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Apologetics

Islam and Sharia Law: jizya

On March 20, 2013 ⋅ Post a comment
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Aid or Jizya?

Posted: 19 Mar 2013 05:15 PM PDT

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 theJizya.
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-yrefers 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 Foeby 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 Hadith says … 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 itsaid as jizya, 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 ourhaq [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.

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Shaikh Al-Qaradawi: Muslim ‘Moderates’ endorse aggressive jihad

Posted: 18 Nov 2011 01:22 PM PST

Two important modern reference works on jihad in Islam are Muhammad Haykal’s Jihad and Fighting according the the Shar‘i Policy (Al-Jihad wa-l-qital fi al-siyasa al-sharia’iyya) and Yusuf Al-Qaradawi’s Jurisprudence of Jihad (Fiqh al-jihad).  Both these works give the lie to apologies offered by many western scholars for Islam’s militancy, such as the claim that jihad is purely defensive.As yet, neither work is available in English translation.  Remarkably, Haykal attempts in his copyright statement to forbid anyone from quoting from or translating his work into any language other than its original Arabic.  (However David Cook’s Understanding Islam gives a useful overview of Haykal on pp.124-127).The TranslatingJihad website has recently posted a translation from a key section in Al-Qaradawi’s Fiqh al-Jihad (see here), which discusses the issue of whether ‘moderate’ Muslims support aggressive jihad.  This was translated from a fatwa posted on IslamOnline.net. The fatwa is by Dr. ‘Imad Mustafa, professor at Al-Azhar University, who relies upon a passage from Al-Qaradawi’s Fiqh al-Jihad to support his ruling in support of aggressive jihad.

Al-Qaradawi is one of the most influential public intellectuals in the world today.  He is a trustee of Oxford University’s Centre for Islamic Studies, and his program on Al Jazeera reaches an estimate audience of 40 million world wide.

In the passage cited by Dr Mustafu, Al-Qaradawi defends ‘moderate’ Muslims from the charge, made by ‘extremists’, that they do not support ‘offensive jihad’, which is aggressive warfare to conquer non-Muslim territory for Islam.

That Al-Qaradawi feels the need to mount such a defense at all is in itself a matter of considerable interest.

Jihad is a highly prestigious concept in Islam.  The traditional view has always been that Islam’s conquest of non-Muslim civilizations was one of its greatest achievements, and certainly not something to be embarrassed about or to resile from.  To accuse a group of Muslims of rejecting aggressive jihad is a tactic which will discredit them in the eyes of many other Muslims.  Thus it is not surprising that Al-Qaradawi feels the need to defend ‘moderates’ – such as himself – from this charge.  He writes:

I want to clarify here the difference between the moderates and extremists, or the “defensive (jihadists)” and “offensive (jihadists)”, as they are called by some.

Some of the offensive (jihadists) have not been fair to those who hold the opposing view. They have put words in their mouths which they did not say, and accused them of that which they are innocent. They say: “They (the defensive jihadists) do not accept offensive jihad under any circumstance, in any form, or for any reason. They do not believe jihad is legitimate except in one condition, which is if Muslims are attacked in their homes and lands.” This is how they depict the opinion of the moderates or the defensive (jihadists).

I think they are not being fair with the opposing side, and are not being precise or honest in presenting their views. Whoever reads their [i.e. the moderates’] opinions, will find that they accept offensive jihad, and attacking the infidels in their lands, for several reasons…

There is a great irony here.  On the one hand, many Western scholars defend ‘moderate’ Islam on the basis that the concept of jihad is merely defensive, or not even militaristic at all.  On the other hand, as prominent and influential a scholar as Al-Qaradawi feels the need to defend ‘moderate’ Islam on the grounds that it endorses aggressive jihad.

Al-Qaradaqi lists four conditions under which aggressive jihad would be supported by ‘moderate’ Muslims:

  1. To remove all obstacles to the propagation of Islam.
  2. Preemptive warfare in the interests of the Islamic state.
  3. To rescue people (Muslims and non-Muslims) from oppressive rulers.
  4. Religious cleansing of Arabia to eliminate all non-Muslim religions (‘Allah’s favour to the Arabs’).

There is ample provision in these principles to support just about any jihad conquest of non-Muslim lands.  Just as Hitler termed the conquest of Poland an act of ‘liberation’, since time immemorial ambitious rulers have used the language of benevolence and liberation to justify their acts of aggressive conquest.

Al-Qarawi’s point number 1 alone is wide enough to drive a truck through.  In his explanation of point 1, Al-Qaradawi states:

[Aggressive jihad is called for:] To ensure the freedom to propagate the call to Islam, to prevent fitna in the religion (of Islam), and to remove the physical obstacles which prevent the call to Islam from reaching the multitudes of people.

This was the reason for the conquests of the rightly-guided (caliphs) and the companions (of the Prophet), as well as those who followed them in righteousness. (They fought) to remove the power of the tyrants who controlled the necks and minds of men, and who said what Pharaoh said to those of his people who believed (in Islam): “Have you believed before I gave you permission to believe?” This is the embodiment of the goal expressed in the saying of the Almighty: “Fight them on until there is no more fitna.”

Al-Qaradawi’s citation of the Quranic verse ‘fight them until there is no more fitna’ deserves explanation.  The key point is the meaning of fitna.  I reproduce here my comments on this concept in The Third Choice (pp.96-98):

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The Arabic word fitna ‘trial, persecution, temptation’ is of crucial importance in understanding Muhammad’s metamorphosis, which was one of the spiritual fruits of the formative Meccan period. The word is derived from fatana ‘to turn away from, to tempt, seduce or subject to trials’. The base meaning is to prove a metal by fire. Fitna can include either temptation or trial, including both positive and negative inducements, up to and including torture. It could encompass seducing someone, or tearing them limb from limb. 
Fitna became a key concept in theological reflection upon the early Muslim community’s experiences with unbelievers. The charge of Muhammad against the Quraysh was that they had subjected him and the rest of the Muslims to fitna – including insult, slander, torture, exclusion, economic pressures, and other temptations – in order to get them to leave Islam or to dilute its claims. Ibn Kathir reports that after the migration to Medina, the first verses revealed concerning fighting made clear that the whole purpose of fighting and killing was to eliminate fitna, because it could cause Muslims to turn away from their faith:

And fight in the way of Allah with those who fight with you,
but aggress not: Allah loves not the aggressors.
And slay them wherever you come upon them,
and expel them from where they expelled you;
persecution (fitna) is more grievous than slaying
.…
Fight them, til there is no persecution (fitna);
and the religion is Allah’s;
then if they give over [i.e. cease their disbelief and opposition to Islam],
there shall be no enmity save for evildoers.’ (Q2:190-93)

The idea that fitna of Muslims was ‘more grievous than slaying’ proved to be a significant one. The same phrase would be revealed again after an attack on a Meccan caravan (Q2:217) during the sacred month (a period during which Arab tribal traditions prohibited raiding). It implied, at the very least, that shedding the blood of infidels is a lesser thing than a Muslim being led astray from their faith.
The other significant phrase in this passage from Q2 is ‘fight them until there is no fitna’. This too was revealed more than once, the second time being after the battle of Badr, during the second year in Medina (Q8:39).
These fitna phrases, each revealed twice in the Quran, established the principle that jihad was justified by the existence of an obstacle to people entering Islam, or of inducements to Muslims to abandon their faith. However grievous it might be to fight others and shed their blood, undermining or obstructing Islam was worse.
Some Islamic jurists maintained a more limited and narrower interpretation, namely that ‘fitna is worse than slaughter’ simply meant fighting should continue ‘until no Muslim is persecuted so that he abandons his religion’. However most extended the concept of fitna to include even the mere existence of unbelief, so the phrase could be interpreted as ‘unbelief is worse than killing’. Thus Ibn Kathir equated fitna with what he called ‘committing disbelief ’ and ‘associating’ (i.e. polytheism), alongside hindering people from following Islam:

Since jihad involves killing and shedding of blood of men, Allah indicated that these men [i.e. polytheists] are committing disbelief in Allah, associating with Him (in the worship) and hindering from His path, and this is a much greater evil and more disastrous than killing. (Tafsir Ibn Kathir)

Understood this way, the phrase ‘fitna is worse than killing’ became a universal mandate to fight and kill all infidels who rejected Muhammad’s message, whether they were interfering with Muslims or not. Merely for unbelievers to ‘commit disbelief ’ – to use Ibn Kathir’s phrase – was a greater evil than their being killed.
On this understanding the concept of jihad warfare to extend the dominance of Islam was based. Thus Ibn Kathir, when commenting on Q2 and Q8, said that the command to fight means to go to war ‘so that there is no more Kufr (disbelief)’ and the Quranic statements ‘and the religion is Allah’s’ (Q2:193) or ‘the religion is Allah’s entirely’ (Q8:39) mean ‘So that the religion of Allah [i.e. Islam] becomes dominant above all other religions.’
The renowned modern jurist Muhammad Taqi Usmani (b. 1943) reports that religious authorities have universally accepted that jihad is warfare to make Islam dominant:

… the purpose of Jehad … aims at breaking the grandeur of unbelievers and establish that of Muslims. As a result no one will dare to show any evil designs against Muslim on one side and on the other side, people subdued from the grandeur of Islam will have an open mind to think over the blessings of Islam. … I think that all Ulema (religious scholars) have established the same concept about the purpose of Jehad. (Islam and Modernism, pp. 133-134)

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Sheikh Al-Bouti dies by the means he promoted

Posted: 25 Mar 2013 02:22 AM PDT

On March 21, Sheikh Dr Mohamed Said Ramadan Al-Bouti of Syria was killed, along with 40 others, by a suicide bomber at the Iman mosque in Damascus.

A 2009 publication edited by John Esposito and Ibrahim Kalin listed the 500 most influential Muslims in the world. Al-Bouti was no. 23.  He was Imam of the Ummayyad Mosque and Dean of the Department of Religion at Damascus University, where he had taught Islam for more than half a century. Aged in his eighties, Al-Bouti was regarded as one of the eminent Sunni jurists of the modern era.

Al-Bouti had long been a critic of Salafists and the Muslim Brotherhood.  More recently, the Brotherhood’s spiritual leader Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawy has been fanning the flames of unrest across the Middle East, reaching millions of viewers on Al-Jazeera.  When asked the question on Al-Jazeera TV,  “Is it permissible to target those who support the [Syrian] regime, especially government scholars?” Al- Qaradawy replied: “We should fight to kill all those who work for the government, whether civilians, army, scholars, or ignorant.”  Al-Qaradawy has also mocked Al-Bouti (here), called him a mad imbecile (here) and threatened him with Allah’s wrath and people’s anger if he did not repent.

Also stirring the pot from the safety of Saudi Arabia has beenAdnan al-Aroor, an exiled Syrian Sunni cleric, who has cursed Al-Bouti and called for his death.

The loss of Al-Bouti will be sorely felt by the Assad regime.  Well-known for his opposition to revolution, he was the most senior Sunni cleric who still supported Assad.

Al-Bouti’s support was consistent with a sharia principle which states that it is unlawful for Muslims to revolt and take up arms against their Muslim ruler, even if he is unjust.  Most scholars agree that this is forbidden.  Ibn Taymiyyah made the famous comment that ‘sixty years under an oppressive ruler are better than one night without any ruler.’

Muhammad himself said:

“The best among your rulers are those whom you love and they love you in turn, those who pray (make supplication) for you and you pray for them. The worst of your rulers are those whom you hate and they hate you in turn, and you curse them and they curse you.”
Someone asked: “O Messenger of Allah! Shall we confront them with swords?”
The Prophet (peace be upon him) said: “No, as long as they hold prayers among you (i.e. as long as the ruler is a Muslim). If you see from your rulers what you hate, hate the action they do but do not rebel against them.”  (Sahih Muslim)

In order for Muslims to rebel, the ruler should first be declared to be a kaffir ‘unbeliever’ who has abandoned Islam.  Declaring Muslims to be kaffir is known as the practice of takfir. There have been many takfir rulings against President Assad and his supporters in recent times to justify fighting and killing them (for example these two rulings against Assad and Alawites on a Salafist website).

It is not surprising that in a statement released after Al-Bouti’s death, President Assad, after declaring Al-Bouti to be a martyr, pledged to continue to work to eliminate ‘takfiri thinking’.

In recent years there have been concerted efforts by leading Muslim scholars to suppress the practice of takfir, notably theAmman Message, sponsored by King Abdullah of Jordan and signed by over 500 leading Muslim scholars, including Al-Bouti and Al-Qaradawy. Nevertheless many Muslims accept the use oftakfir against apostates from Islam, against groups regarded as heretical such as the Ahmadis, and against those who, like Salman Rushdie, are considered to be blasphemers.

Islam has a long doctrinal tradition of warfare – the institution of jihad – which offers Paradise to those who die fighting. Indeed in Islam, all warfare should be religious, because it is forbidden to wage war without a religious mandate.

The principle of Islamic law that Muslims should not take up arms against Muslim rulers is pragmatic.  It helps protect Islamic societies from being torn apart by sectarian conflict.  The dogma of jihad and practice of takfir, if invoked by competing parties in a conflict, can produce extraordinary devastation, as was witnessed in the Iran-Iraq war, in which there were more than a million ‘martyrs’. It was on such grounds that Al-Bouti supported Assad – and opposed the more radical takfiri Muslims, who now constitute the opposition forces in Syria.

His distaste for armed rebellion notwithstanding, Al-Bouti was a theological conservative who endorsed the classical principles of Islamic jihad.  In Fiqh Al-Sira (‘Jurisprudence of the Life of Muhammad’) he defined the doctrine of jihad to consist of the duty of Muslims to impose Islamic government on the world if they have sufficient military force. In support of this principle he cited Sura 9:123:

 “O ye who believe! Fight those of the disbelievers who are near to you, and let them find harshness in you, and know that Allah is with those who keep their duty (unto Him).”

as well as the words of Muhammad:

“I have been ordered to fight the people till they say: ‘None has the right to be worshipped but Allah,’ and whoever says, ‘None has the right to be worshipped but Allah’, Allah will save his property and his life from me [i.e. from Muhammad], except justly [i.e. he has committed a crime], and his account will be with Allah.”  (Sahih Al-Bukhari)

Al-Bouti also taught that atheists, idolaters and polytheists could be fought against, to compel them into Islam, while Christians and Jews could be permitted to live alongside Muslims provided they submit to sharia law and pay tribute to the Islamic authorities.  He pooh-poohed the distinction often made between offensive and defensive jihad:

“It is nonsense to want to distinguish the two aspects of defensive and offensive warfare in the struggle for the cause of Allah.  The legitimacy of jihad does not depend upon the right of attack or defense as such; it is based upon the necessity of establishing an Islamic society which follows the laws and principles of Islam, therefore it matters little how one pursues jihad towards this end, whether offensive or defensive.” (Fiqh Al-Sira, from the French translation of Z. Diab, pp. 187-188).

Like many other leading Muslim scholars, Al-Bouti issued a fatwa endorsing ‘martyrdom operations’ — suicide bombings — in Israel.  This fatwa was cited by Nawaf Hayel Al-Takrouri in Martyrdom Operations in Islamic Jurisprudence (al-Amaliyat al-Istishhadiyya fi Mizan al-Fiqhi) along with 31 other similar rulings:

“These operations are one hundred percent legal if the one who carries it out intends to inflict defeat upon the enemy, but not to kill himself. If he intended to kill himself, he has committed suicide and he is not a martyr. His intention must be to inflict defeat upon the enemy and not death [to himself]. Allah might save him supernaturally.”

Then he [Prof. Al Bouti] gave an illustration.  He said:

“A man says, ‘Since I am tired of life, I am going to carry out a [martyrdom] operation.’ This [person] would be committing suicide.

Someone else says, ‘I am pursuing jihad in the cause of Allah to strike the enemy. If I die, that is good; if I don’t die, that is better.’ This [person] will be a martyr, Allah willing. Furthermore, this an act of vengeance.”

It is a bitter irony that this respected scholar was killed at the end of a long and productive life by someone who was acting out the very belief he had promoted against Israelis: that a Muslim who blows himself up to inflict defeat upon ‘the enemy’ has not committed suicide, but is a martyr enjoying the delights of paradise, provided his intentions are ‘good’.

Muslim armies down the centuries have found the doctrine of jihad to be a potent weapon against their non-Muslim foes. However bellicose dogmas, which even ‘moderate’ Muslims, such as Al-Bouti espouse, have the capacity to tear societies apart in a bloodbath if conditions for their implementation are triggered. The recent slaughter of 41 civilians in the Iman mosque in Damascus was but a microcosm of the larger theologically-driven tragedy which is engulfing Syria, and threatens to make mince-meat of much of the Middle East. For too long Arab states have tolerated and even invested heavily in the promotion of jihadist dogma in their societies.  Those who stoke the fires of jihad better watch out for the blowback.

This article was first published by frontpagemag.com.

Mark Durie is an Anglican vicar in Melbourne, Australia, author of The Third Choice, and an Associate Fellow at the Middle Eastern Forum.

Mark Durie is an Anglican pastor and author of The Third Choice: Islam, Dhimmitude and Freedom.

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