the territories controlled by the nascent Islamic
state. The relevant quranic verse in that regard
commands the Muslims to “fight those who have
previously received revelation and do not believe
in God or in the Last Day, who do not forbid that
which God and his Prophet have forbidden, and
who do not believe in the true religion, until they
agree to pay the jizya in humility.” (Q 9:29) Thus,
dhimmi status is not accorded to all members of
religions recognized as having had previous divine
revelation. Rather, it is the status of members of
those religions living within an Islamic polity (the
dar al-Islam) who have submitted to the politi-
cal dominance of the Islamic state. Much of the
modern demagoguery around this topic is there-
fore entirely irrelevant, insofar as Muslims, who
constitute small minorities in the West, could not
(and generally would not) attempt to make others
submit to their religiopolitical authority.
Historically, dhimmi status has been applied
quite broadly to various non-Muslims living in
lands controlled by Muslims. Thus, for instance,
Zoroastrians, who did not have a “previously
received revelation” or scripture, were accorded
this protected status, as were Hindus and many
others. Being treated as a dhimmi in such circum-
stances carried certain benefits as well as poten-
tial liabilities. The benefits were clear: Dhimmis
were allowed to practice their religions freely and
without constraint, except in cases in which a
public practice might openly conflict with Mus-
lims’ sensibilities or in which they insulted Islam.
Moreover, dhimmis were granted most of the
protections due to Muslims, could not be arbi-
trarily harmed, and could not be forced to convert
or emigrate from Muslim-ruled territories. The
liabilities were potentially numerous, but gener-
ally only one was of any import: paying the jizya,
or poll tax—a tax on individual members of the
community in question. Jizya was regularly col-
lected, and it appears to have been onerous for
impoverished dhimmis, as evidenced especially in
Goitein’s work on Jews in medieval cairo. In some
cases, the wealthy dhimmis might pay the tax for
others of the community who were indigent, but
this was not universal by any means. Other than
the tax, there were numerous regulations, often
cast as the so-called Pact of Umar, referring to the
second caliph, but most likely from the 11th cen-
tury or so, at least in its present form. Nonethe-
less, from the eighth century, certainly, one could
find occasions when rulers imposed restrictions
on the dhimmis, including forcing them to wear
certain prescribed clothing different from that of
Muslims (perhaps originally to forestall espio-
nage), forbidding their building of new places of
worship or even repairing existing ones, requiring
that all high officials be Muslims (they very often
were not), and so on.
However, historical evidence makes abun-
dantly clear that the dhimmi rules were never sys-
tematically applied and were most often applied
temporarily by rulers who lacked legitimacy and
tried to gain it by dressing themselves in the garb
of piety. While restrictions governing non-Mus-
lims were generally not applied, others, such as
those prohibiting non-Muslim men from mar-
rying Muslim women (but not the inverse), as
well as rules against apostasy from Islam (but not
the inverse), were broadly applied. While these
restrictions do not amount to persecution, they
likely made conversion to Islam more attractive.
On the other hand, compared to the virulent anti-
Judaism that arose in Europe in medieval times,
the situation of dhimmis was quite enviable. The
picture, in other words, was complex.
In the modern period, this term has occasion-
ally been resuscitated, but it is generally obsolete.
aFghanistan’s taliban wanted to impose the
legally prescribed dhimmi dress codes on non-
Muslims and did so to some extent. But this has
not been the case elsewhere, and most Muslims
worldwide appear to have regarded this action
incredulously. As ideas about nationalism and
citizenship take precedence over those of reli-
giously determined identity, many Islamic groups
such as the mUslim brotherhood have recognized
the equality of Muslims and non-Muslims in adhimmi 195 J