Before 'Abd al-Malik we have no evidence for the public display of Islam by the state. Possibly caliphs before him thought that Islam was only meant for the conquerors, not for the conquered, or that, as with Muhammad’s community, people could keep to their own religion and there was no one official creed, or else they did not want to antagonize their non-Muslim subjects while their rule was still new and fragile. We do not really know, but in any case this situation changed dramatically from the time of 'Abd al-Malik when coins and documents, and even practical objects like milestones and glass weights, became emblazoned with Qur’anic slogans emphasizing God’s oneness and Muhammad’s mission. Individual believers, too, especially those going on pilgrimage to Mecca, inscribed on rocks and stones their belief in God and His prophets and their desire to join them in paradise and stay out of hellfire (Figure 6.6). Entrances to monumental buildings—mosques and palaces—began to display Arabic texts paying homage to God’s power and Muhammad’s prophetic status. This change was a response to the need to unify the conquest community after its acrimonious civil war (683-92): it stressed the common faith that the majority of them held and it focused their attention on their chief surviving enemy, the Byzantine Christian empire. Many of the official religious slogans were accordingly chosen for their challenge to Christianity, in particular Qur’an II2: “God the one, God the eternal, He did not beget and was not begotten,” and Qur’an 9:33: “Muhammad is the messenger of God whom He
FIGURE 6.6 Arabic inscription of 109 AH (727—28) from Jabal Ramm in southern Jordan, recording the prayer of ‘Abd al-‘Ala' ibn Sa‘id that God accept his Ramadan fast and grant him peace, mercy, and blessings. © Alison McQuitty.
Sent with guidance and the religion of truth that He might make it the dominant religion.” And the magnificent Dome of the Rock (Figure 5.5), erected on the spot in Jerusalem where Jesus had predicted that “not one stone will be left upon another” (Mark 13:2), was decked out with beautiful tiles inscribed with a paraphrase of Qur’an 4:171: “The Messiah Jesus son of Mary was only a messenger of God, and His word which He committed to Mary, and a spirit from Him. . . . Do not say ‘three.’ . . . God is only one god; he is too exalted to have a son.” This process of elevating Islam to the religion of state was inevitably accompanied by a demotion of all other religions, and in the decades after ‘Abd al-Malik, Muslim lawyers gradually worked out a legal framework for incorporating all creeds into Islamic society whereby the non-Muslim faiths would have a subordinate, but protected, status within the new empire. The result was a society that was increasingly ordered along religious lines.
Differential Status
Of course, all states make some distinction between categories of people living within their borders and accord them different rights. Some differentiate between full citizens and resident aliens, the latter facing a number of restrictions. In the Greco-Roman world, such people (called metoikos in Greek, peregrinus in Latin) were not allowed to hold public office, own land, or marry a citizen (until the time of Augustus in the Roman case). The promotion of Christianity to the state religion gradually changed this situation and increasingly the distinction was between Christian and non-Christian, the latter further subdivided into adherents of a licit religion (Jews), who were—in theory at least—protected, or of an illicit religion (pagans), who faced severe constraints. The same model took hold in the Arab Empire, with non-Muslims being classified either as possessors of a scripture (ahl al-kitab), in which case they could pay a tax in return for protection and the right to continue in their religion, or as pagans (mushrikun), who faced the stark choice of conversion or death. The Sasanian Persian Empire, by contrast, tended to put more weight on social distinctions (having a caste-like system) than on religious distinctions. The Georgian patriarch emphasized to his Armenian counterpart that Khusrau II, unlike the Byzantines, “permitted every people to have its own religion,” and certainly a number of groups that would have looked decidedly pagan to the Byzantine Christians, such as the Mandaeans and Yazidis of Iraq, enjoyed protection. Fortunately, the Muslim government in Iraq left in place this tradition, categorizing most as possessors of a scripture, and as a result such groups have survived until modern times, although in drastically reduced
Numbers.19
Medieval and modern historians tend to assume that the Arabs enforced the distinction between Muslim and non-Muslim as soon as they began their conquests. However, as we have seen, there were many non-Muslims in their ranks initially; what united them was their focus on jihad and so the distinction in the early decades was chiefly between conquerors and conquered. Only later, when most of the non-Muslims in the imperial armies had converted to Islam, did the division conqueror/conquered shift to Muslim/non-Muslim. In any case, it is only with 'Umar II that we begin to have contemporary evidence for discriminatory policies.20 The stimulus for this seems to have been the ignominious failure of the Arab siege of Constantinople in 717—18 and the huge loss of Arab life. This defeat intensified hostility toward Byzantium, and by association toward Christians, and it also accelerated the professionalization of the army. Many Arab Muslims relinquished their military role and became civilians, but they did not want to rub shoulders on an equal footing with the non-Muslim conquered peoples. Accordingly, restrictions were placed on the latter to keep them in their subject position. The raw material for these restrictions came mostly from Byzantine curbs on Jews (not building new synagogues, not giving testimony against Christians, not defaming Christianity, etc.) and Sasanian Persian regulations for distinguishing between nobles and commoners (not wearing the same headgear, overcoats, belts, shoes, and hairstyles of the superior group, etc.). Gradually there evolved an extensive body of legal rulings governing what non-Muslims could and could not do and how they should behave toward Muslims. Jews and Christians and other non-Muslims became a subordinate class, and yet were integrated within the Muslim legal system and granted protection.
Differential Taxation
The most contentious aspect of this discriminatory policy was taxation. Initially, as one would expect, the Arabs, as conquerors and soldiers/rulers, did not pay any taxes. The (adult male) conquered people, on the other hand, all paid tax, irrespective of their religion or ethnicity, unless they were granted an exemption in return for providing military service or spying or the like. Contemporary Egyptian papyri make clear that there were a number of different taxes, but the main two were land tax and poll tax.21 The latter came to be regarded as a religious tax, payable only by non-Muslims, but in the beginning it was simply what the conquered people paid to the conquerors, though it may have been perceived as apt that those whom God had evidently forsaken should pay for the upkeep of those whom God had patently favored. The Arab conquerors would probably have wished that things stayed that way: themselves living a life of luxury at the expense of the conquered. Inevitably, however, many of the latter sought to get a share of the immense privileges enjoyed by the conquerors, in particular, release from taxes. Fiscal agents for Hajjaj complained again and again that “the tax revenue has diminished, for the conquered people have become Muslims and gone off to the garrison cities.” One group that we hear a lot about in the papyri of the late seventh and early eighth centuries are peasants who had fallen behind with their taxes and left their land in the hope of escaping their plight by conversion. In former times they would have sought refuge in a monastery, whereas now they hoped to find service with an Arab patron or to be enrolled in the army. This situation also left its mark in the Muslim literary sources, which recount numerous tales of ragtag groups of converts who served alongside registered soldiers in the army but received no pay or rations. The authorities did not want such untrained recruits in the military and worried about the depletion of the agricultural labor force, and so they usually had them rounded up and sent back to their villages where they would once again be liable for taxes.22
'Umar II, revered as the most pious and devout of all the Umayyad rulers, sought to extend 'Abd al-Malik’s policy of promoting the status of Islam as the foundation of the Arab Empire. He was, therefore, angry at this treatment of converts to Islam and he wrote to his governors ordering them to desist from exacting taxes from Muslims, whatever their origin. He reinforced this point in an edict on taxation: “Whosoever accepts Islam, whether Christian, Jew or Zoroastrian, of those now subject to taxes and who joins himself to the body of the Muslims in their abode, forsaking the abode in which he was before, he shall have the same rights and duties as they have, and they are obliged to associate with him and to treat him as one of themselves.”23 His successors, however, obstructed this policy, and some governors circumvented it by agreeing to relieve recent converts of taxes, but only on condition that they could demonstrate the sincerity of their conversion by reciting a portion of the Qur’an and undergoing circumcision, which provoked widespread retraction. The problem might usefully be compared to the attitude of modern wealthy nations toward immigration. Being a citizen of such countries brings many benefits and those who are already citizens tend to be nervous that if the door is opened wide to immigrants those benefits will be diluted. The authorities would ideally like to accept only educated and skilled immigrants, but it can be difficult to justify a selection process on legal grounds and returning failed immigrants is always contentious. The conquerors were in much the same position: the benefits that they enjoyed were very generous, and so there really was no way that these could be extended to all who sought to join them without decimating the economy. The choice before them was either to use increasing force to stem the tide of would-be members of their club or to reduce the benefit package.
Not surprisingly, given their numerical inferiority, the Arabs chose the latter course and from the time of 'Abd al-Malik onward a number of major changes were introduced with the aim of making the financial basis of the Arab Empire more sustainable. First, as we have said before, the incentive to enroll in the army was reduced by commuting payments to soldiers as a reward for past participation into a regular salary for continuing service. One could no longer rest on former glory but had to remain an active and full-time soldier. This not only made would-be recruits pause for thought before signing up, but also prompted a number of existing members to opt out and join the civilian ranks. Second, to stem the reduction in land tax caused by non-Muslim farmers converting to Islam and Muslims buying land from non-Muslims, there was a shift from payment according to category of person (Muslim or non-Muslims) to payment according to category of land. In general, for non-crown lands, there was now a uniform land tax levied on Muslims and non-Muslims alike. The third reform was to provide a Muslim counterpart to the poll tax, which had come to be seen as a specifically non-Muslim tax; the solution was to make almsgiving for Muslims compulsory, collected just like a tax. This policy was probably introduced not long before 730, when we find Najid ibn Muslim, the governor of the Fayum district, south of modern Cairo, both justifying and explaining the new system to an underling:
God sent his prophet Muhammad, may God praise him, with guidance and the true religion and everything that God approves of for his worshippers. On those belonging to the people of the religion of
Islam (ahl al-islam), the upright religion, God has imposed an alms-tax (sadaqd) on their property in order to purify them. . . . Give a receipt for everything that you have taken from each person. . . with their name, the name of their father, their tribe and village. . .24
By the second half of the eighth century, the island of privilege that the early Arab conquest society had been no longer existed. An average Muslim very likely paid less tax than an average non-Muslim, but it varied according to profession and status, and of course the reality of tax collection was very much more complex than the simple and elegant theories of the lawyers.
World History
