Mark Durie Talk 4 Feb 2008

It is an honor to be speaking today in this company. I have had a connection with ICJS since the very beginnings of its activities, and am pleased to be able to speak today on Islam, and to present my book ‘The Third Choice: Islam, Dhimmitude and Freedom'.

You may be wondering why a Christian pastor is speaking about Islam at all.  Why not just invite a Muslim to speak on this subject?

Let me say, first of all, that I am not here to speak as a pastor, but rather as an expert on the subject of non-Muslims living under Islamic law.

Second, I am not speaking on Islam in and of itself, but VERY specifically, on the situation of non-Muslims under Islamic law.  This is who I am - a non-Muslim - and I contend that as a non-Muslim I have every right to discuss how Islam treats the human rights of non-Muslims.

Indeed I have family members whose ancestors lived for 1400 years under Islamic rule.

Third, I would point out that the Qur'an and Islam in general, has a great deal to say about non-Muslims.  Much of it is not flattering, to say the least.  Much of it can easily be interpreted as inciting of hatred towards non-Muslims.  For this reason, non-Muslims have EVERY right to study and speak about Islam, for themselves.  If their holy book says Christians should be fought against, or that they will burn in hell - that that is MY business, and I have every right to study it for myself, have my own opinions about it, and speak about it publicly.

Fourth, it must be understood that for Muslims, many aspects of their faith that are critical of non-Muslims are not issues they would want to bring up in conversation with non-Muslims.

Let me give you an example. Let me identify one problem for Jews and Christians in relation to Islam. The first chapter of the Quran, known as al-Fatihah, is very short.  It is incorporated into the compulsory daily prayers of Muslims, and a pious Muslim will recite this chapter 17 times a day in their prayers. Essentially this is a prayer for guidance. It includes these words (translated)

Show us the straight path, the path of those whom Thou hast favoured; not the (path) of those who earn Thine anger nor of those who go astray. (vv.6-7)

Now the question is - who are these people who deserve Allah's anger, or who have gone astray.

As it happens, Muhammad himself has given the answer - as every commentary on the Qur'an will confirm. Muhammad said:

‘Those who have earned the anger are the Jews and those who are led astray are the Christians.' 
(See http://www.tafsir.com/default.asp?sid=1&tid=523 ) 

These are the words of Muhammad himself.  He was referring to al-Fatihah.  Notice that the Arabic doesn't ACTUALLY say Jews and Christians, but a Muslim with training in Islam will know that this prayer refers to Jews as those who have earned Allah's wrath, and Christians as those who have gone astray.

17 times a day this is declared.  If you invite a Muslim imam to pray or recite the Qur'an in your church or synagogue, it is highly likely that his prayer or recitation will include al-Fatihah.

This al-Fatihah is a BIG issue in interfaith relations. I have known some people from a Muslim background who have said it is like cursing Jews and Christians 17 times a day. That is a strong way to put it, but at the very least it is not very nice. Is it really true that a billion people in the world are declaring 17 times a day that Jews are under the wrath of Allah?

My question to those involved in interfaith dialogue with Muslims is "Have Muslim ever raised this as a problem in their discussions with you?"

It is completely unreasonable to expect Muslims to take the lead in explaining such issues to non-Muslims. They will NOT take you to the commentaries on this passage. They cannot. It would be embarrassing, to say the least.  Again, I deliberately understate the matter.

The fact is, al-Fatihah is one of the biggest issues between Muslims and Jews and Christians. It is worse for Jews of course.  We Christians have gone astray, but the Jews are under the wrath of Allah.

That was my fourth point - Muslims are unlikely to bring up the really hard issues.  It is completely understandable.  It would be unfair to expect them to do so. And the problem is, there are a LOT of really hard issues.

There are other reasons why it is difficult for Muslims to talk about the subjects I am going to discuss tonight.

But we don't need to go there now. It's in the book.

My point is a very simple one - I am speaking out of knowledge that I have. It has been hard-won. People can take it or leave it.  Everything I say can be tested from reliable sources.

But I insist that as a non-Muslim I have every right to discuss the way in which Islam treats non-Muslims, specifically when that treatment is not good.

I mention this because I understand that a few people said they would not come tonight because they thought is inappropriate for a Christian to be speaking on Islam.  This is like saying that Australian Aboriginals should not speak on white racism, women should not speak on male sexism, and Jews can't discuss Christian anti-semitism.  It is preposterous.

But let me turn to the Three Choices? My book is called The Third Choice: Islam, Dhimmitude and Freedom.

What are the three choices, and why is this important for faith relations in the world today?

In 2006, when Pope Benedict gave his now famous Regensburg lecture, he quoted Emperor Manuel II Paleologus, who spoke of Muhammad's ‘command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.'

The pope's comments elicited a sharp reaction from Muslims all over the world.  Some lost their lives in these reactions.

One of the most interesting responses was from Sheikh ‘Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh, Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, who issued a press release stating that Islam was not spread by violence.  He argued that it is false to say Islam was spread by violence, because the infidels had a third choice. The first option was Islam, the second the sword, but the third was, as he put it, to ‘surrender and pay tax, and they will be allowed to remain in their land, observing their religion under the protection of Muslims.'

The Grand Mufti referred his readers to the example of Muhammad.  He said ‘Those who read the Quran and Sunnah can understand the facts.' 

I would like to speak about this third choice, to unpack it for you, but first, let me say a few things about Islam.  I want to speak about the Quran and the Sunnah - as the Grand Mufti said, that's where the facts are.

But before this, let me introduce a word to you.  This is a word beginning with f'. falah.  It means ‘success'.  A very important word in Islam.

In the Islamic world view, the problem with the world, with human beings in general, is that they lack guidance.  They are ignorant of what their master, Allah, wants of them.  If you read the Qur'an you will find the word ‘loser' cropping up a lot. If you are not rightly guided, you will be a loser.

But to those who are guided, Islam promises success - in this life and the next.  You will be one of the fa'zeen or ‘winners'.

That is Islam in a nutshell.  Ignorance, solved by guidance, leads to success.

The guidance is, of course, found in Muhammad.  It comes in two forms.  One is the Qur'an, the other is the Sunna, which refers to the teaching and example of Muhammad.  The Sunna is sort of the bedrock of Islamic law, combined with the Qur'an.  You can't have one without the other.  In fact the Qur'an again and again says that.  For example Sura 24:54 is:

Say: Obey Allah and obey the messenger. ... If ye obey him, ye will go aright.

Do what Muhammad says, and you will be on the right track.

What the religion of Islam has done is take the materials of the Quran and the Sunna - all the things Muhammad was said to have done and said, and turned them into rules and principles to live by.  This is known as Sharia, which literally means ‘way' or ‘road'. 

The Sharia is a set of rules and principle for every aspect of life.  Clothing, business, warfare, politics, good manners, sexual relations, family life, marriage, death - everything.  It is all based on the Example and Teaching of Muhammad.

Now one thing that is important about the Sharia is that the way it has been constructed by the great Islamic scholars, it assumes an Islamic society.  It is a set of rules for living in an Islamic state.  And included in those rules are principles for dealing with the conquered peoples of Islam - the non-Muslims who are living under Islamic law.  This is my subject tonight.

The condition of non-Muslims living under Islamic rule is determined by some key principles from the Quran.  One is that the Qur'an says that Muslims are the best people in creation, with a destiny to guide all mankind:

You are the best community that hath been raised up for mankind. You command right conduct and forbid indecency; and ye believe in Allah. (Sura 3:110)

Another is that it is the destiny of Islam to rule over all other religions.

He it is Who hath sent His messenger with the guidance and the religion of truth, that He may cause it to triumph over all religion. ... (Sura 48:28)

This is part of the success which Islam promise: dominance in this world.

Also, as regards Christians and Jews, it is important to understand that Islam teaches that Islam is the original religion.  Islam is the original religion, the religion of Moses, David, Solomon and Jesus. Christians (& Jews) are ‘People of the Book'.  This means they were given a book, but they have now gone astray - remember al-Fatihah: the Christians are astray.  This is SO important it is part of the daily prayers, 17 times a day.

But Muhammad was sent by Allah to call them back to their original religion, back to Islam.  And the Quran says that true believers will recognize Muhammad and follow him.

These are a few key theological points.

But now back to the three choices.

The doctrine of the three choices goes back to of Muhammad, who taught his followers:

"Fight in the name of Allah and in the way of Allah. Fight against those who disbelieve in Allah. ...  When you meet your enemies..., invite them to three courses of action. ...Invite them to (accept) Islam;
[1] if they respond to you, accept it from them and desist from fighting against them .... [3] If they refuse to accept Islam, demand from them the tribute. If they agree to pay, accept it from them and hold off your hands. [2] If they refuse to pay the tax, seek Allah's help and fight them."

The order of the choices is varied in different sources, but they are always the same:  Islam, the sword or surrender.

The question of whether Islam is to be spread by force is one of the core contested ideological issues of our day.

If the Grand Mufti is correct, and the key plank in the defense against this accusation is the third option of surrender to Islam rule, accepting life under the Sharia, then it is a matter of the greatest interest what this third choice entails. 

What does it mean to take the third choice?  My book The Third Choice: Islam, Dhimmitude and Freedom is devoted to answering this question.  This book analyses and explains the situation of non-Muslims living under Islamic law. 

Islamic tradition calls non-Muslims living under the political dominance of Muslims the dhimmis.  The conditions which sharia law determines for them are known as dhimmitude.

The story of the dhimmis, and of dhimmitude is, I believe, one of the most pressing political, social and spiritual issues facing the world today.

But one of the challenges, which I explain in my book, is that, despite the urgency of this question, the treatment of non-Muslims under Islamic rule is a subject which is steeped in silence and denial.

At the heart of the book is an analysis of the dhimma pact, or covenant of surrender, which in sharia law is the covenant or contract under which non-Muslims were considered to be living. 

It is an interesting quirk of history that the basic characteristics of the dhimma pact were established by Muhammad, when he conquered Jews in a place called Khaybar, in Arabia.  That, by the way, is why Hezbollah called their rockets which they were sending into Israel, Khaybar rockets.

In Islamic law, the dhimma pact treats non-Muslims as people whose lives would have been forfeit, if Muslims had not spared them.  This goes back to a pre-Muslim idea that if you conquered someone, and let them live, they owed you their head.  Conquered non-Muslims were understood to be in this category.

The annual jizya head tax, paid by dhimmis, to the Islamic state, is described in authoritative Islamic sources as a redemption paid by dhimmis in return for their life.  Muslim lexicographers defined jizya as:

"the tax that is taken from the free non-Muslim of a Muslim government whereby they ratify the compact [the dhimma pact] that ensures them protection, as though it were a compensation for their not being slain." (Lane)

At-Fayyish, 19^th C, Algeria explained this principle in his commentary of Chapter 9:29 of the Koran:

"It was said: it [jizya] is a satisfaction for their blood. It is said ‘X' has sufficed ..... to compensate for their not being slain. Its purpose is to substitute for the duties (wajib) of killing and of slavery.... It is for the benefit of Muslims."

Or, as William Eton explained, in 1799, in his compendious Survey of the Turkish Empire:

The very words of their formulary, given to the Christian subjects on their paying the capitation tax [jizya], import, that the sum of money received, is taken as compensation for being permitted to wear their heads that year.'

In researching this book I unearthed the powerful symbolism of the annual tax payment ritual - the jizya payment - which dhimmi males were required to undergo all over the Muslim world until modern times.  This payment ritual involved a blow on the neck, and in some versions, a form of ritual strangulation, signifying that the dhimmi is paying for his very life, rescuing his head by this tax.  I was able to find around 30 references to this ritual decapitation, from Morocco to Bukhara, from the 9^th to the 20^th centuries, from Muslim and non-Muslim sources alike.

Imagine if after the Normans conquered England, they required the Anglo-Saxons to line up on every village green each year, and redeem their heads, and as they hand over their tribute to the Normans they are ritually stabbed in the heart, to show they have escaped death through this tax.  This system, which would have begun in 1066, will need to run another 400 years before it reaches the time period which applied in Morocco, Damascus, or Baghdad.  This continued, for the Jews of Afghanistan, right up until the 1950's.

The dhimma system was designed to reduce the Christian and Jewish communities it dominated.  The 18^th century Moroccan commentator Ibn ‘Ajibah describes its purpose - in a passage unearthed, translated, and published for the first time in this book - as a killing of the soul:

"[The dhimmi] is commanded to put his soul, good fortune and desires to death.  Above all he should kill the love of life, leadership and honor. [The dhimmi] is to invert the longings of his soul, he is to load it down more heavily than it can bear until it it is completely submissive. Thereafter nothing will be unbearable for him. He will be indifferent to subjugation or might. Poverty and wealth will be the same to him; praise and insult will be the same; preventing and yielding will be the same; lost and found will be the same. Then, when all things are the same, it [the soul] will be submissive and yield willingly what it should give." Ibn ‘Ajibah (d.1809)

Al-Alusi, a 19^th century Iraqi commentator writes of ‘plundering the soul' of the dhimmi:

"But we know that enslaving them is permitted.  Whoever may be enslaved can also be subjected to jizya, ... because both [slavery and jizya] involve plundering his soul. The case of slavery is clear, because we all benefit from slaves. In the case of jizya, this is produced by the infidel from what he earns, and he lives on what he earns, so when he surrenders his earnings to Muslims, which is his reason [for being allowed] to live, this is ruled to be [equivalent to] taking away his soul." - al-Alusi (d.1854)

In essence, non-Muslims are regarded in classical Islamic law as people who owe their lives to their Muslim conquerors.  They are expected to adopt an attitude of gratitude and humble inferiority.  Indeed the commentators are quite explicit on this issue.

Many sharia regulations were designed to impose inferiority and vulnerability upon non-Muslims. For example:

• Witness of dhimmis not accepted in court
• Lower houses, not riding horses
• No means of self-defence; vulnerable to abuse
• No visible display of religion
• No criticism of Islam
• Dhimmis have to dress differently, and more poorly than Muslims (coloured patches, bells)

To support this point the jurists cited Muhammad:

"... I have been sent with a sword in my hand to command people to worship Allah and associate no partners with him. I command you to belittle and subjugate those who disobey me, for those who look alike are of the same."

This was all understood as a social and legal expression of being ‘brought low' (lit. made ‘small') (Sura 9:29)

It is, I argue, these twin expectations of gratitude and inferiority which are increasingly shaping contemporary geo-politics.    A good example was when President Obama spoke of what he called civilization's ‘debt to Islam'. Just as the dhimmi is meant to feel that he owes his life to his conquerors so the West  - indeed all of civilization - is supposed to feel endebted to Islam.

The key to this phenomenon lies in the dhimma.

I could mention many examples of this sense of indebtedness and inferiority, but let me tell you about David Khalili.

One of the many incidents which attracted my attention over the years was an art exhibition in Sydney, of Islamic Art.  The owner of this collection David Khalili is a Jew of Iranian extraction.  Now extremely wealthy, he devotes his life to promoting positive regard for Islam in the West. 

This is a remarkable thing, because the Iranian's treatment of Jews under the dhimma system was particularly cruel and oppressive. 

What most interested me about David Khalili were his statements about Islam and Muslims.  For example, he was asked whether his work to present Islamic art might help Muslims to understand that Jews are not inferior.  He responded ‘‘I don't think there is a question of the Jews being inferior. I don't think that has ever crossed any Muslim's mind."  He went on to say that:

Virtually one third of the Qur'an, Surat al-Baqarah [Q2], is in the praise of the two other religions, Judaism and Christianity. I don't think that's a question at all. I think the problem is ignorance amongst people, and I can say, on your program, that I believe that the biggest and the real weapon of mass destruction is ignorance. If people try to understand their culture, their religion, their way of life, then they started to respect each other.

What struck me about Khalili's statements, uttered to an Australian reporter, were that they were utterly and completely false. 

For example, Sura 2 (al-Baqarah) comprises 7% of the Quran, not a third. Far from being in praise of Christianity and Judaism, it largely consists of a long litany of retorts given to the Jews of Medina, as a kind of prologue to Muhammad's expulsion of them from the city, and genocidal attack on the final remaining tribe, the Bani Quraiza. Included  in Sura 2 is a verse which says that Allah changed some Jews into apes (Q2:65), and another which alleges that the Jews forged their scriptures (Q2:79), to name but a few of the very many anti-Jewish libels in this chapter. There is, it must be admitted, one verse which speaks positively of Jews.

Such events - of which I have collected many examples over the years - raise troubling questions. 

I am familiar from pastoral ministry with the denial of the battered woman, who praises her abusive partner despite all his cruelty to her.  The idea that victims praise their oppressors is hardly new. No-one can live without hope, and an abused person will characteristically shift blame to other parties, even to themselves, in the effort to make life bearable and not completely hopeless. Survivors of abuse MUST blame themselves, because it gives them hope, and a belief that they have some control over their situation. They defend and identify with their abuser, even as the abuse continues. 

I have seen that terror on the faces of abused women. They honestly believe that their husband's aggression is everyone else's fault.  The terror and shock comes at the point when they realize that the husband is the problem, and nothing they or anyone else has done, can justify the behaviour.  This is the point of sheer terror.  It is a point of realization which victims are schooled to avoid.  The denial, gratitude and expressions of inferiority help protect the victim from this point of realization.

I recently read a statement produced by Christians in the Middle East, who were protesting against Israel's occupation, and looking in hope to live in a multi-religious secular state encompassing what is now Israel and the Palestinian territories. It found it a very sad document. They are a captive people, schooled by a century of genocide and rising Islamist violence, to the point where they are imprisoned.

They were just like the abused woman. 

So The Third Choice is also concerned with the wounds to the souls of non-Muslims, and indeed of Muslims too, caused by centuries of such abuse.  I devote a whole chapter to analyzing the persecution of Christians in Muslim nations, arguing that in every particular it follows principles laid down in Islamic sacred law for the treatment of dhimmis.

There is a deep resistance in Western cultures to take theology seriously.  By and large we have forgotten how to apply theological constructs to everyday life. There is also a great fear of being intolerant.

But the West can no longer afford to lull itself to sleep by assuming that religions are essentially the same, that all gods are the same, that religion does not matter. 

Theological illiteracy is no solution to the problems caused by religious intolerance and hatred. We need the ability to think critically about faith, to analyse and understand its distinctive contributions. 

For this reason, one of the things I do in The Third Choice is made a case that faith matters, and it needs to be understood and interacted with on theological grounds, if we are to understand our world today.

This has been an incredibly hard book to write. It speaks of the most profound and deeply affecting themes of personal identity and spiritual history, as well as about geopolitics and the future destiny of nations.

PLEASE do not be like many who when faced with the kinds of information I offer in the book, refuse to engage with it, because THEY CANNOT IMAGINE A SOLUTION.

This is a terrible disease in the West - the laziness of the mind which refuses information it cannot ‘solve'. 

Our first challenge is to understand the problem.  I believe that if we do that, while retaining human compassion and respect for the dignity of all people, solutions will, in time come.  They will not be easy, but they will come.

I do commend The Third Choice to you.  It was written to challenge and transform people's world views.  I hope that no-one will think the same about world events after reading it.  It provides resources for linking up events and ideas of great importance in the world around you.  It offers a window into one of the great political and spiritual issues of our day.

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