“Renowned Western scholars of Islam such as Sir Hamilton
Gibb, William Montgomery Watt, Jacques Augustin Berque, Maxime Rodinson,
Marshall Hodgson, Rev. Kenneth Cragg, and the Georgetown duo John L. Esposito
and John O. Voll – to name just a few – have all either peddled the myth of
dhimmitude as tolerance, or downplayed its destructive effects on its
victims. Refreshing deconstructions of
such appeasement views have come recently from Bat Ye’or, Daniel Pipes, Robert
Spencer, George Weigel, and Ibn Warraq.”
-
Habib Malik, Associate
Professor of History, American Lebanese University, Islamism and the Future
of Christianity in the Middle East, p. 61
On my third day in Egypt, I asked my professor if Christians
in Egypt could be considered “persecuted.” He thought about it, and said, “Not
overtly. A rough analogy of
Christian-Muslim relations in Egypt would be to white-black relations in
America.”
Oh, I thought. That’s
not so bad.
In the intervening four years, my views on both the Middle
East and on race relations in America have shifted considerably. In short, I think my professor is right – and
that is pretty bad.
Needless to say, things in the Middle East have shifted
considerably as well in the past four years, and not to the advantage of the
region’s minorities.
A few weeks ago, I blogged
about a book on Middle Eastern history by Albert Hourani that I was reading, which posed the question
of why Christians living under Muslim rule declined from 90% of the population to
around 10%. His answer contained this
phrase: “Even in the best circumstances
the position of a minority is uneasy.” If you’re keeping track at home, that
makes no sense.
The actual answer to this question is the subject of some
debate.
A recent New York Times Review of Books piece about an exhibition of Islamic art at the Metropolitan Art Museum in New York sums up the position of one side of this debate quite nicely:
"This exhibition—along with the groundbreaking
scholarship that has gone into its catalog—has banished the melodramatic
tone with which the rise of Islam has usually been presented in
standard accounts of the period. We can now say with confidence that the
Arab armies did not leave a trail of desolation across the Middle East.
Local populations did not sink into poverty. Far from retreating into
the status of timorous minorities, vigorous Christian and Jewish
communities continued to maintain their own traditions largely
unmolested. ...Muslims
talked their way into the Middle East quite as much as they fought their
way across it."
(The same piece contains this remarkable passage: "In [one] room...we notice the
discreet censoring of the representation of a living creature on the
floor of a Christian church, out of respect for Muslim attitudes toward
art." Censoring art in a church out of respect for Muslim attitudes. Sounds like a peaceful relationship between equals!)
Bat Ye'or represents the other side of this debate.
I recently finished Bat Ye'or's The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam. Bat Ye'or is an Egyptian Jew who was forced to flee Egypt in 1957 during the anti-Jewish pogroms following the 1956 Egypt-Israel war. She has no academic degree and has never taught in a university.
Robert Benton Bretts accuses her of "selective scholarship," Johann Hari of The Independent calls her a "conspiracy theorist," Craig Smith of the New York Times calls her one "of the most extreme voices on the new Jewish right," and Israeli peace activist Adam Keller calls her "racist and inflammatory."
All of these quotes came from her page on a website called "Loonwatch."
So her work is somewhat contentious, and I approached it with a great deal of trepidation.
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