istorical zones of confrontation and interaction should be examined in order to understand their modern expressions.
Characteristics of the Conflict
The Israeli-Arab conflict is only one regional, limited aspect of the traditional, worldwide struggle engendered by the ideology of jihad. For over a millennium, Muslims had conquered and held lands populated by Christians and Jews on three continents: Africa, Asia, and Europe. In East Asia, they also colonized and Islamized Buddhist and Hindu empires. Caliphs and sultans administered this multitude of peoples through a juridic-political system based on interpretations of the Qur'an and the hadiths,(1) which integrated the pre-Islamic laws and customs of the vanquished peoples into an Islamic conceptual structure. This system of governing subjected populations, which I have called "dhimmitude,"(2) determined the demographic, religious, and ethnic changes in the countries absorbed by jihad. The term "dhimmitude" encompasses all the aspects and complexities of a political system, whereas the word "tolerance" implies a subjective opinion. The system of dhimmitude includes the notion of tolerance, but this latter term cannot express all the interactions of political, religious, and juridical factors that, over the centuries, shaped the civilization of dhimmitude.
The jihad ideology requires that the shari'a -- the law that governs the Islamic domain -- be applied over all the jihad-conquered lands. In this context, the Jews formed a small minority among the non-Muslim populations, all to be targeted by the jihad ideology. Islamic law confers an identical status on Jews and Christians as the People of the Book (the Bible), while Zoroastrians and others, considered pagans, were relegated to a far worse situation and subjected to more severe oppression.
In the Islamic-Christian context, the jihad-wars of Islamization, unleashed from the seventh century and sustained for over a millennium, have again -- in the last decades -- ignited jihad fires in Lebanon, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Armenia, Sudan, Nigeria, Kashmir, the Philippines, and Indonesia. …