I am nearly done reading Bat Yeor’s book Islam and Dhimmitude, Where Civilizations Collide. It has been a long and very disturbing book to read. There were many times when I would have quoted many sections of her book here on Lunar Skeletons. But I decided not to do so, partly because I didn’t want to violate copyright laws, but mostly because she ties together so many different threads, and merely quoting just a section here or there is liable to cause misunderstanding and really doesn’t do justice to how she covered the subject she was trying to elucidate. Nevertheless, here is any interesting paragraph near the end of her concluding chapter:

Dhimmitude has become a global way of relationship between Europe and muslim countries. It has established at all levels a dissymmetry in respect of human rights, freedom of the press, of opinion and religion, as well as of democratic rights. The reason is that dhimmitude is not recognized as a crucially important page of world history. Hence the West has adopted the Islamic view of history, where dhimmi nations had no history, no culture, no existence. Indeed, dhimmi peoples have neither a cause nor history. They do not have the right to claim any reparations for the centuries of exile, deportations, spoilations, massacres and persecution. They do not even have the right to speak of this. And when they try to retrieve some of their homeland and part of their history, they are called aggressors and usurpers. However, it is precisely their testimony which could allow the injustice of dhimmitude to be recognized, opening the way to peace and reconcilation.

There were many other interesting paragraphs, but I would tell everyone that really the best thing to do is simply to read the book. It is well worth it. However, it is not likely that it will be on the shelf at retailers such as Borders, or Barnes & Noble. But the book can still be ordered if you ask for it. Bat Yeor covers so much territory that it would be hard to express an adequate summary of it all. Furthermore, her book was on the difficult side because of her dense and erudite style of writing. And for me reading her book has made me much more pessimistic about the prospects of success for President Bush’s strategy of inculcating democracy in the center of the Middle East as the means of combating Jihadist terrorism. In my view, terrorism and tyranny are not the primary obstacles to the success of such a program—the theological core of Islam itself is the central problem.

I rarely watch television myself. However, Mrs. Moonbones sometimes does, since she is a fan of Survivor, American Idol, and Star Search, and a few other shows. So last night as we were preparing to retire our collective ossicles for the night, she had the television in the bedroom turned on and was flipping through the channels. To my surprise, the PBS television station out of Spokane, Washington, station KSPS to be exact, was broadcasting an old movie. That by itself is not unusual, since they often broadcast old movies late at night. What was unusual was that the old movie was none other than Quo Vadis. Yes, it was the Technicolor™ Quo Vadis (1951), starring the raven-haired and debonair Robert Taylor, the ravishing young redhead Deborah Kerr, and the young, roly-poly, hyper-histrionic Peter Ustinov. “Quo Vadis on public television? This is out of the ordinary!” I said to myself. So I went out to the living room and watched it on the other television, beginning roughly about in the middle of the film. Mrs. Moonbones on the other hand wasn’t interested and instead went to sleep.

There are several things that strike me as remarkable about Quo Vadis. First of all, I didn’t realize until the closing credits that the heroine, Lygia, was played by Deborah Kerr. Up until then I remembered only that she played a singing role opposite Yul Brenner in the movie rendition of Roger and Hammerstein’s The King and I, back in the Fifties as I recall. But in Quo Vadis she was young enough that I didn’t immediately recognize her. And though his face looked vaguely familiar, all the time I was watching the movie I kept wondering who was playing Marcus, the Roman centurian with major hots for the Xtian Lygia. Marcus turned out to be Robert Taylor.

Secondly, Peter Ustinov’s super-thespian rendition of the worse-than-decadent and laughably degenerate Nero was so over-the-top, so hyperbolic, and so dripping with self-conscious irony, that it verged on eclipsing the rest of the story in the movie. I would go so far as to say that nowdays when most people think of Nero they will picture in their minds something very close to Ustinov’s depiction of him.

Also, there were often scenes in Quo Vadis that were very much charged with erotic undertones. But what is remarkable is that the film incorporated them without so much as having anybody take their clothes off.

The movie ended with most everyone dead, except for Marcus and his new bride Lygia—who were married by the apostle Peter himself while they were waiting in the dungeon to be dispatched. (Peter was crucified shortly thereafter. Upside down, of course.) But later they barely managed to escape martyrdom by a fortuitous Roman military coup d’etat against Nero, who later committed suicide, bemoaning the world's under-appreciation of his artistic talents.

But finally, what was most amazing to me was that Quo Vadis actually cast Xtians in a somewhat favorable light. When was the last time PBS ever did that? When was the last time Hollywood ever did that? In any case, I think I can confidently predict that Hollywood will never do a remake of Quo Vadis. It would be just too “politically incorrect” nowdays.

Now back in olden days—around the time of the Nixon Era—while in college, I once knew a rather talented drama student, whom I will call “Polonius,” and who thought that Quo Vadis was so irredeemably corny and so mawkishly melodramatic that he decided to write and stage a musical which spoofed Quo Vadis. The musical was entitled “The Debut.” The primary scene of the play was in the dungeon underneath the Coliseum, the night just before the next day when everyone was to be tossed to the lions. The main character, who was a Xtian recently transported from Athens to Rome to become cat food, was the real Dionysius the Areopagite—as opposed to the Pseudo-Dionysius of angelology fame. Of course, the Dionysius character was played by Polonius himself. There’s not much about the play that I can remember now. But I do remember that, while in the dungeon, Dionysius explains to the others Xtians with him that it was not at all stylish to be so passive while enduring martyrdom; and, for his part, he decided that he would do a rousing song and dance number for the Roman spectators gathered in the bleachers. Now in Quo Vadis, the Xtians were singing hymns just before being killed (by fire or by fang), singing which greatly annoyed Nero, who just recently had found out the true opinion everyone had of his own lyrical abilities. Howbeit, at the very end of “The Debut,” a messenger comes back to report what had happened during Dionysius’s starring performance. The messenger was asked if the audience liked it. His reply was “They ate it up.”