Dhimmitude old and new

I suggested yesterday that Bat Ye’or is the first author to write about the phenomenon of mental dhimmitude. Andrew Bostom, a leading exponent of Bat Ye’or’s work, informs me that this is not correct. As he has discussed at FrontPage Magazine, Jovan Cvijic and Sir Jadunath Sarkar articulated the same idea almost a century ago, and Bat Ye’or acknowledges Cvijic as a major source of inspiration. Thus Bostom writes:

…In his detailed psychosocial analysis of the Serbian dhimmis under Turkish Muslim rule, early 20th century sociologist and geographer Jovan Cvijic described how the Serbs “moral mimicry” accentuated their submission. Thus the Serbs (exemplifying prototypical dhimmi adaptive behaviors), became,

“ … increasingly accustomed to forming an inferior servile class whose duty it is to win his master’s approval, to cringe before him, and to please him … used to hypocrisy and lowliness, because this is necessary for them to live and to protect themselves from violence.” [Cvijic, J. La Peninsule Balkanique, Paris, 1918, pp. 387-388.]

Bostom also writes:

Sir Jadunath Sarkar, … the pre-eminent historian of Mughal India, wrote the following in 1920 regarding the impact of centuries of jihad and dhimmitude on the indigenous Hindus of the Indian subcontinent:

“When a class are publicly depressed and harassed by law and executive caprice alike, they merely content themselves with dragging on an animal existence. With every generous instinct of the soul crushed out of them, the intellectual culture merely adding a keen edge to their sense of humiliation, the Hindus could not be expected to produce the utmost of which they were capable; their lot was to be hewers of wood and drawers of water to their masters, to bring grist to the fiscal mill, to develop a low cunning and flattery as the only means of saving what they could of their own labor. Amidst such social conditions, the human hand and the human spirit cannot achieve their best; the human soul cannot soar to its highest pitch. The barrenness of intellect and meanness of spirit of the Hindu upper classes are the greatest condemnation of Muhammadan rule in India. The Muhammadan political tree judged by its fruit was an utter failure.”

I am surprised to learn that the upper class Hindus of the modern world have been so shaped (or rather misshapen) by the centuries-earlier Moghul rule.

In any case, the above helps clarify my point about mental dhimmitude. It seems that there are three types of dhimmitude: (1) the actual, legal and physical submission of the “people of the Book” (plus the Hindus, who were treated according to the same rules) to lowly, oppressed, and humiliating (but still “protected”) status under Muslim rule; (2) the mental dhimmitude that is a symptom of this legal state, as described by Sarkar and Cvijic above; and (3), the new mental dhimmitude of today, the dhimmitude of people who are not actually under Muslim domination but who have taken on some of the characteristic attitudes of those who are. This seems to be the phenomenon that Bat Ye’or is the first to explicate. She not only coined the term dhimmitude (from the Arabic word dhimmi) but has broadened its meaning to fit the voluntary dhimmitude of the liberal West in our time.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 05, 2005 11:35 AM | Send