ADMINISTRATIONbut al-f:lajjaj raised it again to eighteen hundred embroidered robes
because he accused them of siding with Ibn al-Ash'ath in his rebellion
in 699. It was only in the reign of 'Umar 11 (717-20), when the
community had shrunk to one-tenth of its former number, that their
levy was made a genuine poll tax separate from their land, the portion
due from those who had died or converted was annulled, and the tax
was set again at two hundred robes worth eight thousand dirhams.^65
Although in theoretical discussions of the poll tax, the Najraniyya
are treated as an exception,66 an indication that the kind of group
responsibility for taxes described in the Talmud had survived among
the native population at least until the end of the seventh century is
provided by the legal correspondence of the Nestorian catholicos f:len-
anisho' (686-93). The exact locations of the villages in question are
unknown but were probably somewhere in upper Iraq. In one case,
the brothers of a man named Piisanosh had died without heirs and
left him all their property except what had been willed to the Church,
but his fellow villagers took his inheritance by force on the pretext
that it was the tax to be paid by the dead if his brothers had not been
sealed. Piisanosh appealed to the catholicos who ordered the property
returned, although he ruled that if "his brothers were not sealed ...
their tax [medata] was incumbent on the village."67 The villagers were
also responsible for distributing their tax. In another case f:lenanisho'
ruled that "the poll tax [kesaf resha] which they are obliged to compute
should be collected from each one according to the proportion of his
property. "68
Part of a dead person's estate could also be sold or mortgaged to
pay his debts or the poll tax.^69 We also hear of a jail for tax debtors
at Shuqa dhe Hadhbeshabba ("Sunday Market") in eighth century
Margha,7° and the language of debt is used in a post-conquest Middle
Persian apocalyptic text, which says "They have imposed taxes [ga-
zztak, from Syriac gezzta] and distributed them upon heads [M.P. apar
saran]. They have demanded the principal [aslzk, from Arabic a~n
6S Abii Yiisuf, Khariij, pp. 88, 100-1, 111-13; Baliidhurl, Futu~, pp. 66-67; Khad-
duri, Islamic Law of Nations, pp. 278-83. If this amount was intended to be equivalent
to the poll tax rates it would mean that there were at most two thousand men in the
community by that time, out of an original maximum of twenty thousand men.
66 Abii Yiisuf, Khariij, p. 187; Khadduri, Islamic Law of Nations, p. 275.
67 Sachau, Rechtsbucher, Il, 14-17, 184.
68 Ibid., 11, 42-43.
69 Ibid., 11, 18-19.
70 Thomas of Margha, Governors, 11, 638.