Bat Ye'or


Bat Ye'or is the pen name of Gisèle Littman, an Egyptian-born British author, focusing on the history of religious minorities in the Muslim world and modern European politics. Ye'or has popularized the concept of dhimmitude in her books about the history of Middle Eastern Christians and Jews living under Islamic governments. Ye'or describes dhimmitude as the "specific social condition that resulted from jihad," and as the "state of fear and insecurity" of "infidels" who are required to "accept a condition of humiliation." She has also popularized the Islamophobic conspiracy theory Eurabia in her writings about modern Europe, in which she argues that Islam, anti-Americanism and antisemitism hold sway over European culture and politics as a result of collaboration between radical Arabs and Muslims on one hand, and fascists, socialists, Nazis, and antisemitic rulers of Europe on the other.
Ye'or's work on the history of religious minorities under Islamic rule and her use of the term dhimmitude have had a predominantly critical reception among academic specialists in the field. Her work on this subject has been praised by some authors writing for a popular audience. Ye'or's other books have also been a subject of controversy.

Early life and education

Bat Ye'or was born into a Jewish family in Cairo, Egypt in 1933. She and her parents fled Egypt in 1957 after the Suez Crisis of 1956, arriving in London as stateless refugees.
In 1958 she attended the UCL Institute of Archaeology and moved to Switzerland in 1960 to continue her studies at the University of Geneva, but never finished her master's degree and has never held an academic position.
She described her experiences in the following manner:
I had witnessed the destruction, in a few short years, of a vibrant Jewish community living in Egypt for over 2,600 years and which had existed from the time of Jeremiah the Prophet. I saw the disintegration and flight of families, dispossessed and humiliated, the destruction of their synagogues, the bombing of the Jewish quarters and the terrorizing of a peaceful population. I have personally experienced the hardships of exile, the misery of statelessness − and I wanted to get to the root cause of all this. I wanted to understand why the Jews from Arab countries, nearly a million, had shared my experience.

She was married to the British historian and human rights advocate David Littman from September 1959 until his death in May 2012. Many of her publications and works were in collaboration with Littman. Her British citizenship dates from her marriage. They moved to Switzerland in 1960 and together had three children.
She has provided briefings to the United Nations and the United States Congress and has given talks at major universities such as Georgetown, Brown, Yale, Brandeis, and Columbia.

Dhimmitude

Theory

Ye'or is credited for employing the neologism dhimmitude which she discusses in detail in . The word, which is borrowed from the French language, bears purposely some phonetic resemblance with the word servitude, which exists both in French and English; dhimmitude was intentionally used and popularized by Bat Ye'or in place of the French "dhimmité" or the English "dhimmity", which should have been the words associated to "dhimma" in a non-polemical setting. In her writings she has credited assassinated Lebanese president-elect and Phalangist militia leader Bachir Gemayel with coining the term, although later she has also claimed that she invented it herself and inspired him to use it through a friend. The term itself is derived from "dhimmi", the adjectival form of the word dhimma, which means "protection" in Arabic and refers to the historical notion of an "indefinitely renewed contract through which the Muslim community accords hospitality and protection to members of other revealed religions, on condition of their acknowledging the domination of Islam".
Ye'or describes dhimmitude as the "specific social condition that resulted from jihad," and as the "state of fear and insecurity" of "infidels" who are required to "accept a condition of humiliation." She believes that "the dhimmi condition can only be understood in the context of Jihad," and studies the relationship between the theological tenets of Islam and the hardships of Christians and Jews under Islamic rule in different times and places. The cause of jihad, she argues, "was fomented around the 8th century by Muslim theologians after the death of Muhammad and led to the conquest of large swathes of three continents over the course of a long history." She says:
Dhimmitude is the direct consequence of jihad. It embodie all the Islamic laws and customs applied over a millennium on the vanquished population, Jews and Christians, living in the countries conquered by jihad and therefore Islamized. return of the jihad ideology since the 1960s, and of some dhimmitude practices in Muslim countries applying the sharia law, or inspired by it. I stress... the incompatibility between the concept of tolerance as expressed by the jihad-dhimmitude ideology, and the concept of human rights based on the equality of all human beings and the inalienability of their rights.

Though Bat Ye'or acknowledges that not all Muslims subscribe to so-called "militant jihad theories of society," she argues that the role of sharia in the 1990 Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam demonstrates that what she calls a perpetual war against those who won't submit to Islam is still an "operative paradigm" in Islamic countries.

Reception

According to journalist Adi Schwartz from Haaretz, the fact that she is not an academic and has never taught at any university, but has worked as an independent researcher, has, along with her opinions, made her a controversial figure. He quotes professor Robert S. Wistrich, head of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, who notes:
Lewis, though, on another occasion, called the notion of Jewish "dhimmi"-tude, i.e., of their "subservience and persecution and ill treatment" under Islamic rule, a "myth", which, just as the myth "of a golden age of equality, of mutual respect and cooperation", "contain significant elements of truth," with the "historic truth" being "in its usual place, somewhere in the middle between the extremes."
British historian Martin Gilbert in his book A History of the Twentieth Century has called her "the acknowledged expert on the plight of Jews and Christians in Muslim lands" who "brought the issue of continuing discrimination to a wide public."
Hans Jansen, Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Utrecht University and MEP for Geert Wilders' Party for Freedom, wrote in Middle East Quarterly that "In 1985, Bat Ye'or offered Islamic studies a surprise with her book, The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians under Islam, a convincing demonstration that the notion of a traditional, lenient, liberal, and tolerant Muslim treatment of the Jewish and Christian minorities is more myth than reality."
Mark R. Cohen said that Bat Ye'or "has made famous" the term dhimmitude, though he thinks it is "misleading". He feels that "e may choose to employ" it keeping in mind that it "connotes protection and that it guaranteed communal autonomy, relatively free practice of religion, and equal economic opportunities, as much as it signified inferior legal status."
Michael Sells, John Henry Barrows Professor of Islamic History and Literature at the University of Chicago, argued that "by obscuring the existence of pre-Christian and other old, non-Christian communities in Europe as well as the reason for their disappearance in other areas of Europe, Bat Ye'or constructs an invidious comparison between the allegedly humane Europe of Christian and Enlightenment values and the ever present persecution within Islam. Whenever the possibility is raised of actually comparing circumstances of non-Christians in Europe to non-Muslims under Islamic governance in a careful, thoughtful manner, Bat Ye'or forecloses such comparison."
In a review of The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude, the American historian Robert Brenton Betts commented that the book dealt with Judaism at least as much as with Christianity, that the title was misleading and the central premise flawed. He said: "The general tone of the book is strident and anti-Muslim. This is coupled with selective scholarship designed to pick out the worst examples of anti-Christian behavior by Muslim governments, usually in time of war and threats to their own destruction. Add to this the attempt to demonize the so-called Islamic threat to Western civilization and the end-product is generally unedifying and frequently irritating."
Sidney Griffith, the head of the department of Semitic and Egyptian Languages and Literatures at the Catholic University of America wrote in a review of Decline of Eastern Christianity that Ye'or has "raised a topic of vital interest"; adding, however, that the "theoretical inadequacy of the interpretive concepts of jihad and dhimmitude, as they are employed here", and the "want of historical method in the deployments of the documents which serve as evidence for the conclusions reached in the study" serve as dual barriers. He goes on to say " are presented out of context, with no analysis or explanation. One has the impression that in their bulk they are simply meant to undergird the contentions made in the first part of the book", concluding that thus Ye'or has "written a polemical tract, not responsible historical analysis."
In a review of The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam, City University of New York Distinguished Professor of History Chase F. Robinson writes,
According to the American scholar Joel Beinin, Bat Ye'or exemplifies the "neo-lachrymose" perspective on Egyptian Jewish history. According to Beinin, this perspective has been "consecrated" as "the normative Zionist interpretation of the history of Jews in Egypt."
Robert Spencer, an American anti-Islamic polemicist, described her as "the pioneering scholar of dhimmitude, of the institutionalized discrimination and harassment of non-Muslims under Islamic law". He argued that she had turned this area, which he believed the "Middle East studies establishment" has hitherto been afraid of or indifferent to, into a field of academic study.
Irshad Manji describes her as "a scholar who dumps cold water on any dreamy view of how Muslims have historically dealt with the 'other'."

Eurabia

Her books Eurabia and Europe, Globalization, and the Coming of the Universal Caliphate are about the alleged relationship from the 1970s onwards between the European Union and the Arab states. Ye'or argues that Islam, anti-americanism and antisemitism hold sway over European culture and politics as a result of collaboration between radical Arabs and Muslims on one hand and fascists, socialists, Nazis, and antisemitic rulers of Europe on the other. Bat Ye'or popularized concept of "Eurabia" in the sense of:

Reception

In a The Jerusalem Post interview, referring to Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis the British historian Martin Gilbert stated "I've read Bat Yeor's book. I know her and have a great respect for her sense of anguish... I'm saying that her book – which is 100 percent accurate – is an alarm call that will ultimately prevent what she's warning about from taking place."
Bruce Bawer, writing in The Hudson Review on Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, wrote that "o book explains the European Muslim situation, in all its complexity, more ably," "t's hard to overstate this book's importance... Eurabia is eye-opening and required reading for anyone seriously interested in understanding Europe's current predicament and its probable fate."
According to Daniel Pipes,
Bat Ye'or has traced a nearly secret history of Europe over the past thirty years, convincingly showing how the Euro-Arab Dialogue has blossomed from a minor discussion group into the engine for the continent's Islamization. In delineating this phenomenon, she also provides the intellectual resources with which to resist it. Will her message be listened to?

According to historian Niall Ferguson, "future historians will one day regard her coinage of the term 'Eurabia' as prophetic. Those who wish to live in a free society must be eternally vigilant. Bat Ye'or's vigilance is unrivalled." British writer David Pryce-Jones called her a "Cassandra, a brave and far-sighted spirit."
The notion of "Eurabia" has been dismissed as a conspiracy theory by other commentators. For example, writing in Race & Class in 2006, author and freelance journalist Matt Carr states:
In order to accept Ye'or's ridiculous thesis, it is necessary to believe not only in the existence of a concerted Islamic plot to subjugate Europe, involving all Arab governments, whether 'Islamic' or not, but also to credit a secret and unelected parliamentary body with the astounding ability to transform all Europe's major political, economic and cultural institutions into subservient instruments of 'jihad' without any of the continent's press or elected institutions being aware of it.

Carr argues that Bat Ye'or is the "main inspiration" for many conspiracy theories current on the far-right. Furthermore, Carr notes that "tripped of its Islamic content, the broad contours of Ye'or's preposterous thesis recall the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories of the first half of the twentieth century and contemporary notions of the 'Zionist Occupation Government' prevalent in far-right circles in the US". He notes further that Bat Ye'or's analysis is driven by a contempt of "Islam's celebrated cultural achievements" and a view of Islam as a "perennially barbaric, parasitic and oppressive religion".
Ye'or's Eurabia theory gathered additional media attention when it was quoted and praised by the perpetrator of the 2011 Norway massacre Anders Behring Breivik in his manifesto released on the day of the attacks. Ye'or expressed regret that Breivik took inspiration from her writings.

Affiliations

Bat Ye'Or sits on the Board of Advisors of the International Free Press Society, identified as a "key organization" of the Counterjihad-movement. She is considered as its "main ideologue", with roots in Ye'or's Eurabia important to the movement.

Works

She is the author of eight books, including ', ', ', and '.

Books