c.e.), and so there has been great confusion as to
what kinds of jizya were paid by non-Muslims in
the earliest period. Because Egyptian papyri from
this period have survived relatively abundantly,
the situation of that province is best known dur-
ing the first century of Islam. It appears that the
term jizya in this period was not entirely fixed
but that officials might call for a tax on the head
or a tax on the land. The tax on the head is what
would later come to be solely identified with the
jizya. Thus, in normative discussions and in later
times, the jizya tax was one imposed on all those
non-Muslims who lived permanently within one
of the Islamicate states. It could be imposed only
on free, adult, able-bodied, sane men. While not
a crushing tax, it was considered humiliating by
some dhimmi elites and was onerous enough that
it periodically posed a hardship for the dhimmi
communities, as demonstrated especially by the
Geniza documents found in cairo’s Ben Ezra Syn-
agogue, although those communities sometimes
found ways to reduce the tax burden. It has often
been argued that conversion to Islam was at least
in part under the pressure of the jizya tax.
The jizya had to be periodically adjusted,
especially to take inflation into account, as when,
between the end of the 17th and the middle of the
19th centuries, the jizya was increased sevenfold
in Ottoman lands to account for the devastating
inflation caused by the influx of New World bul-
lion. While this created disturbances among the
dhimmi populations, it probably reflected no more
than the impact of inflation on the devaluation
of the coinage. Additionally, the jizya was on a
sliding scale. Thus, those at the top end in 1834
were responsible for 60 units of payment, while
those at the bottom were responsible only for 15.
In general, this spread appears typical of Ottoman
jizya collection.
In Mughal India (1523–1857), aUrangzeb
(d. 1707) imposed the jizya in 1679 after his
great-grandfather akbar (d. 1605) had famously
eliminated the tax as part of his general policy of
toleration of all religions. Aurangzeb’s policy of
tightened central control and increasing religious
rigor is credited, in part, with the subsequent
breakup of the Mughal Empire under the pressure
of separatist non-Muslim states and increased
British influence. After his death, the jizya was
not collected.
Today the jizya is nowhere in force. It was
done away with in egypt by Khedive Said in 1855
and in the other Ottoman lands (the last signifi-
cant territory in which it was practiced at all) by
the Khatt-i-Humayun decree of 1856. In the lat-
ter part of the 20th century, militant groups such
as the Islamic Group (al-Jamaa al-Islamiyya) of
Egypt called for its reinstatement and began rob-
bing Christian businesses towards this end; the
state finally crushed these groups by the end of
the 1990s. Mainstream Islamist groups, however,
such as the mUslim brotherhood, have firmly
rejected both the violence of these groups and the
possibility of resurrecting jizya; they now embrace
the logic of citizenship with its notions of shared
duties and rights for all.
See also christianity and islam; JUdaism and
islam; islamism; kharaj; mUghal dynasty; otto-
man dynasty; tanzimat.
John IskanderFurther reading: Daniel C. Dennett, Jr., Conversion and
the Poll Tax in Early Islam (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1950); S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean
Society, Vol. 2. (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1971); Jørgen Bæk Simonsen, Studies in the Genesis
and Early Development of the Caliphal Taxation System
(Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag, 1988).John the Baptist (early first century c.e.) for
Muslims, an exemplary prophet who appears in the
Quran and many subsequent Islamic sources
John the Baptist, the desert prophet who baptized
JesUs (see, for example, Matt. 3; Mark 1; Luke
3), is known in Islamic tradition as Yahya ibn
Zakariyya, meaning John the son of Zechariah.John the Baptist 403 J