#jizya

UK-based Imam Umayr Mulla was suspended from Masjid Khazra in Nottingham after stating he “had no issue with Israel,” and recognized Israelis’ history in the Middle East while appearing in an interview in Jerusalem with British anti-immigration campaigner Tommy Robinson last week.

“I have no issue with Israel, as long as people are living in peace, I believe both sides should have their own countries,” Mulla said. “The Palestinians should have their own safe space, where they can live freely without oppression or injustice. I think this is the solution for peace in the Middle East."

Masjid Khazra released a statement apologizing for the imam’s “personal views that are deeply offensive and are wholly inconsistent with the values of our institute.”

“Our institute is founded on a commitment to diversity, equality, and inclusion. We appreciate and respect all parts of the Muslim community and the wider community we serve, and we are dedicated to maintaining a respectful and supportive environment for pupils, staff, and families,” the mosque wrote.  

The imam claimed all religions lived in peace under Muslim rule

In the interview, Mulla stated that Israel’s Muslim population wants to live without oppression or injustice, stating that historically, all religions lived in peace when Muslims ruled the region.

“As long as [non-Muslims] paid the Jizya tax, which is like a protection money. It’s no different from the taxes we pay in Britain,” Mulla said, adding that this wasn’t a form of oppression against non-Muslims.

“If you read history, there was no oppression or occupation. They paid taxes like we do. Muslims, however, had to pay Zakat, which is charity,” he explained.

Mulla also stated that, despite being happy the British government had recognized a Palestinian state, he was against the pay-for-slay policies of the Palestinian Authority, as well as many actions terror organizations like ISIS and Hamas have committed in the name of Islam.

“I can say freely they are not Muslims at all… Some of their teachings and actions go against Islamic teachings,” he said.

Following his suspension, Mulla released a statement of apology, saying he “regret deeply the hurt my remarks have caused to the Kashmiri and Pakistani communities, to Palestinians, to my employers, family, friends, and to anyone beyond who was offended directly and indirectly.”

in order for you to understand why Western civilization is very different than the Islamic world, you need to understand the history of Islam.

When Prophet Muhammad supposedly revealed his Revelation from the angel Gabriel that he is supposed to be the last of the prophets in the early 600s, he started preaching in his own city Mecca. He tried to recruit friends and followers to be able to spread his religion. And he tried for 12 years and failed. And after 12 years he was only able to recruit his immediate family and friends.

So he decided, if I go to Medina, which was the Jewish Hub of Arabia, the business hub where the Jews lived, if I go there and preach my religion to them, if they accept me that will buy me respect and stature between my own people and they will accept me.

So Prophet Muhammad started borrowing a lot from the Old Testament to make his religion more palatable to the Jews, to make it a lot similar. This is why you see a lot of similarities between Judaism and Islam. For example, Jews don't eat pigs, Muslims don't eat pigs. Jews pray a few times a day, Muslims pray a few times a day. Jews fast on Yom Kipur, Muslims fast on Ramadan.

And this is why you started seeing a lot of good writing in the beginning of the Quran when Prophet Muhammad was saying all the good things about the People of the Book. He took his message and went to Medina trying to recruit the Jews, talking about the People of the Book, talking about how similar the two religions are.

When they refused to accept him and follow him as the last of the Prophet, that's when he turned against them and started killing them and started expelling them. That's when Islam went from a spiritual movement for the first 12 years of Islam into a political movement cloaked in religion after the year of the Hijrah, after Muhammad went to Medina and the Jews did not accept him.

He became a military warrior and declared war on them and started expelling them. Jews and Christians became dhimmi, or second class citizens. They were only allowed to stay alive and not be killed only by paying the jizya, or the protection tax. So they had a choice, convert to Islam, or if you want to stay alive, you have to pay the jizya, or protection tax, living as dhimmi in the Islamic nation.

Christians and Jews could not ring church bells. Jews could not blow the shofar. Christians could not ring church bells. They could not pray publicly. Christians and Jews could not gather together and build new churches or new temples. And the way they paid the jizya or the protection tax was in a monthly ceremony where they would get together downtown and the Jew would kneel on his knee and hand his goods to the mullah who would take the goods as the price for buying the protection.

And in many areas, Jews and Christians were given necklaces to wear as a receipt that they paid their jizya, or their protection tax. Jews considered najis under Islam. Najis is bodily fluid. Najis is garbage. Najis is dogs. Najis is dirty. So Christians and Jews were treated as second class citizens.

Islam continued to grow. As Islam grew, more people became dhimmi, or second citizens. Jews and Christians were given identifiable clothing. The yellow star, which was given to the Jews that most people think is a German invention, it was actually an Islamic invention in the 9th century in Iraq by the second Khalif, Khalif al-Mutawakkil of Iraq, who invented the yellow star for the Jews to be identified as they walked down the street.

Because Jews were considered najis, if a Muslim man or a Jew walked on the same side of the street, the Jew had to cross the other side so the Muslim man can walk so he's not dirtied by the filth of the Jew.

Christians were given the zunar, the belt, which most of you men are wearing right now. That was an Islamic invention for the Christians.

Islam continued to grow. They went all the way to Jerusalem. They conquered Jerusalem. Christians couldn't ring their church bells in Jerusalem.

The Pope in Rome in 1090 told the Christians how could you sit idly by and allow your brethren to suffer like this in the Holy Land. You need to go liberate the Christians. You need to go help the Christians. That's why the Crusaders were launched. The Crusaders were not launched because they just felt like waking up in the morning and going and converting a bunch of Muslims or beheading them. The Crusaders were launched to liberate Jerusalem. And they were able to liberate Jerusalem for less than 100 years before Salah ad-Din al-Ayyubi, Saladin, took it back and Jerusalem remained under Islamic control until 1967 when the state of Israel liberated Jerusalem, where Christians Jews and Muslims could pray under the same sky.

The Crusaders continued fighting Islam and for 300 years they tried and failed. And by the 1300s the Crusaders disappeared because they could not win against Islam.

Islam continued to expand. They went all the way to Central Europe. They went all the way to China. They went to India. They conquered Spain. They changed the name of Spain from Spain to Andalusia.

And they started, as as they advanced, as they conquered more nations, more people paid the jizya or the protection tax. And this is how the Islamic empire grew. It went all the way until they was stopped at the gates of Vienna on 9/11. 9/11 is not a date that Osama bin Laden just picked out of a hat. 9/11 is a symbolic date in the Islamic calendar.

By the 1600s, Islam had covered more of the Earth's surface than the Roman Empire did at its peak. Between the 1600s and the 1800s, the Europeans were experiencing the European Industrial Revolution where the Europeans were able to invent products on factory lines, where they are able to make money and sell products which gave them the money to build a strong army in order to fight the Muslims. And that's how they were able to stop them at the gates of Vienna on 9/11.

The Europeans started the push back against Islam, they pushed them out of Europe, they pushed them all the way to the Middle East and North Africa.

By 1924, the Islamic Empire ended in 1924, the Islamic caliphate ended in Turkey by President Ataturk who was a secularist. He ended the Islamic Empire and he gave women rights to vote. He gave women a right to an education, a right to work, a right to choose a husband. He forbid women from wearing the hijab. He forbid men from wearing the beard. The Muslim hate him so much that they consider him a Jewish agent because they believe that his mother in her bloodline was Jewish and that was the influence on Ataturk.

By the time the Islamic Empire or the Islamic Caliphate or the Islamic State ended in 1924, the Islamic Caliphate had existed for 1,400 years and it ended less than 100 years ago.

By the time the Islamic Caliphate ended in 1924, 270 million people around the world were killed by Islam. 270 million. And we didn't have weapons of mass destruction and there wasn't nuclear weapons. All of these people were killed butchered by the sword.

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Amazing history lesson.

First thing first Dhimmi is the name of men who had to pay the tax and it means “protected person” the tax itself was called Jizya.

No Muslim state currently apply it or wish to apply it right now.

That being said the Jizya is very often misunderstood so I will explain what it is. You have to put things in their historical context. People were very often at war and borders were not as secure as they are (mostly) nowadays. In Islam you can “draft” Muslim men if a war was to happen but you cannot “draft” non Muslim men they have to chose to join the army (some didn’t allow non muslim men in the army making them automatically dhimmi) So the Jizya was a way to participate to the protection of ALL the people (including non Muslims) for men who were physically able to take arms to defend the land but didn’t. Women, children, elderly and disabled people who were not Muslim didn’t have to pay it. Same with non Muslim abled men who wanted and were allowed to take arms instead to protect the land and its people. In the majority of cases but not all people who couldn’t afford it were also automatically forgiven. The Jizya was also a way to be allowed autonomy and freedom in their religious practices.

It’s also important to say that the amount was often based on existing taxes before the Islamic conquest in the area and that Muslims had to pay their own taxes that non Muslims didn’t have to pay. (For exemple I don’t even live in a Muslim country and I give 2.5% of my savings, value of my gold jewelry included, to someone in need or to charity every year because it’s an obligation for Muslims.).

In some cases Muslims also had to pay the Jizya. In what is today day Algeria and part of Libya for example the Imazighen were like “we’re okay with the whole religion thing we revert to Islam but Arabs (actual Arabs not Arabized Imazighen) can’t rule us we will rule ourselves”. Because of that the Arabs did not trust the Imazighen with weapons they didn’t allow them to serve in the military and made them pay the Jizya instead. Which was lived as an injustice (they also had to pay the Muslim specific taxes and making them pay the Jizya was implying that they were not Muslims) and led to revolts against actual Arabs not against Islam.

So its important to understand a few things before we get into this.  Firstly, ISlam almost 1500 years old, is spread across multiple continents, and has over 1.6 billion followers, it like Christianity is a massively diverse faith with a ton of different interpretations, so there isn’t a single correct take on Islam.  

Secondly, the Qur’an isn’t a straight narrative story or even a series of commandments, its a collection of poems, really odd poems that are not written in a straight order.  Also if you follow most forms of Islam, you have to learn Classical Arabic (which is as dead as Latin) in order to understand it property.  And if you’ve ever read poetry...its not...really clear what Islam does and does not say.  Muslims have been arguing this for almost1500 years now, there is no single agreed upon take on most parts of Islam. 

So to address the question of “The people of the book” it varies a LOT depending on the Muslim sect in question.  Fundamentalist's or radical sects tend to be like “Kill everybody who isn’t Abrahamic” but that is a minority even among conservative Islamism (and not all Muslims are Islamist).  But that view does exist.  Meanwhile, historically many Muslim empires ruled over non Abrahamic peoples, Zoroastrians in Persian, Samaritans in the Middle East, Mandeans in Central Asia, and Sikhs in South Asia have all been accepted by various Muslim empires as People of the Book.  However even Hindus and Buddhists , who tend to be as polytheistic as they come, were many times seen as People of the Book by the Murghal Empire in what is today India/Pakistan, though some Sultans reversed that ruling.  So within the Caliphate/Sultanate model of ruling, most religious minorities were tolerated in Islamic states as long as they accepted the Dhimma and payed the Jizya.   Now there have been many incidents of Muslims murdering “Pagans” or destroying their culture, but you have just as many of them tolerating non Abrahamic faiths as long as they kept in their own community.  

Among Muslims today, it depends on the sect, the majority of Muslims have embraced the Nation-State/Civic State model of goverment, which tends to have religious tolerance if not full religious integration.  That doesn’t mean these Muslims aren’t free of religious bigotry's (though many are) its just that they don’t see the Dhimma or Jizya as useful terms today.   

Islamist Muslims want to go back to the caliphate model and have religious minorities in segregated communities but still tolerated, which is pretty unjust but not extermination.  

There are radical purist sects who want to actively eliminate non Abrahamic faiths, but again they aren’t popular and currently rule no nations.  

When they do later refer to the Qur’an, the texts they cite do not, in fact, speak of love for neighbor as the motivating force for the various righteous activities that are mentioned therein (e.g., giving money to orphans, the needy, travelers, and beggars). This is not surprising, because “love between human beings...is mentioned only a handful of times in the Qur’an,” and it is never appealed to as a motivation for neighbor keeping. This, in turn, is not surprising, since love is not central to the Muslim concept of God nor to the Muslim idea of the right human response to God. Transcendent power, on the one hand, and submission, on the other, are the governing ideas.

If the Qur’an does not explicitly tell believers to love their neighbors, however, it certainly does tell them explicitly not to love some of them. Muslims are exhorted, for example, not to love outsiders to the faith, who are considered to be both God’s enemies and theirs (60:1). This is logically consistent with the fact that among the various people in the Qu’ran who God himself does not love are the unbelievers (the al-kafireen: 2:276; 3:32; 30:45).

Here “neighbors” and “enemies” are in two different camps, divided along confessional lines; love is to be offered to the one but not the other. The Qur’an, then, does not exhort love for the enemy. Indeed, the concept of jihad (struggle) is very important to Muslims:

“The world is divided into two mutually hostile camps: the sphere of Islam (dar al-islam) and the sphere of War (dar al-harb). Enemies will convert, like the polytheists, or submit, like the Christians and the Jews.”

Once again, power and submission are the governing ideas; love is reserved for those who have submitted to power and obeying Allah’s laws. Obedience to God, rather than love for neighbor, is the key concept in the Muslim view of how to relate rightly to one’s fellow human beings.