Marked for Death: Islam's War Against the West and Me (16 page)

Some of the classic restrictions against dhimmis were outlined in the seventh-century “Pact of Umar,” in which Caliph Umar demanded that Syrian Christians meet numerous conditions in exchange for his “protection.”
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One of these conditions was a ban on renovating churches—if their churches collapsed, Christians were not allowed to rebuild them. The Pact of Umar is reproduced on various Islamic websites today and is still taken seriously by some.
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Notably, on September 30, 2011, after attending Friday prayers at local mosques in the village of Elmarinab, Egypt, an Islamic mob destroyed St. George’s church because it was being renovated.
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Having faced harsh discrimination ever since the seventh-century Islamic conquest, Jewish communities in the Middle East were all but wiped out after World War II. Christians have fared slightly better under Islam, but not by much; until the end of the eleventh century, half the Christians in the world lived under Islamic rule.
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Christians remained a majority in Egypt and Syria until the thirteenth century, but now they’re a small minority in both countries. In Turkey, 30 percent of the population was still Christian in the early 1900s, but that community was devastated when the Turks massacred 1.5 million Armenians in the genocide of 1915, expelled 1.5 million more from Asia Minor in the early 1920s, and chased out 130,000 from Istanbul through the anti-Greek pogrom of 1955. In Iraq, the Christian population has shrunk from 2.5 million to 1.5 million just in the last decade due to violent attacks and intimidation by Islamic terrorists.
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Whenever Islam becomes empowered, the non-Muslim population suffers. That’s something to keep in mind as Islam relentlessly expands throughout the West.

The
jizya
was not the only—or even the worst—dhimmi tax. In the Balkans and in Greece, the Ottoman Turks levied a blood tax, the so-called
devshirme,
or boy tribute. Every three years an Ottoman tribute officer visited Christian villages to select the strongest and smartest male children. The most talented and promising boys were forcibly taken from their families, converted to Islam, and enrolled for service in the administration of the Ottoman Empire. Other times they were conscripted into the army, where they formed the Janissary regiments that were used to subdue the communities from which the boys were stolen.

Janissaries were allowed to marry. Since no one who was born Muslim could be enslaved, however, their own sons were barred from joining the regiments, which constantly had to be replenished with new slave boys. As a result, the boy tribute forced Christian communities such as the Balkan Slavs, Albanians, and Greeks to surrender about one-fifth of their own sons. A dhimmi family could only prevent the theft of its sons by converting to Islam.

“The boy tribute fulfilled the logic of an empire geared for war,” writes historian Jason Goodwin. “Just as war booty financed the next assault, so the borderlands could be made to furnish the men who, being raised to perfection in the capital, were turned out again to rule the empire and to expand the frontiers of the state.”
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Although the Ottomans put their own stamp on this system, the basic practice was not their invention; Islamic nations used slave armies from the ninth century until as late as the mid-1800s. In 1863, Mohammed Said Pasha, the Ottoman viceroy of Egypt, sent an army of Sudanese slaves to Mexico at the behest of French Emperor Napoleon III.
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As the number of tax-paying dhimmis dropped, slavery became crucial to the Caliphate’s economy. Here, too, a continuous supply of new slaves was needed because, like the Janissaries, the slaves were forcibly converted to Islam, meaning their children were born Muslims and could not be enslaved. In most cases, however, Muslims ensured their slaves had no children by castrating them. The Janissaries were spared this fate because the Ottomans believed castration weakened their fighting ability.

Tropical Africa was the principal area for procuring the Caliphate’s slaves. Muslims dominated that continent’s slave trade, including in West Africa, where Muslims sold slaves to Europeans who shipped them to the Americas.
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By contrast, in Western Europe, with the exception of Islam-occupied Spain, slavery had largely disappeared by the end of the fifteenth century. The re-conquest of Spain, however, reacquainted Europeans with the wretched institution.
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In the following decades and centuries, as the Spaniards, followed by other European nations, began to colonize the New World, they shipped millions of African slaves across the Atlantic Ocean. Most of these slaves were purchased from Arab raiders in West Africa.
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The bulk of Africa’s slaves was sent to the Islamic world. In the ninth century, half the population of lower Iraq consisted of
Zanj,
or black slaves. They worked in saltpeter mines around Basra and on sugar cane plantations in the marshlands of the Tigris and Euphrates delta. The largest slave rebellion in history happened in southern Iraq between 868 and 883. Involving over 500,000 black slaves, the revolt lasted fifteen years until it was finally suppressed by large Arab armies. Unlike the rebellion of Spartacus, which involved a comparatively small group of 120,000 slaves and took the Roman Empire just three years to subdue, the massive Zanj Rebellion against the Abbasid Caliphate has not attracted the attention of Hollywood, though it is a tale of great sacrifice and heroism.

Today, nearly two million of Iraq’s 27 million people are blacks. Widely overlooked by the international media, they have hardly any political representation, suffer severe job discrimination, and are reportedly forced to sit in the back of school classrooms and banned from marrying Arab girls. They say they are “still seen as slaves,”
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and some even claim that sheiks still keep blacks as slaves today.
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When Barack Obama was elected president, this oppressed minority hoped he would speak out on their behalf.
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In his Cairo speech, however, Obama only referenced the past oppression of American blacks, not the current oppression of blacks in the Islamic world.

American author Thomas Sowell, himself a descendant of slaves, notes an interesting anomaly: “Although the Islamic countries of the Middle East and North Africa imported more slaves from sub-Saharan Africa than did the European off-shoot nations of the Western Hemisphere, there are in those Moslem countries today no such large, discrete and self-conscious groups of black African descent as the 60 million Negroes currently living in the Western Hemisphere.” He explains, “What is known, is that there was an extremely low reproduction rate among the Africans enslaved in the Moslem countries.”
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This was largely because Islamic slave masters suppressed both marriage and sex among slaves.
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They also castrated hundreds of thousands of black boys and men in a gruesome procedure that killed an estimated 90 percent of those subjected to it. In this operation, a slave’s testicles and penis were swept off with a single cut of a sickle; a tin or wooden spigot was set in the urethra; and the wound was cauterized with boiling oil and bandaged. Unable to relieve himself, the victim suffered intense pain for three days before the bandage and spigot were removed. If the sufferer could then relieve himself, he was typically out of danger; if he could not, he was usually doomed to an agonizing death from a burst bladder.
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This kind of male genital mutilation was confined to slaves. In contrast, female genital mutilation (sometimes called FGM, cliterodectomy, or female circumcision) was—and still is—widely performed on Muslim girls. The procedure, which involves cutting out the clitoris, was sanctioned by Muhammad, though he thoughtfully ordered Muslims not to cut off the
whole
clitoris. “Do not cut severely as that is better for a woman and more desirable for a husband,” he said.
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Eunuchs brought far higher prices than other slaves in the Caliphate. The tenth-century court of the Caliph in Baghdad included 7,000 black eunuchs and 4,000 white ones.
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Because the blacks were “clean-shaven,” meaning they lacked all genitalia, they served in the harem. The whites, who had their testicles removed but retained their penis, served in the administration or in other places away from women. Thus, most of the key elements of the Caliphate, from its finances to its economy to its military to its governmental administration, relied on slavery.

The cruel fate of many blacks in the Caliphate was connected to the inveterate racism that has always run deep in Islamic societies. This was demonstrated in the writings of many Islamic historians. For example, Al-Masudi (896-956), one of early Islam’s pioneering historians, wrote that Sudanese have “kinky hair, thin eyebrows, broad noses, thick lips, sharp teeth, malodorous skin, dark pupils, clefty hands and feet, elongated penises and excessive merriment.... Surely the dark complexion person is overwhelmed by merriment due to the imperfection of his brain; therefore, his intellect is weak.”
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Similarly, Ibn Qutayba (828-89), a renowned Islamic scholar from Baghdad, argued that blacks “are ugly and misshapen, because they live in a hot country. The heat overcooks them in the womb.” (Qutayba contrasted blacks with Europeans, who he claimed “are undercooked in the womb.”)
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Persian philosopher Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (1201-74) remarked that “the ape is more teachable and more intelligent than the Zanji [blacks].” Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) from Tunis, widely considered the greatest Islamic scholar of all time, wrote that “the Negro nations are, as a rule, submissive to slavery because [Negroes]... are quite similar to... dumb animals.”
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The
Umma
took white slaves, too, who were stolen by Islamic pirates from ships in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. This included 130 American seamen seized in the Atlantic between 1785 and 1793. They also raided European coastal areas, depopulating towns from Sicily to Cornwall.
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One notorious seventeenth-century Islamic pirate was Murad Reis. Previously known as Jan Jansen van Haarlem, Reis was a Dutch sailor, born in Haarlem near Amsterdam, who had been captured by the Barbary pirates. He subsequently converted to Islam and became a steersman of Sulayman Reis, another Dutchman who had converted to Islam and become a Barbary pirate. Sulayman began his career as a corsair under yet another Dutch pirate who worked for the Bey of Algiers.
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In July 1627, Murad Reis raided Iceland and kidnapped 242 men, women, and children. On the way back, he captured a Dutch vessel and seized more unfortunates destined for servitude in the Islamic world. On June 20, 1631, Reis and his crew of Dutch, Algerian, and Turkish pirates attacked the village of Baltimore on the southwest coast of Ireland, where they captured 108 people.
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The event was memorialized in the poem “The Sack of Baltimore” by the early nineteenth-century Irish poet Thomas Osborne Davis, who wrote,

The yell of “Allah!” breaks above the prayer, and shriek, and roar: O blessed God! the Algerine is lord of Baltimore!
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