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The dhimmis: guilty people

May 27, 2010 8:40 am By Robert Spencer

Why must Maher El-Gohary and his daughter live in hiding, under serious daily threat of death? What crime have they committed? Obviously they have apostatized from Islam, and despite the willful ignorance of the American mainstream media and the deceptions of American Muslim advocacy groups, leaving Islam really does warrant the death penalty according to Islamic law.

But there is more to this as well. Note that the imam shouts about Christians, “Do not shake their hands. Do not go into their homes. Do not eat their food.” He is apparently referring not just to apostates, but to all Christians. The Qur’an does say that the idolaters are unclean (9:28) — the Arabic word used in this verse is مشركون (mushrikun), those who commit شرك (shirk), which is the worst sin in Islam: associating partners with Allah. Christians are the worst practitioners of shirk, since they worship Jesus Christ as the Son of God; thus they are unclean as per this verse.

Christians are also by definition guilty people. As I noted in my book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), “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.” While the classic Islamic laws regarding dhimmis are not in force in Egypt today, they’re still part of Islamic law, and as such Islamic clerics regard them as the proper status that Christians and other “People of the Book” should assume in the Islamic state. The Arabic word ذمي”Ž (dhimmi) is derived from ذمة”Ž (dhimma), “‘protection, custody'”), and from ذم”Ž (dhamma), which means “to blame.” Thus the dhimmis are the blamed, or guilty ones.

How is it that “protection” and “custody” can be related to “blame” and “guilt”? Dhimmi does indeed mean “protected,” “guaranteed,” and “secured,” but the semantic connotations of the word pertain to “indebtedness” and “liability.” That’s according to the online Sakhr dictionary, which is not by any stretch of the imagination an “Islamophobic” publication — for example, it translates the word “Israel” into “a Jewish country set up on the Palestinian land.” So when it says that dhimmi has to do with guilt, it is not reflecting some anti-Muslim bias!

In any case, the Arabic root-word “Z-M-M” (from which “dhimmi” issues) means “the opposite of praise,” that is, to “censure,” “dispraise too much,” “blame,” “criticize,” “find fault with,” “accuse,” “obligate,” “hold liable,” “hold in bad conscience,” “accuse,” and “hold guilty,” etc. And that’s not a semantic connotation, that is the meaning, according to the Elias Modern Arabic Dictionary.

And then there is, of course, the experience that dhimmis and intended dhimmis have of dhimmitude. Ask Maher El-Gohary how “protected” he feels.

Maher El-Gohary Update: “Egyptian Convert Endures Life at a Standstill – on the Run,” from Compass Direct, May 25 (thanks to George):

CAIRO, Egypt, May 25 (CDN) — From the mosque across the street, words blasting from minaret megaphones reverberate throughout the tiny apartment where Maher Ahmad El-Mo’otahssem Bellah El-Gohary is forced to hide. Immediately following afternoon prayers, the Friday sermon is, in part, on how to deal with Christians.

“Do not shake their hands. Do not go into their homes. Do not eat their food,” an imam shouts as El-Gohary, a convert to Christianity from Islam, looks through his window toward the mosque, shakes his head and grimaces.

“I hope one day to live in a place where there are no mosques,” he says.

Then don’t go to Ground Zero, El-Gohary!

“How many megaphones do they need?”

For nearly two years, El-Gohary and his teenage daughter have been living in hiding because he abandoned Islam and embraced Christianity. During this time he has been beaten and forcibly detained, and his daughter has been attacked. He has had to endure death threats, poverty and crushing boredom.

Asked what gets him through the constant pressure of living on the run, El-Gohary said he wants to show the world how Christians are treated in Egypt.

“My main driving force is I want to prove to people the amount of persecution that Muslim converts and Christians face here, and that the persecution has been going on for 1,400 years,” he said….

There is much more. Read it all.

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Filed Under: dhimmitude, Egypt


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