Customer Reviews

The Third Choice: Islam, dhimmitude and freedom

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Westerners have a hard time understanding why Muslims are so sensitive to criticism of their ideology. This new book by an Australian evangelical minister, Mark Durie, provides some valuable insights. The author recounts about a young scholar who was in Egypt and wanted to study the Coptic theological analyses of Islam. He went to the Coptic Bishop in Cairo and asked where he could locate such books. The Bishop told him that they don't exist. How could this be, with Copts living under Islamic domination for 1,400 years? This would be baffling to Westerners, but perhaps not to Copts.

Durie's book gets down to basics in "unpacking" the Islamist thinking about dhimmitude -- the non-Muslim's liability for refusing to submit to Islam -- and jizya -- money paid to Muslims to restore what was their Allah-given rightful inheritance (being the entire world). One of the requirements of dhimmis is that they never criticize Islam or Muhammad, explaining why to this day, any criticism of Islam is seen as a serious offense to Muslims. The book is well-documented and carefully reasoned. It is not your typical anti-Islam rant, nor is it at all preachy.

Non-Muslims must resist the incipient dhimmitude attitude in the West that we shouldn't offend Muslims by criticising their ideology. On the contrary, this fact-filled book will help non-Muslims speak the truth in love to Muslims who most need to hear that their ideology, based on the Quran and the Sunna of the Prophet, runs counter to prevailing attitudes of freedom, equality, and true brotherly love in the West. This message is timely and important.

This is a very scholarly and methodical approach to explaining the concept of dhimmitude to anyone who will listen, Muslim or not. To be brutally literal, one could argue that dhimmitude per se only refers to civilisations who were under Islamic rule, and since the west is not, then use of the term is misleading. However, it is correct to suggest that dhimmitude is not only a geo-political or historical state, but a state of mind. It is a figure of speech, of sorts, to warn against an uncritical acceptance of Islamic claims. The book is not written for a pro-Christian echo chamber, but rather to those who believe (correctly) that all faiths are deserving of critical scrutiny and reasoned unbiased analysis.

Durie makes no attempt to feign "tolerance", nor pander to those multicultural sensitivities which so stifle honest debate these days. However, he does go to lengths to show compassion for Muslims at a personal level, without patronising them. Where Durie does not compromise, is insisting that "interfaith dialogue" is not a path to learning objectively about Islam regardless of how fashionable this might be to career religionists. He insists that personal study of Islam's own scriptures, overlaid against a backdrop of past and current Islamic behaviour, is the only way to fully understand. Durie doesn't fail at providing real world examples of Islamic behaviour or incidents to underpin his points, and his work is fully referenced. In fact, the scope and depth of his references and their relevance is quite alarming. You might say that this book does not pontificate or editorialise, so much, on the rights or wrongs of Islam, instead crediting the reader with the intelligence and autonomy to work out those moral issues for themselves. Rather, it suggests how these issues can and do affect our own society and how we must deal with it at a personal level.

HIs writing style is scholarly and erudite but could be read and understood by all levels. An excellent and vitally important book.

This is the book I've been waiting for since before 911. (Yes, I read "Jihad in the west" by Fregosi before 911 and few other important books.)

Open it up and find out what people like Ravi Zacharias, Andrew Bostom, Robert Spencer and Bat Yeor are saying about "The Third Choice".

It maybe the most important book on Islam ever written. I've read more than a few and it is the best one I've ever read. It explains the real reason we are fighting this war on terror. It also explains why so many Jews and Christians have good things to say about Islam. (Yes, that's always confused me too.)

Buy a copy or 100. Every academic, journalist and politician ought to read this book. Atlas Shrugs calls it a "Blockbuster". She's right.


Everyone needs to read this book, even those Muslims who believe that the Sharia is great. Maybe they've never heard about the detrimental effects it had on non-Muslims and Muslims. (Yes Muslims, because extremists don't allow any criticism of the Sharia most Muslims have never even dared to think that there might be a serious problem with trying to implement the Sharia no matter how well meaning or moderate the implementers are.)

Like the dvd "The Third Jihad", "The Third Choice" introduces people to the difficult issues gently. Durie does not avoid the difficult issues or water them down but tells us plainly, from history, what it was like to live under the Sharia and why we must resist it at all costs. After reading this book people will be more inclined to consider what Mark Steyn, Robert Spencer and Bat Yeor have to say.

Just buy it!

This man knows how to write. His sentences are transparently clear and sometimes distilled to an almost magical purity of meaning. It's not a long book and it's easy enough for people with no knowledge of Islam, yet experts will probably be able to learn a lot from it too, because of the author's outstanding mastery of his material. The book manages the feat of combining tremendous readability with great scholarly thoroughness. It also manages the feat of being both more hard-hitting and yet more compassionate than any other book out there on Islam.

The Third Choice should be a top contender for best single introduction to Islam and also to the Islamic textual and historical basis of "dhimmitude." Dhimmitude means turning non-Muslims into second class citizens subject to various kinds of legal and social discrimination. The institution is reminiscent of Jim Crow era segregation or South African apartheid, but dhimmitude is based on religious rather than racial discrimination, and is often considered by Muslims eternal and unchangeable till the end of time, because sourced in the eternal word of Allah in the Qur'an, and in the example of Muhammad in the canonical Islamic traditions about Muhammad's life.

The Third Choice employs Durie's conscientious and insightful style to make a powerful case that Islam and creeping dhimmitude pose growing dangers to civil liberties and open societies. He makes the case through a consideration of core Islamic texts, Islamic history, modern media reports, and his own experience living in Indonesia. Durie evinces a profound knowledge of the core Islamic texts and what those texts direct Muslims to do about unbelievers. Despite the book's relative brevity, it's almost miraculously comprehensive and thorough, pulls no punches, and reveals the darkest underbelly of Islam with unmatched effectiveness and yet with genuine compassion. A work of genius.

Mark Durie has done a very impressive amount of research to lend credence to his work about Islam. From authoritative source, most of Islamic origin, he shows what this particular worldview really is about in terms of its relationship to non-Islamic people of this world. He also shows how many leaders in both church and world are extremely gullible when it comes to assessing Islamic influences on the world scene. This book is a must-read for all who live in today's global village in which everybody at some point or other will be confronted with the Islamic phenomenon. Mark Durie will presumably be safe from persecution because in his critical assessment he predominantly leads the reader to conclusions based on the Islam's own sources. It is an eye-opening read which will do much to get rid of gullibility and naivete which marks so much of the Westerners perception of Mohammad's religious system.

Dr Herm Zandman
Blood, Sweat and Gears

This is a very important work, and should be recommended reading for all students of religion, as well as politicians.

Mark Durie has exposed the miserable fate of all free peoples who fall under the power of Islamic rule, and explains in great detail why non-Muslims living under Islamic rule, even today, lead lives of great fear, unable to exercise any of the many personal freedoms that we in the West now take for granted.

We must oppose the rise of Islam wherever we can - a Europe under Islam would be about as enjoyable for non-Muslims as for Jews in Hitler's 1000-year Reich, and may very well last for thousands of years. Durie shows how Jews and Christians have suffered for over 1000 years in Morocco and Egypt, to find relief only during the Colonial period.

We can do little to aid the oppressed in Islamic countries, but we must fight the creeping islamification of our Western societies. Above all, we must hold dearly our freedom of speech, to our right to criticise Muhammud, or all of our hard-won freedoms may disappear for millenia.

I finished reading Rev. Durie's book in a single day. Very impressive, erudite and yet highly readable. He has a special knack for explaining the background and reasons for such issues as the nature of jizya, why non-Muslims living in Muslim countries never speak ill of Islam and the degree of dissimulation that even scholars like Bernard Lewis (whom I have great respect for) engage in. His analogy of "British art in India" is a classic illustration of how distorted our thinking has become about the "achievements of Islam". Most importantly he superbly illustrates the double-standards in modern scholarship that allows Islamic law to escape the title which it so richly deserves; religious apartheid!, the separate and unequal treatment of people based on their religious beliefs. This is the tragedy of Islam! An ideology that condemns non-Muslims to silence and servitude cannot emerge from a medieval mindset. Once the non-Muslims have been strangulated then the downward spiral of mindless legalism must eventually begin to eat its own children. But I am hopeful; the screams of "Takfir" raging across the Muslim world are ripping the fabric of the Islamic prison apart and for the first time in history, Muslims in large numbers are escaping from the Sharia penitentiary. Iran is the place to watch for it is here that the Islamic revolution is unravelling in an unprecedented way.

A must read for all concerned about dealing with a more agressive Islam from a Christian perspective.

This book has to be one of the most important reads of our time. It has greatly educated me about the history of oppression due to Islam as well as the source of it. It cannot be said that Islam is a religion of peace given the exhaustive facts presented in this book from the Quran, Sunna, and from Islam's own respected Islamic commentators. While we may still separate the person from the religion, what the faith itself teaches is not love. Thank you Mark for your courage! While we are to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us, this is not to be mistaken as submission to Islam in dhimmitude.