Were Muslims “Very Kind to Christians”?

A response to some interesting claims made on Tucker Carlson... 

 

 

 Tucker Carlson is at it again—platforming pro-Islamic claims that clash with reality.

During a recent episode, Carlson interviewed JD Hall about Christian Zionism. Although Islam itself has no direct connection to that topic, pro-Islamic claims once again entered the conversation.

At one point, Hall made the following assertion:

The Ottomans didn’t charge churches tax. And so when the Ottomans were in control of the promised land—for 400 years—in the millet system they didn’t charge churches tax. Israel started just a few years ago.

Is that true? Did the Ottoman Turks, who controlled the Holy Land from around 1517 to 1917, really not tax churches for 400 years?

No—this is a highly misleading claim.

The Ottomans may not have directly placed a tax on church buildings themselves, but they always did tax the Christians for the very right to exist and keep churches. Under Ottoman rule, Christians were required to pay the onerous and sometimes crippling jizya tax—a tribute imposed upon non-Muslims living under Muslim authority, based on Koran 9:29.

Failure to pay such taxes could carry severe consequences, including execution, enslavement, and the destruction and confiscation of Christian religious property.

Throughout history, Muslims always destroyed or converted churches into mosques whenever Christian communities were perceived as resisting Muslim authority.

Even so, Carlson encouraged Hall to elaborate on what he presented as “evidence” of Muslim tolerance.

From there, the claims became even more striking.

Hall stated:

The Muslim rulers didn’t tax churches during the Ottoman period. They were very kind to Christians. As a matter of fact, they took care of our holy sites. Islamic authorities rebuild the church of the Sepulchre three different times over the centuries.

According to this interpretation, keeping Christians as dhimmis—meaning oppressed subjects who do not in any way, shape, or form enjoy the same rights as Muslims; killing or enslaving them if they do not pay exorbitant taxes and tributes; and denying them any semblance of justice whenever Muslim mobs rose up against them—which was very common, then and now—all this was a way of being “very kind to Christians”?

It is also worth remembering that, during those same centuries that the Ottoman Turks ruled the Holy Land, they were the scourge of Christian Europe—seen as the vilest of all Muslim oppressors which had come before them (which is saying something).

The atrocities the Turks committed during their conquest of thousands of miles of Christian lands often beggar description: nonstop raids, massacres, enslavements, rapes; the seizure of the strongest Christian boys—who were forcibly Islamized and turned into jihadists, who were later unloosed on their Christian kin, the notorious Janissaries—and the seizure of Christian girls, who were thrown into Ottoman harems and turned into sex slaves.

Not to mention, of course, the systematic desecration and destruction of thousands of … churches and holy sites, such as the Hagia Sophia.

The situation in the Holy Land itself was no exception. Christians, as a minority population living under Muslim rule, had little choice but to submit—or convert, or die. Ottoman authorities imposed taxes on pilgrims, periodically restricted Christian activity, and frequently allowed local tensions to turn into harassment and violence against Christian communities.

For extensive documentation of Ottoman persecution of Christians, see Sword and Scimitar and Defenders of the West, which are saturated with centuries of Ottoman atrocities against Christians.

And importantly, Christians were treated this way—that is to say, not “very kindly”—precisely because they were Christians.