Re-imposing the Jizyah: Decoding Sharjeel Imam’s Speech

If the CAA protests across the country revealed the gaping wound of India that is Islamic radicalism, the Shaheen Bagh protests have removed all doubt. The truth about radical Islam had never become so obvious before, at least in front of the general public. The relation of the so-called moderate Muslims with radical Islam has never been any clearer.

Political ideologies like secularism, liberalism, socialism, which were used to play the game of deception with the Hindu masses, are now past their expiry dates. Radical Islam had been using these ideological vehicles to peddle its narrative and further its agenda until the time of deception would be over. The deception was planned until the Muslims would be at least 30% in number, when the need to maintain a façade would be over and they could come out directly in the open with the Islamization of India as their end goal.

The End of the Useful Idiot

The BJP government with its back-to-back decisions on Article 370, Ram Janmabhoomi, Sabarimala Review and the CAA forced them to reveal their hand before time. And now the cat is out of the bag. The façade of secularism lies shattered on the ground and the useful idiots among Hindus who helped keep up that façade are left to pick up the bits and pieces. Like any traitors, they are the first ones to be discarded and rejected.

The Shaheen Bagh revolutionaries have been gifting us one eternal truth after another, almost every day. There are some crucial takeaways from their ‘revolutionary speeches’.

The time of the Hindu useful idiot is over. Sharjeel Imam has said what every radical Muslim thinks about Hindu useful idiots like Kanhaiya Kumar. They are useful only until the charade of secularism is up. Once the radical Muslim is out in the open, the useful idiot is usually the first one to be disposed of, like the traitor who leads the foreign army to the gates of his country. Once the secret path is given up, there really is no use for him. Past his usefulness, he only becomes a burden to carry.

The ‘secularism’ of this useful idiot was useful in deluding the Hindu, but it also runs the risk of deluding future Muslims about the true goal of radical Islam and hence once the charade is over, the smokescreen of secularism has to be disposed off immediately. That is why Sharjeel Imam and his female versions are so eager to do away with Kannhaiya Kumars and others. Their time is up.

This is good for Hindu society. One by one the smokescreens created by the unholy alliance of radical Islam and liberal left are clearing. One by one the enemy lines are becoming visible. The elephant in the room is now becoming increasingly visible to the common Hindus. This will make the defense of Hindu Dharma easier.

The Concept of Jizyah

The second most important take-away from the speech of Sharjeel Imam is his call for the re-imposition of Jizyah on the Hindus.

“Ab Waqt ye hai ki ham gair muslimon se bolein ki agar hamdard ho to hamaari sharton par aake khade ho…”

“Time has come for us Muslims to tell the non-Muslims, that if you sympathize with us then you have to act on our terms…” [1]

The ‘othering’ of the Hindus cannot be more complete than this. The visceral hatred for everything and everyone non-Muslim is palpably clear. But it doesn’t just stop at hate. Sharjeel Imam may have shocked the millennial Hindus, but it is the standard Islamic attitude towards all non-Muslims and particularly Hindus.

Hindus, under the Islamic law, Shariat, have no rights at worst and secondary status at best. The non-Muslim is living in perpetual sin, as believing in any other religion after the One True Faith had been revealed to Prophet Muhammad is the gravest sin possible. The Hindu, in his devilishness and superstition still believes in his demonic false gods. And it is the pious duty of the devout Muslim to bring him to the One True Religion of Islam or kill him if he does not agree. The pagan polytheists have only two choices under Islamic rule. Either convert to Islam, or die at the hands of the devout Muslim.

The Prophetic Monotheistic religions like Christianity and Judaism were exempted from this fate temporarily by giving them some protection under the tag of the ‘People of the Book’. This is called the imposition of Jizyah. The non-Muslims are given ‘protection’ under Jizyah. The status of the non-Muslim is of a second-class citizen in such a state under Jizyah and he is called the Dhimmi. But this ‘protection’ is far worse than the protection of the collection mafias of Mumbai. While the mafia is only just after money and perhaps women, the soldiers of radical Islam would aim at nothing less than the absolute destruction of the culture and civilization of the subject non-Muslims.

This law was not applicable on the Hindus according to many schools of Islamic jurisprudence since the Hindus were the worst kind of offenders, the idolaters and the superstitious worshippers of demons. However, the Hindus were just too many to massacre and so in some schools of Islamic jurisprudence (like the Hanbali) the Hindus too were granted ‘protection’ under the rule of Jizyah. The destruction of Hindu culture and civilization goes on apace under the imposition of Jizyah, gradually but definitively.

The Terms of Jizyah

Dr. Harsh Narain has done a brilliant study of Jizyah and the Spread of Islam. He says that Jizyah is nothing more than a tool of completing the global conquest of Islam. “Jizyah presupposes the principles (i) That the world is meant for and belongs to the Muslims to the entire exclusive of the Kafirs, and (ii) That thereby life and property of the communities conquered by the Muslims in Jihad is entirely at the disposal of the latter, who could plunder, enslave, or kill them at will.” [2]

Looking at the world through this Islamic lens, the devout Muslim thinks that he has legal right over all lands all over the globe. Any non-Muslim country, institution or individual existing and holding land is violating the basic rights of the Muslims. And hence it is legal for them to wage Jihad and take back these lands from non-Muslims and establish the rule of Allah over all earth.

This is called the imposition of Jizyah on them, in which certain disabilities are imposed upon the second-class non-Muslim. The second Caliph of Islam, the second of the Four rightly guided Caliphs, Umar, was a great military general. It was his aggression and vision that spread Islam far and wide, outside the boundaries of Arabia. The Islam of Prophet Muhammad had become confined inside Arabia. It was Umar who made it a global faith, outcompeting Christianity for a while.

When Umar conquered Syria from the Byzantine Empire, Damascus was laid to waste. Its ancient churches were destroyed, mosques built over them and Jizyah was declared to ‘protect’ the non-Muslim or Christian population of the province. The Jizyah is a tax which the non-Muslim has to pay under the Muslim rule, just for existing, just for staying non-Muslim and not converting to Islam.

Not converting to Islam is considered a serious sin in the Islamic jurisprudence, and for a certain period of time, the ignorant heathen is allowed to remain non-Muslim under serious disabilities and a high penalty. The Christians of Syria of the seventh century had no choice but to agree to the terms of Jizyah. They were forced to sign a letter which Umar signed and ratified. This letter is the earliest document which codifies the terms of Jizyah. It became a model for all non-Muslims who were to be put under the yoke of Jizyah. I am reproducing the terms of that letter:

1. ‘Not to build in Damascus and its environs church, convent, chapel, monk’s hermitage;
2. ‘Not to repair what is dilapidated of our churches nor any of them that are in Muslim quarters;
3. ‘Not to withhold our churches from Muslims stopping there by night or day;
4. ‘To open doors to the travelers and the wayfarer;
5. ‘Not to shelter there nor in our houses a spy, not to hide one who is a traitor to the Muslims;
6. ‘To beat the naqus only gently in our churches;
7. ‘Not to display a cross on them;
8. ‘Not to raise our voices in prayer or chanting in our churches;
9. ‘Not to carry in procession a cross or our book;
10. ‘Not to take our Easter or Psalm Sunday processions;
11. ‘Not to raise our voices over our dead, nor to show fires with them in the markets of the Muslims, nor bring our funerals near them;
12. ‘Not to sell wine nor parade idolatry in companies of Muslims;
13. ‘Not to entice a Muslim to our religion nor invite him to it;
14. ‘Not to keep slaves who have been the property of Muslims;
15. ‘Not to prevent any relative from entering Islam if he wishes it;
16. ‘To keep our religion wherever we are;
17. ‘Not to resemble the Muslims in wearing the qalansuwah (hat of a Greek priest), the turban, shoes, nor in the parting of the hair, nor in the way of riding;
18. ‘Not to use their language nor be called by their names;
19. ‘To cut the hair in front and divide our forelocks;
20. ‘To tie the zunnar round our waists;
21. ‘Not to engrave Arabic on our seals;
22. ‘Not to ride our saddles;
23. ‘Not to keep arms nor put them in our houses nor wear swords;
24. ‘To honor Muslims in their gatherings, to guide them on the road, to stand up in public meetings when they wish it;
25. ‘Not to make our houses highter than theirs;
26. ‘Not to teach our children the Koran;
27. ‘Not to be partners with a Muslim except in business;
28. ‘To entertain every Muslim traveler in our customary style and feed them in it three days;
29. ‘We will not abuse a Muslim and he who strikes a Muslim has forfeited his rights.” [3]

Translated into the current scenario where a radicalized minority is threatening the quiescent Hindu majority with unconditional compliance these terms would mean that:

1. The Hindus can’t build any new temple; can’t repair old ones; have to allow the Muslims to desecrate them; have to allow the Muslims to use them for civil and military purposes and in turn destroy them.
2. The Hindus under Jizyah can’t display Hindu religious symbols in public; not to show any signs of Hindu culture in public. They also can’t stop Muslims from intervening in their private affairs.
3. In case of conversions to Islam, Hindus under Jizyah: can’t convert Muslims to Hinduism; can’t convert the converted Hindus back to Hinduism; can’t stop their family members from converting.
4. The Hindus under Jizyah have to wear different dress, markers identifying him as a non-Muslim Kaffir.
5. The Hindus under Jizyah also can’t keep arms of any kind.

Jizyah in Modern India

Analyzing the post-independence history of India, one would realize with shock that Hindus are already under a kind of Jizyah. What Sharjeel Imam was calling for was just the declaration of his Allah ordained right.

The Hindu still cannot show his religious symbols in public without fear. Hindu processions in many parts of the country are routinely attacked by Muslim hooligans and quite often the Hindu pilgrims are waylaid and massacred by rampaging Muslim mobs. In areas like Bengal and Kerala taking out a Hindu procession has become a hazardous proposition in itself. [4]

Vande Mataram, which should have been India’s National Anthem, was rejected because it hurt the iconoclastic sensibilities of the Muslims. Iconoclasm, a destructive tendency which aims to destroy all art, is respected by India’s political elite, just because it appeases the Muslims.

While the Hindus could and did build many new temples post-independence the apathy that the anti-Hindu governments showed towards Hindu heritage meant that some of the most magnificent temples rotted under the ‘supervision’ of the ASI, meaning that they would not be revived as sacred centers and just be maintained as historical ruins at the mercy of an antiquated government department. Most of the sites of the original Hindu temples are still occupied by some Islamic monument and the Hindu cannot reclaim any of those.

And while the Muslims control their institutions, the Hindus are not free to do so. Most of the important Hindu temples in India come under State control. This is not a place to go into the details but it will suffice to say that the finances and the administration of these temples are managed by the government. The same governments then, in pandering to Muslim appeasement, fund Haz pilgrimage and many other schemes benefitting only the Muslim community. In this way, the Hindu temple is directly funding the Muslim only projects. This is a clear case of modern Jizyah that Hindus still pay to the Muslim community.

In the case of conversions too, the same situation prevails. Love Jihad is just one aspect of conversion to Islam. While there is no repercussion of a Hindu converting to Islam, a Muslim converting to Hinduism is more often than not, brutally murdered by the Muslim community and hence conversions from Islam to Hinduism are so rare that one can scarcely find them. [5]

And the Arms Act 1959 selectively affects the Hindu community in keeping arms. While the law does not discriminate between the followers of the two communities, in practice the difference comes because of the differences in tendencies to abide by law. While the Hindu dutifully abides by the secular law of modern India, the Muslims keep stocking arms in their mosques and even their homes without risking getting caught by the police. The risk, until some vigilant government like that of Yogi Adityanath, was very low since the establishment always feared ‘angering the Muslim community’.

The dictum to convert Hindus to Islam and not let the reverse process happen is a strategy towards the ultimate goal of Islam: absolute conversion of all Hindus to Islam and to make India an Islamic country. This Islamization of India goes apace with high rates of birth among the Muslim community and with the aid of infiltration from the neighboring country of Bangladesh which sends off all of its access Muslims to India, thereby killing many birds with one target. Many cities in Kerala are fast turning into all Muslim provinces.

The act of CAA coupled with the future NRC in principle threatens to reverse at least this process of Bangladeshi Muslim infiltration in India. The goal is far from being achieved and will demand an iron discipline from the BJP government. But even the hint that the Islamization of India will be prevented has boiled the blood of radical Muslims. That is why the likes of Sharjeel Imam are calling for the blockade of north east India by suffocating the ‘chicken neck’ of India. The idea behind Sharjeel’s exhortation is to cut off North East from India and then to completely Islamize it with a genocide of its Hindu and Christian populations.

While even the kids of the RSS leaders are scarcely aware of the civilizational dangers that the Hindu society faces from its enemies, even the illiterate Muslims could respond with pleasure on Sharjeel Imam’s call for cutting the ‘chicken neck’ of India.

That is the level at which the global consciousness of Islam operates. For Muslims, geo-political strategy is a part of their ‘deen’, their practice of religion. Just by being Muslim they know the religious demographic map of India by heart. They know which areas they dominate; they know which areas they are ascendant in; and they know which areas they need to target in future in order to make India an Islamic country.

What was even more threatening in his speech was his order that now “Hindus will have to live on the will and whims of Muslims’. The Islamic sense of superiority, the visceral hatred for the ‘other’, the non-Muslim, the hated Kaffir, the idolatrous Hindu, is so absolute that the slightest provocation leads an ‘educated Muslim’ to express it in very clear terms. What Sharjeel Imam was saying was that the superior Muslim cannot bear to live under the rule of the dirty Kaffir and thus the Hindu has to comply with the demands of the Muslim.

But all this anger, violence against the Hindu population of India is not just because of the CAA. Ever since independence the Hindus were essentially following the Jizyah and simply accepted their fate that they cannot reclaim their sacred spaces and destroyed temples that were destroyed in the Middle Ages by the Muslim iconoclasts and were replaced by mosques.

That the Ram Mandir is the first case of such reclamation by the Hindu, in which a pagan, polytheistic society has been able to reclaim its sacred space from Islam, has rattled the radical Muslim of India. For anyone who is obsessed with goal of Islamization of India, this is a dangerous precedent. It shows that the advance of Islam can be reversed and was reversed in this case. Who can guarantee that the Hindus, thus awakened, won’t demand other of his places to be returned to him?

The Hindu, after independence, until very recently, was living in an undeclared Jizyah, in which he was subsidizing the Islamization of India and accepted the status of a second-class citizen with public humiliation heaped upon his religious sympathies, with the government working against him and the Muslims getting the lion’s share of every resource.

It is the refusal of the Hindu to no more follow the Jizyah that has angered the likes of Sharjeel Imam, Arfa Khanum, Saba Naqvi etc.

And it is this momentum which the Hindu society has to keep up if he does not want a return to the status of the second-class citizen where his women could be kidnapped and converted to Islam, where his temples would be destroyed, where he would be forced to subsidize the Islamization and the subsequent destruction of his ancestral dharma and society.

REFERENCES

1. https://www.opindia.com/2020/01/sharjeel-imam-islamist-arrested-shaheen-bagh-plan-of-action/
2. Narain, Harsh. Jizyah and the Spread of Islam. Voice of India, 1990. p. 11-12.
3. Ibid. p. 24-26.
4. https://www.opindia.com/2019/10/idol-vandalised-gaya-jehanabad-balrampur-pakistan-zindabad/
5. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-42941522

Featured Image: The Quint

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. IndiaFacts does not assume any responsibility or liability for the accuracy, completeness, suitability, or validity of any information in this article.