The Pact of Umar, and the status of non-Muslims in Muslim lands

From domini.org, here is the text of the Pact of Umar, which spelled out exactly the "tolerance" granted (note the term "granted") to Christians (and Jews) in Muslim lands, and was the guideline for dhimmitude, the "pact of protection" Jews and Christians were bound to live under, or face death. It is commonly attributed to the second caliph, Umar ibn al-Khattab (reigned 634-644), but for a number of reasons that seems too early; it is more likely to be a product of the reign of Umar II (717-720), who was considered to be a pious and good caliph (unlike those other corrupt, impious Umayyad caliphs, the later Abbasid histories sniffed). Needless to say, he was not known for his tolerance and lassiez-faire attitudes! For that matter, his predecessor Umar I was infamous for his fanatical zeal for Islam and desire to destroy the unbelievers.

Herewith, the text:

In the name of God, the Merciful and Compassionate. This is a letter to the servant of God Umar, Commander of the Faithful, from the Christians of such-and-such a city. When you came against us, we asked you for safe-conduct (aman) for ourselves, our descendants, our property, and the people of our community, and we undertook the following obligations toward you:

We shall not build, in our cities or in their neighborhood, new monasteries, churches, convents, or monks' cells, nor shall we repair, by day or by night, such of them as fall in ruins or are situated in the quarters of the Muslims.

We shall keep our gates wide open for passersby and travelers. We shall give board and lodging to all Muslims who pass our way for three days.

We shall not give shelter in our churches or in our dwellings to any spy, nor hide him from the Muslims.

We shall not teach the Qur'an to our children.

We shall not manifest our religion publicly nor convert anyone to it. We shall not prevent any of our kin from entering Islam if they wish it.

We shall show respect toward the Muslims, and we shall rise from our seats when they wish to sit.

We shall not seek to resemble the Muslims by imitating any of their garments, the qalansuwa, the turban, footwear, or the parting of the hair. We shall not speak as they do, nor shall we adopt their kunyas [i.e. names starting with Abu ("father") or Umm ("mother")].

We shall not mount on saddles, nor shall we gird swords nor bear any kind of arms nor carry them on our persons.

We shall not engrave Arabic inscriptions on our seals.

We shall not sell fermented drinks.

We shall clip the fronts of our heads.

We shall always dress in the same way wherever we may be, and we shall bind the zunar round our waists.

We shall not display our crosses or our books in the roads or markets of the Muslims. We shall use only clappers in our churches very softly. We shall not raise our voices when following our dead. We shall not show lights on any of the roads of the Muslims or in their markets. We shall not bury our dead near the Muslims.

We shall not take slaves who have been allotted to Muslims.

We shall not build houses taller than the houses of the Muslims.

(When I brought the letter to Umar, may God be pleased with him, he added, "We shall not strike a Muslim.")

We accept these conditions for ourselves and for the people of our community, and in return we receive safe-conduct.

If we in any way violate these undertakings for which we ourselves stand surety, we forfeit our covenant [dhimma], and we become liable to the penalties for contumacy and sedition.

Umar ibn al-Khittab replied: Sign what they ask, but add two clauses and impose them in addition to those which they have undertaken. They are: "They shall not buy anyone made prisoner by the Muslims," and "Whoever strikes a Muslim with deliberate intent shall forfeit the protection of this pact."

This, boys and girls, is what is really meant when Muslims and Muslim apologists wax poetic about the vaunted tolerance of Islam. There are plenty of accounts (reproduced in books such as Bat Ye'or's The Dhimmi, as well as her other books) by Western travelers to the Ottoman Empire in the 1800s that report that Christians and Jews were still following the rules laid down in this document, such as having to wear distinctive clothes, not being able to openly practice their religion or fix their churches or synagogues, and being made to feel their humiliation and inferiority to the Muslims in every way, such as being shoved out of the middle of the street to walk at the muddy side of the road--the middle was only for Muslims. This is what Arabs insist that Jews now living in Israel would be happy living under in a Palestinian state. This is what Islamists really mean when they talk about how non-Muslims would be "tolerated" in an Islamic state, today! I'm not talking about whether it was/was not better than Christian Europe at that time, I'm talking about the fact that plenty of Muslims see this as a fair, reasonable example of "tolerance" today, in this day and age! This "tolerance" would consist of: not being forced to convert to Islam at the point of a sword, being judged by their own religious courts (no secular law here!), and that's about it.

I find the condition mentioned of non-Muslims not teaching their children the Qur'an to be rather interesting. Perhaps they wanted to avoid the spectacle of Christians and Jews trashing their holy book and beliefs. Even today, Muslim writers for a non-Muslim audience will very rarely tell the whole truth about exactly what is in Qur'an or Hadiths or Shari'ah, possibly because it might cause the non-Muslim to become disgusted with Islam; they just don't have the right attitude to really "understand" it correctly and so must be kept from the truth. (Bizarrely enough, I have found that generally the more a non-Muslim actually knows about Islam, Qur'an, Hadiths and Shari'ah, not whitewashed BS, the more they dislike and distrust Islam, unlike most other religions, where familiarity more often breeds closeness and understanding).

The condition of Jews and Christians not being too loud with their religious services and not being allowed to offend Muslim sensibilites, as well as the prohibition of building new churches or fixing old ones, really gives the lie to the "freedom of religion" claimed by Muslims and Muslim apologists (which just means the right not to be slaughtered and/or forced to convert to Islam, in this usage). There is an incident described in Ibn Battuta's Rihla, the book describing his travels, that demonstrates the attitude of Muslims towards non-Muslim practices very well. While traveling through Kaffa, in what is now the Crimea in Russia, he heard the church bells begin to ring. Alarmed, Ibn Battuta hurried to the minaret of the nearest mosque and began chanting the Qur'an and call to prayer in an effort to drown out the satanic clamor, which was not allowed in Muslim lands. Eventually the local Muslims persuaded him to come off his high horse--or rather, tower. In another incident, while at a Turkish court he loudly denounced a Jewish physician who had a high rank for daring to seat himself above the Qur'an readers. Non-Muslims had to know their place, after all.

In addition to the conditions described above, the testimony of a non-Muslim was not allowed in a Muslim shari'ah court, so if a Jew or Christian had a case against a Muslim, he would have to get Muslim witnesses, since his own testimony was disallowed (on the grounds since that he had rejected Islam, the self-evident truth itself, and since the Jews and Christians had falsified their scriptures, everything he said and did was suspect). They also had to pay the jizya tax, prescribed in the Qur'an itself (9:29) and which proved a sizeable source of income for the state, to the point where the rulers often did not want too many people converting to Islam, for fear they would loose too much money in jizya revenues! This tax could be backbreakingly high, serving as a "persuasive reason" to convert to Islam (the claim that Islam did not "force" people to convert is disingenious at best; not only were there quite a few cases of forced conversions, all the conditions and restrictions certainly made life inordinately difficult for those who didn't convert to Islam, and were a direct cause of the eventual conversion of most of the Middle East, which had formerly been mostly Christian, to Islam). Sometimes Jews and Christians would not be allowed to stand in the rain, as they were najjas, "filthy," and would contaminate the rainwater (even today some Shi'a Muslims will wash a dish or glass used by a non-Muslim seven times, once with water mixed with dirt, as they would to something licked by a dog, to remove the impure filth left by the kafir). There were countless other ways to make the non-Muslims know their place in Muslim society--at the bottom (except maybe for the slaves and women of all religions).

Traditionally, if Jews or Christians tried in any way to improve their situation, they were often claimed to be in breach of the dhimma pact, which meant that their lives and property were fair game for Muslims. Nevertheless, sometimes a select few Jews and Christians would rise to high rank in the government (though typically as an advisor, as opposed to someone wielding official power, which was reserved for Muslims). They were much like the "court Jews" in Europe, who were honored and became wealthy while the vast majority of their coreligionists lived in poverty and squalor. Sometimes, if the populace felt that a Jew or Christian was too high up in the state hierarchy, they would riot against the group in question, such as the 1066 riots in Granada against the Jews, sparked by the murder of Joseph ibn Nagrela, a Jew who served as vizier to the ruler, in which the entire Jewish population of Granada was massacred. When Europeans began to trade and travel extensively in the Middle East in the 18th and 19th centuries, Muslims fumed at the "special protection" (meaning being treated better than canine manure) Western Jews and Christians often demanded and got for their Eastern co-religionists as the price of doing business. And it should be noted that, according to traditional Islamic law, the Jews who eventually threw off Muslim rule and founded the state of Israel would be considered to be in breach of the dhimma contract, meaning that they could be killed at will. Such a nice, tolerant doctrine, don't you think?

It must be noted that conditions changed depending on place and time, usually at the whim of the ruler, some of whom were much more tolerant than others, although the ones considered to be "good" by the religious leaders were usually fanatical zealots vis-a-vis the kafir peoples living in their lands. For example, in India, the Mughal ruler Akbar the Great (ruled 1556 to 1605) was held in high esteem by Hindus for his tolerance of unorthodox religious views, even going so far as to start his own religion, and for his abolishment of the jizya tax on Hindus, but he was savaged by the ulema as a heretic. Later, Aurangezeb (ruled 1658 to 1707) was held in high regard by Muslims, who saw him as a real warrior and defender of the faith, while Hindus shuddered, and still do, at his unrelieved brutality, slaughtering thousands of Hindus and demolishing their temples, building mosques on their sites. And anyway, would you find it tolerable to have your most fundamental rights at the mercy of the ruler of the day, whose opinions might change at any time? There's a reason that human rights are today considered universal and inviolate, not subject to whoever happens to be ruling at the time (at least in theory, anyway; reality is often less pleasant, but at least it's a start).

Note that the preceeding discussion typically only applied to Jews and Christians, with some Zoroastrians sometimes thrown in. Those not of the "people of the Book" were typically offered the choice between Islam and death, as prescribed by three of the four Sunni schools of law. The fourth, Hanafi, says that those of any religion may live as dhimmis. This was the school followed in India, and the main reason it was adopted seems to have been because there were just too many Hindus to kill (even today, Hindus make up 80% of the population of India, roughly 800 million people). Buddhists and Buddhism, being pacifist, were utterly destroyed in the lands conquered by Islam, and Sikh gurus were tortured and killed by Indian Muslim rulers, as were their followers. And then there is Iran's treatment of Baha'is and Pakistan's treatment of Ahmadis, both considered heresies from Islam in that they follow "new" prophets that came after the absolute final prophet, Muhammad, and so are not granted any freedom of religion, instead often being persecuted.

Though in many Islamic countries the status of non-Muslims is not quite as dim as it was in the past, that is due to the adoption of Western codes of law including equal citizenship for those of all religions. And even so, the position of non-Muslims is often quite unhappy, such as with the Copts in Egypt, who are discriminated against and treated poorly by the government, the Armenians who were massacred by the Turks during WWI, the Jews run out of Arab countries after the foundation of Israel, many with nothing but the clothes on their backs, the precarious situation of Christians in Lebanon, the special rights given to the 52% of Malaysians who are Muslim and denied to non-Muslims, and so on. Many Muslim countries have no problem with religious minorities because said minorities no longer exist--Turkey is now 99% Muslim, Pakistan is close to it, North Africa has hardly any Jews or Christians left, and so on.

Eventually this record must be at least acknowledged by Muslims and condemned, instead of extolling how Muslims were exceedingly tolerant, respectful, and kind to non-Muslims in a fantastically rosy version of Islamic history, where the lands of Islam were not only more tolerant than Europe during the Middle Ages and the Inquisition, but the status of non-Muslims in Muslim lands compares very well with the status of religious minorities in modern states today, where those of all religions or none have the same rights and are equal citizens! (Can you say "delusional"?) Many even claim that the Jews were/would be happier under "tolerant, enlightened" Muslim rule than under their own rule in the state of Israel! Nothing will change as long as this shameful record and the sufferings of non-Muslims under Muslim rule are honestly acknowledged, instead of constantly changing the subject to European intolerance and the Spanish Inquisition. At the very least, there needs to be some sort of statement like, "That was then, it was a cruel age and they didn't know any better, and this is now, and we know better now." If that is done, then perhaps there can be the start of understanding and honest discussion between Muslims and their victims, though I have to say I'm not overly optimistic, given what I've seen and read from Muslims, who are more likely to fret about discrimination against Muslim minorities than give a thought to the discrimination against non-Muslims under Muslim rule. Perhaps someday more Muslims will eventually be mature enough to be able to acknowledge the sufferings of others at Muslim hands.

(This topic always puts me in a particularly bad mood, because I have yet to see a Muslim really acknowledge this problem; instead it's all deny, deny, deny, with Muslims, of course, cast as the "true" victims, no matter what was done to others. It's yet another example of the "double standards" problem. And the non-Muslim apologists are the worst, especially considering how their own co-religionists were treated under Islam, and how they themselves would be treated in an Islamic state--unless they converted to save their own skins.)

Kilder:

http://disaffectedmuslim.blogspot.com/2003_05_11_disaffectedmuslim_archive.html

http://www.domini.org/openbook/umar.htm