Kharaj
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Kharāj (
Arabic: خراج) is a type of individual Islamic tax on agricultural land and its produce, regardless of the religion of the owners, developed under Islamic law.[1]
With the
Sassanid Empire in the east; later and more broadly, kharaj refers to a land-tax levied by Muslim rulers on their non-Muslim subjects, collectively known as dhimmi. Muslim landowners, on the other hand, paid ushr, a religious tithe on land, which carried a lower rate of taxation,[2] and zakat. Ushr
was a reciprocal 10% levy on agricultural land as well as merchandise imported from states that taxed Muslims on their products.
Changes soon eroded the established tax base of the early
Abbasids and would thereafter form the model of tax systems in the Islamic state.[3] 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.[2]
20th-century Russian orientalist, A. Yu. Yakubovski, compares the land tax system of
Sassanids with that of the post-Islamic Caliphate
era:
A comparison between pre-Islamic documents and those of the Islamic period reveals that conquering Arabs increased the land taxation without exception. Thus, raising taxes of each acre of wheat field to four dirhams and each acre of barley field to two dirhams, whereas during reign of
Khosro Anushiravan it used to be a single dirham for each acre of wheat or barley field. During the later stage of the Umayyad Caliphate, landowners were paying from one fourth to one third of their land produce to the state as kharaj.[4]
In the
cizye.[citation needed
]
Notes
- ISBN 978-0691134840.
- ^ a b Lewis (2002), p. 72
- ^ Lewis (2002), p. 79–80
- ^ N. V. Pigulevskaya, A. Yu. Yakubovski, I. P. Petrushevski, L. V. Stroeva, A. M. Belenitski. The History of Iran from Ancient Times to the End of Eighteenth Century (in Persian), Tehran, 1967, p. 161.
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)
- Melis, Nicola, "Il concetto di ğihād", in P. Manduchi (a cura di), Dalla penna al mouse. Gli strumenti di diffusione del concetto di gihad, Angeli, Milano 2006, pp. 23–54.
- Melis, Nicola, "Lo statuto giuridico degli ebrei dell'Impero Ottomano", in M. Contu – N. Melis - G. Pinna (a cura di), Ebraismo e rapporti con le culture del Mediterraneo nei secoli XVIII-XX, Giuntina, Firenze 2003.
- Melis, Nicola, Trattato sulla guerra. Il Kitāb al-ğihād di Molla Hüsrev, Aipsa, Cagliari 2002.
- 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 0-8276-0116-6.
- Watt, W. Montgomery. Islamic Political Thought: The Basic Concepts (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1980)
External links
Wikiquote has quotations related to Kharaj.
- The Institute of Ismaili Studies, Glossary H-K (kharaj) Archived 2006-02-09 at the Wayback Machine