Dhimmitude is a neologism characterizing the status of non-Muslims under Muslim rule, popularized by the Egyptian-born British writer Bat Ye'or in the 1980s and 1990s. It is a portmanteau word constructed from the Arabic dhimmi 'non-Muslim living in an Islamic state' and the French (serv)itude 'subjection'.[1]
Bat Ye’or defines it as a permanent status of subjection in which Jews and Christians have been held under Islamic rule since the eighth century, and that forces them to accept discrimination or "face forced conversion, slavery or death". The term gained traction among Bosnian Serb forces during the Balkan wars in the 1990s and is popular among self-proclaimed counter-jihadi authors. Some scholars have dismissed it as polemical.[2]
The term was coined in 1982 by the President of Lebanon, Bachir Gemayel, in reference to attempts by the country's Muslim leadership to subordinate the native Lebanese Christian minority. In a speech of September 14, 1982 given at Dayr al-Salib in Lebanon, he said: "Lebanon is our homeland and will remain a homeland for Christians... We want to continue to christen, to celebrate our rites and traditions, our faith and our creed whenever we wish... Henceforth, we refuse to live in any dhimmitude!"[3]
The concept of "dhimmitude" was introduced into Western discourse by the writer Bat Ye'or in a French-language article published in the Italian journal in 1983.[4] In Bat Ye'or's use, "dhimmitude" refers to allegations of non-Muslims appeasing and surrendering to Muslims and discrimination against non-Muslims in Muslim majority regions.[5]
Ye'or further popularized the term in her books The Decline of Eastern Christianity[6] and the 2003 followup .[7] In a 2011 interview, she claimed to have indirectly inspired Gemayel's use of the term.[8]
The associations of the word "dhimmitude" vary between users:
This Islamizing innovation, one of many formative Arabic impacts on Jewish philosophy,[14] regarding servitude, apparent also in his language had little earlier basis in Jewish laws regarding residents in Israel (ger toshav). Noah Felodman and David Novak note that it bears a close parallel with what Islamic law requires of dhimmis, non-Muslims desiring to live unconverted in Islamic countries: "Maimonides here both borrows the Islamic legal model of subordinate status for tolerated peoples and turns it on its head by putting Jews on top and others below."[15] [16]
Robert Irwin's review stated that her book Islam and Dhimmitude confuses religious prescriptions with political expediency, is "relentlessly and one-sided polemical", "repetitive", "muddled", and poorly documented in terms of the original languages. Her book stretches from massacres of Jews from Muhammad's time to the poor press Israel receives in modern times. It is, he opined, a book even Israel's keenest supporters can do without. It denounces Christians for failing to back Jewish resistance to Muslim repression. Irwin thinks that the author is rankled by the failure of Palestinian Christian Arabs to assist Israel against their Muslim neighbours. He states that her facts are accurate but devoid of context: many ordinances for times of crisis had to be continually renewed and quickly fell into disuse. Both Jews and Christians often flourished, Irwin notes, under Muslim rule, and the laws of shari'a were frequently flouted. He cites Bernard Lewis's analysis of an anti-Jewish poem in terms of the envy of the writer for the fact Jews were doing rather well in the poet's milieu at that time, a point that concluded: "To the citizen of a liberal democracy, the status of dhimmi would no doubt be intolerable - but to many minorities in the world today, that status, with its autonomy and its limited yet recognized rights, might well seem enviable".[17]
Sidney H. Griffith, a historian of early Eastern Christianity, dismissed Bat Ye'or's dhimmitude as "polemical" and "lacking in historical method", while Michael Sells, a scholar of Islamic history and literature, describes the dhimmitude theory as nothing more than the "falsification" of history by an "ideologue".[2]
Mark R. Cohen, a leading scholar of the history of Jewish communities of medieval Islam, has criticized the term as misleading and Islamophobic.[18]
Bernard Lewis, Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, states,