squeezethejuice (Muslim): There is nothing wrong or immoral with Jizya, b/c those paying also get benefits that even we Muslims are not entitled to. And should always be comparable in amount to the amount of zakat that Muslims are expected to donate; same order of magnitude. Among the benefits, for example, they are exempt from joining the Muslim army and potentially fighting defensive wars against their own Christian or Jewish brethren, even those who have committed acts of violence against innocent Muslims.
What ISIS and the others don’t understand about Jizya is that we Muslims are bound to offer security & protection to those paying it, i.e. no threats or anything.
And there are more ways to pay Jizya than just money. While the Jews are rich and will never be in this situation, poor Christians can offer their young daughters in marriage to Muslims, and of course we should consider their Jizya paid for the next 5 years if they have done so.
Angemon (non-Muslim): Zakat is 2.5% of the yearly income, jizya has always been crushingly heavy with the intent of humiliating non-Muslims. Those two taxes are not “comparable” or in the “same order of magnitude”, and historically the jizya was collected through force, mafia style – it’s no coincidence that the term “mafia” comes from the Arabic and originated in a region who was once under Islamic rule.
And it’s not that non-Muslims were exempt from joining the Muslim army – the Janissaries were originally non-Muslims abducted from their families – because they had a special status. It’s that Muslims were too afraid of letting non-Muslim owning weapons (for fearing a rebellion) or letting them fight (especially when Muslims were fighting against he native trying to get their land back).
Think about it: if non-Muslims were paying the same amount of tax as Muslims and not being drafted to the army them human nature would cause Muslims to convert out of Islam and not the other way around. When Muslim conquered a new land they were in minority so they couldn’t risk letting the conquered getting their hands on weapons and starting a rebellion.
And can you imagine a Muslim leader, indoctrinated to believe that Jews and Christians are always scheming against Muslims, let’s say, Christians from a land he just conquered to fight against Christians who were trying to drive the Muslims out of their lands? Why would Christians being forced into battle against their own people side with the Muslims? No, non-Muslims were forbidden from owning weapons and fighting because Muslims feared for their safety. Would they need to fear for their safety if they treated non-Muslims fairly?
Even if we were to overlook the jizya, there are plenty of degrading conditions in the pact of Umar that make it quite clear that non-Muslims in a Muslim state don’t have the same rights as Muslims. Heck, let’s let Abu Waleed explain by his own words how “wonderful” life is for non-Muslims in a Muslim state:
Besides the barrage of lies about jizya and the status of non-Muslims in a Muslim state, poor stj makes a remark about Jews that was probably straight out of a deleted scene from Borat. What do you think it would happen to a Jew who couldn’t afford to pay the jizya in the hands of someone who seems to think all Jews are rich?
We know what happened to Kinana when he told Muhammad he had no treasure hidden. He was tortured with fire on his chest and, since he neared death without saying anything, Muhammad had him beheaded. And since Muhammad is the example Muslims are supposed to emulate…
stj also seems to believe that it’s ok for poor Christians to sell their daughters into marriage with Muslim men as payment for the jizya. So much for “security and protection”, non-Muslim women in a Muslim state are to be used as chattel for the enjoyment of Muslim men.
Notice that he said that “There is nothing wrong or immoral with Jizya” because those who pay it, even if they do so by selling their daughters into marriage, are entitled to the “benefits” explained by Abu Waleed in the above video, so he doesn’t see anything wrong or immoral with using non-Muslim women as currency. So remember, if you think it’s immoral to sell a girl into marriage to someone who will regard and treat her as subhuman trash you’re an “Islamophobe”.
Note the Youtube video above. That is exactly what dhimmitude is supposed to be under the Islamic state, and for centuries, non-Muslims probably had to live in dhimmitude. However, state-imposed dhimmitude has been dead since about 1900. Even in Iran, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, it does not exist. I believe some form of dhimmitude was enforced when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan.
It looks like ISIS is trying to impose some sort of dhimmitude on the Christians under its rule. The Shia are faring war worse. ISIS simply kills any Shia they can get their hands on. They do the same thing to any Alawite they can get their hands on in Syria. ISIS also kills Yezidis at random and on sight. Both Yezidis, the Shia and the Alawi are considered to be heretics. When ISIS took over the Druze region of southern Syria recently, a number of Druze villages were ordered to convert to Sunni Islam or die. The villages duly converted. In truth, Druze really isn’t even Islam, although it looks a bit like it. Some Christians have also been given the “convert or die” or the “convert, leave or die” option by ISIS in Syria.
Since dhimmitude for all intents and purposes has not existed for 115 years, it seems a bit silly to rant and rave about how Muslims force all non-Muslims into dhimmitude when they are the majority because it is simply not true.
However, these Al Qaeda radicals do indeed want to bring back dhimmitude is some form or another. Jihadis have raided Christian homes in the Dora region of southern Baghdad and ordered Christians to pay the zakat or be killed. After ISIS took over a town in Syria recently, they ordered all Christians to pay a zakat. The zakat was quite a hefty amount, and most of the Christians did not have it.
As you can see in the video, the purpose of dhimmitude is to make life as a non-Muslim under Muslim rule so awful and humiliating that many non-Muslims simply convert to Islam to get out from under the oppression. All of the arguments for the zakat are false. It’s not a protection tax; instead, it is more like a Mafia protection racket. The non-Muslims are told to pay protection fees to the Muslim Mafia. If they don’t pay up, bad things are going to happen just like if you refuse the pay the Mafia’s protection tax. There is no humanitarian aspect to this tax.
The Muslims have always lied about what happened in the countries they conquered. In most lands it was the same story. Gradually, over time, more and more non-Muslims converted to Islam, although Spain, the Balkans and India were exceptions. The Muslims say that more and more infidels simply embraced Islam over time, apparently because it is so groovy. That’s clearly not what happened. They were terrorized into converting via dhimmitude.
Egypt has a large number of Coptic Christians. However, under Mubarak, they were not allowed to repair their churches when they started to fall down. This is one of the tenets of dhimmitude – Christians are not allowed to repair existing churches nor are they allowed to build new ones.
Also the periodic terror that is inflicted on non-Muslims in many to most Muslim countries can be seen a form of dhimmitude.
