had made available to English readers a wealth of material that abundantly established Islam's attitude toward non-Muslims as hardly one of tolerance. Consequently, for the mythmakers history itself had to be made over. This wasn't accomplished definitively until a considerable time after the birth of the myth; but it was ultimately accomplished in a most spectacular manner. In 1978, a Christian Arab professor. Edward Said, published Orientalism, which quickly became the defining text for academic study of Islam in the West. Said didn't so much establish that Islam had a genuine tradition of tolerance as make it racist to suggest otherwise. The great scholars. of Islam such as Muir and Margoliouth were, in Said's view, simply tools of Western imperialism, whose visions of the Orient were not objective scholarship but politically motivated tracts designed only to portray the Muslim world as needing the guiding hand of Christian colonial masters. Any criticism of Islam, including any questioning of the myth of Islamic tolerance, was thereafter deemed ipso facto imperialist and racist by an academic establishment that quickly fell in thrall to Saidism as an integral element of its overall program of hostility to the Western civilization and heritage. The myth of Islamic tolerance reigned supreme not because it was borne out by the facts, but because to challenge it was to identify oneself with a despised and discredited political program. So Said and his followers were actually guilty of the very thing for which they excoriated the Orientalists: they set out to force the facts to give way to overriding political realities.  

THE MYTH OF ISLAMIC TOLERANCE By Robert Spencer   What you see here is text which is available on Amazon.com. ... click on book to see more about it ... Pick one up for a friend!

CONTENTS
Part 1. Islamic Tolerance: Myth and Reality

Part 2. Islamic Law Regarding Non-Muslims

Part 3. Islamic Practice Regarding Non-Muslims Protected Peoples under Islam Historical Amnesia: Naming Jihad and Dhimanitude Dhimmi Peoples: Oppressed Nations Dhimmitude: Jews and Christians under Islam

Part 4. The Myth and Contemporary Geopolitics Past Is Prologue: The Challenge of Islamism Today Oriental Jewry and the Dhimmi Image in Contemporary Arab Nationalism Aspects of the Arab-Israeli Conflict Euro-Arab Anti-Zionisim The Oppression of Middle East Christians: A Forgotten A Christian Minority: The Copts in Egypt Eastern Christians Tom Asunder: Challenges-New and Old Christians in the Muslim World Persecution of Jews and Christians: Testimony versus Silence What Is Happening in Indonesia? Documentation of Oppression of Religious Freedom in Acch, Indonesia Jihad and Human Rights Today: An Active Ideology Incompatible with Universal Standards of Freedom and Equality Culture of Hate: A Racism That Denies the History and Sufferings of its Victims The Dhimmitude of the West Beyond Munich: The Spirit of Eurabia Eurabia: The Road to Munich The Islamic Conquest of Britain Something Rotten in Denmark?

Part 5. Human Rights and Human Wrongs at the United Nations Islamism Grows Stronger at the United Nations Universal Human Rights and "Human Rights in Islam" "Blasphemy" at the United Nations and Judeophobia in the Aralt-Muslint World Dangerous Censorship of a UN Special Rapporteur Judeophobia Today = Anti-Judaism / Anti-Zionism / Anti-Semitism: A Growing "Culture of Hate" The Ideology of Jihad: Anti-Semitism / Genocide / Slavery in the Sudan The Alarming Growth of Judeophobia / Anti-Semitism Since the Vienna World Conference on Human Rights (1993) and the UN Decade for Human Rights Education: 1995-2004 WUPJ Written Statement Submitted to the Sixtieth Session of the UNCHR "Free at Last"- Slaves in Sudan / Disappearing Jews of Iran: Their History The Ancient Jewish Community of Iran: End Silence, Disappearances, Discrimination, "Dhimmitude" WUPJ Statement to the Sixtieth Session of the UNCHR. The Remnant Dhimmi Populations of the Middle East and North Africa: Forgotten Jewish Refugees and Persecuted Indigenous Christian Communities Historical Facts and Figures: The Forgotten Jewish Refugees from Arab Countries WUPJ Written Statement to the Fifty-fifth Session of the UNCHR's Sub-Commission Discrimination in the Egyptian Criminal Justice System: The Exemplary Case of Dr. Neseem Abdel Malek Grave Attacks and Discrimination against Copts AWE Written Statement to the Sixtieth Session of the UNCHR "Rushdie Affair": Syndrome and Historical Overview The Right to Life and Human Rights Mechanisms AWE Written Statement to the Sixtieth Session of the UNCHR Blasphemy Legislation in Pakistan's Penal Code WE Written Statement to the Fiftieth Session of the UNCHR's Sub-Commission Universality of International Human Rights Treaties Homage to UN High Commissioner Sergio Views de Mello International Bill of Human Rights: Universality / International Standards / National Practices AWE Statement to the Fifth - fifth Session of the UNCHR's Sub-Commission Combating Defamation of Religions Apostasy. Human Rights, Religion, and Belief -- New Threats to the Freedom of Opinion and Expression: A General View of Apostasy Apostasy, Human Rights, Religion, and Belief -- New Threats to the Freedom of Opinion and Expression: A Concrete Proposal Apostasy, Human Rights. Religion, and Belief -- New Threats to the Freedom of Opinion and Expression: Pakistani Blasphemy Law Apostasy, Human Rights, Religion, and Belief -- New Threats to the Freedom of Opinion and Expression: The Problem of Apostasy in an Islamic - Christian Context Utopia: A "United States of Abraham" Yasir's Terrorist Jesus

Part 6. The Myth in Contemporary Academic and Public Discourse Edward Said and the Saidists; Or Third World Intellectual Terrorism Jihad and the Professors The Islamic Disinformation Lobby: American Muslim Groups' Politically Motivated Distortions of Islam Islam and the Dhimmis Answering Al-Azhar Islam, Taboo, and Dialogue: Reclaiming Historic Truths in Seeking Present-Day Solutions Israel, Christianity, and Islam: The Challenge of the Future Honest Intellectuals Must Shed Their Spiritual Turbans