Book Description: Bat Yeʼor. Understanding Dhimmitude

Bat Ye’or (“Daughter of the Nile” in Hebrew) is the pseudonym of Gisèle Littman. She is an independent scholar whose 1985 book The Dhimmi: Jews & Christians Under Islam generated considerable controversy that continues. She also wrote extensively about the decline of Christian communities in the Muslim world and Islamization in Europe. Understanding Dhimmitude is a collection of brief talks and other documents she and her husband, the noted human rights lawyer David Littman, produced throughout her career. Her work is hard to classify and will represent particular challenges when used in the classroom. Bat Ye’or was born a Jew in Egypt, forced to leave with her family in 1957. She lived stateless in Britain for many years until gaining British citizenship upon her marriage to Littman. Her scholarship is serious reflecting her broad and deep knowledge of her topics. On the other hand, her presentation is prosecutorial rather than detached. Her work sometimes seems a scholarly bearing of witness to her experience as a non-Muslim living in a Muslim state, a cry of the heart.
Bat Ye’or argues that the institutionalized unequal status of followers of non-Muslim monotheistic faiths in Muslim countries results from a dilemma faced by the Muslim Arab conquerors. They found themselves holding a vast empire in the generations immediately following the life of the Prophet Muhammad. In religious terms, this resulted from the successful practice of the doctrine of Jihad, carrying the Faith by war into other lands. Most inhabitants were Christians, pagans, and Jews. In order to solve the practical, strategic problem of how to create Muslim majorities in these lands, she suggests that the leadership developed the doctrine she calls Dhimmitude. Dhimmitude places substantial limitations on Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians, forcing them to choose a second-class status or convert to Islam. Pagans faced an even more stark choice, conversion or death. The doctrines of Dhimmitude and Jihad, then, are, in her view, joined at the hip. Also of note, she stresses that the status of Jews and Christians living under Islam is legally the same.

Bat Ye’or associated herself with organizations and people, particularly in Europe, whose attitude toward Muslims many legitimately called into question. She is clear in opposing violence against Muslims. On the other hand, her criticism of the doctrines of Jihad and Dhimmi is unrelenting to the point that her ideas about the islamization of Europe have been described as a conspiracy theory. Some consider her a progenitor of what is known today as Great Replacement Theory.

Bat Ye’or’s style complicates her work. She writes in anger and sorrow. This can be off-putting if our goal is to conduct objective, unemotional learning about a topic. She reprints correspondence where she tends to come off as a prickly interlocutor, remembering insults for decades.

Understanding Dhimmitude is a collection of essays and other documents produced over a long period by Bat Ye’or and her husband. It will probably not be usable as a source read from cover to cover. It is repetitive, which is in the nature of such literary collections. Nevertheless, individual essays are constructive in briefly describing Bat Ye’or’s theories and opening them for discussion. Students will probably need some preparation regarding how to constructively read a troubling document produced as testimony by a victim of prejudice. In our day, when we speak often of the value of listening respectfully, even if critically, to the testimony of victims, her work has potential uses in classroom discussion.

Bibliographic Information:
Bat Yeʼor. Understanding Dhimmitude: Twenty-One Lectures and Talks on the Position of Non-Muslims in Islamic Societies. New York: RVP Press, 2013.
ISBN: 978-1-61861-335-6