Kharaj
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In Islamic law, kharaj is a tax on agricultural land. Kharaj has no basis in the Qur'an or hadith, being rather the product of ijma, consensus of Islamic scholars, and urf, Islamic tradition.
Initially, after the first Muslim conquests in the 7th century, kharaj usually denoted a lump-sum duty levied upon the conquered provinces and collected by the officials of the former Byzantine and Sassanid empires or, more broadly, any kind of tax levied by Muslim conquerors on their non-Muslim subjects, dhimmis. At that time, kharaj was synonymous with jizyah, which later emerged as a poll tax paid by dhimmis. Muslims landowners, on the other hand, paid only ushr, a religious tithe, which carried a much lower rate of taxation.[1]
However, the mass conversion of Christians and Zoroastrians to Islam eroded the tax base of the Arab empire. On top of that, a large, but unsuccessful, expedition against the Byzantine Empire undertaken by the Umayyad caliph Sulayman in 717 brought the finances of the Umayyads to the brink of collapse. Even before Sulayman's ascent to power, Al-Hajjaj, a governor of Iraq, attempted to raise revenues by demanding from Muslims a full rate of taxation, but that measure met with opposition and resentment. To address these problems, Sulayman's successor Umar II worked out a compromise that beginning from 719, land from which kharaj was paid could not be transferred to Muslims, who could lease such land, but in that case, they would be required to pay kharaj from it. With the passage of time, the practical result of that reform was that kharaj was levied on most land without regard for the cultivator's religion. The reforms of Umar II were finalized under the Abbasids and would thereafter form the model of tax systems in the Islamic state.[2] From that time on, kharaj was also used as a general term describing all kinds of taxes: for example, the classic treatise on taxation by the 9th century jurist Abu Yusuf was called Kitab al-Kharaj, i.e. The Book On Taxation.[1]
[edit] Notes
[edit] References
- Cooper, Richard S. "The Assessment and Collection of Kharaj Tax in Medieval Egypt" (Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 96, No. 3. (Jul. – Sep., 1976), pp. 365–382.
- Cummings, John Thomas; Askari, Hossein; Mustafa, Ahmad. "Islam and Modern Economic Change" in Esposito, 1980, pp. 25–47
- Esposito, John L. (ed.). Islam and Development: Religion and Sociopolitical Change (Syracuse, NY, Syracuse University Press, 1980)
- Gaudefroy-Demombynes, Maurice (tr. John P. MacGregor). Muslim Institutions (London, Allen & Unwin, 1950)
- Hourani, Albert, A History of the Arab Peoples (Cambridge, MA : Belknap-Harvard University Press, 1991)
- Hawting, G. R. The First Dynasty of Islam: The Umayyad Caliphate AD 661-750 (London, Routledge, 2000)
- Lambton, Ann K. S. Landlord and Peasant in Persia: A Study of Land Tenure and Land Revenue Administration (London, Oxford University Press, 1953)
- Lewis, Bernard (2002). The Arabs in History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-280310-7.
- Poliak, A. N. "Classification of Lands in the Islamic Law and Its Technical Terms". The American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures, Vol. 57, No. 1. (Jan., 1940), pp. 50–62.
- Stillman, Norman (1979). The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Source Book. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America. ISBN 0827601166.
- Watt, W. Montgomery. Islamic Political Thought: The Basic Concepts (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1980)
