How to be a Dhimmi

By Francis X. Maier
In late July, some 60,000 migrants surged into the Spanish North African enclave of Ceuta from Morocco. The migrants were mainly young males. And since 99 percent of Moroccans practice Islam, most were almost certainly Muslim. Ceuta is not a Spanish colony. It's an "autonomous city" integral to the Spanish state, with Spanish sovereignty dating back to 1580. It's thus a (hoped for) gateway to the European Union, and a priority target of "undocumented" immigration.
Spanish police pushed most of the migrants back across the border. They left behind – as the Wall Street Journal noted – a normally tranquil city stunned by the chaos. All of this is now old news. But what sticks in the memory is the response of the Spanish Church: an ambiguous mix of concern for the law; concern for Ceuta's traumatized legal residents; and a vigorous worry that the incident might be used as a "political weapon" to polarize public opinion, demonize migrants, and "stoke fear."
To the latter concern – the treatment of migrants – we'll return in a moment. But first, some background and context.
Jacques Ellul (d. 1994) was a distinguished French philosopher and scholar of history and sociology. He was active in the French Resistance during World War II, helping Jews escape the pro-Nazi Vichy regime. He's best remembered for his many books, including masterworks like The Technological Society and Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes. He was also a committed (Calvinist) Christian and a lay theologian in the Reformed Church of France. And in that role, he was an articulate critic of Islam and the emerging prospect of an "Islamized" Europe.
Ellul is inconvenient for today's secular narrative. We live in a moment when Europe's elites have repudiated the continent's Christian past, while revising history to soften and valorize many elements of Islam. Christian thinkers, meanwhile, often minimize the gulfs that separate Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in a search for mutual respect. Public voices who fail to jump on the bandwagon are branded as "racist" like Jean Raspail (see here), or "alarmist and Islamophobic" like Michel Houellebecq (for his novel Submission), or lacking in academic gravity, like the scholar Bat Ye'or (see below).
Ellul, were he alive, could not be so easily dismissed. His robust critique of Islam can be found in two of his books, here and here. Simply put, he argues that the three great "monotheistic" religions have very different understandings of God, each other, and the human person. They do not share a common grounding in Abraham. And they do not relate to their Scriptures in a similar way. This same point is carried forward today by the Ratzinger Prize-winning French Catholic philosopher Rémi Brague. And it has very practical, real-world consequences.

Ellul especially criticized what he saw as an irreformable totalitarian streak in Islam based on a claimed divine right. This led to Islam's introduction of the concept of "holy war" into religious thought. And this, in turn, triggered the Christian notion of "crusade" as a response.
For Islam, violence and coercion – when seen as necessary – are legitimate tools in spreading the faith. They're hardwired into Islam's original structure in a way completely alien to Christianity. As Ellul notes, this has rarely stopped Christians from ignoring their own beliefs in the pursuit of self-interest. But in their fundamental attitudes toward religious violence, the two faiths have very different DNA.
For our purposes here, some of Ellul's key thoughts about Islam appear in his preface to The Dhimmi and his foreword to The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam, both written by the Jewish scholar Bat Ye'or (the pen name of Gisèle Littman). The great value of each book is its thoroughly researched study of dhimmi life through the centuries. The dhimmis were and are non-Muslim persons living under Islamic rule. Today much is made of Muslim "tolerance" toward Jew...