JIHAD AND GENOCIDAL ISLAMIC ANTI-SEMITISM IN SHI’ITE IRAN

What has always been the nature of the system of governance imposed upon indigenous non-Muslims conquered by jihad?

In his seminal The Laws of Islamic Governance, al- Mawardi (d.

The native infidel, dhimmi (which derives from both the word for “pact” and also “guilt”—guilty of religious errors), population had to recognize Islamic ownership of their land, submit to Islamic law, and accept payment of the Koranic poll tax (jizya, the tax paid in lieu of being slain) based on Koran 9:29. Al-Mawardi notes: “The enemy makes a payment in return for peace and reconciliation.. Reconciliation and security last as long as the payment is made. If the payment ceases, then the jihad resumes.”³⁶ A treaty of reconciliation may be renewable, but must not exceed ten years. This same basic formulation was reiterated during a January 8, 1998, interview by Yusuf al-Qaradawi confirming how jihad continues to regulate the relations between Muslims and non-Muslims to this day.³⁷

The “contract of the jizya, or dhimma, encompassed other compulsory and recommended obligations for the conquered non-Muslim dhimmi peoples. Collectively, these “obligations” formed the discriminatory system of dhimmitude imposed upon non-Muslims—Jews and Christians, as well as Zoroastrians, Hindus, and Buddhists—subjugated by jihad. Some of the more salient features of dhimmitude include:³⁸

• The prohibition of arms for the vanquished dhimmis

• The prohibition of church bells

• Restrictions concerning the building and restoration of churches, synagogues, and temples

• Inequality between Muslims and non-Muslims with regard to taxes and penal law

• The refusal of dhimmi testimony by Muslim courts

• A requirement that Jews, Christians, and other non­Muslims, including Zoroastrians and Hindus, wear special clothes

• The overall humiliation and abasement of non-Muslims

It is important to note that these regulations and attitudes were institutionalized as permanent features of the sacred Islamic law, or sharia.

The dhimmi is obliged not to mention Allah or His Apostle.. Jews, Christians, and Majians must pay the jizya [poll tax on non-Muslims].. On offering up the jizya, the dhimmi must hang his head while the official takes hold of his beard and hits [the dhimmi] on the protruberant bone beneath his ear [i.e., the mandible].. They are not permitted to ostentatiously display their wine or church bells.. Their houses may not be higher than the Muslim’s, no matter how low that is. The dhimmi may not ride an elegant horse or mule; he may ride a donkey only if the saddle-work is of wood. He may not walk on the good part of the road. They [the dhimmis] have to wear [an identifying] patch [on their clothing], even women, and even in the [public] baths.. [Dhimmis] must hold their tongue.³⁹

The practical consequences of such a discriminatory system were summarized by S. D. Goitein in 1970:

Taxation [by the Muslim government] was merciless, and a very large section of the population must have lived permanently at the starvation level. From many Geniza⁴⁰ letters one gets the impression that the poor were concerned more with getting money for the payment of their taxes than for food and clothing, for failure of payment usually induced cruel punishment.. The Muslim state was quite the opposite of the ideals. embedded in the constitution of the United States. An Islamic state was part of or coincided with dar al-Islam, the House of Islam. Its treasury was.the money of the Muslims. Christians and Jews were not citizens of the state, not even second class citizens. They were outsiders under the protection of the Muslim state, a status characterized by the term dhimma.. They were also exposed to a great number of discriminatory and humiliating laws.. As it lies in the very nature of such restrictions, soon additional humiliations were added, and before the second century of Islam was out, a complete body of legislation in this matter was in existence..

At the outset of the sixteenth century, Iran's Safavid rulers formally established Shi'a Islam as the state religion, while permitting a clerical hierarchy nearly unlimited control and influence over all aspects of public life.⁴² The profound influence of the Shi'ite clerical elite continued for almost four centuries (although interrupted between 1722-1795 during a period of Afghan invasion and internecine struggle) through the later Qajar period (1795-1925); as characterized by the Persianophilic scholar E. G. Browne:

The Mujtahids and Mulla are a great force in Persia and concern themselves with every department of human activity from the minutest detail of personal purification to the largest issues of politics.⁴³

These Shi'ite clerics emphasized the notion of the ritual uncleanliness (najis) of Jews in particular (but also Christians, Zoroastrians, and others), as the cornerstone of interconfessional relationships toward non-Muslims.⁴⁴ The impact of this najis conception was already apparent to European visitors to Persia during the reign of the first Safavid Shah, Ismail I (1502­1524). The Portuguese traveler Tome Pires observed (between 1512-1515), “Sheikh Ismail.never spares the life of any Jew,” while another European travelogue notes, “The great hatred (Ismail I) bears against the Jews.”⁴⁵

The writings and career of Mohammad Baqer Majlisi elucidate the imposition of dhimmitude in Shi'ite Iran. Majlisi (d. 1699), the highest institutionalized clerical officer under both Shah Sulayman (1666-1694) and Shah Husayn (1694-1722), was perhaps the most influential cleric of the Safavid Shi'ite theocracy in Persia. Indeed, for a decade at the end of the seventeenth century, al-Majlisi functioned as the de facto ruler of Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini of his era.⁴⁶ By design, he wrote many works in Persian to disseminate key aspects of the Shi'a ethos among ordinary persons.

And, that they should not enter the pool while a Muslim is bathing at the public baths.. It is also incumbent upon Muslims that they should not accept from them victuals with which they had come into contact, such as distillates, which cannot be purified. If something can be purified, such as clothes, if they are dry, they can be accepted, they are clean. But if they [the dhimmis] had come into contact with those cloths in moisture they should be rinsed with water after being obtained. As for hide, or that which has been made of hide such as shoes and boots, and meat, whose religious cleanliness and lawfulness are conditional on the animal's being slaughtered [according to the sharia], these may not be taken from them. Similarly, liquids that have been preserved in skins, such as oils, grape syrup, [fruit] juices.and the like, if they have been put in skin containers or water skins, these should [also] not be accepted from them.. It would also be better if the ruler of the Muslims would establish that all infidels could not move out of their homes on days when it rains or snows because they would make Muslims impure.⁴⁹

Far worse, the dehumanizing character of these popularized “impurity” regulations fomented recurring Muslim anti-Jewish violence—including pogroms and forced conversions throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, which rendered areas of Iran Judenrein—as opposed to merely unpleasant, “odd behaviors” by individual Muslims toward Jews.⁵⁰ For example, the preeminent modern historian of Iranian Jewry, Walter Fischel, provides these observations based on the nineteenth-century narrative of Rabbi David d’Beth Hillel and additional eyewitness accounts, which describe the rendering of Tabriz Judenrein, and the forced conversion of the Jews of Meshed to Islam:

Due to the persecution of their Moslem neighbors, many once flourishing communities entirely disappeared.