Found these two interesting responses to a Bernard Lewis book on Amazon (The Jews of Islam):
I am a non-Muslim from a predominantly Muslim country. I grew up learning the traditions and history of Islam with my Muslim childhood friends.
Although as always, Prof Lewis writes well and convincingly (hence the 2 stars) it irks me (....no, in fact it dowright enrages me) everytime a non-Muslim Westerner who has never lived under the Islamic yoke proclaims with great confidence how tolerant Islam is. Having said this, although Prof Lewis tries to be politically correct, thankfully he is not as bias towards Islam as Karen Armstrong, Prof Michael Sells, Edwad Said and John Esposito.
It must be emphasised that Islamic jurisprudence with regards Islam's relationship with Jews is based on how Prophet Muhammad treated the Jews during his lifetime. Muhammad's first real contact with the Jews was in Yathrib (now known as Medina) where he encountered three Jewish tribes, namely Banu Qaynuga, Banu Nadir and Banu Quraiza. The Prophet hoped that the Jews would accept him as the "One". When they did not, he was so enraged that not only did he instruct his followers to stop facing Jerusalem (but to Mecca) when they prayed but he attacked and pillaged all the three Jewish tribes. The first two were expelled after being relieved of their possessions. With regards the last of the three tribes (i.e. Banu Quraiza), he had all the men (about 700) decapitated outside Medina and enslaved their wives and children. Only one was spared because he embraced Islam.
The rest of Prophet Muhammad's life was spent fighting 66 offensive wars against pagans and Jews including those at Khaybar [Hence, the contemporary Palestinian war cry "O Jews (Yahud) of Khaybar, the army of Muhammad is coming"]. Two of Muhammad's many wives and concubines (ie. Safiya and Reihana) were Jewish widows whose husbands and fathers, the Muslims killed. One of Muhammad's last instructions were to expel all Jews and Christians (all pagans have been forcibly converted) from the Arabian peninsula. It is clear in the Quran that he who obeys Prophet Muhammad, obeys God (Allah).
For those who are interested in knowing the true history of the Jews (and Christians) under Islam, I would like to recommend Bat Yeor's "Dhimmi" and "Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam" and Ken Blady's Jewish Communities in Exotic Places. Bat Ye'or's books include many texts by well-known Muslim historians and jurists showing the persecutions of and humiliations experienced by Jews (and Christians) during the 13 or 14 centuries under Islam. Although not all Jews were forcibly converted, there were a few occassions where this happened to Jews in a certain locality or community (i.e. Meshed and Isfahan in Persia). Ken Blady's book describes how Jewish communties once flourished in the Middle East and North Africa before Islam and how the Jews were persecuted. It seems that on the eve of the Muslim conquest, most of the world's Jewry were in the Middle East/Persia and North Africa. A great many of those Jews were forcibly converted to Islam and were absorbed by the Persians, Yemenis, Morrocan and Libyan Berbers, Tats, Kurds, Arabs, Afgans/Pathans etc.
As one can see, the difference with Nazism is Hitler killed all Jews including those who embraced Christianity. Islam on the other hand is not "technically" anti-semitic nor is it concerned with genetics. There are good Jews and bad Jews. The good ones are those who embrace Islam.
My last point is although politically correct pro-Islam Western historians always talk about the 1492 expulsion of Spanish Jews, few ever mention about the persecution in Spain by the Almohads where many Jews including the great Maimonides were forcibly converted to Islam. Also, although they talk about exiled Spanish Jews finding refuge in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire, they always fail to mention about those Sephardim who emigrated to equally tolerant Christian countries such as South west France (Bordeaux), Holland and England, and how their descendants fared so much better than their counterparts in Muslim countries. On the eve of the creation of Israel, descendants of those Spanish Jews who emigrated to Christian lands consists of many great merchant dynasties in America, Britain, Holland, France and Belgium whereas those in Muslim lands were living in abject poverty without knowing that they would be expelled in a few years time after the creation of Israel. There are or were dozens of Jewish peers in the House of Lords (such as Lord Rothschild and Lord Forte) and many more as American senators. How many Jews are allowed to remain in the Islamic lands? This more or less sums it up for the Jews of Islam.
Response 2:
Even Professor Lewis' elegant prose cannot redress the serious limitations in this very disappointing book. Organizational lapses - the book is merely a "re-assembly" of lecture material delivered in November, 1981- may explain some of these inadequacies. More importantly, he ignores a voluminous amount of historical data, and his own sound advice to avoid "loaded comparisons". As a result, his analyses are plagued by grossly inaccurate generalizations, and awkward internal contradictions. I have focused my discussion on two egregious, broad reaching examples which best illustrate these major flaws.
Professor Lewis states, "..Persecution, that is to say, violent and active repression, was rare and atypical. Jews and Christians under Muslim rule were not normally called upon to suffer martyrdom for their faith. They were not often obliged to make the choice, which confronted Muslims and Jews in reconquered Spain, between exile, apostasy, and death. They were not subject to any major territorial or occupational restrictions, such as were the common lot of Jews in premodern Europe.." He then adds this somewhat contradictory caveat: "..There are some exceptions to these statements, but they do not affect the broad pattern until comparatively modern times, and even then only in special areas, periods, and cases..".
Professor Lewis frames this debatable premise by ignoring his own advice (about "loaded comparisons"), inviting a comparison between the Reconquista, and presumably, the jihad conquests that preceded the Reconquista. In fact, the first three centuries of Islam in the in the East overlapped the Carolingian rule in Christian Europe (747-987 C.E.), a period recognized by scholars as one when European Jewry experienced a considerable degree of security and prosperity. Muslim chroniclers themselves, in contrast, have described the ongoing jihad conquests during the same period (i.e., the first three centuries of Arab Muslim conquests), which included the destruction of whole towns, the massacre of large numbers of their populations, the enslavement and deportation of women and children, and the confiscation of vast regions. Indeed, between 640 and 1240 C.E., jihad conquests lead to the total and definitive destruction of Judaism and Christianity in the Hijaz (modern Saudi Arabia), and the dramatic decline of once flourishing Christian and Jewish communities in Palestine, Egypt, Syria, and Mesopotamia. In the North African Maghreb, Christians had been virtually eliminated by 1240 and the Jews decimated by Almohad persecutions (including an "Inquisition" for Jewish converts to Islam which antedated the infamous "Spainish Inquisition" by over two centuries).
Muslim Spain itself was a land of constant jihad ruled under Maliki jurisdiction, which offered one of the most severe, repressive interpretations of Islamic law. It was populated by tens of thousands of Christian slaves, and humiliated and oppressed Christian dhimmis, in addition to a small minority of privileged Christian notables. The muwallads (neo-converts to Islam) were in nearly perpetual revolt against the Arab immigrants who had claimed large estates for themselves, farmed by Christian serfs or slaves. Expropriations and fiscal extortions ignited the flames of continual rebellion by both muwallads and mozarabs (Christian dhimmis) throughout the Iberian peninsula. Leaders of these rebellions were crucified, and their insurgent followers were put to the sword. These bloody conflicts, which occurred throughout the Hispano-Umayyad emirate until the tenth century, fueled endemic religious hatred. An 828 letter from Louis the Pious to the Christians of Merida summarized their plight under Abd al-Rahman II, and during the preceding reign: confiscation of their property, unfair increase of their exacted tribute, removal of their freedom (probably meaning slavery), and oppression by excessive taxes. In Grenada, the Jewish viziers Samuel Ibn Naghrela, and his son Joseph, who protected a once flourishing Jewish community, were both assassinated between 1056 to 1066, followed by the annihilation of the Jewish population by the local Muslim community (at least three thousand Jews perished in an uprising surrounding the 1066 assasination, alone).
Professor Lewis also errors when he maintains that the Jews were somehow limited uniquely under European Christendom by being forced to practice usury, for example, which was reviled by Christians. In fact he appears to acknowledge that under the yoke of dhimmitude in Muslim countries, the most degrading vocations were set aside for the Jews, including: executioners, grave-diggers, salters of the decapitated heads of rebels, and cleaners of latrines (in Yemen, in particular, this was demanded of Jews on Saturdays, their holy sabbath). Islamic societies also exhibited their own unique forms of severe oppression of Jews, NOT found in Christian Europe, such as: abduction of Jewish girls for Muslim harems; enslavement (including women and children) during warfare, revolts, or for economic reasons (for example, impossibility of paying the jizya, a blood ransom "poll tax" demanded of non-Muslims); the obligation for a Jew to dismount from his donkey on sight of a Muslim; the obligation in some regions (like the Maghreb) for Jews to walk barefoot outside their quarters; prohibiting Persian Jews from remaining outdoors when it rained for fear of polluting Muslims. With regard to enslavement, specifically, from the Middle Ages, right up until their mass exodus in 1948, rural Yemenite Jews were literally Muslim chattel.
He offers yet another self-contradiction when he acknowledges the plight of Jews in Morocco and Persia (Iran) who were in fact confined to living in ghettos.
Finally, Professor Lewis also contends that, "..In the early centuries of Islamic rule, there was little or no attempt at forcible conversion, the spread of the faith being effected rather by persuasion and inducement..".
In fact, enforced conversions were not exceptional, they were the norm. Orders for conversion were decreed under the Umayyads, Abbasids, Fatimids, and Mamluks- ranging from Spain and the Maghreb, to Yemen and Persia. Moreover, during jihad, the (dubious) concept of `no compulsion' was meaningless. An enduring practice was to enslave populations taken from outside the boundaries of the Muslim shari'ah. Inevitably fresh non-Muslim slaves or their children were Islamized within a generation, their ethnic and linguistic origins erased. Two enduring and important mechanisms for this conversion were concubinage and the slave militias.
