Caravan raids yielded Islamic upshoot

Here’s a clever graph and piece from Citizen Warrior last summer which makes some very good points.  It concludes that we should be buying flex fuels.  That certainly wouldn’t hurt, but in the U.S., voting for candidates who would expand domestic oil drilling would do more to decrease our Middle East oil dependence more rapidly.

The Key to Jihad is Money

MONEY IS THE POWER behind jihad. This has been the case since Muhammad began his raids on caravans. Look at the graph below. Before Muslims started gaining plunder, their numbers hardly increased for 13 years. Once the money started coming in, Islam’s success rate skyrocketed.

Plunder from raids was only part of the cash flow. They also confiscated goods from the Jews they expelled from Medina (and the Jews they slaughtered, taking their women and children as slaves).

The other very crucial part of the Islamic cash flow was the jizya they took from the dhimmis.

All of these forms of income were parasitical. They took wealth from non-Muslims and added it to the cause of Islam.

And it is happening today. The non-Muslims of the world paid OPEC nations three and a half TRILLION dollars last year. That number should make you sit down to catch your breath. It is a literally incomprehensible sum of money. Much of it is now in the hands of orthodox Muslims.

Just like the use of jizya in Muhammad’s time, orthodox Muslims drain the wealth of non-Muslims, keeping them weak and struggling, while strengthening and enriching Islam’s prime directive.

The world is now in a severe and prolonged recession. Why? We’re paying a rapidly growing percentage of our income to Islam.

Do you want this to stop? We need to all become flex fuel fanatics. Petroleum must get competition. It must get so much competition that its strategic status is reduced to just an ordinary commodity like any other (rather than the indispensable commodity everyone must have). This can be done. It MUST be done if we have a hope of stopping the third jihad from succeeding. The key to jihad is money. The key to stopping jihad is stopping the money.

Allah requested loan, offered interest

The Koran, Sura 57 (“Iron”), Verse 11 says “Who is he that will lend a generous loan to God?”  The verse continues by assuring that Allah will “double it” as repayment to the lender.

Several passages of the Koran parallel this verse.  From a theological standpoint, it is curious that an all-powerful god would request a loan from the people he created.  An outsider could wonder, as did some of the Jews in Arabia during the time of Muhammad, if “Allah is poor and we are rich.”

But Abu Bakr, Muhammad’s best friend and himself a rich man, did not like being confronted with the possibility of Allah’s state of financial dependence or the verse from the Koran which suggested it.  Here’s the story of the Jewish rabbi Finhas, who resisted Abu Bakr’s appeals by saying:

“We have no need of Allah, but He has need of us! We do not beseech Him as He beseeches us. We are independent of Him, but He is not independent of us. If He were independent of us, He would not ask for our money as your master Muhammad does [for a war against Mecca]. He forbids usury to you, but pays us interest; if He were independent of us He would give us no interest.”

At this, Abu Bakr became angry, and struck Finhas violently, saying, ‘I swear by Him in whose hands my life rests that if there were no treaty between us I would have struck off your head, you enemy of Allah!’

Abu Bakr wished he could cut off Finhas’s head for pointing out the contents of the Koran and the contradictions of riba.  Even assuming that the loan-to-Allah verse is a non-literal expression, we are still left with the contradiction that Allah will “double” the repayment of loans made to him, which sounds a lot like the riba (interest) or usury which is outlawed throughout most other texts of Islam.

Many Muslims now claim in public that the loan to Allah in Verse 11 is actually charity for the poor, but the preceding verse of the Koran suggests, as Finhas suspected, a more warlike purpose:  “Those among you who contributed before the victory, and fought, shall be differently treated from certain others among you!” (Koran 57:10).  Charity toward “victory”?  Charity toward “fighting”?  Charity toward “iron”?  No—in context, the loan does not appear to be for charity for poor people, but financing the conquest of Mecca and the establishment of the Islamic state.

Rewards promised to those who give their money toward the military victory of Islam are frequent throughout the Koran.

Recalling the post-Ottoman tax on non-Muslims

In November, 1942, the government of Turkey imposed the varlik vergisi, a tax on wealth, assets, and capital, that was applied mostly and at the highest rates against Turkish non-Muslims.  The rates were often higher than 100 percent of one’s total wealth.  The non-Muslims who could not afford to pay the tax where railroaded off to forced labor camps.

A recent article from Today’s Zaman noted that, “Within the scope of wealth tax payment requirements, 1,229 non-Muslims were sent to Aşkale via the Haydarpaşa railroad station in İstanbul to perform the jobs assigned to them.”  According to Wikipedia, 21 non-Muslims died at the labor camps.  The government collected over 320 million Turkish lira (approximately 270 million USD at the time) from Assyrians, Chaldeans, Greeks, Jews, and Armenians through the tax.

The varlik vergisi showed that the devshirme blood tax and the jizya against non-Muslims from the days of the Ottoman Empire could not be permanently purged from the “secularist” Turkish regime that replaced it.

Fortunately, Turkey rescinded the tax in 1944.

However, Turkey continues to impose the jizya against Greek Cypriots to this day, according to published reports.

Discriminatory taxes against non-Muslims in the post-caliphate Islamic world are much overlooked but not uncommon, whether it was the Turkish varlik vergisi, Malaysia’s bumiputra system, or government-endorsed jizya against Sikhs in Pakistan, Jews in Yemen, and Copts in Egypt.

Islamic law creates economic toilet bowl

Michael Schuman at Time magazine has written a good article openly supporting the theory that the Islamic world suffers economically because of Islamic law itself.  Normally, the mainstream media subject readers to arguments about the legacy of colonial “exploitation” or some other nonsense to explain Muslim poverty, so this honest acknowledgement of the obstacles to economic growth that Islam creates is quite refreshing.

Islam’s prohibition of riba (interest), while not specifically cited in the article, is certainly one of the major factors which retarded the development of modern financial systems in the Islamic world.

The economic condition of Islamic nations is quite depressing.  One recent article revealed that inequality is rampant across Islamic countries, and that 230 million people in Islamic countries suffer from hunger.  Amazingly, while millions of Muslims live in misery created largely by Islam, Iranians and Muslim allies of the Occupy Wall Street protestors have the nerve to criticize American capitalism and its effects on the world.

From Time’s Curious Capitalist blog on Oct. 18:

Is Islamic law to blame for the Middle East’s economic failures?

One of the great mysteries of economic history concerns how the Islamic world lost its mojo. A thousand years ago, the Middle East was richer and more influential in the global economy than Europe. According to data compiled by the late economist and statistical wizard Angus Maddison, the Middle East accounted for about 9.5% of global GDP in the year 1000 while Western Europe’s share was less than 9%. By 1700, however, the situation had totally reversed, with Western Europe commanding a hefty 22% of global GDP and the Middle East a pathetic 3%. The Arab world had controlled many of the lucrative trade routes between Asia and the West, but that role got usurped first by the Portuguese, then by the British and Dutch. What went wrong?

Economists and historians have struggled over that question for centuries. The answer is not just of academic interest. The revolutions that have swept through the Middle East, toppling dictators in Libya, Egypt and Tunisia, got a good part of their momentum from the widespread public frustration over the persistent lack of economic progress and opportunity omnipresent in the Middle East. Perhaps the biggest challenge facing the new governments that have emerged from the Arab Spring is providing the jobs and higher incomes all of those young people who participated in the rebellions desperately expect. If the new political leaders fail to deliver, the Arab Spring, which has brought such hope to the region, could deteriorate into a cycle of protest and political upheaval that will only set back its economic development.

There have been many theories of how the Middle East lost out economically to the West. But they have generally felt unsatisfactory.

Muslims in India levied jizya and shameful abuse

We hear so frequently that the jizya that even “moderate” Muslims would like to impose on non-Muslims would be “modest” and less than zakat.  That is a lie.

Further evidence of that lie comes to us through a wonderful piece posted to Satyagni last month by somebody called “Rushmore,” who documents the degree to which Hindus in India historically faced tyrannical taxation and shameful abuse under the invading Muslims.  Past is prologue…

…Unlike the lightning victories that Muslim armies saw from Spain to Mongolia, India was way too large, too populous, too varied (geography, society, customs) and importantly too resistive to Islamic onslaughts. While Muhammad Bin Qasim gained a toehold in Sind, be it him or any of the future Islamic warriors could not gain complete control from Kashmir to Deccan or from Sind to Bengal. In fact prior to Hajaj, two other Caliphs had sent at least ten expeditions to subjugate India but they were all beaten back.

As the Islamic rule was beginning to get established in pockets of North West India and then in Delhi, the invading Islamic rulers and their advisers realized the futility of completely Isalmizing India, unlike a Syria or Egypt. So they fell back on a combination of forced conversions and jizyah in order to forward the Islamic cause. And India did not have one emperor or figure head, who, once defeated, would mean the subjugation of the entire land mass. As soon as a Muslim army won and beheaded a Hindu king and plundered the city, another Hindu ruler had to be contended with. And there were always open revolts in many parts of India against the Muslim rulers.

All these prompted Islamic rulers had to come up with an innovation, where, the wealth of the people that was propelling the rebellions had to be rooted out. Simply put, if the people are brought down to a hand to mouth existence they will not have any wherewithal to revolt. This mindset of Muslim rulers is reflected in Fatawa-i-Jahandari by Barani and in Farishtah, where, the strict imposition of jizya was followed up with a rise in the land tax (kharaj) to 50% and they started taxing possessions like cows, buffaloes and goats. Added to this was another tax called the grazing tax. Barani proudly writes that all these meant “Hindu women and children went out begging at the doors of the Musalmans.”

The same is chronicled in Tarikh-i-Wassaf and Futuh-us-Salatin by Wassaf and Isami respectively. In order to ensure the realization of these tyrannical taxing systems, a separate department called Diwan-i-Mustakhraj was established by the Muslim rulers. There were many recorded instances where defaulting of tax payments by peasants led to their wives and children being carried away as slaves. The tillers were made to part with more than 2/3^rd of the produce failing which, they were apprehended and if an entire village opposed it, the village was sacked by the local Muslim commander [Abdul Fazal, Akbar Nama].

All this not only led to the complete crippling of the agriculture based economy driving people out of their settlements but the desperate situation gradually led people to convert to Islam to escape taxes and lead a normal life. While the fanatic brainwashed Muslims, today, claim that even Muslims pay Zakat as an obligatory tax, Muslims rulers usually levied jizya to be twice that of zakat. (And please remember that Zakat is not the symbol of any inferior status of the payer but Jizya is). This is permissible based of “Hedaya” which is an Islamic legal text.

In FuthuHat-i Firozshahi by Shaikh Abdur Rashid, one can read the following, after Firoz Shah Tuglaq imposed jizyah on Hindus also said that jizya would be exempted if they converted to Islam: “‘the Hindus thronged in clusters after clusters and groups after groups and were glorified by the glory of Islam. And likewise to this day of ours, they come from far and wide, embrace Islam, and Jizyah is off from them.” Kashmir had a unique situation, where Sikandar Butshikan levied both zakat and jizyah upon Hindus, which obviously multiplied the economic miseries manifold. And Amir Khusrau writes about jizya being a hatch for the dhimmis: “Did the Dhimmis not enjoy the concession of the Shariah, all trace of the Hindus would vanish root and branch.”

And the actual event of a collector of Islamic jizya visiting a Hindu neighborhood was shameful for the kinds of things he engaged in. Qadi Mughith ad-Din told Sultan Ala’ud-Dîn Khaljî: “If the Jizyah-collector asks a Hindu for silver, the latter should offer gold in all humility. If the collector wishes to spit into his mouth, the latter should open his mouth without demur, so as to enable the former to spit into it.” [from Diyâ' ad-Dîn Baranî, Tarîkh-i Firozshâhi, Sayyid Athar Abbas Rizwi, selected Hindi tr., in his Khaljî-Kalîna Bhârata, Aligarh, 1955, p. 70]

In conclusion, while jizya was viewed as the second best thing by Islamic rulers of India (given the factors unique to India that prevented complete Islamization), it is this Islamic tax system that led to so much of economic hardships of the common Hindus that many ended up converting to Islam to escape the tyranny and many had their wives and children enslaved by Islam.

And from the standpoint of economy, the Islamic tax system simply broke the back of the wealthy Indian economy, where, Hindus were reduced to a hand to mouth existence, agricultural productions dropped, as, many agrarian families escaped from their native agricultural land for fear of punishment and in general, the human enterprise of the native Hindu was thrown out.

What a tragic development that Indian Muslims- the descendants of those Hindus who had to pay Jizya and later convert to Islam from the fear of enslavement- are now paying Jakat to strengthen the same Arabic system that once enslaved their forefathers! May Eeshvar give strength to all Muslims to come to their ancestral roots, Vedas. In the next article we will discuss Islamic way of spreading the cult- Imperialism.

Non-Muslims bear burden in Islamic tax law

More from the Islamic department of discriminatory taxation.  Let’s jump in a time portal through Bernard Lewis’s The Arabs in History to look back at taxes under the Umayyad dynasty:

The Arabs took over only state lands and the lands of enemies of the regime.  Other landowners who recognized the new government retained effective freehold rights on payment of certain taxes.  The confiscated lands were registered and administered by the state.  Muslims were allowed to buy land outside Arabia and many were granted lands in a form of lease known as Qati’a (pl. Qata’i’).

These concessions might be cultivated lands or of dead lands, and in the latter case were usually accompanied by state aid in the form of tax remissions.  While few such grants were made by ‘Umar, many were made by his successors.  Muslim landowners outside Arabia did not pay the full land tax, but, after some dispute, paid a much smaller due known as the ‘Ushr, or tithe.  Apart from a small religious levy on Muslims all other taxes were paid by the subject non-Muslim peoples.  These included the Jizya and the Kharaj.  The Jizya, but not the Kharaj, is mentioned in the Qur’an.  In later times these terms were differentiated to mean the poll-tax payable by non-Muslims and the land tax.  Under the early Caliphate, however, while Jizya apparently already acquired the technical meaning of poll-tax, Kharaj was still a generic term for any kind of tax, and was used loosely for the collective tribute levied by the Arabs as a lump sum from each region.

What Lewis is saying is that the Umayyad rulers gave away a lot of the land conquered by Islam through concessions to Muslim ethnic Arabs.  And once those Muslim Arabs acquired the land, they only paid the ushr (which actually isn’t always a ten percent tithe—in the case of artificially irrigated land, the harvest tax is only five percent).  The “small religious levy” is, of course, zakat, although you wouldn’t know it to read all the falsehoods from modern Muslim liars who claim that zakat is greater than jizya.

As if the land giveaways and jizya of the early Umayyad period weren’t bad enough, Lewis paints a grim picture of tax policy under the later Umayyad period as well:

The main basis of the new order was the legal fiction that the land and not the landowner paid Kharaj.  From this time on, all land assessed as Kharaj land paid the full rate irrespective of the religion or nationality of its owner.  The ‘Ushr land formed under the early Caliphate continued to pay the lower rate, but could no longer be added to.  The Dhimmis in addition paid the Jizya, or poll-tax.  The working of this new system, which was to become the canonical system of Islamic jurisprudence, was made more effective by the appointment of separate financial superintendents alongside the provincial governors with the task of carrying out a survey and a census as the basis of new assessments.

“All land assessed as Kharaj land paid the full rate irrespective of the religion or nationality of its owner.”  On the surface that almost sounds fair or egalitarian, but the truth is quite the opposite.  The land assessed as kharaj land was land originally owned by non-Muslims prior to the incursion of Arab Muslims to the area.  Even those who converted to Islam were still liable for kharaj.  This was a central tenet of Arab racial supremacy during the Umayyad reign.  Non-Arabs, not just non-Muslims, suffered under Islamic taxation.

La sabiduría de Colón

A major factor behind Christopher Columbus’s voyage across the sea in 1492 was his desire to sidestep the heavily taxed Ottoman land routes, as Money Jihad documented on Columbus Day last year.  This year, in honor of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella who funded Columbus’s voyage, and in appreciation to our readers in the Spanish-speaking world, we offer the information in Spanish:

Constantinopla Cristiana cayó al Imperio Otomano islámico en 1453. Los otomanos habían ganado el control de la Ruta de la Seda al Lejano Oriente. ¿Qué significó esto para la Europa cristiana y el descubrimiento de América? La Prof. Cynthia Smith, de la Universidad de Hawai, explica:

Hay una consecuencia final del control y la expansión otomana, quizás la más importante desde la perspectiva de la historia del mundo. El Imperio Otomano, a finales del siglo 15, controlaba el Cercano Oriente y el Mediterráneo Oriental. Esto significaba el control de las rutas de tierra que unían la Ruta de la Seda entre Asia y el Mediterráneo. El control de estas conexiones de comercio Este/Oeste permitió que los líderes otomanos cobraran impuestos a todas las mercancías que circulaban al Este y el Oeste a través de sus territorios. Por lo tanto, el control estratégico producía asombrosa riqueza para el Imperio Otomano–riqueza que disfrutaron por siglos.

Este control fue, como era de esperarse, una fuente de resentimiento cada vez mayor por parte de los europeos, especialmente después del siglo 14, cuando el comercio se convirtió cada vez más importante para los europeos. Los comerciantes europeos y líderes resentían la pérdida de ingresos debido a los altos impuestos, y los consumidores europeos de productos asiáticos resentían los altos precios. También hubo tensión religiosa sentían por los cristianos que tenían que seguir las leyes musulmanas para mantener sus conexiones comerciales con el Oriente. Este resentimiento que algunos europeos llamaron el “dominio absoluto” del Imperio Otomano en el comercio internacional fue la razón principal por la cual los líderes políticos y los intereses comerciales invirtieron dinero en  esfuerzos para encontrar las rutas marítimas a los mercados de Oriente–lanzando cambios épicos provocados por la exploración europea y la expansión a finales de los años 1400 a 1500.

En otras palabras, los viajes que resultaron en la “Era de los Descubrimiento” o “Edad de la Expansión” europea fueron motivados principalmente por el deseo de soslayar al Imperio Otomano. La expansión del dominio europeo y el poder global que fueron el resultado de estas primeras expediciones cambiaron la historia del mundo. El dominio otomán regional y los intentos europeos para evitar el control económico fueron los catalizadores del dominio marítimo europeo, la colonización, el “descubrimiento” del continente americano y el aumento de las interacciones globales.

Cada vez que alguien pasa a través de la jurisdicción de un ashir’ (recaudador de impuestos), paga impuestos. Si usted es un comerciante extranjero musulmán en un país musulmán, puede pagar aduanas mínimas. Cuando usted es un comerciante no musulmán en un país musulmán, tiene que pagar el máximo. Los intereses vitales de Europa eran incompatibles con la extorsión sharia durante la Era del Descubrimiento. ¿Cómo es que hemos olvidado lo que Colón reconoció 519 años atrás?

Jizya and the Armenian Genocide

Remember the caliphate that Islamist thinkers (and even Western elites) would like to restore to the world?  Some would even still like to see it be a Turkish-based caliphate like the last one, which worked out so well for the Christians (see here for earlier coverage) in that neck of the woods–at least if you like massacres, rapes, and taxation.  From the American Thinker on Aug. 7:

The “Armenian Genocide”

Most historians regard 1912 to 1925 as a time of massive Christian annihilation and relocation by the Muslim Ottoman Empire. Although commonly given the misnomer “Armenian Genocide,” the atrocity was a carefully planned ethnic cleansing to rid Asia Minor of Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks and other minorities in order to establish an exclusively Muslim Turkish state. Some scholars date the first phase of the Christian genocide from the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid and his Hamidian Massacres of 1895-1897 through the Istanbul Pogrom of 1955.

The Hamidian massacres attempted to assert Muslim supremacy and advance the cause of Turkification. French ambassador Pierre Paul Cambon described Turkey at the time as “literally in flames” with “massacres everywhere” and Christians murdered “without distinction.” Marauding Kurdish chieftains in the region were encouraged to join in and channel their aggression into the killing, pillaging and raping of non-Muslim populations. Estimates of the number of Christians who perished during the reign of Sultan Hamid range from 100,000 to 300,000.

From the 1900′s to 1922, the Christian population declined from 25% to less than 5% within Anatolia. Under Islam, Christians had few rights, paid exorbitantly high taxes – the jizya – and enjoyed limited political representation and access to government services. Their testimony was inadmissible, no provision existed for their legal protection, they were prohibited from owning firearms, and their property, wives and children were vulnerable to spontaneous attacks.

Approximately 2.5 million Armenians, Assyrians and Greek Christians were massacred during this period. Kurds were encouraged to settle in Christian territory, demand the payment of tributes and illegally seize land. They were given free rein against local Christians in exchange for their loyal service to the Ottoman government.

Read the full article here.

Culture Killer

“When he was asked why the vast majority of Egyptians, the heirs to a great pre-Islamic civilization, speak Arabic rather than Coptic, a leading Egyptian historian replied: ‘Because we had no Ferdowsi.’”  –Amil Imani

The Persian poet Ferdowsi was able to save the Persian language and culture, but the original Egyptians are but a shadow of their former selves.  Unsurprisingly, Islamic taxation also played a part in the systematic destruction of that national pre-Islamic Egyptian identity.  A passage from Mordechai Nisan’s Minorities in the Middle East explains that history quite well (thanks to a Feb. 2 CAMERA article for bringing this to light):

The Islamic conquest of Egypt from 640 to 641 inaugurated the decline of Christianity in the Nile Valley. There were one hundred bishoprics in the year 600, but only seventy by 700; in the year 1300 only forty remained. While some Copts joined the Arab governmental apparatus as accountants and translators, others engaged in revolt to secure Christian self-expression. Overtime, the burden of dhimmi taxation compelled thousands to accept Islam. The surge to revolt, like the insurrections from 725 to 773, persisted intermittently until 830 at least, but to no avail. Copts were dragged off to Baghdad as slaves. By the tenth century, the spoken Coptic language had all but died, replaced by Arabic. The caprice of changing rulers would arbitrarily affect the Copts’ condition. It is said that Saladin, suspecting Copt collusion with the crusaders, punished them sternly. The overall Christian population, formerly some 90 percent of Egypt, dwindled incessantly to some 10 percent.

 The extreme fragility of Copt existence was rooted in the superiority of Muslims exercised through the dhimma doctrine. Islamic supremacy often degenerated into brutal repression. A Maghrebian visitor to Cairo in 1301 witnessed the degradation of the Christians: None could ride a horse or hold public office; churches were closed; and Christians had to wear a distinguishable colored turban different from that of the Muslims. Violence against Copts and their ecclesiastical establishment was a central theme in the sectarian relationship. Muslim mobs, based on the rule of Islam, ransacked Copt neighborhoods and massacred their inhabitants, as in Cairo in 1343.

 The situation led continually to mass conversions from the Cross to the Crescent. Islam legal opinion developed a harsh attitude toward churches, as both Ibn Taimiyya in the fourteenth century and Shaykh Ahmad al-Damanhuri in the eighteenth century condoned the construction of churches. Sixty churches were destroyed in 1321. With the Copt religion victimized, the Copt language fading, and the Copt community straining under heavy jizya and kharaj tribute, Copt history was burned with minority-status bitterness under Islam for more than a thousand years. (Page 119)

Remember, the kharaj can be even an even greater tax burden than the jizya, and it is imposed on land owned by non-Muslims and land formerly owned by non-Muslims.  Centuries ago, Persia waged a tax revolt against the kharaj that forced tax reforms by the caliph.  If only Egypt had been able to also, the Copts might not be staring down the barrel of their own oblivion today.

Your money and your sons

How Ottomans taxed Christian Bosnians

Lee Jay Walker offered up an alternative historical explanation of the conflict in the Balkans via the Pakistan Christian Post on Wednesday.  The Christians in Bosnia were long-suffering victims of the Muslim Ottoman tax system including the wicked devshirme and the jizya.

The hidden “Islamic jihad” and dimensions of Bosnia have been ignored prior to the conflict, during the civil war in the early 1990s, and afterwards. This misrepresentation of reality meant that thousands of Islamists from all over the world were aided by so-called democratic powers and the role of the mass media and many leading academics served the ambitions of Al-Qa’ida and other outside powers. Therefore, what is the reality of Bosnia and why is it claimed that all communities resided in peace and tranquility?

According to many naïve Western commentators Bosnia was a tranquil reality where Muslims and Christians lived happily together for many centuries. Not only this, the Western rhetoric claimed that in modern times it was the Muslim leadership in Bosnia which was open-minded, democratic, modernist, and which desired to maintain a multi-cultural and multi-religious society.

The truth could not have been further and Western commentators and academics are clearly glossing over reality because the Ottoman Empire was not based on enlightenment. On the contrary, the Islamization of Bosnia was paid by the blood of Christians and the slavery and forced conversions of young Christian boys who were forcibly converted to Islam via the barbaric devshirme system.

Jizya is lifeblood of imperial Islam

Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch recently took part in a debate about Islam at Thomas More College.  Spencer suggested that Islam is at its wealthiest and most expansive when it has the largest number of Christians and Jews living under it from whom to extract funds through jizya.  Islam is at its feeblest once the religious minority communities have been sucked dry.

This shouldn’t be too controversial an argument given that classical Islamic tax law requires that Islamic armies be funded entirely by taxes paid by infidels through the jizya and kharaj.  Spencer makes a compelling case and sums up the historical and modern reality of jizya in Islamic law nicely.  From Jihad Watch on Dec. 21:

In chapter nine of the Qur’an are numerous teachings–which of course are portrayed as divine revelation which cannot be questioned and have to be obeyed by any pious and observant Muslim. These are instructions to wage offensive warfare against Jews and Christians–particularly in chapter nine verse twenty-nine which tells Muslims to fight against those who do not obey Allah and his messenger and do not forbid that which he has forbidden (in other words, don’t follow the strictures of Islamic law) even if they are the People of the Book, which is the Qur’anic designation for primarily Jews and Christians, until they pay the jizya (which is a tax) with willing submission and feel themselves subdued.

That verse became the foundation of an elaborate superstructure of laws that are still part of Islamic jurisprudence and of Islamic political law that Islamists, that jihad terrorists, that any Islamic supremacist wants to impose over the world today. These laws mandate that non-Muslims, the People of the Book, must pay a special tax from which Muslims are exempt. As a matter of fact, you can pretty much correlate in Islamic history the strength and aggression and rise of the great Islamic empires of the past with the size of the Jewish and Christian communities that were subjugated within those empires and were paying for that imperial expansion. When those communities were exhausted economically, then the Islamic empires went into decline. This is an absolute correlation that recurs again and again and again. The Christians and Jews in Muslim lands were subjugated in accord with that section of the verse, that last part where they must ‘pay the jizya with willing submission and they feel themselves subdued.’ They never enjoyed equality of rights with Muslims: they were denied the right to build new houses of worship or to repair old ones; they were denied the right to hold authority over Muslims so that Jews and Christians were relegated to the most menial and degrading jobs in the society. They were subject to various other humiliating and discriminatory regulations.

Now this is, as I cannot emphasize enough, still part of Islamic law. This is not one sect or one school or one group that’s heretical that has made this part of their teaching. This is universal among all sects and schools of jurisprudence that are recognized as mainstream and orthodox by fellow Muslims. They all teach–you cannot find one that does not teach–the necessity to wage wars against unbelievers and to subjugate them under the rule of Islamic law. In fact, Hamas, in Gaza, has announced its intention, once it’s fully consolidated its power, to impose this system of dhimmitude and subjugate the Christians that remain there under institutionalized forms of discrimination. Gangs in Baghdad, without government authority to be sure, terrorized the Christian community–which I’m sure you know is terrorized on a more or less daily basis: there was just another massacre in a church in Baghdad the other day–they were knocking on doors in Baghdad last year and demanding payment of the jizya, this tax which amounts to protection money. You pay it and you don’t get killed. But you don’t pay it, or you transgress some of the other laws that are set out for these subjugated peoples, and then your life is forfeit.

Read the full transcript of the debate here.