Ibn Khaldun on how to deal with Christians

I haven’t read the famous late medieval Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun, but did read an interesting article by Jim Kalb years ago about Khaldun’s theories of society. Based on Khaldun’s scholarly and objective-sounding ideas, I think I assumed he was a more “enlightened” type of Muslim, i.e., perhaps nominally Muslim but not orthodox Muslim. But it turns out he was a complete sharia man. Look at this, by Andrew Bostom at FP today:

These excerpts [Manuel II’s Paleologos’s dialog with the learned Persian]—deemed so incendiary today by Muslims despite their having been recorded more than six centuries earlier—were part of a stereotypical exchange reflective of its time. For example, Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406), jurist, renowned philosopher, historian, and sociologist—one of the greatest luminaries of Muslim civilization—was a contemporary of the Byzantine “philosopher king” Manuel II Paleologus. Here are Ibn Khaldun’s personal observations on Christianity, from his monumental historical treatise “The Muqaddimah”

We do not think that we should blacken the pages of this book [The Muqaddimah] with discussion of their [Christian] dogmas of unbelief. In general, they are well known. All of them are unbelief. This is clearly stated in the noble Koran. To discuss or argue those things with them is not up to us. It is for them to choose between conversion to Islam, payment of the poll tax, or death.

Thus even one of the greatest of Muslim intellectuals had not the slightest interest in “dialog” with Christians. Christians were to be converted, killed, or subjugated, period. Yet the Catholic pope today, like a naïve child, or, worse, like an Israeli leftist trying to start up the “peace process” for the 800th time, is talking about his great desire for “dialog” with Muslims, who, for their part, as Diana West points out today, just want Christians to shut up—or else. The choice given to us infidels has thus been simplified since Ibn Khaldun’s time. Instead of convert, be a dhimmi, or die, it’s shut up or die.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 22, 2006 08:49 AM | Send