TAXESsettlement. Such conditions have been used to explain why the terms
used by Muslims for land and poll taxes were interchangeable and
not really sorted out in Islamic usage until the eighth century-khariij
for land tax and jizya for poll tax. These conditions are also used to
suggest that in dealing with the agricultural population of lower Iraq,
the difference between land and poll taxes was probably made more
by the government than by the people on the land who paid all their
taxes as a combined assessment.^44 However, the distinction between
land taxes as rent and poll taxes as tribute appears to apply to the
town-dwelling population.
Eventually poll taxes also came to be considered as the contribution
to be made to the state by productive noncombatants in return for
military protection. From this point of view, the tendency to consider
the poll tax as a levy on non-Magians appears underway by at least
the fourth century when Shapiir 11, in order to offset the expense of
his wars and arguing that the Christians in his empire were living in
peace even though their faith differed from the established one, re-
quired the bishop of Ctesiphon (Mada'in) Shem'on bar Sabba'e, to
collect a double poll tax (Syr. kesaf reshii) and land tax (Syr. mediitii)
from Christians.^45 This imposition is said to have evoked the retort
from the bishop that "I am no tax collector, but a shepherd of the
Lord's flock."46 The sixth-century reform of Aniishirvan served to
increase the religious dimension of the poll tax especially in Iraq, where
it was mainly paid by the non-Persian, non-Magian part of the pop-
ulation because of the exemptions he made.
This late Sasanian tendency appears to have merged easily with the
tribal Arab definition of jizya as the personal ransom paid by a person
defeated and captured in battle, and with the Qur'anic use of jizya as
the collective tribute paid to Muslims following political submission
by those non-Muslims with a revealed scriptureY The replacement of
the Persians by the Muslims as rulers of Iraq and the way in which,
at least initially, the Muslims maintained themselves as both a religious
community and a military garrison contributed materially to a crys-
tallization of the trend begun under the Sasanians to regard the poll
44 F. Altheim and R. Stiehl, Ein asiatischer Staat (Wiesbaden, 1954), p. 172; Gibb,
"Fiscal Rescript," pp. 15-16; Khadduri, Islamic Law of Nations, p. 49.
45 M. Kmosko, "S. Simeon Bar Sabba'e," Patrologia Syriaca (Paris, 1894), II, 791;
Pigulevskaya, Villes, p. 173.
46 A. V66bus, History of Asceticism in the Syrian Orient (Louvain, 1958), I, 238.
47 M. Bravmann, The Spiritual Background of Early Islam (Leiden, 1972), pp. 199-
212; Qur'an, 9:29; Khadduri, Islamic Law of Nations, p. 49.