...given that Christians and Jews were the negroes of the Islamic empire, protected only so long as they accepted their subordinate status, the proportion of Muslims grew, and after the Crusades Islam became the majority religion. In fact, I think it likely that the glory of Islamic civilization is inversely related to the proportion of Muslims in the society; i.e., in the Abbasid Empire (and later the Ottoman Empire), culture flourished precisely because most of the people weren’t Muslim, and decline began as soon as that changed.
There are two points Krikorian makes here, and two kinds of dishonesty. As to the first, while it's true that Jews and Christians had subordinate status to Muslims in Islamic civilization, this is true of religious minorities in every civilization up to and during that time. Islamic civilization is in fact notable for the rights and protections which religious minorities did enjoy, rights and protections which existed in few, if any, other societies until about the 19th century.
Let's consider the status of Jews and Muslims in Christian lands. To the extent that these communities existed, they had it far, far worse than their co-religionists under Islam. Jewish and Christian communities existed under Islamic rule in a way that minority communities never did under Christianity. Jews and dissident Christians regularly fled to Muslim lands from Christian Europe to escape persecution. There was no comparable emigration in the other direction. This is called voting with your feet.
As to Krikorian's second point, that "the glory of Islamic civilization is inversely related to the proportion of Muslims in the society," well, this is just offensive, on top of being entirely unsupported by anything other than Krikorian's frankly racist opinion. And you have to be amused by Krikorian's construction "In fact, I think." I don't doubt that that is, in fact, what he thinks. That is, of course, distinct from his thought actually being a fact.
What really bothers me here is the apparent need to degrade Islamic civilization an an attempt to establish Western cultural superiority. Western culture may be in many respects dominant at this point, and while I am exceedingly grateful to be living in a Western-style liberal democracy it's worth remembering that it wasn't always thus, and that Muslims were developing, among many other things, chemistry, pharmacy, architecture, and higher mathematics at a time when Europeans were living in their own shit. Krikorian's attempt at rewriting history here seems of a piece with a broader conservative attempt to characterize Islam as inherently barbaric and intrinsically belligerent, whether it's Ann Coulter advocating "killing their leaders and converting them to Christianity" or Jonah Goldberg making glib allusions to the forces of Mordor.
Once again, let's look at history: How many people were slaughtered in Christian lands in the 20th Century, with Western Civilization at its apex, versus those in Muslim lands? There is no contest: Christians massacred each other with an efficiency and ferocity and in numbers without historical parallel. To claim, when faced with that fact, that Islamic civilization is inherently barbaric or intolerant, especially when compared to Western civilization, is to declare oneself utterly unmoored from reality.
But I suppose in order to be a conservative in 2005 America one does have to believe several impossible things before breakfast. And that's just getting started.
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