In recent years, largely in connection with geopolitical agendas involving Israel, the concept of the dhimmi has been revived in popular discourse, often in some simplified or polemical form. Historically, dhimmi status referred to non-Muslim subjects, primarily Jews and Christians (collectively known as ahl al-kitab, i.e., “People of the Book”), living under Islamic governance. In exchange for state protection, exemption from military service, and the right to practice their religion, dhimmis paid a special poll tax known as the jizyah, and their communities were subject to the broader fiscal land tax system, the kharaj, depending on the region and period. The jizyah was both a fiscal instrument and a legal marker of communal distinction within the premodern Islamic polity.

It is somewhat ironic, for example, that contemporary Western Christian commentators frequently invoke the case of jizyah as an immoral practice of systemic religious oppression, especially given the fact that the modern West, having elevated economic rationality to near-sacral status, has seen Christianity erode not under external tribute but under internal socio-cultural pressures. By contrast, many Christian communities lived under Islamic rule for centuries and, in some regions, for over a millennium, maintaining significant religious, linguistic, and institutional continuity.

Regarding the notion of “humiliation” associated with dhimmi status, derived from Qur’an 9:29, it is important to distinguish between exegetical interpretation, historical practice, and contemporary polemics. Classical jurists debated what degree of formality or symbolic subordination the payment of jizyah was meant to entail. In practice, the level of “humiliation,” whether real or ritualized, varied widely across regions and dynasties and was often minimal or unremarkable in daily life. (Of course, it must be noted that the actual jurisprudential rulings and conclusions take precedence and are what is authoritative, not history.)

If one adopts a broader analytical framework, a comparative question arises: how does this premodern dynamic relate to the forms of cultural marginalization (itself a form of “humiliation”) experienced by Christians in many post-Christian Western societies today – societies they historically shaped but in which they increasingly perceive themselves as culturally peripheral? We could easily argue that contemporary Western secularism entails a symbolic diminishment of the Christian identity, ranging from social mockery of religious figures (including Jesus, peace be upon him) to the erosion of institutional influence.

A useful way to approach the question of “humiliation” is through an analogy of relational proximity. Consider two scenarios: In the first, a father is derided by his own children within his own household. In the second, he is occasionally mocked by strangers in public. From a sociological and psychological perspective, the former generally constitutes a much deeper affront. Insults originating from within one’s intimate sphere (one’s family, community, or “home”) tend to undermine identity, belonging, and authority at a very fundamental level. By contrast, disparagement from outsiders, particularly if it is sporadic and from individuals who hold no normative significance within one’s worldview, typically carries less existential weight. Christians in the secularized West represent the former category.

Other critical angles are also applicable, each of which further complicates the conventional (and secularized-liberalized) Christian complaints about the matter.

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Foreign Rule as Divinely Ordered

A useful point of comparison comes from the Hebrew Bible itself. The Mosaic Law establishes multiple layers of legal and religious differentiation, including distinctions between:

• Native Israelites and resident foreigners (ger)
• Members of the covenant and non-members
• Priests, Levites, and ordinary Israelites

These categories entailed differentiated rights, obligations, and religious expectations. The presence of such structured legal asymmetry within a text Christians regard as divinely inspired complicates any principled objection to the mere existence of differentiated legal frameworks in another religious civilization. If asymmetry itself were inherently immoral, then core portions of the biblical tradition would become theologically incoherent.

One could argue, from a Christian perspective, that the Mosaic legal system no longer applies in a post-Christ covenantal context. Yet a more relevant consideration is the New Testament’s own portrayal of political subordination. In Trinitarian theology, Jesus, as “God incarnate,” explicitly affirms the legitimacy of foreign rule (“Render unto Caesar…”), and the New Testament never presents political equality as a theological mandate.

Moreover, the people of Israel have themselves lived for long periods under non-Israelite domination, including:

• Egypt
• Babylon
• Persia
• Rome

Biblical literature frequently frames these periods not as mere misfortunes but, rather, as being divinely permitted or divinely orchestrated. A key example is Jeremiah 27:5–8, where God declares that He has given all nations into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, even referring to him as “my servant.” We also read:

If, however, any nation or kingdom will not serve Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon or bow its neck under his yoke, I will punish that nation with the sword, famine and plague, declares the Lord, until I destroy it by his hand.

This symbolism is highly significant, since Nebuchadnezzar, an idolatrous foreign emperor, is depicted as an instrument of divine will, even though in Jewish collective memory he stands as the negative symbol of destruction, exile, and the traumatic loss of the First Temple. His authority over Israel is not illegitimate within the biblical narrative. Rather, it is a tool for divine judgment, purification, and historical redirection. The message to Israel is not one of rebellion. It is of faithfulness within conditions of political and social subordination.

Indeed, a consistent theological pattern emerges across the Hebrew Bible in which foreign domination is portrayed as a divinely imposed consequence of Israel’s unfaithfulness. Already in the covenant warnings, Deuteronomy 28:25 declares that “YHWH will cause you to be defeated,” and Deuteronomy 28:49–52 intensifies this by warning that “YHWH will bring a nation against you… like an eagle swooping down,” a nation that will “besiege all your cities” and “devour the fruit of your land.” This grim pattern materializes in Israel’s early history: in Judges 2:14–15, YHWH, “in his anger against Israel”, “gave them into the hands of raiders who plundered them” and “sold them into the hands of their enemies all around,” while also fighting directly against them so that “the hand of YHWH was against them to defeat them.” Likewise, Judges 3:8 depicts Israel’s oppression as divinely inflicted, with the text stating that YHWH “sold them” into the power of Cushan-Rishathaim. The same dynamic marks the monarchy period, for 2 Kings 13:3 reveals that YHWH “kept them under the power” of Hazael and Ben-Hadad, making their rule an extension of divine anger. The prophets sharpen this political theology even further: Isaiah 10:5–6 calls Assyria “the rod of my anger” and declares, “I send him… to trample them down like mud.” Isaiah 42:24–25 asks, “Who gave Jacob to the looter?” and answers: “Was it not YHWH?” who then poured out “the heat of his anger” like fire. Lamentations 1:12–14 laments that “the LORD has afflicted me” and “handed me over to those I cannot withstand,” while Lamentations 2:1–8 goes further still, saying the Lord “swallowed up” Israel’s strongholds and “destroyed without pity.” In Ezekiel 23:22–24, God announces, “I will stir up your lovers against you” and “give you into their hands,” empowering foreign armies to execute judgment. Hosea 11:5–6 foresees that “Assyria will rule over them” and that God’s “sword will flash in their towns,” while Amos 6:14 declares that YHWH Himself will “raise up a nation” to “oppress” Israel. Finally, Habakkuk 1:6 records God’s chilling proclamation: “I am raising up the Babylonians… a ruthless and impetuous people,” who will serve as instruments of divine judgment. Taken together, these passages present a unified and stark theological vision: foreign domination is not accidental but a divinely orchestrated act of judgment, executed through nations whom God Himself empowers, unleashes, or “raises up” to chastise Israel and summon it back to covenant faithfulness.

Christians thus inherit a scriptural tradition in which God (Jesus in Trinitarian readings) repeatedly allows, and even forces, His people to live under the legal authority of non-Israelite rulers, often with constraints, disadvantages, or second-tier status.

Consequently, there is no strong biblical basis for claiming that civil equality is a theological necessity or that religious communities must always inhabit positions of political dominance to remain faithful. The biblical pattern suggests instead that spiritual vocation is compatible with – and sometimes shaped by – asymmetric social arrangements.

In fact, the modern demand for strict legal egalitarianism is itself a product of the secular-liberal political imagination, which universalizes a particular modern Western conception of citizenship and projects it backward onto premodern societies. This is historically and conceptually anachronistic, as neither the biblical tradition nor the long Christian intellectual heritage treat absolute civic equality as a theological or social axiom.

The irony, of course, is that secular liberalism – the very framework now used by some Christians to critique historical Islamic legal hierarchies – has been the primary force driving the de-Christianization of the contemporary West.

Premodern Eastern Christian communities, unaffected by the categories of modern secular liberalism, often responded to early Muslim rule in ways that diverge drastically from today’s polemical narratives. As Thomas W. Arnold (a British Orientalist and historian of Islam, 1864–1930) demonstrated in numerous case studies throughout his work The Preaching of Islam (first published 1896, expanded 1913), several Christian groups neither resisted nor feared the Muslim conquests. Instead, they welcomed Muslim governance as a relief from the preceding political or ecclesiastical order.

The example of the Coptic Christians in Egypt is particularly well-documented. Under late Byzantine rule, the Copts, who adhered to Miaphysite Christology, faced both theological persecution and heavy taxation imposed by an imperial church-state that regarded them as heretical. When the Muslim armies entered Egypt, Copts perceived the new rulers as more tolerant of their ecclesiastical autonomy and less intrusive in doctrinal affairs. This explains the relatively rapid stabilization of Muslim authority and the limited resistance among local Christian populations.

Even more striking is Arnold’s observation concerning Jerusalem. He records that segments of the indigenous Christian population, despite living under Crusader control, preferred a return to Muslim rule (pp. 95-96):

The monk Burchard, writing about 1283, a few years before the Crusaders were driven out of their last strongholds and the Latin power in the East came utterly to an end—represents the Christian population as largely outnumbering the Muslims throughout the whole of the Muhammadan world, the latter (except in Egypt and Arabia) forming not more than three or four per cent of the whole population. This language is undoubtedly exaggerated and the good monk was certainly rash in assuming that what he observed in the cities of the Crusaders and of the kingdom of Little Armenia held good in other parts of the East. But his words may be certainly taken to indicate that during the period of the Crusades there had been no widespread conversion to Islam, and that when the Muhammadans resumed their sovereignty over the Holy Land, they extended the same toleration to the Christians as before, suffering them to “purchase peace and quiet” by the payment of the jizyah. The presumption is that the conversions that took place were of individual Christians, who were persuaded in their own minds before they took the final step. Instances have already been given of Christians who took service under Muhammadan masters, in the full enjoyment of their own faith, and the Assises of Jerusalem made a distinction between “those who have denied God and follow another law” and “all those who have done armed service to the Saracens and other miscreants against the Christians for more than a year and a day.”

 

The native Christians certainly preferred the rule of the Muhammadans to that of the Crusaders, and when Jerusalem fell finally and for ever into the hands of the Muslims (A.D. 1244), the Christian population of Palestine seems to have welcomed the new masters and to have submitted quietly and contentedly to their rule.

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Paul’s Proto-Madkhalism

Within the Christian tradition, Paul stands as the foremost influential architect of early Christian thought. There is far more attributed to him textually in the New Testament than than Jesus’ own spoken words as preserved in the Gospels. If Christians sometimes refer to Muslims as “Muhammadans,” the structural irony is that it would be far more fitting to call Christianity “Paulinian,” for it is Paul’s theological vision, not Jesus’ recorded sayings, that shapes the contours of Christian doctrine, ethics, and communal self-understanding. A dimension of this vision that modern Christians often neglect is Paul’s unmistakably quietist political posture, articulated during a period when Christians enjoyed neither civil equality nor legal protections.

• This becomes immediately clear in Romans 13:1–7, where Paul instructs believers to “be subject to the governing authorities,” to pay taxes, and to show honor and respect to those who wield civil power. He presents these authorities, not merely rulers who are just but essentially any ruler (even those that are unjust), as instituted by God. What makes this striking is not the moral exhortation itself, but the historical context in which it was uttered: Paul was writing under the Roman Empire, a pagan power that neither recognized Christianity as a legitimate religion nor refrained from persecuting its adherents. In such matters, imperial Rome was worse than any form of Islamic rule. Yet Paul offers no suggestion that Christians should resist, protest, or seek “parity” before the law. Instead, he frames submission as an act grounded in divine sovereignty. Political hierarchy is not treated as an injustice that Christianity must overcome but, rather, as a fact of the human condition that believers must inhabit faithfully. The very empire that would later martyr Christian leaders is nevertheless depicted as a vessel through which God orders the world.
• A similar attitude appears in 1 Timothy 2:1–2, where Paul urges Christians to pray for kings and all who hold authority so that they may live “peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness.” Rather than framing rulers as illegitimate or oppressive, he portrays them as figures whose stability benefits Christian piety. There is no call for resistance, no doctrine of civil rights, and no insinuation that Christian faith is compromised by living under non-Christian domination. Even unjust authority is to be met not with agitation but with prayer and dignified endurance. This is consistent with Paul’s own behavior in Acts 23:5, where, upon insulting the high priest who had mistreated him, he immediately retracts his words based on the commandment not to speak evil of a ruler, quoting Exodus 22:28 (“Do not blaspheme God or curse the ruler of your people“).

Thus, Paul articulates no theology of “civil equality” (as per the definition of secular liberalism), nor does he defend a believer’s right to “equal treatment” under non-Christian law. His writings assume that not only can Christian faith flourish under political subordination, it is often shaped and deepened by it. This is remarkable when one recalls that Roman authority was vastly more demanding than anything encountered under premodern Islamic systems such as dhimmah. Rome required civic participation in pagan rites, denied Christians any form of communal autonomy, and at various points executed them for refusing to honor imperial “gods.” Faced with this environment, Paul did not develop a political program of resistance or a doctrine of rights. He counseled obedience, reverence, and patient endurance.

Paul’s stance can be read as an embryonic analogue to what contemporary Islamic discourse knows as Madkhalism: a deviant Gulf-backed doctrinal current that not only promotes political quietism but also advances a theologically sacralized deference to existing rulers under the rubrics of “social order” and the “avoidance of sedition and civil war (fitnah).” In practice, however, this posture functions less as a principled commitment to stability than it does an ideological instrument enabling regimes to delegitimize any demand for Islamic governance at home (incorporating all forms of “political Islam” or Islamism within the category of “sedition”) and to dilute or trivialize calls for broader Islamic solidarity (or Pan-Islamism) in foreign affairs. The cumulative effect, from this perspective, is the production of a politically neutered religiosity that aligns neatly with the geopolitical architecture of the Zionist-dominated global order. In this sense, Paul’s theological endorsement of obedience to non-Christian imperial authority anticipates, in an earlier register, the same logic of depoliticized yet theologized submission that later finds expression in such modern movements.

Yet crucial distinctions remain. Despite all the valid criticisms that one may (and should) direct at the Madakhilah, they remain Muslims, albeit deviant ones. This basic fact commands a degree of “respect” despite disagreements on other, even if essential, matters. More significantly, even Madkhali ideologues, despite absolutizing obedience, typically articulate their doctrine with reference to a Muslim ruler, however narrowly or tendentiously they define that category. Paul, by contrast, universalizes the imperative of submission to encompass authorities who neither shared his religious commitments nor even tolerated them. Some actively persecuted the nascent Christian community. Thus, where Madkhalism confines its quietism within an Islamic framework, Paul’s logic demands deference to an explicitly non-Christian and, at times, anti-Christian, imperial power – an even more radical form of politically disarmed religiosity.

Still, Paul’s political posture could be described as an intensified form of proto-Madkhalism. His ethic doesn’t merely discourage rebellion; it envisions a spiritual stance in which even deeply unsympathetic and religiously alien authorities are to be obeyed as part of God’s providential order. If Christians were to align themselves consistently with the theological orientation of the figure who most decisively shaped their tradition, they would find little basis for resisting or problematizing the historical conditions under which Christians lived in Islamic lands.

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