The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> In Which I Agree With David

In Which I Agree With David
Posted by Bob Aprim (Guest) - Monday, February 12 2007, 20:12:05 (CET)
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I must say I agree with David and Ms Jone that we should keep religion out of our discussions and show respect to all sides. It’s for that reason too that I refused to accept the sites Ms Jone suggested, because they were both clearly religious. I wouldn’t take my history from a site titled “wwwmuslimfanaticsfortruthaboutchristians.com” either.

And yet, religion being of primary, if not supreme importance, next to food and you-know-what, I can’t see leaving it entirely out of discussions about our history, since it played and still plays such a central role…and for that reason I stick to purely historical facts and recognized, more neutral and objective sources…I’m even careful not to select Muslim historians, but Christian ones, for I feel Muslims might be biased.

And rather than cite a number of examples I thought to narrow my focus for the sake of clarity to one at a time.

In Durant’s, “Age Of Faith”, we find this:

Chapter II, p. 218

“As in most religions, the various sects of Islam felt towards one another an animosity more intense than that with which they viewed the “infidels” in their midst. To these “Dhimmi”: Christians, Zoroastrians, Sabeans, Jews, the Umayyad caliphate offered a degree of toleration hardly equaled in contemporary Christian lands. They were allowed the free practice of their faiths, and the retention of their churches, on condition that they wear a distinctive honey-colored dress, and pay a poll tax of from one to four dinars per year according to their income. This tax only fell on non-Moslems capable of military service, it was not levied upon monks, women, adolescents, slaves, the old, cripples, blind, or very poor.”

Since it is the part of the man or woman of Peace to bring together rather than drive further apart, I’d like to see if there is anything out of the ordinary which Muslims did that other faiths did not, with the intention of showing how much more similar we are than different, so maybe we can one day lay down our weapons and do as Jesus commanded.


Durant’s quote shows an interesting truth right from the start when he says that people of one faith have more anger and hatred towards people of their same faith, who disagree with them, than they have for people outside their faith. I think the history of Christian Europe shows this to be the case for often people and families turned on each other with far greater savagery than on outsiders.

He points out that the non-Muslims, the Dhimmi, were shown more toleration by Muslims than they were in Christian lands. And indeed where Christianity is concerned, the Christians of Egypt, Syria and Iraq welcomed the Arabs as liberators from the oppression, greed and cruelty of their Christian, Byzantine masters.

The rule that non-Muslims had to wear distinctive clothing is certainly regrettable for it made them vulnerable to insult from every street hoodlum. But Christians also required this of Muslims in Spain and even as late as 1939, Germany required Jews to wear a distinctive badge because of their religion. While it is regrettable that any humans would do these things, there is some comfort at least in knowing that we all have done them at times and maybe we can agree finally, as brothers and sisters, to stop doing this to each other.

The other thing mentioned in this paragraph is the poll tax or jizya. I’d heard much about this and was surprised to find how relatively small and reasonable a tax it was….as well as how much less it was than what Christian lords and prelates were charging their own people. And I wondered too how many of us would have been glad to pay such a tax if it could have kept us out of the draft in Vietnam…or out of all wars. Because those who paid the tax, only men of military age, were spared having to fight in wars. Not bad.

What was equally new to me was to learn that women, children, cripples, the elderly and surprisingly, the clergy didn’t have to pay the tax at all. I had read about raids by Christians against Christians and others where entire crops were burned and the people shorn of every means of survival as against this type of raid which left them their wealth but asked a tax to maintain the armies and keep the soldiers from pillage and theft and wanton destruction of all that couldn’t be carried away…at that time there were no standing armies paid a regular salary by the state…soldiers were paid when they had a victory and spoils of war was the form of payment. It seems to me that to leave a defeated people with their wealth and implements, so they can go on living, but require a tax to pay the army, rather than turn them lose on the people was a much wiser and more humane way to proceed.

It’s interesting in this regard how historians misunderstand our ancestors. The Assyrians kings attacked Jerusalem a few times when the tribute was witheld. The Hebrews would shut themselves up behind their walls and the Assyrians would camp outside and wait for starvation to do the job. In time the Hebrews would agree to pay the tribute and the Assyrians would go back home…that too was a form of taxation meant to offset the cost of keeping their empire and the surrounding region free form attack and disruption. However historians have seen in it an inability of the Assyrians to defeat the “mighty” Hebrews.

The Assyrian kings had no desire to defeat the Hebrews for after such a war there would be great damage and the costs would have to be made up by taking all the wealth of the Hebrews. Instead it was a warning, delivered in person, meant to gather the tribute, which even the Jews exacted for the brief moment they had anything resembling an empire...it was normal procedure in those days…the Assyrians were content with the tribute and had no desire to wipe out Jerusalem. It was not the courage or military might or intelligence of the Hebrews which saved them...it was the reasonable way in which the Assyrians conducted themselves…after all, who can doubt that the only empire to have conquered mighty Egypt and Babylon as well as so many other famous and war-like kingdoms couldn’t break down the gate of Jerusalem, if that had ever been their intention.

I’ll stop here for any comments.



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