TAXESgarded as the special heritage of those who had taken it as their
permanent booty.89 This privilege began to be abused almost imme-
diately. Muslims would enter the villages near Kufa and demand "Sat-
isfy me!" or "Invite me!" These orders caused the villagers to complain
to 'All at Madina in 656. When 'All sent Tha'laba ibn Yazld al-
J:limmanl with one hundred horsemen to investigate, the latter swore
upon his return to Madina that he would never return to the Sawad
because of the evil he had seen there. 'Ali then abandoned his intention
of partitioning the Sawad among the Muslim garrison with seven or
nine men assigned to each village to support them. He declared he
would have done so "if some of you had not struck the faces of
others."9o
AMOUNTS
Judgments about the relative efficiency of tax collection, attention
to the agricultural tax base, and the socioreligious consequences of
tax discrimination have been based on comparisons of the amounts
of taxes raised by the Sasanians and by the Muslims in lower Iraq.
Early attempts to link an apparent decline in poll taxes during the first
century of Muslim rule to mass conversions to Islam^91 have been
effectively refuted by Dennett.92 However, land tax figures continue
to be used as evidence for the contraction or at least stability of the
land under cultivation, or of Muslim inefficiency in administering it.^93
Such arguments tend to be based on fairly simple assumptions about
the uniformity and permanence of the land tax regime and of the value
of the income, and are easily misled by the figures cited in the Arabic
sources. While these figures should not be taken literally, they provide
relative orders of magnitude for the value of tax revenues. Any con-
89 Abii Yiisuf, Khariij, p. 60; TabarI, Ta'rikh, I, 2470. There appears to be a reference
to the responsibility of Jews to quarter Muslim soldiers in a responsum of R. Natronai
(Mann, "Responsa," p. 123).
90 Ya~ya ibn Adam, Khariij, p. 43.
91 The earliest use of tax figures to make this point appears to be that of A. von
Kremer, Culturgeschichte des Orients unter den Chalifen (Vienna, 1875), 1,172, who
was folIowed by T. Arnold, The Preaching of Islam (New York, 1913), p. 81, and
A. Tritton, The Caliphs and Their Non-Muslim Subjects (London, 1930).
92 D. Dennett, Conversion and the Poll Tax in Early Islam (Cambridge, Mass., 1950).
For the refutation of similar arguments based on Egyptian tax receipts, see I. Lapidus,
"The Conversion of Egypt to Islam," Israel Oriental Studies 2 (1972),248-62.
93 These figures were used this way by R. Adams, Land Behind Baghdad (Chicago,
1965), pp. 84-85, which also goes back to von Kremer, Culturgeschichte, I, 258-60.