Bat Ye'or - Misplaced Pages

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Bat Ye'or (meaning "daughter of the Nile" in Hebrew; pseudonym of Giselle Littman) is an Egyptian-born British Jewish author and historian specializing in the Middle East, Islam, and non-Muslims in Muslim lands.

Early life

Bat Ye'or was born in Cairo, but her Egyptian nationality was revoked in 1955 because she was Jewish; she and her parents left Egypt in 1957, arriving in London as stateless refugees. In 1959 she became a British citizen. From 1958 she attended the Institute of Archeology at London University, before moving to Switzerland in 1960 to continue her studies at the University of Geneva.

She describes how her life experience influenced her research interests:

I had witnessed the destruction, in a few short years, of a vibrant Jewish community living in Egypt for over 2,600 years and which had existed from the time of Jeremiah the Prophet. I saw the disintegration and flight of families, dispossessed and humiliated, the destruction of their synagogues, the bombing of the Jewish quarters and the terrorizing of a peaceful population. I have personally experienced the hardships of exile, the misery of statelessness−and I wanted to get to the root cause of all this. I wanted to understand why the Jews from Arab countries, nearly a million, had shared my experience.

Research

Her first book, The Jews in Egypt, appeared in 1971. She published it, along with her next study on Copts in Egypt, under a pseudonym Yahudiya Masriya, meaning "Egyptian Jewess" in Arabic. Since then, Bat Ye'or focused predominantly on the history of non-Muslims under Muslim rule. She is known for promoting the use of the term dhimmitude, which she discusses in detail in Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide. She credits assassinated Lebanese president-elect and Phalangist militia leader Bachir Gemayel with coining the term.

Ye'or regards dhimmitude as the "specific social condition that resulted from jihad," and as the "state of fear and insecurity" of "infidels" who are required to "accept a condition of humiliation." She believes that "the dhimmi condition can only be understood in the context of Jihad," and studies the relationship between the theological tenets of Islam and the sufferings of the Christians and Jews who, in different geographical areas and periods of history, have lived in Islamic majority areas. The cause of jihad, she argues, "was fomented around the 8th century by Muslim theologians after the death of Muhammad and led to the conquest of large swaths of three continents over the course of a long history." . She says:

Dhimmitude is the direct consequence of jihad. It embodie all the Islamic laws and customs applied over a millennium on the vanquished population, Jews and Christians, living in the countries conquered by jihad and therefore Islamized. return of the jihad ideology since the 1960s, and of some dhimmitude practices in Muslim countries applying the sharia law, or inspired by it. I stress the incompatibility between the concept of tolerance as expressed by the jihad-dhimmitude ideology, and the concept of human rights based on the equality of all human beings and the inalienability of their rights.

Jacques Ellul attempts to summarize her views in the foreword to The Decline (see below), saying that Ye'or focuses on "jihad and dhimmitude ... as ... two complementary institutions... here are many interpretations . At times, the main emphasis is placed on the spiritual nature of this 'struggle'. Indeed, it would merely the struggle that the believer has to wage against his own evil inclinations.... his interpretation ... in no way covers the whole scope of jihad. At other times, one prefers to veil the facts and put them in parentheses. xpansion ... happened through war!" Though Ye'or acknowledges that it is not the case that all Muslims subscribe to so-called "militant jihad theories of society", she claims that the role of the sharia in the "1990 Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam" demonstrates that "a perpetual war against those infidels who refuse to submit" is still an "operative paradigm" in Islamic countries.

Bat Ye'or has focused on the rapid conversion of Eastern Christian lands to Islam, concluding that corruption and division among Christians contributed and may even have afforded Islam certain models of legal control of subjugated populations; she suggests that Yugoslavia is an example of the long-term scars of dhimmitude, where Christians were under that status for centuries.

Usage of the term "dhimmitude" has increased in recent years: some scholars have used it both by itself and in association with Bat Ye'or's work, e.g. in undergraduate courses relating to the relationship Muslims have had historically with other peoples.

Other issues Bat Ye'or has written on include:

The existence or otherwise of pluralism in Islamic culture, with a focus on Eastern Europe
Violations of human rights in Islamic cultures
The theological rules that govern jihad
How Muslims interpret the history of the dhimmi peoples
How the Muslim interpretation of religious scripture influences Islamic interpretation of history and modern-day events
The "dialog of civilizations" and the "negation of the other"

"Eurabia"

In Bat Ye'or's latest book, Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, she explores the dialogue between the European Union (then the European Economic Community) and the Arab states that began in the 1970s and traces what she sees as connections between radical Arabs and Muslims, on the one hand, and fascists and Nazis, on the other hand, in the origins and developing influence, as she sees it, of Islam over Europe, its culture and politics. . She has coined the term Eurabia to describe this relationship, a concept discussed at length in her most recent book, Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis:

Eurabia is a geo-political reality envisaged in 1973 through a system of informal alliances between, on the one hand, the nine countries of the European Community (EC) which, enlarged, became the European Union (EU) in 1992 and on the other hand, the Mediterranean Arab countries. The alliances and agreements were elaborated at the top political level of each EC country with the representative of the European Commission, and their Arab homologues with the Arab League's delegate. This system was synchronised under the roof of an association called the Euro-Arab Dialogue (EAD) created in July 1974 in Paris. A working body composed of committees and always presided jointly by a European and an Arab delegate planned the agendas, and organized and monitored the application of the decisions.

Public appearances

Testimony before Governing bodies:

1997 "Past is Prologue: The Challenge of Islamism Today. An Historical Overview of the Persecutions of Christians under Islam". Congressional Testimony at United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Subcommittee on Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs. Hearing on Religious Persecution in the Middle East. (Congressional Records Testimony on May 1, 1997)
1997 Similar testimony delivered to a U.S. Congressional Human Rights Caucus (CHRC) Briefing on Capitol Hill (April 29, 1997)
2001 A Culture of Hate Analysis to the Association of World Education
2002 "Human Rights and the Concept of Jihad". Congressional Human Rights Caucus (CHRC) Briefing on Capitol Hill (February 8, 2002)

She has appeared on U.S. television station C-SPAN.

Controversy

Works by Bat Ye'or have attracted both criticism and praise. Historian Victor Davis Hanson asserts:

She is not a conspiracist at all, but an empiricist, whose work is based on observation, facts, and logic: look at the demography of Europe; look at the history of Christians living under Muslims (going to Church in Saudi Arabia is not the same as worshipping in a mosque in Madrid); and read not what Western elites say about Muslim clerics, but what Muslim clerics themselves say. So, yes, she is a scholar and should not be dismissed because her views bother us because they are largely insightful. Europe has a gut-check time coming very soon as it ponders Islamic populations in its own borders, the admission of Turkey into the EU (in some ways very good for the US, a disaster for Europe), and nuclear missile capability of Iran. We shall see whether it reawakens or not.

Esther Benbassa, Director of Religious Studies in Modern Judaism at the Sorbonne has also questioned Ye'or's academic credentials and says that the historic restrictions on "people of the book" existed, but were more symbolic than practical with non-Muslim minorities enjoying protection, autonomy and freedom. (PDF)

An article in the New York Times (controversially ) referred to her as one of the "most extreme voices on the new Jewish right." She rejects that charge, claiming to have been "calumniated" in the paper.

Jason Burke, chief reporter for the British weekly The Observer, described Bat Ye'or as "a favourite of the more unsavoury right-wing American websites."

Sidney H. Griffith in the International Journal of Middle East Studies writes of The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam: "The problems one has with the book are basically twofold: the theoretical inadequacy of the interpretive concepts jihad and dhimmitude, as they are employed here; and the want of historical method in the deployment of the documents which serve as evidence for the conclusions reached in the study. There is also an unfortunate polemical tone in the work."

Bibliography

Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, 2005, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, ISBN 083864077X.
Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide, 2001, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, ISBN 0838639437.
"The Dhimmi Factor in the Exodus of Jews from Arab Countries" (pp. 33-51), in Coll. work (ed.) Malka Hillel Shulewitz, The Forgotten Millions. The Modern Jewish Exodus from Arab Lands (London/New York: Cassell, 1999; Continuum, 2000)
The Decline of Eastern Christianity: From Jihad to Dhimmitude, 1996, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, ISBN 0838636888.
The Dhimmi: Jews & Christians Under Islam, 1985, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, ISBN 0838632629.
A Christian Minority. The Copts in Egypt. Case Studies on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. A World Survey. 4 vols. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976
Les Juifs en Egypte (Jews in Egypt: French) (Geneva: Editions de l'Avenir, 1971)
Bibliography of Bat Ye'or

Documentaries

Islam: What the West Needs to Know

References

Smith, Craig: "Europe's Jews Seek Solace on the Right", New York Times, February 20, 2005
Poller, Nida: "Slap at European Jewry prompts backlash", New York Sun, March 3, 2005

External links

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