Iraq after the Muslim Conquest - Michael G. Morony

ADMINISTRATION

received them collected one-third and one-quarter of the produce from
their village estates.^28 By the end of the eighth century, the principles
had been established in Islamic theory that the tasq represented the
price of an annual sale or rental to the tenants on ustiin land, according
to the terms of their leases and the quality of the land, and could
amount to as much as one-half of the crop.29 As we have seen, the
expansion of state lands through reclamation in Iraq, which began in
the time of Mu'awiya, increased the territory under this tax regime
and made its revenues an important alternative source of income.
When applied to income from landed property, the tithe tax (Ar.
'ushr) paid by Muslims was also proportional to the yield. The only
significant 'ushr-paying lands in Iraq were in the vicinity of Basra and
were created in two ways. First, in contrast to the Sawad of Kufa,
where native converts or Muslims who acquired land from native
landlords continued to pay khariij on their land, in the seventh century
converts and Muslims who acquired land by gift or sale from natives
around the town of Furat near Basra paid 'ushr on it until the time
of al-I:Iajjaj, who required such land to pay khariij.30 Second, the land
reclaimed privately by Muslims around Basra paid 'ushr.31 In the
second half of the seventh century and well into the eighth century,
this part of Iraq was the scene of an agricultural boom where land
development extended the area under cultivation in the form of large
plantation estates. The spread of crown lands and private estates through
land reclamation was the most important development in the agri-
cultural economy of lower Iraq in the early Islamic period, but neither
kind of new land served to increase the amount of khariij collected
by the state. '

POLL TAX

Even more than in the case of land taxes, seventh-century devel-

opments concerning poll taxes fit the general trend towards regularity,

28 Abii Yiisuf, Kharaj, p. 93; Baladhuri, Futii/J, p. 273.

29 Qudama, Kharaj, p. 38.

. 10 Baiadhuri, Futii/J, p. 368. Of course there was nothing new about tithe land as
such in Iraq. The payment of one-tenth of the crops existed as the lowest rate in ancient
Babylonia and in the Sasanian muqasama system. Tithes on agricultural and commercial
income are known in Sumerian records in the period of Vr III and in Akkadian from
the tithe (Ak. eSru) of the Old Babylonian period through the "tithe fields" (Ak. bIt
esru) of the neo-Babylonian period (Ellis, Agriculture and the State, p. 150).
31 Abii Yiisuf, Kharaj, pp. 77, 96, 98; Aghnides, Finance, pp. 361-62.