sexta-feira, 11 de setembro de 2015

Jizya, dhimmīs e zakat



jizya, também, transliterada como jizyah, yizya, djizîa ou djizîat (em árabe: جزية‎; transl.: ǧizyah; AFI: [dʒizja]; em turco otomano: cizye; ambos derivados do pálavi e possivelmente do aramaico gaziyat) é um imposto per capita cobrado a uma parte dos cidadãos não muçulmanos de um estado islâmico. É aplicado aos homens adultos não deficientes em idade de cumprirem o serviço militar e com posses, embora haja algumas situações que dão direito a isenção.

Na perspectiva dos governantes muçulmanos, a jizya era uma prova material da aceitação da sujeição ao estado e às suas leis por parte dos não muçulmanos, ao passo que para quem o pagava era, na prática, a continuação dos impostos pagos a regimes anteriores. Em troca desse imposto, os não muçulmanos eram autorizados a praticar a sua religião, gozavam de uma certa autonomia comunitária, recebiam proteção do estado muçulmano contra ameaças externas, e ficavam isentos do serviço militar e dos impostos zakat obrigatoriamente pagos pelos cidadãos muçulmanos. 
Zacate, Zakat ou Zakah (árabe: زَكَاة ) é um tributo religioso, é impropriamente traduzido como esmola . É o terceiro dos cinco pilares do Islão. Significa, literalmente, "crescer" ou "aumentar".
O seu pagamento é anual e obrigatório para todos os muçulmanos. De uma maneira geral incide sobre 2,5% da riqueza de cada pessoa. Cada muçulmano pode escolher a altura mais adequada do ano para pagar o zakat, mas muitos optam por fazê-lo no mês sagrado do Ramadã.

Já o termo jizya deriva da raiz árabe que significa "parte", ou seja, é tirada de parte da riqueza de cidadãos muçulmanos. Em alguns casos não era usado a palavra jizya para designar o imposto. al-Tabari escreveu que alguns membros da comunidade cristã pediram ao califa Omar se podiam chamar sadaqah (que literalmente significa "caridade") à jizya, o que foi aprovado por ele.

Etimologia e significado

Segundo uma definição de um dicionário árabe, jizya é aquilo que é cobrado aos dhimmīs, que é a quantia de dinheiro acordada no contrato que concede o estatuto de dhimmai. A palavra está relacionada com o verbo "recompensar, como se a jizya fosse a recompensa por não ser morto".

O termo aparece no verso 9:29 do Alcorão, mas este livro não especifica que é um imposto per capita. Segundo Paul Heck, o imposto parece ser uma forma evoluída da prática fiscal sassânida



- Garoto sírio chutado por cinegrafista na Hungria entra em campo ao lado de Cristiano Ronaldo (aqui)




Islamic Jizya: Fact and Fiction


Jizya (1)
Frontpage, by Raymond Ibrahim, May 29, 2015:

 The Return of Jizya
Muslim demands for non-Muslim “infidels” to pay jizya on pain of death are growing, even as the West fluctuates between having no clue what jizya is and thinking that jizya is an example of “tolerance” in Islam.
In the video where the Islamic State slaughters some 30 Christian Ethiopians in Libya last April, the spokesmanrepeatedly pointed out that payment of jizya (which the impoverished Ethiopian migrant workers could not render, nor the 21 Copts before them) is the only way for Christians around the world to safeguard their lives:
But whoever refuses [to pay jizya] will see nothing from us but the edge of a spear. The men will be killed and the children will be enslaved, and their wealth will be taken as booty. This is the judgment of Allah and His Messenger.
When the Islamic State invaded ancient Christian regions around the Ninevah Plain last June,  it again declared: “We offer them [Assyrian Christians] three choices: Islam; the dhimma contract—involving payment of jizya; if they refuse this they will have nothing but the sword.”
The Islamic State—which most Western politicians ludicrously insist “has nothing to do with Islam”—is not alone in calling for jizya from Christian “infidels.”  In 2002, Saudi Sheikh Muhammad bin Abdul Rahman, discussing the Muslim prophet’s prediction that Islam will eventually conquer Rome, said, “We will control the land of the Vatican; we will control Rome and introduce Islam in it. Yes, the Christians . . . will yet pay us the jizya, in humiliation, or they will convert to Islam.”
And in a video recently posted, Sheik ‘Issam Amira appears giving a sermon in Al Aqsa Mosque where he laments that too many Muslims think jihad is only for defense against aggressors, when in fact Muslims are also obligated to wage offensive jihad against non-Muslims:
When you face your pagan enemy, call them—either to Islam, jizya, or seek Allah’s help and fight them.  Even if they do not fight [or initiate hostilities], fight them!… Fight them!  When?  When they fight you?  No, when they refuse to convert to Islam or refuse to pay jizya….  Whether they like it or not, we will subjugate them to Allah’s authority.
In short, if the Islamic State is enforcing jizya on “infidels,” demands for its return are on the increase all around the Muslim world.  Put differently, if Abu Shadi, an Egyptian Salfi leader, once declared that Egypt’s Christians “must either convert to Islam, pay jizya, or prepare for war,” Dr. Amani Tawfiq, a female professor at Egypt’s Mansoura University, once said that “If Egypt wants to slowly but surely get out of its economic situation and address poverty in the country, the jizya has to be imposed on the Copts.”
The Doctrine and History of Jizya
So what exactly is jizya?
The word jizya appears in Koran 9:29, in an injunction that should be familiar by now: “Fight those among the People of the Book [Christians and Jews] who do not believe in Allah nor the Last Day, nor forbid what Allah and his Messenger have forbidden, nor embrace the religion of truth, until they pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued (emphasis added).”
In the hadith, the Messenger of Allah, Muhammad, regularly calls on Muslims to demand jizya of non-Muslims:  “If they refuse to accept Islam, demand from them the jizya. If they agree to pay, accept it from them and hold off your hands. If they refuse to pay jizya, seek Allah’s help and fight them.”
The second “righteous caliph,” Omar al-Khattab, reportedly said that any conquered “infidel” who refuses to convert to Islam “must pay the jizya out of humiliation and lowliness. If they refuse this, it is the sword without leniency.”
This theme of non-Muslim degradation appears regularly in the commentaries of Islam’s authorities.  According to the Medieval Islamic Civilization Encyclopedia, Muslim “jurists came to view certain repressive and humiliating aspects of dhimma as de rigueur. Dhimmis [subjugated non-Muslim Christians and Jews] were required to pay the jizya publicly, in broad daylight, with hands turned palm upward, and to receive a smart smack on the forehead or the nape of the neck from the collection officer.”
Some of Islam’s jurists mandated a number of other humiliating rituals at the time of jizya payment, including that the presiding Muslim official slap, choke, and in some cases pull the beard of the paying dhimmi, who might even be required to approach the official on all fours, in bestial fashion.
The root meaning of the Arabic word “jizya” is simply to “repay” or “recompense,” basically to “compensate” for something.  According to the Hans Wehr Dictionary, the standard Arabic-English dictionary, jizya is something that “takes the place” of something else, or “serves instead.”
Simply put, conquered non-Muslims were to purchase their lives, which were otherwise forfeit to their Muslim conquerors, with money. Instead of taking their lives, they took their money.  As one medieval jurist succinctly put it, “their lives and their possessions are only protected by reason of payment of jizya.”
Past and increasingly present, Muslims profited immensely by exacting jizya from conquered peoples.
For instance, Amr bin al-As, the companion of Muhammad who conquered Christian Egypt in the early 640s, tortured and killed any Christian Copt who tried to conceal his wealth. When a Copt inquired of him, “How much jizya are we to pay?” the Islamic hero replied, “If you give me all that you own—from the ground to the ceiling—I will not tell you how much you owe. Instead, you [the Christian Copts] are our treasure chest, so that, if we are in need, you will be in need, and if things are easy for us, they will be easy for you.”
Yet even that was not enough. Caliph Uthman later chided Amr bin al-As because another governor of Egypt had managed to increase the caliphate’s treasury double what Amr had. In the words of Uthman, the “milk camels [Egypt’s Christians, that is] . . . yielded more milk.”  Years later, yet another caliph, Suliman Abdul Malik, wrote to the governor of Egypt advising him “to milk the camel until it gives no more milk, and until it milks blood.”
Little wonder Egypt went from being almost entirely Christian in the seventh century to today having a mere 10%—and steadily dwindling, thanks to ongoing persecution—Christian minority.
Related to the idea of institutionalized jizya is the notion that non-Muslims are fair game to plunder whenever possible.  The jizya entry in the Encyclopaedia of Islam states that “with or without doctrinal justification, arbitrary demands [for money] appeared at times.” Even that medieval traveler, Marco Polo, whose chronicles appear impartial, made an interesting observation concerning the Muslims in Tauris (modern day Iraq) in the thirteenth century:
According to their doctrine [Islam], whatever is stolen or plundered from others of a different faith, is properly taken, and the theft is no crime; whilst those who suffer death or injury by the hands of Christians [during the course of a plunder-driven raid], are considered as martyrs….  These principles are common to all Saracens [Muslims].
All this is echoed in recent times by the words of  Sheikh Abu Ishaq al-Huwaini, spoken a few years ago, concerning what the Muslim world should do to overcome its economic problems:
If only we can conduct a jihadist invasion at least once a year or if possible twice or three times, then many people on earth would become Muslims. And if anyone prevents our dawa [invitation to conversion] or stands in our way, then we must kill or take them as hostage and confiscate their wealth, women and children. Such battles will fill the pockets of the Mujahid [holy warrior] who can return home with 3 or 4 slaves, 3 or 4 women and 3 or 4 children. This can be a profitable business if you multiply each head by 300 or 400 dirham. This can be like financial shelter whereby a jihadist, in time of financial need, can always sell one of these heads.
So it was for well over a millennium: Muslim rulers and mobs extorted money from “infidels” under their sway as a legitimate way to profit.
Much of this financial fleecing came to an end thanks to direct European intervention. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, one Muslim region after another abolished the jizya and gave non-Muslims unprecedented rights—originally to appease Western powers, later in emulation of Western governance. The Ottoman Empire’s Hatt-i Humayun decree of 1856 abolished the jizya in many Ottoman-ruled territories. Elsewhere in the Muslim world, the jizya was gradually abolished wherever Western powers were present.
Today, however, as Muslims reclaim their Islamic heritage—often to the approval and encouragement of a West, now under the spell of “multiculturalism”—jizya, whether institutionalized as under the Islamic State, or as a rationale to plunder infidels, is back.
Even in the West, in 2013, a UK Muslim preacher who was receiving more than 25,000 pounds annually in welfare benefits referred to British taxpayers as “slaves,” and explained:  “We take the jizya, which is our haq [Arabic for “right”], anyway. The normal situation by the way is to take money from the kafir [infidel], isn’t it? So this is the normal situation. They give us the money—you work, give us the money, Allahu Akhbar [“Allah is Great”]. We take the money.”
Academic Lies about Jizya
Yet if Muslims—from Islamic State jihadis to Egyptian university professors—know the truth about jizya, the West is today oblivious, thanks to its leading authorities on Islam: Western academics and other “experts” and talking heads.
Consider the following excerpt from John Esposito, director of the Prince Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University and a widely acknowledged go-to source for anything Islamic:
In many ways, local populations [Christians, Jews, and others] found Muslim rule more flexible and tolerant than that of Byzantium and Persia. Religious communities were free to practice their faith to worship and be governed by their religious leaders and laws in such areas as marriage, divorce, and inheritance. In exchange, they were required to pay tribute, a poll tax (jizya) that entitled them to Muslim protection from outside aggression and exempted them from military service. Thus, they were called the “protected ones” (dhimmi). In effect, this often meant lower taxes, greater local autonomy (emphasis added) …
Despite the almost gushing tone related to Muslim rule, the idea that jizya was extracted in order to buy “Muslim protection from outside aggression” is an outright lie.  Equally false is Esposito’s assertion that jizya was paid to “exempt them [non-Muslims] from military service”—as if conquering Muslims would even want or allow their conquered “infidel” subjects to fight alongside them in the name of jihad (holy war against infidels) without first converting to Islam.
Yet these two myths—that jizya was for “Muslim protection from outside aggression” and exemption from military service—are now widely accepted.  In “Nothing ‘Islamic’ About ISIS, Part Two: What the ‘Jizya’ Really Means,” one Hesham A. Hassaballa recycles these fabrications on BeliefNet by quoting Sohaib Sultan, Princeton University’s Muslim chaplain, who concludes: “Thus, jizyah is no more and no less than an exemption tax in lieu of military service and in compensation for the ‘covenant of protection’ (dhimmah) accorded to such citizens by the Islamic state.”
In reality and as demonstrated above via the words of a variety of authoritative Muslims, past and present,  jizya was, and is indeed, protection money—though protection, not from outsiders, as Esposito and others claim, but from surrounding Muslims themselves.  Whether it is the first caliphate from over a millennium ago or whether it is the newest caliphate, the Islamic State, Muslim overlords continue to deem the lives of their “infidel” subjects forfeit unless they purchase it, ransom it with money.  Put differently, the subjugated infidel is a beast to be milked “until it gives no more milk and until it milks blood,” to quote the memorable words of an early caliph.
There is nothing humane, reasonable, or admirable about demands for jizya from conquered non-Muslim minorities, as the academics claim. Jizya is simply extortion money. Its purpose has always been to provide non-Muslims with protection from Muslims: pay up, or else convert to Islam, or else die.
And it is commanded in both the Koran and Hadith, the twin pillars of Islam.  In short, jizya is yet another ugly fact of Islam—add to offensive jihad, imperialism, misogyny, slavery, etc.—one that, distort as they may, the academics cannot whitewash away, even as the world stands idly by watching its resumption in the twenty-first century.
Note: Most quotations not hyperlinked are sourced from Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians.  Full references can be found there.





Islamic Jizya: ‘Protection’ from Whom?


Jizya

Is jizya—the money non-Muslims historically paid their Muslim conquerors—meant to buy them “protection,” including from outside enemies, as modern Western academics maintain?  Or was it simply extortion money meant to buy non-Muslims their lives, as Islam’s scriptures mandate?
The word jizya appears in Koran 9:29: “Fight those among the People of the Book [Christians and Jews] who do not believe in Allah nor the Last Day, nor forbid what Allah and his Messenger have forbidden, nor embrace the religion of truth, until they pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued (emphasis added).”
In the hadith, the Messenger of Allah, Muhammad, regularly calls on Muslims to demand jizya of non-Muslims:  “If they refuse to accept Islam,” said the Islamic prophet, “demand from them the jizya. If they agree to pay, accept it from them and hold off your hands. If they refuse to pay jizya, seek Allah’s help and fight them.”
Keeping the above in mind, consider the following July 18 report from Reuters:
Islamist insurgents have issued an ultimatum to northern Iraq’s dwindling Christian population to either convert to Islam, pay a religious levy or face death, according to a statement distributed in the militant-controlled city of Mosul….
It said Christians who wanted to remain in the “caliphate” that the Islamic State declared this month in parts of Iraq and Syria must agree to abide by terms of a “dhimma” contract—a historic practice under which non-Muslims were protected in Muslim lands in return for a special levy known as “jizya.”
“We offer them three choices: Islam; the dhimma contract – involving payment of jizya; if they refuse this they will have nothing but the sword,” the announcement said.
“After this date [July 19], there is nothing between us and them but the sword,” it said.
The Nineveh decree echoes one that the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, the former name for the Islamic State, issued in the Syrian city of Raqqa in February, demanding that Christians pay the jizya levy in gold and curb displays of their faith in return for protection.
Note how straightforward the Islamic State’s words are—jizya, conversion, or death—compared to the language of Reuters, which twice invokes the concept of “protection” without explaining from whom:  1) “a historic practice under which non-Muslims were protected in Muslim lands in return for a special levy known as “jizya”; 2) “demanding that Christians pay the jizya levy in gold and curb displays of their faith in return for protection.”
Reuters doesn’t bother to clarify this notion of “protection,” but rather leaves it vague, implying that the protection Christians receive is against some random elements.
The reason for this obfuscation is that Mideast academics in the West have been whitewashing the meaning of jizya for decades.  After all, the concept of jizya is one of the most ironclad proofs that Islam is innately intolerant of non-Muslims.
A very typical Western definition for jizya can be found in the Encyclopaedia Britannica: “The Muslim rulers tolerated the dhimmis [conquered non-Muslims] and allowed them to practice their religion. In return for protection [from whom?] and as a mark of their submission, the dhimmis were required to pay a special poll tax known as the jizya.”
Other academics have gone so far as to claim that non-Muslims paid jizya to buy Muslim protection against outside forces.  Consider the following excerpt from John Esposito, director of the Prince Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University.  It essentially makes the idea of being subjugated to Islamic overlords and paying them tribute appear as an enviable position for non-Muslim minorities:
In many ways, local populations [Christians, Jews, and others] found Muslim rule more flexible and tolerant than that of Byzantium and Persia. Religious communities were free to practice their faith to worship and be governed by their religious leaders and laws in such areas as marriage, divorce, and inheritance. In exchange, they were required to pay tribute, a poll tax (jizya) that entitled them to Muslim protection from outside aggression and exempted them from military service. Thus, they were called the “protected ones” (dhimmi). In effect, this often meant lower taxes, greater local autonomy (emphasis added) …
The idea that jizya was extracted in order to buy “Muslim protection from outside aggression” is an outright lie—one that, as the equivocal tone of the aforementioned Reuters report indicates, has taken root in the West.





Aid or Jizya?


011

In sharia law, jizya refers either to tribute paid by non-Muslim nations to ward off jihad attack, or to a head tax paid by conquered non-Muslim adult males living under Islamic conditions.
Muhammad instructed his followers:
Fight in the name of Allah and in the way of Allah.
Fight against those who disbelieve in Allah. Make a holy war …
When you meet your enemies who are polytheists, invite them to three courses of action.
If they respond to any one of these, you also accept it and withhold yourself from doing them any harm.
Invite them to (accept) Islam; if they respond to you, accept it from them and desist from fighting against them ….

If they refuse to accept Islam, demand from them the Jizya.

If they agree to pay, accept it from them and hold off your hands.
If they refuse to pay the tax, seek Allah’s help and fight them.
(Sahih Muslim. The Book of Jihad and Expedition. (Kitab al-Jihad wa’l-Siyar). 3:27:4294.)
Consistent with this message, the renowned Andalusian jurist Averroes (Ibn Rushdi) wrote:
Why wage war? The Muslim jurists agree that the purpose of fighting the People of the Book … is one of two things: it is either for the conversion to Islam or the payment of the jizya. The payment of the jizya is because of the words of the Exalted, ‘Fight against such as those who have been given the Scripture as believe not in Allah or the Last Day, and forbid not that which Allah and His Messenger hath forbidden, and follow not the religion of truth, until they pay the tribute readily being brought low.’
[The Qur’an, Sura 9:29]. (Bidayat al-Mujtahid wa Nihayat al-Muqtsid, The Distinguished Jurist’s Primer).
The Arabic word jizya means ‘compensation’ or ‘reparations’. The  root j-z-y refers to something provided as a compensation or satisfaction, instead of something else.  Muslim lexicographers defined jizya as a tax taken from non-Muslims ‘that ensures their protection, as though it were a compensation for their not being slain’. (E. W. Lane, An Arabic-English Lexicon).
Paying jizya is a long-standing US tradition.  As soon as it won independence from Britain, and recognizing that its ships were no longer protected by British naval power, the US began to send tribute to the Barbary states.  The first appropriation by Congress was made in 1784 was for $80,000, and in 1795 the US government paid a million dollars in cash, naval stores and a frigate to ransom 115 kidnapped soldiers from Algiers (America and the Barbary Pirates: An International Battle Against an Unconventional Foe by Gerard W. Gawalt).  In that year, total US government revenue was six million dollars.
There was a period at the start of the 19th century when the US government was consistently paying over 10% of US revenue in jizya to the Barbary states to prevent further jihad attacks against US ships.  An equivalent proportion of US Government revenue today would amount to hundreds of billions of dollars, or more than the annual cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined.  The US Navy was created in 1794 to address this challenge.  Gerard W. Gawalt writes:
In fact, it was not until the second war with Algiers, in 1815, that naval victories by Commodores William Bainbridge and Stephen Decatur led to treaties ending all tribute payments by the United States. European nations continued annual payments until the 1830s.
In The Third Choice  (pp.212-213) I questioned whether aid given by Western states today might  be considered by some Muslims to be ‘jizya’.  I meant by this that aid would not be received as a generous gift from a friend, but something taken as a right, a payment compensating a potentially violent aggressor:
Aid or Jizya?
One can also ask some troubling questions about the flow of funds from Western governments to organizations and nations which are committed to Islamization. This includes what is known as ‘international aid’, but might just as easily be called tribute. Some of the largest aid grants from the USA and the European Union have been going to Islamic communities which are producing large numbers of radicals, such as Egypt and Pakistan. Professor Moshe Sharon, emeritus Professor of Islam at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem has written:

… the billions of dollars which stream from the EU to Muslim terror groups under various disguises are nothing less than Jizyah money paid by the dhimmisof Europe to the Muslim rulers. … European money is the collective Jizyah paid by the Europeans in the (false) hope that it will secure for them the protected status of the dhimmi.
It is an irony that clerics funded by the Palestinian Authority, who live off European and US aid, have denounced Western governments on Palestinian Television, declaring the inevitable victory of Islam over the whole world. For example, Sheikh Muhammad Ibrahim al-Madhi, a Palestinian authority employee,preached a sermon broadcast on PA Television on April 12, 2002, in which he prophesied the defeat of every nation on the earth:
Oh beloved, look to the East of the earth, find Japan and the ocean; look to the West of the earth, find [some] country and the ocean. Be assured that these will be owned by the Muslim nation, as the Hadithsays … from the ocean to the ocean’…
Raymond Ibrahim has drawn our attention to a Salafist cleric’s recent pronouncement on Egyptian television that US aid to Egypt should indeed be considered as jizya:
According to the sheikh, Egypt must be less cooperative with the U.S. and at the same time insist for more monetary aid.  If so, the sheikh believes that “America will accept; it will kiss our hands; and it will also increase its aid.  And we will consider its aid asjizya, not as aid.  But first we must make impositions on it.”
When the host asked the sheikh “Do the Americans owe us jizya?” he responded, “Yes,” adding that it is the price Americans have to pay “so we can leave them alone!”  When the host asked the sheikh if he was proclaiming a fatwa, the latter exclaimed, “By Allah of course!”  The sheikh added that, to become a truly Islamic state, Egypt must “impose on America to pay aid as jizya, before we allow it to realize its own interests, the ones which we agree to.”
While the Egyptian cleric was focused on “international jizya”—that is, money paid by one non-Muslim nation to a Muslim nation, U.S money to Egypt—other Muslims have been receiving and enjoying individual “jizya” from Western, infidel governments, in the form of welfare aid.
Just last February, for example, Anjem Choudary, an Islamic cleric and popular preacher in the United Kingdom, was secretly taped telling a Muslim audience to follow his example and get “Jihad Seeker’s Allowance” from the government—a pun on “Job Seeker’s Allowance.” The father of four, who receives more than 25,000 pounds annually in welfare benefits, referred to British taxpayers as “slaves,” adding, “We take the jizya, which is our haq [Arabic for “right”], anyway. The normal situation by the way is to take money from the kafir [infidel], isn’t it? So this is the normal situation. They give us the money—you work, give us the money, Allahu Akhbar [“Allah is Great”]. We take the money. Hopefully there’s no one from the DSS [Department of Social Security] listening to this.”
This issue – of Western aid being interpreted as tribute and a rightful due – is part of a broader problem of interactions between Muslims and non-Muslims.  In The Third Choice I discussed this in the context of Christian-Muslim interactions, but the issue affect non-Muslims in general:
In submitting to the requirement of grateful service to Islam, Christians may well interpret their own submissiveness in gospel categories of forgiveness and service, but from the Islamic side this can just look like the program of Islam as ‘submission’ is working. Muslims can often interpret such submissiveness as Islam’s rightful due, not an expression of grace, and even allow themselves to feel generous in accepting this service. For this reason, Christians involved in partnering with Muslims should make every effort to understand the theological grid which dhimmitude would seek to impose upon the relationship, and while continuing to be gracious, back up the grace with a strong admonition to reciprocity.
The issue here is not so much whether Muslims will misinterpret the motives of Christians. It is rather the danger of a politico-theological framework being imposed upon the Christian-Muslim relationship, to conform it to the requirements of dhimmitude…  (The Third Choice, p.223)
The Egyptian Salafist Sheikh was giving voice to a mindset which is real and widely held.  Western donors  to the Muslim world to be alert to the potential for aid to be regarded as a ‘right’ from the Muslim side.  According to this mindset, recipients of modern-day ‘jizya’ could respond with more belligerence – and not friendship – to extract even more resources from the infidels.
Aid or jizya – the difference is crucial.  Aid is a gift to friends.  Jizya is an act of surrender .  Western donors should be most wary of making military donations to sharia-compliant states.  In 2013 US aid to Egypt will amount to c. 1.5 billion dollars, most of which will be military hardware.  One of the traditional uses of jizya by Islamic states is to fund further jihad, so belligerence can extract more jizya.  It is completely understandable that US lawmakers are seeking to restructure US Aid to Egypt.
Given that Egypt is now governed by the Muslim Brotherhood, US should not be sending a single item of military hardware Egypt’s way.  Instead it should start forwarding desperately needed food aid (and see here), with ‘US AID’ stamped in large letters on the parcels.
Mark Durie is an Anglican vicar in Melbourne, Australia, author of The Third Choice, and an Associate Fellow at the Middle Eastern Forum.





Al Azhar Scholar: Christian Copts Will Pay Jizya


Dr. Mahmoud Shu’ban
Dr. Mahmoud Shu’ban
During a recent interview, Dr. Mahmoud Shu‘ban, a professor at Al Azhar University, made clear that the Copts, Egypt’s Christian minority, will pay the jizya—what is often referred to in the West as an Islamic “poll tax.” According to the Al Azhar professor, “If non-Muslims were to learn the meaning of ‘jizya,’ they would ask for it to be applied—and we will apply it, just like Islam commands us to.” His logic is that, if Christians pay the jizya, they would buy for themselves “protection,” hence why they themselves should want to pay it.
Most Western apologists for Islam also claim that jizya money was historically paid to protect conquered dhimmis, though they often imply protection from outside enemies, non-Muslims. In fact, the jizya was/is protection money from surrounding Muslims themselves—precisely Shu‘ban’s point: pay up and maybe your churches won’t be burned and your girls routinely abducted; because you are not paying, you are not protected from such things and have no right to complain.
Read more at Jihad Watch
Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum.