12 THE HISTORICAL ROOTS OF RACISM By Lewis, Bernard ve humans, a IN THE STATE OF NATURE, among wild creatures or primi stranger, he who is “not one of us” or like us, is viewed at least with suspicion and more likely with hostility. He may be seen as a predator to be fled or as prey to be i neither of these, as a rival, and therefore an enemy, to be fought. There jes at the present day of which the ideological or organizational antecedents are the wolf pack or the anthill, More civilized peoples introduced broader criteria, no longer simply based on the family, the clan, or the tribe--that is, on blood--but on other standards. These are exemplified, for the Western world, by two lines of development: one through Greece and Rome, the other through Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In both of these, blood and kinship ceased to be the sole, or eventually even the main, In the one, identity was defined by culture and later the other, by religion--that is, shared belief and worship. Parallel developments occurred in other ions in other parts of the work These new identities still left a barrier between the insider and the outsider. Those who do not share our culture are barbarians; those who do not share our reli unbelievers; those who are not citizens of o aliens. But the crucial difference between these barriers and the more primitive barriers of blood and kin is that these are permeable. They can be crossed. By adopting our culture, the barbarian may become one of us. By accey e unbeliever may become a believer. By joining our city, the alien may become a citizen. There are degrees and levels of acceptance, which may differ. It took a while for the metics to become members of the Greek ci ook a long time for the privilege of Roman citizenship to be extended to all those under Roman rule. In the Hebrew Bible, the Jews are commanded in a number of places to deal justly and fairly with the stranger in their midst--to do him no injury, and to protect him from injury by others, at times linking him in this respect with the widow and the orphan. The context makes it clear that the stranger who lived in their midst was expected to abide by their laws and customs. The same was true of new citizens and residents of the Greek or Roman ed to the outsider to become an insider marked an immense ive savagery or even from barbarism towards civilization, jct and two important questions to be The opportunity allow step forward from pri but it still left an important difference resolved.The first is how to deal with the outsider who remains outside--external to our cit well as to our faith or culture. For most of recorded history the answer has usually been that we treat him with at least suspicion and often hostility. In this respect the responses of Christendom and Islam have been remarkably similar: Jihad, Crusade, Conversion. We convert him if we can; we fight him if we must. In other words we try in one way or another to absorb him. In different forms and disguises this attitude and the policies to which it gives rise have persisted until modern times. Dealing with the outsider who remains outside is a comparatively simple matter. Far more difficult is the case of the outsider who becomes part of our communi by conquest or by immigration, and yet wishes to retain his otherness. How do we deal with the unbeliever who persists in his unbelief; the alien who accepts citizenship but does not fully share our identity and loyalties as we perceive them; the barbarian who wants to retain his barbarous customs, or at least customs that we regard as barbarous? Until comparatively modern times, the position of the unassimilated, unconverted resident outsider varied between total rejection and limited tolerance. Some soci categorically refused him and tried to terminate his presence by expulsion, forced conversion, or sheer physical destruction. All three methods have precedents in history and have found practitioners in our own time. Other societies permitted him to stay and even to follow his own ways, speak his own language, practice his own religion, preserve his separate identity, but with certain limitations and restrictions. In general, the rights accorded to such groups, which came to be known as minorities, were inferior to those of the dominant groups. Minority rights varied considerably, from mi al to maximal forms. Some societies even allowed members of minorities to live full and useful lives as participant members of the society and loyal subjects of the state, though they did not share the basic beliefs of the majority and therefore did not enjoy full rights. ‘The wars of religion in Europe, which pitted Protestants against Catholics and led to enormous devastation, eventually produced a new idea, that of tolerance. Tolerance, and the associated idea of the separation of church and state, was a Christian solution to a Christian problem. The question had not arisen in the Islamic lands, where different religions and--a more searching test--different versions of the same religion had been able to live side by side in reasonable if intermittent concord. The idea of toleration was therefore not propounded and argued, perhaps because the fact of toleration was generally established and accepted as axiomatic or, ious terms, as part of the divine order of things. The Qur'an (ii, 256) states explicitly, “there is no compulsion in religion," and this was usually interpreted to mean that those who follow a religion other than Islam, provided it meets certain criteria, may be allowed to practice that religion, subject to certain political, social, and above all fiscal s. The pact between the Muslim state and the non-Muslim community that qualifies for this status and agrees to abide by it is in Arabic called the dhimma. A member of such a community is called dhimmi.These disabilities were usually intended to exclude non-Muslims from pol military power, but in other respects, in the great periods of Islamic civil as the medieval caliphate and the Ottoman Empire, they did not prevent non-Muslims from contributing significantly to the social and economic and, at times, also the cultural and intellectual life of the society, and from serving the Muslim state in a variety of ways. There have been times and places in Islamic history when the non- Muslim minorities endured serious discrimination and repression, but genuine persecution in the form of forced conversion or expulsion, though not unknown, was rare. In general, the non-Muslim subjects of the Muslim state, which in practice in the Middle East and North Africa usually meant Jews and Christians, were reasonably safe as long as they were seen to respect the terms of the dhimma and did not attempt to exceed the status that it assigned to them. This kind of tolerance--enjoined by religion, enforced by law. endorsed by public opinion--worked well for centuries and ensured for non-Muslims and deviant Muslims in most Muslim lands a better life than was for long possible for outsiders and deviants in much of Christian Europe. But the impact of the modern age changed all that. European power created new pressures; European ideas aroused new expectations, and the two together undermined the old relationship and understanding between those who offered and those who accepted tolerance. In the era of democracy and human rights, tolerance was not enough, and the time-honored dhimma was abandoned by both sides. In much of the Muslim world, it has not yet been adequately replaced. The new development had begun in Protestant Europe, particularly in the Netherlands and in England, in the late seventeenth century, when the idea of religious tolerance was extended to include the exercise of political rights--in other words, beyond tolerance to equal coexistence. The idea was eloquently expressed by John Locke in his Letter concerning Toleration, published in both Latin and English in 1689. In this he remarks that “neither Pagan nor Mahometan, nor Jew, ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the commonwealth because of his religion.” This was also one of the basic principles that inspired the American Revolution. George Washington, the first President of the United States, explained in a letter written to a Jewish community leader in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1790 how the new republic embodied this pr The citizens of the United States of America possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of ci it is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the government of the United States, which gives tobigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection, should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support. In these words, Washington was pointing to the difference between tolerance on the one hand and coexistence with mutual respect on the other. Tolerance was good but insufficient, since it implicd that a dominant group, however defined, permitted, for whatever reason, the extension to members of other groups some, though rarely if