ADMINISTRATIONtax as exclusively imposed on the economically productive part of
society whose religion happened to be different from that of the rulers,
in return for military protection. In practice, tribute was imposed on
all non-Arabs in Iraq regardless of religion: Jews, Christians, Magians,
and pagans.^48 These early associations between the poll tax and mil-
itary protection also survived in Islamic legal traditions as in the state-
ment of as-Sarakhsi that "the property owner has no more right to
invalidate the right of collection which belongs to the imiim by the
authority bestowed on him by the Shari'a, than has the person who
is subject to the poll tax to settle it himself to the warriors who are
the beneficiaries of that tax."49
The association of the poll tax with the tribute paid by non-Muslims
meant theoretically at least, that conversion to Islam ought to free a
person from paying it. Actually only non-Arabs who entered the ruling
class as soldiers or administrators seem to have been allowed to escape
it whether they converted to Islam or not. One good example is that
of a Persian convert at Basra, Arraban, the mawla of 'Abdullah ibn
Durra al-Muzani, who was allowed to pay the Muslim alms tax (Ar.
zakiit) to 'Umar 1.^50 This did not apply to the agricultural population
for whom little practical difference existed between land and poll taxes.
However, the famous case of the forced return by al-I:Iajjaj of Jewish
and Christian converts to Islam who had escaped to the cities of lower
Iraq at the end of the seventh century has more to do with the at-
tachment of agricultural labor to the land than with the issues of
conversion and taxation. The emergence of protected (Ar. dhimmi)
status and the definition ofjizya as the poll tax on non-Muslim subjects
appears to have been achieved only by the early eighth century. This
came as a result of growing suspicions about the loyalty of the non-
Muslim population during the second civil war and of the literalist
interpretation of the Qur'an by pious Muslims, including Khawarij,
who insisted on adding the requirement of the possession of a revealed
scripture to the other aspects of the poll tax inherited from the Sa-
samans.
Parallel to the increasingly religious nature of the poll tax went the
development of the issue of whether or not those engaged in religious
professions should be exempt. Even before the sixth-century reforms,
attendants of the Magian fire temples were exempt from the kragii,
48 Abii Yiisuf, Khariij, pp. 101, 187; Khadduri, Islamic Law of Nations, p. 275.
49 Aghnides, Finance, p. 300.
50 Ibn Sa'd, Tabaqiit, VII(l), 88.