Machine summary:
Tritton has gathered a large number of quotations from Muslim and Christian sources bearing upon the position of Christians, Jews and Magians under the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphs and the treatment they received in different countries and at different times.
s, but the only law he recognised, and the only real Islamic law · concerning them, was the Quranic injunction not to molest them when they pay the tribute readily, It is probable that intelligent Muslims recognised this throughout the period which Mr. Tritton covers,· which would account for the indulgence shown to the dhimmis always when there was no popular outcry.
some lO trouble between them and their Muslim neighbours, and as the Christian writers are accustomed to expatiate upon their wrongs ( often untruthfully if one may judge from similar complaints in modern times), Mr. Tritton's collec• tion reads like a record of oppression and persecution with some brighter intervals.
Becker -at present German Minister of Education -full of curious informa• tion and amazingly clever, but exhaling an aroma of high journalism which makes us suspect: that they are products of the days when readers of the Frankfurter Zeitung used to be enlightened on the subject of Islam, the faith of Germany's Ally, by a distinguished Orientalist.
" · Because the "life-and-death struggle" must take place in the intellectual field, the service which Mr. Khuda Bukhsh himself is rendering by placing the work of the most scholarly and candid Western critics of Islam within the reach of thousands of Muslim readers can hardly be overestimated.