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Raymond Ibrahim: Islamic Jizya: Fact and Fiction

May 29, 2015 3:39 am By Raymond Ibrahim

The Return of Jizya

Muslim demands for non-Muslim “infidels” to pay jizya on pain of death are growing, even as the West fluctuates between having no clue what jizya is and thinking that jizya is an example of “tolerance” in Islam.

In the video where the Islamic State slaughters some 30 Christian Ethiopians in Libya last April, the spokesman repeatedly pointed out that payment of jizya (which the impoverished Ethiopian migrant workers could not render, nor the 21 Copts before them) is the only way for Christians around the world to safeguard their lives:

But whoever refuses [to pay jizya] will see nothing from us but the edge of a spear. The men will be killed and the children will be enslaved, and their wealth will be taken as booty. This is the judgment of Allah and His Messenger.

When the Islamic State invaded ancient Christian regions around the Ninevah Plain last June,  it again declared: “We offer them [Assyrian Christians] three choices: Islam; the dhimma contract—involving payment of jizya; if they refuse this they will have nothing but the sword.”

The Islamic State—which most Western politicians ludicrously insist “has nothing to do with Islam”—is not alone in calling for jizya from Christian “infidels.”  In 2002, Saudi Sheikh Muhammad bin Abdul Rahman, discussing the Muslim prophet’s prediction that Islam will eventually conquer Rome, said, “We will control the land of the Vatican; we will control Rome and introduce Islam in it. Yes, the Christians . . . will yet pay us the jizya, in humiliation, or they will convert to Islam.”

And in a video recently posted, Sheik ‘Issam Amira appears giving a sermon in Al Aqsa Mosque where he laments that too many Muslims think jihad is only for defense against aggressors, when in fact Muslims are also obligated to wage offensive jihad against non-Muslims:

When you face your pagan enemy, call them—either to Islam, jizya, or seek Allah’s help and fight them.  Even if they do not fight [or initiate hostilities], fight them!… Fight them!  When?  When they fight you?  No, when they refuse to convert to Islam or refuse to pay jizya….  Whether they like it or not, we will subjugate them to Allah’s authority.

In short, if the Islamic State is enforcing jizya on “infidels,” demands for its return are on the increase all around the Muslim world.  Put differently, if Abu Shadi, an Egyptian Salfi leader, once declared that Egypt’s Christians “must either convert to Islam, pay jizya, or prepare for war,” Dr. Amani Tawfiq, a female professor at Egypt’s Mansoura University, once said that “If Egypt wants to slowly but surely get out of its economic situation and address poverty in the country, the jizya has to be imposed on the Copts.”

The Doctrine and History of Jizya

So what exactly is jizya?

The word jizya appears in Koran 9:29, in an injunction that should be familiar by now: “Fight those among the People of the Book [Christians and Jews] who do not believe in Allah nor the Last Day, nor forbid what Allah and his Messenger have forbidden, nor embrace the religion of truth, until they pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued (emphasis added).”

In the hadith, the Messenger of Allah, Muhammad, regularly calls on Muslims to demand jizya of non-Muslims:  “If they refuse to accept Islam, demand from them the jizya. If they agree to pay, accept it from them and hold off your hands. If they refuse to pay jizya, seek Allah’s help and fight them.”

The second “righteous caliph,” Omar al-Khattab, reportedly said that any conquered “infidel” who refuses to convert to Islam “must pay the jizya out of humiliation and lowliness. If they refuse this, it is the sword without leniency.”

This theme of non-Muslim degradation appears regularly in the commentaries of Islam’s authorities.  According to the Medieval Islamic Civilization Encyclopedia, Muslim “jurists came to view certain repressive and humiliating aspects of dhimma as de rigueur. Dhimmis [subjugated non-Muslim Christians and Jews] were required to pay the jizya publicly, in broad daylight, with hands turned palm upward, and to receive a smart smack on the forehead or the nape of the neck from the collection officer.”

Some of Islam’s jurists mandated a number of other humiliating rituals at the time of jizya payment, including that the presiding Muslim official slap, choke, and in some cases pull the beard of the paying dhimmi, who might even be required to approach the official on all fours, in bestial fashion.

The root meaning of the Arabic word “jizya” is simply to “repay” or “recompense,” basically to “compensate” for something.  According to the Hans Wehr Dictionary, the standard Arabic-English dictionary, jizya is something that “takes the place” of something else, or “serves instead.”

Simply put, conquered non-Muslims were to purchase their lives, which were otherwise forfeit to their Muslim conquerors, with money. Instead of taking their lives, they took their money.  As one medieval jurist succinctly put it, “their lives and their possessions are only protected by reason of payment of jizya.”

Past and increasingly present, Muslims profited immensely by exacting jizya from conquered peoples.

For instance, Amr bin al-As, the companion of Muhammad who conquered Christian Egypt in the early 640s, tortured and killed any Christian Copt who tried to conceal his wealth. When a Copt inquired of him, “How much jizya are we to pay?” the Islamic hero replied, “If you give me all that you own—from the ground to the ceiling—I will not tell you how much you owe. Instead, you [the Christian Copts] are our treasure chest, so that, if we are in need, you will be in need, and if things are easy for us, they will be easy for you.”

Yet even that was not enough. Caliph Uthman later chided Amr bin al-As because another governor of Egypt had managed to increase the caliphate’s treasury double what Amr had. In the words of Uthman, the “milk camels [Egypt’s Christians, that is] . . . yielded more milk.”  Years later, yet another caliph, Suliman Abdul Malik, wrote to the governor of Egypt advising him “to milk the camel until it gives no more milk, and until it milks blood.”… Keep reading

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Filed Under: dhimmitude, Islamic supremacism Tagged With: dhimma, jizya


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Comments

  1. Angemon says

    May 29, 2015 at 5:25 am

    Great article. It should be required reading for Western “analysts” and counter-terrorism “experts”.

    • Shane says

      May 30, 2015 at 10:32 am

      They are “wilfully ignorant” about jihad, jiyza, and taqiyya. They do not want to admit that Islam is a religion of war. Three Quran Verses Every Christian Should Know: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5Nu6EabQD8

  2. Don McKellar says

    May 29, 2015 at 9:15 am

    I agree with Angemon.

    It’s pretty clear to me that if only there would be some basic education about Islam — and all it would have to be would be a series of succinct articles like this one that are easy to digest and understand — the world would literally be better off. Foreign policy of nations would change dramatically because they would actually know where moslems are coming from in their actions and attitudes. And because there is almost NO ORIGINAL THINKING for Islamic supremacists, and everything they do falls into the pattern laid out for them under sharia law, predicting their actions in nearly every situation becomes relatively easy and, provided there is the political will to do so, defeating them would be relatively easy.

    I mean look at Jihad Watch for example. Learned writers like Robert Spencer and Raymond Ibrahim (and others) are always a couple of steps ahead of Islamic supremacists on nearly every news story. They successfully predict what the moslems are going to say, what they are going to try and do, and the outcome of any attempt to foolishly appease them or have dialogue with them. As I’ve said before, it’s like they’re psychics. If American foreign policy were shaped by such clear understanding, backed up by political will, it would be a remarkable success. Billions of dollars would be saved, thousands of lives spared, jihadis powered down and on the run, and the world a dramatically safer place for civilized people.

  3. TheBuffster says

    May 29, 2015 at 9:25 am

    It’s a nightmare.

    • mortimer says

      May 29, 2015 at 9:43 am

      It’s the insertion stage. When they are numerically stronger, they will demand funding for Islamic programs, thus breaking the ‘no-establishment’ clause.

      Preferential hiring will destroy the US and lead to a hidden form of jizzya.

      • Birdddog says

        May 30, 2015 at 8:03 am

        Climate Change = Hidden form of jizya.

  4. mortimer says

    May 29, 2015 at 9:36 am

    NO ONE wants these supremacists in the West. It’s a small group of cultural Marxists who are controlling immigration. The people need to tell the politicians that we DON’T WANT MORE SUPREMACISTS in the West.

  5. ManchesterLad says

    May 29, 2015 at 1:15 pm

    NO ONE wants these supremacists in the West.

    If only this were true! The trouble is that the left control the media, education and most tiers of government and they give the population nothing but endless propaganda that this is what they want!

    The people are so brainwashed into thinking that if they oppose, or question the wonderful multi-culturalism that has been imposed on us, then they are racist scum – which is the worst thing in the lefty book of nasty-things-to-be.

    I agree though, education is the key to spreading information about Islam. They get none from the UK media or education system.

  6. Jerry says

    May 29, 2015 at 6:38 pm

    Why don’t the Israelis stop the genocidal sermons at Al Aksa?

  7. FredvanH says

    May 29, 2015 at 6:54 pm

    We Europeans have been paying the jizya, in never ending welfare handouts and allowances of all kinds, for the longest time. Our governments know they are obliged to be generous: not doing so would result in unmanageable levels of criminality and violence in the public sphere, such that the resulting anarchy would make a normal functioning of society radically impossible. The other option would be to let the chips fall where they may, and let things come to a head. But they can’t clamp down on those poor helpless muslims, now can they. That would be racist, bigoted and xenophobic.

  8. Michelle Wayne says

    May 30, 2015 at 12:16 am

    We all pay them Jizya when we pay them Welfare and the multiple wives and children support and home name of it is”single mothers pension”

    • bernie says

      May 30, 2015 at 3:32 am

      “We have to impose jizyah if we want to address poverty and other problems in Egypt.”

      Actually, it’s the religious and ethnic bigotry behind the common Wahabist interpretation of Islam which is behind most of Egypt’s woes in the first place!

  9. Celtic says

    May 30, 2015 at 6:54 am

    This article is brilliant and indeed gives great insight into the reason why most muslim countries – the ones without oil, are poor: Because the main source of wealth in previous centuries was plunder, slavery and taxing the Dhimmis.

    • bernie says

      May 30, 2015 at 10:52 pm

      Celtic: that’s exactly right. Those sources of wealth by nature discourage a strong work ethnic, honesty, innovation and so forth. There are of course exceptions: for example, Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey; however, as the book “The World Is Flat” (Friedman) points out, those tend to be the more secular Muslim nations. Moreover, as JW has been correctly mentioning, even those 3 countries along with Indonesia are starting to slip back into extremist fundmentalism in some quarters.

    • bernie says

      May 30, 2015 at 11:03 pm

      This article also reminded me of something else; years ago, I read a different article which talked about the decline of Spain in the 17th Century. In the prior century (the 1500s), the main source of wealth for Spain was the plunder of the Aztecs and the Incas, and the theft of their gold and silver. However, by the 1600s (and following the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588) the gravy train had started to dry up, and Spain was confronted by much more industrious, productive and innovative powers such as Britain, France and the Netherlands. Spain had begun to liberalize in government and religion just before the disaster of the Napoleonic invasion in the early 1800’s, but it wasn’t until after the Spanish Civil War and the fascist-like rule of General Franco that they finally became modernized and democratic, in the late 20th Century.

  10. Awani Kumar says

    May 30, 2015 at 9:35 am

    By and large, Jizya was levied on non-Muslims in India since the advent of Islam here in 8th century. It came to an end with the decline and fall of Mughal empire in 18th century.Some believe, Jizya is still here in the guise of Haj subsidy. Although Jaziya was in India (which ones included present day Pakistan, Bangladesh and some part of Afghanistan) for almost 1000 years, there is hardly any mention of its details in history textbooks. There is no book in India which covers Jaziya even in a paragraph. This is the price one has to pay for political correctness.

    I request scholars from Europe and America to study Jizya in India in detail. Indian historians can do so but are too scared to touch such a topic.

    Regards,

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