Sanitizing Islam in textbooks Soft-pedaling of past intolerance mustn't obscure current eradication of competing faiths
When shocking events happen, it is worthwhile to consider how future generations will retell them. In April 1945, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower wrote to Gen. George Marshall, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to explain why he visited the concentration camps even though it was “so overwhelming as to leave [him] a bit sick” and too powerful for even Gen. George S. Patton to enter. Eisenhower wrote, “I made the trip deliberately in order to be in position to give firsthand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’”
It is for the same reasons that the world must pay attention to what has been happening in Iraq. Our society does exhibit a tendency to forget and dismiss atrocities.
By now, anyone who cares has heard the horrifying news that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has eradicated the ancient Christian community of Mosul after forcing an ultimatum on the population to choose between conversion to Islam, paying a special tax, or dying. ISIS relied on a centuries-old Islamic practice of placing Christians and Jews in a lower societal rank, referring to them as “dhimmi.” The associated tax non-Muslims paid to preserve their lives and religion historically was called “jizya.”
The dhimmi system and the jizya requirements were not universally applied in historic Muslim states and, in fact, they were adopted from the Sassanid (Persian) Empire that predated Islam. ...
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