Conquest of Christendom: 3rd Time's The Charm?

AEI conferred its Irving Kristol award on Bernard Lewis this year. The text of his speech accepting the award's been sitting on my desk for a month. Too much of interest to properly summarize, but here's an aspect of the difficulty of "dialogue" between the West & Islam that was new to me. What follows will be lengthy, but worth it:

In the Ottoman Empire and other states before that--I mention the Ottoman Empire as the most recent--the non-Muslim communities had separate organizations and ran their own affairs. They collected their own taxes and enforced their own laws. There were several Christian communities, each living under its own leadership, recognized by the state. These communities were running their own schools, their own education systems, administering their own laws in such matters as marriage, divorce, inheritance, and the like. The Jews did the same.

So you had a situation in which three men living in the same street could die and their estates would be distributed under three different legal systems if one happened to be Jewish, one Christian, and one Muslim. A Jew could be punished by a rabbinical court and jailed for violating the Sabbath or eating on Yom Kippur. A Christian could be arrested and imprisoned for taking a second wife. Bigamy is a Christian offense; it was not an Islamic or an Ottoman offense.

They do not have that degree of independence in their own social and legal life in the modern state. It is quite unrealistic for them to expect it, given the nature of the modern state, but that is not how they see it. They feel that they are entitled to receive what they gave. As one Muslim friend of mine in Europe put it, "We allowed you to practice monogamy, why should you not allow us to practice polygamy?"

Isn't that interesting? The first thing anyone cites about the difficulty of "assimilating" Muslims is their entwining of Mosque & state, and here's a concrete example of the problem. Earlier he noted that the distinction between lay and ecclesiastical, spiritual and secular was so foreign to Muslims that they didn't have words to express it until today.

Lewis also summarizes the Crusades (he doesn't think much of JP II having apologized for them, although in the Pope's defense, his apology wasn't a matter of taking the blame for them; it was part of the "purification of memory" leading up to the millennium):

We have seen in our own day the extraordinary spectacle of a pope apologizing to the Muslims for the Crusades. I would not wish to defend the behavior of the Crusaders, which was in many respects atrocious. But let us have a little sense of proportion. We are now expected to believe that the Crusades were an unwarranted act of aggression against a peaceful Muslim world. Hardly. The first papal call for a crusade occurred in 846 C.E., when an Arab expedition from Sicily sailed up the Tiber and sacked St. Peter's in Rome. A synod in France issued an appeal to Christian sovereigns to rally against "the enemies of Christ," and the Pope, Leo IV, offered a heavenly reward to those who died fighting the Muslims. A century and a half and many battles later, in 1096, the Crusaders actually arrived in the Middle East. The Crusades were a late, limited, and unsuccessful imitation of the jihad--an attempt to recover by holy war what had been lost by holy war. It failed, and it was not followed up.

And he also recounts what should receive the all-time Dhimmi award:

On October 8, 2002--I insist on giving the date because you may want to look it up-- the then French prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, who I am told is a staunch Roman Catholic, was making a speech in the French National Assembly and talking about the situation in Iraq. Speaking of Saddam Hussein, he remarked that one of Saddam Hussein's heroes was his compatriot Saladin, who came from the same Iraqi town of Tikrit. In case the members of the Assembly were not aware of Saladin's identity, M. Raffarin explained to them that it was he who was able "to defeat the Crusaders and liberate Jerusalem." Yes. When a French prime minister describes Saladin's capture of Jerusalem from the largely French Crusaders as an act of liberation, this would seem to indicate a rather extreme case of realignment of loyalties.

I was told this, and I didn't believe it. So I checked it in the parliamentary record. When M. Raffarin used the word "liberate," a member--the name was not given- called out, "Libérer?" He just went straight on. That was the only interruption, and as far as I was aware there was no comment afterwards.

I was delighted to hear that someone actually protested. RTWT. It's not exactly heartening, but it's not hopeless, either.