Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide Paperback – January 1, 2001

This was the first book I read for Pat Ye'Or.Pat provides an excellent view of the collision of the Arabic so called civilization with almost all other civilizations. The historical facts in the book are so well referenced.Pat, I admire you for your excellent work. Keep it up.

This is one of dozens of books I used to mine historical information for my seminar on Understanding Islam. It explores the origins of Jihad and its application throughout history. The picture it paints is not a pretty one. One must keep in mind that Mohammed respected Christians and Jews in his earlier days. Then things went horribly wrong.

Many in the free West do not know what history the Islam has. Bat Yeor has written a book about what Islam did in the period from 700 till 1400. EVERY FREE man should read this. If you know the past, then the future will NOT surprise you

Met all my expectations. Bat Ye'or is a first class historian.

Chilling info on Muslim domination.

"was the assassination of the truth." Colonel Barakat was speaking before the U.S. Foreign Relations Committee about conditions of christian Lebanese refugees in Israel. Those refugees had fought against pro-Syrian islamist forces and the anti-Israeli group Hizbollah; they had been victims of jihad, islamic wars in South Lebanon, and had been ignored, abandoned by the international community. This story is found in the last chapter of this book.I think Isaiah agrees with Colonel Barakat when he says in Isaiah 59:14-15:Justice is turned back,And righteousness stands afar off;For truth has fallen in the public squares,And uprightness cannot enter.Yes, truth is lacking;And he who departs from evil makes himself a prey.Now the LORD saw,And it was displeasing in His sight that therewas no justice.In talking about this book, I'm always asked "what is dhimmitude", and I still don't have a good answer. Bat Ye'Or defines it in her introduction as "a domain which embraces the social, political, and religious relations of different human groups", and "dhimmitude embraces the condition of the dhimmi (non-muslim "protected" by islamic law). What helped me was her analogy that "the concepts of dhimmi and dhimmitude are equivalent to Jew and Judaism, of Christian and Christianity." If you're still mystified, as I am, Bat Ye'Or has websites devoted to these subjects on the worldwide web.An "Amazon friend" recommended that I attend a talk by Bat Ye'Or in my neighborhood. So glad I did, and I bought my book directly from the source! I was impressed by this woman's soft-spoken demeanor, her mastery of the English language, (better than mine!), and the subject matter which is so relevant today. Unfortunately, students at Georgetown University were not so receptive when she gave a talk there soon after this book was published in 2002. The research in this book is incredible, Bat Ye'Or's research navigating through unchartered areas of islamic history, revealing how islamic law really deals with the "other" religions and peoples (dhimmis) to be found in their theocratic society. It took me two weeks to slowly plod through this book, underlining, highlighting so many pages, the information and islamic terms totally unfathomable and foreign to me. (I recommend bookmarking or photocopying the two page glossary of islamic words at the end, before and while reading it).In this book, she looks at "the people of the book", jews and christians in islamic lands all over the globe. She has been criticized, because she is a jew, of being biased in her research. However, I was surprised that she didn't write of Israel and anti-zionism more. That information is to be found in this book, but there is plenty of evidence from other dhimmi groups to make a case that, at least to me, islamic laws need reforming. Except that is no easy solution; Islamic law is perfect and to criticize it is blasphemous and the sentence for blasphemy is death! What helped me in reading this book was what little I knew about the Armenian genocide during WWI from reading the Forty Days of Musa Dagh and Peter Balakian's The Burning Tigris. The deportations and slaughters, somehow becoming understandable upon reading this book, Bat Ye'Or revealing how islamic law and jihad, islamic war, operate in the dar al-Islam (land of Islam). Ownership of ammunition is forbidden the dhimmi as well as the building of new churches or synagogues. Mohammed has said that "the bell is the devil's pipe", Chapter 3:Religious and Social Aspects of Dhimmitude; therefore, without the simple church bell, communities are rendered utterly defenseless, unable to warn one another of dangers, unable to mobilize any defenses when protection (Jezhiya/poll tax) cannot be paid for. (Thank goodness for the second amendment in this country).No telling how many people in the Sudan are being murdered as I type this right now. A jihad there has been going on for decades. In Chapter 8: The Return of Dhimmitude, Bat Ye'Or mentions that in 2000, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum had an exhibit entitled "Genocide Warning:Sudan"; Amnesty International, this past week or so, now claims that today that warning is now a reality.We must understand Islam, but we must be selective about the sources we listen to. Bat Ye'Or's voice is, in my opinion, as Major Joppolo explains in A Bell for Adano, "another broadcast, that you cannot hear quite so clearly."

Readers will find untruth by incomplete statements/accounts to such an extent that an anti-Islam agenda is obvious. Of little scholarly interest or impact without researching the whole story. (Like explaining Judaism as occupier ONLY under Joshua invading Canaan, or Saul losing his kingship for refusing to slaughter an indigenous king...))Daniel C. SmithRichmond, VA

It is a dominant theme of the literature on the Jewish Diaspora that Jews in Muslim lands were treated better than Jews among Christians. It is repeated like a mantra, every student of Jewish history or of Islamic studies must learn it and repeat it, until it becomes myth. This excellent study is one of the few to challenge this dominat view. Today academics encourage the propoganda that Islam is 'more tolerant' than Christianity. However here we are given a small taste of that 'tolerance'. Dhimmi is a word meaning 'protected'. However just as the Nazis created concentration camps to 'protect' the Jews the word itself can be used in many ways. This book analyzes the experience of Jews in Muslim lands. Some have accused this work of 'only' concentrating on the negative aspects of Muslim-Jewish relations, however this is just the point, a litany of works have focused on this subject in Europe, it time that the dust be taken from the truth about Islamic nations.Partly the problem rests on lack of sources and literature, this book begins to fill this essential gap.A second way to analyze the question of which Jews were 'better off' is to see the end result. If Muslim lands were 'better' to the Jews then why did the Jews of Europe become free and wealthy? Why were there more Jews in Europe than muslim lands despite persecution, endless forced conversion and murder due to claims that Jews created the black death? Jews numbered 12 million in Christian lands while they numbered only a million in Muslim ones in 1930. By 1945 the numbers were 6 million and 1 million. By 1967 the numbers were 8 million and 50,000.Seth J. Frantzman