There is a word that the modern world has largely forgotten, and the forgetting is not innocent, for the word names a condition under which Jews and Christians lived for more than a thousand years across the lands that Islam conquered. The word is dhimmitude, from the Arabic dhimmi, the protected one, and it describes the legal and social status of the non-Muslim permitted to survive under Islamic rule. We are told, and told insistently, that this status was a model of tolerance, a beacon of coexistence that puts the bigotry of Christian Europe to shame. There is a grain of truth in the claim, and we shall give the grain its due. But the whole truth is harder and sadder, and it is a truth that the friends of Israel cannot afford to forget, because the State of Israel is, among other things, the Jewish people’s emphatic answer to it.

We undertake this examination with the same two commitments that govern all our work in this field. We will not soften the record to flatter, and we will not blacken it to frighten. We will distinguish the doctrine from the man, the law from the loophole, the bad century from the better one. And we will keep before us throughout that the subject is a system and a history, not the soul of any living Muslim, the vast majority of whom never imposed a single one of these conditions on anyone and would be astonished to learn what their own law once required. The dhimmi system is a real thing with a real history, and we mean to look at it plainly.

The Word and the Thing

The dhimmi was the non-Muslim—in practice the Jew or the Christian, the people of an earlier Book—who was granted, under a contract called the dhimma, the protection of the Muslim state in exchange for his submission to it. He was not enslaved, and he was not, as a rule, compelled to convert; in this his lot was milder than that of the pagan, to whom the law offered conversion or the sword. He might keep his faith, his worship, and his community, and govern his own family affairs by his own religious law. This much the apologist rightly emphasizes, and it is not nothing. In an age of forced baptisms and expulsions to the west, the survival of whole Jewish and Christian communities under Islam for centuries is a fact that must be reckoned with honestly.

But the protection came at a price, and the price was a permanent, codified, and public inferiority. The dhimma was not a charter of equal citizenship; it was a contract of subjugation, in which the conquered bought their lives and their worship by accepting a station beneath the conqueror in law, in dress, in the courts, in the very posture of the body. The protected one was protected as a subordinate is protected, on condition that he never forget, and never be allowed to forget, that he was a subordinate. To call this tolerance is to empty the word of meaning. It was toleration in the literal and chilling sense: the conquered were tolerated, as one tolerates a thing one has the power to destroy and chooses, for the moment and on conditions, to spare.

The Verse of the Tribute

The scriptural foundation of the system is a single verse of the Qur’an, and it is worth understanding exactly what it commands. The believers are instructed to fight the people of the Book—named explicitly—until they pay a tribute, the jizya, and pay it, in the phrase that has echoed down the centuries, while in a state of subjection, or out of hand, or being brought low. The classical commentators did not soften this. They understood the verse to require not merely a tax but a tax paid in a manner that enacted and displayed the payer’s humiliation, so that the very transaction by which he purchased his survival should remind him of his place. Some jurists prescribed that the dhimmi present the payment standing while the collector sat, or with a blow or a shove, to dramatize the submission the verse demands.

Here we meet the difference between a tax and a tribute, and it is the whole difference. A tax is the price a citizen pays for the services of his state; it carries no shame. A tribute of the kind this verse commands is the price a conquered man pays for the mercy of not being killed, and it is designed to carry shame, for the shame is the point. The jizya was not chiefly a revenue measure—though it raised revenue, and the loss of it when subjects converted was a real worry to Muslim treasuries. It was, above all, a ritual of subordination, an annual reminder, enforced by the threat behind the verse, that the dhimmi lived by sufferance and not by right. The grammar of the verse is the grammar of the whole system: protection in exchange for lowliness, the lowliness made visible and paid for by the head.

The Pact of Umar

The terms of the dhimmi’s lowliness were spelled out in a famous document known as the Pact of Umar, attributed to the second caliph and elaborated over the early centuries into the standard catalogue of dhimmi disabilities. Its provisions read like an inventory of humiliations, and they were not idle words; they were enforced, with varying strictness, across the Islamic world for the better part of a millennium. The dhimmi was forbidden to build new houses of worship or to repair the old ones; forbidden to display his cross or sound his bell or raise his voice in prayer or recitation where a Muslim might hear; forbidden to build his house higher than a Muslim’s; required to rise for a Muslim and yield him the road; barred from bearing arms or riding a horse, the mount of the warrior, and permitted at most the donkey, and that sidesaddle.

He was required, in many times and places, to wear distinctive clothing or a distinguishing mark—a particular color, a patch, a belt—so that he might be known at a glance and never mistaken for a member of the ruling community. The reader will note, with a shudder, where else in history a people were compelled to wear a mark upon their clothing, and the resemblance is no accident; the medieval Christian world borrowed the badge from the Islamic world it fought. The catalogue goes on: the dhimmi could not hold authority over a Muslim, could not marry a Muslim woman, could not own a Muslim slave. Each provision served the single governing purpose, to fix the non-Muslim in a station of permanent and visible inferiority, neither killed nor freed, but kept.

The Daily Weight of It

Law on the page is one thing; life under it is another, and the daily reality of the dhimmi varied enormously across thirteen centuries and three continents. There were long stretches and whole regions where the disabilities lay lightly, where enforcement lapsed, where a clever or wealthy or useful dhimmi rose to influence at a court, where neighbors of different faiths lived in easy familiarity untroubled by the jurists’ rules. The honest historian insists on this, and we insist on it with him. The dhimmi’s life was not an unbroken misery, and to paint it so would be its own falsehood. There were good rulers and slack centuries and quiet towns, and many a Jew and Christian lived out his days under Islam in tolerable peace.

But the disabilities were always there, codified and available, a structure of subordination that could be relaxed in good times and tightened at will in bad. And the bad times came. When a ruler wished to display his piety, or a mob sought a target for its grievance, or a zealous jurist gained the ruler’s ear, the rules were there to be enforced, and the dhimmi had no recourse, for he could not testify against a Muslim in court and could not hold the office that might protect him. His security was never a right; it was a permission, and a permission can be withdrawn. To live as a dhimmi was to live always at the discretion of another, in a peace that depended entirely on the goodwill or the indifference of the master, and that could turn, without warning and without appeal, into persecution. That precariousness, more than any single rule, was the essence of the condition.

Neither Bell Nor Witness

Two of the disabilities deserve particular notice, because they cut to the root of a people’s dignity and a people’s safety. The first was the silencing of public worship: no bell, no procession, no cross displayed, no voice of prayer or scripture raised where a Muslim might hear it, no new house of worship built. The faith of the dhimmi was permitted to survive, but only as a private and muted thing, never to assert itself in the public square, never to compete, always to whisper. A religion that may not be heard is a religion on the road to disappearance, and the rule was understood, by those who made it, to encourage exactly that. The muffling of the bell was the slow strangling of the community that rang it.

The second was the disqualification of the dhimmi’s testimony. In the courts of the Islamic state the word of a non-Muslim could not stand against the word of a Muslim, and in many schools could not be heard against him at all. Consider what this meant for the safety of a Jew or a Christian. If a Muslim wronged him—robbed him, struck him, seized his property, harmed his family—he could not, in the ordinary course, obtain justice, for he could not give evidence against his assailant. He was, in the most literal sense, defenseless before the dominant community, his life and goods secure only so far as that community chose to leave them alone. A man who cannot bear witness against his attacker is a man who has no protection but mercy, and mercy is not a right. This single disability, more than the dress or the donkey, reveals the true nature of the dhimmi’s peace.

The One-Way Door

The genius of the system, if so dark a thing may be called ingenious, lay in the way its pressures all ran in a single direction. Every incentive pushed toward conversion to Islam, and none pushed the other way. The dhimmi who wearied of the tax, the badge, the silenced bell, and the closed courtroom had always one escape ready to hand: he could submit, profess the faith, and rise in an afternoon from a tolerated inferior to a full member of the ruling community, his disabilities lifted, his tax abolished, his testimony suddenly valid. The door out of lowliness stood always open in one direction. And the law made certain it opened in one direction only, for the Muslim who left Islam for the faith of his fathers was an apostate, and the penalty for apostasy, in the classical law, was death.

Reflect on what this means across centuries. A community subjected to steady disadvantage, offered an easy and honorable exit through conversion, and forbidden on pain of death to convert back, can move only one way over time, and that slowly, generation by generation, toward dissolution. It is demographic engineering of a patient and almost gentle kind, requiring no massacre and no forced baptism, only the relentless application of incentive in a single direction and the sealing of the return. The great Christian populations of the Middle East did not vanish in a day; they leaked away through the one-way door across a thousand years. The Jewish communities, smaller and more cohesive, endured longer, but the pressure never relented. The dhimma did not need to kill the dhimmi. It needed only to make his children’s submission the path of least resistance, and to bar the road back, and time would do the rest.

The Myth of the Golden Age

We come now to the famous claim, the claim of the golden age, the convivencia, the lost paradise of tolerance in which Muslim, Jew, and Christian flourished together in mutual respect, chiefly located in medieval Spain and held up as a rebuke to the supposed greater bigotry of the Christian world. The claim is not pure invention. There were indeed periods, especially in certain courts of Muslim Spain, when learned Jews rose to high office, when Hebrew poetry flowered, when philosophy and medicine and commerce flourished across the lines of faith. The greatest Jewish thinker of the age wrote his masterworks in Arabic in this world. These were real achievements, and the friends of Israel need not deny them; the truth is large enough to hold them.

But the golden age has been gilded by nostalgia and by polemic until it bears little resemblance to the harder record. The same Jewish luminary so often cited as proof of Islamic tolerance fled for his life from a wave of Muslim persecution that gave the Jews of his city the choice of conversion, exile, or death, and he wrote bitterly of the special harshness the children of Ishmael had shown to Israel. The brilliant courts coexisted with the same legal subjection everywhere else, and the brilliance could end in an afternoon: one of the celebrated centers of the golden age was also the site of a massacre in which the Jewish community was slaughtered in the streets. The golden age was real, and it was an island, and it was always provisional, liable at any moment to be swept away by the very system beneath it. To mistake the bright island for the whole sea is the central error of the myth.

The Defenders’ Honest Case

Fairness demands that we let the defenders of the record speak at their fullest, for they are not without serious arguments, and the friend of truth must reckon with them. They say, first, that the comparison that matters is the comparison with Christian Europe of the same centuries, and that by that measure the Islamic world was the more humane: it did not, as a rule, expel its Jews wholesale as England and Spain and a dozen other realms did, did not stage the great massacres of the Crusades and the Black Death, did not invent the blood libel that drenched Europe in Jewish blood. A Jew of the Middle Ages, they argue, was on the whole safer in Cairo than in Mainz, and that is a fact the polemicist against Islam conveniently forgets.

They say, second, that the very survival of the Jewish and Christian communities under Islam for more than a thousand years is itself the decisive evidence, for a system bent on their destruction would not have preserved them so long. The dhimma, on this reading, was a framework of coexistence imperfect by modern standards but remarkable by the standards of its age, under which non-Muslims kept their faith, their courts, their schools, and often their prosperity. And they say, third and most importantly, that whatever the medieval law required, the Muslim of today is not bound to it, that vast numbers of Muslims repudiate the dhimmi system as a relic, and that to hang its disabilities around the neck of a modern believer is as unjust as hanging the Inquisition around the neck of a modern Catholic. These arguments have real force, and the honest examiner concedes each of them its due weight rather than waving it away.

Yet the concessions, fairly made, do not overturn the conclusion; they refine it. That the dhimma was milder than Christian persecution is true and damning of Christendom, but it does not make subjugation into equality, and a lower circle of subordination is subordination still. That the communities survived is true, but they survived as tolerated inferiors and, in the Christian case, dwindled toward extinction under the slow pressure we have traced. That the modern Muslim is not bound by the medieval law is gloriously true, and we rejoice in every Muslim who repudiates it—but the law remains in the books, available to be revived, and in our own century movements have arisen that wish precisely to revive it. The defenders have shown that the dhimma was not the worst thing in a brutal world. They have not shown that it was tolerance, nor that the Jew was wrong to want, at long last, to be free of it altogether.

The Christians, Too

Though our chief concern is the Jewish people, honesty requires us to remember that the dhimmi system bore down upon the Eastern Christians as heavily, and in the long run more destructively, than upon the Jews. The lands that Islam conquered in its first century—Syria, Egypt, North Africa, Mesopotamia, Anatolia—were overwhelmingly Christian, the very heartland of the ancient church, the country of the great councils and the desert fathers and the first apostolic sees. Under the slow, patient pressure of the dhimma—the tax that fell on the unconverted, the disabilities that ground down the dignity of the believer, the periodic persecutions, the relentless incentive to escape one’s lowliness by submission—those ancient Christian populations were reduced, over the centuries, from the great majority to the dwindling and frightened remnants they are today.

This was not, for the most part, conversion by the sword in a single bloody hour; it was attrition, the death of a civilization by a thousand small humiliations and quiet incentives stretched across a thousand years. The bell that could not ring, the church that could not be repaired, the testimony that could not be given, the tax that fell only on the holdout—these did their slow work, generation upon generation, until the Christian heartland of antiquity became the Muslim world we know. The friends of Israel should ponder this, for it is a preview written large. A people that lives by another’s permission, however long the permission lasts, lives under a sentence whose execution is merely deferred. The Eastern churches learned this over centuries. The Jewish people, in our own age, resolved that they would not learn it again.

The Century of Expulsion

For the system did not die in some distant medieval past; it reached into living memory, and its final convulsion against the Jews came in the twentieth century. As the modern Jewish national movement grew and the State of Israel was reborn, the ancient Jewish communities of the Arab and wider Muslim world—communities older by far than Islam itself, some tracing to the Babylonian exile—were subjected to a wave of persecution, expropriation, and expulsion that emptied them almost entirely. In Baghdad in 1941 a pogrom over two days murdered scores of Jews and pillaged their quarter, a foretaste of what was coming. In the years around 1948 and after, something near to eight hundred and fifty thousand Jews were driven or fled from the lands of Islam, their property seized, their ancient presence erased, a population larger than the Arab refugee population of the same war, and one for whom the world arranged no perpetual agency and no annual commemoration.

This was the dhimma’s last word to the Jewish people: that even the long, precarious permission to exist as a subordinate was now withdrawn, and the protected ones were to be protected no longer. The communities that had paid the jizya and worn the mark and held their peace for a thousand years discovered, in the end, exactly what their security had always been worth—nothing, the moment the master’s mood changed. The Jews of Baghdad and Cairo and Aleppo and Sanaa, who had kept their heads down for centuries, found that keeping their heads down had purchased them no permanence at all. And so they came home, the great majority of them, to the one place on earth where a Jew need not live by anyone’s permission. They came to Israel.

Why Israel Is the Answer

Here, at last, we reach the reason this forgotten history matters so urgently to the friend of the Jewish state, for the State of Israel is the deliberate and total repudiation of the dhimmi condition, and it cannot be understood apart from it. For nearly two thousand years the Jew lived as a guest in other men’s houses—in Christendom under the badge and the ghetto and the expulsion, in Islam under the dhimma and the jizya and the mark—always tolerated, never sovereign, his survival forever a permission granted by a stronger hand and revocable at that hand’s pleasure. Israel is the end of that arrangement. It is the place where the Jewish people, for the first time in two millennia, hold their own life by right and not by sufferance, defend it with their own arm, and answer to no master for the crime of existing.

This is why the demand that Israel surrender her sovereignty, dissolve into some larger entity, and trust her safety once again to the goodwill of a surrounding majority is not, to the Jewish ear, a reasonable compromise. It is a demand that the Jew return to dhimmitude, that he lay down the one thing that history taught him at an unbearable cost he must never lay down again—the power to protect himself. The whole memory of the protected centuries, and of how they ended, stands behind Israel’s refusal. A people that has been the guest, and learned what the guest’s security is worth, will not willingly become the guest again. The Christian who grasps the history of the dhimma understands Israel’s tenacity not as stubbornness but as the hard-won wisdom of a people that will not make the old mistake twice.

The God Who Lifts the Head

And so the believer who has walked through this long and sorrowful history is brought, in the end, to worship, for he sees in the regathering of Israel and the lifting of her head the hand of the God who promised exactly this. The same Lord who warned that His people would be scattered among the nations and would there find no ease, no rest for the sole of the foot, but a trembling heart and failing eyes and sorrow of mind—the very portrait of the dhimmi’s precarious centuries—is the Lord who swore that He would gather them again from all the countries whither He had driven them, and bring them into their own land, and that they should be afraid of none. The end of dhimmitude was written in the Book before the dhimma was ever imposed.

The Christian Zionist, then, does not recount this history to nurse a grievance or to stoke a hatred; he recounts it to magnify the faithfulness of God, who lifts up the head of the bowed and brings home the exile and turns the protected guest into a free people in his own land. He grieves the long humiliation of both Jew and Eastern Christian under the dhimma; he prays for the Muslim peoples among whom that system arose, that they too may know the freedom of the gospel; and he stands with Israel, immovably, because Israel restored is the visible proof that the God who keeps covenant has not forgotten His ancient promise. The donkey and the badge and the silenced bell belong to the world that was. The free Jew in his own land, his head unbowed at last, belongs to the world that the Lord swore to bring. He that scattered Israel will gather him, and keep him, as a shepherd doth his flock. And the believer who has counted the long cost of the centuries of permission understands at last why the regathered nation holds her sovereignty so fiercely and apologizes to no one for surviving: she has tasted what it is to live by another’s leave, and she has resolved, with the full weight of two thousand years behind the resolve, that she will live by it no more. That resolve is not arrogance. It is memory turned into wisdom, and it is the answer of a free people to the forgotten history of the protected.