the abbasìd’s golden age 169The First Specialised Books on Islamic EconomicsWriting on Kharàj
Meaning of Kharàj
The word Kharàj claims an Arabic etymology. The word has been
mentioned in the Qur"àn indicating the meaning of payment, or reg-
ular payment, “And they said, ‘Dhul-Qarnayn, Gog and Magog are
ravaging this land, would you build a rampart between us and them
and we will pay you a kharàj”. The Qur"ànic verses, 18:94, inform
us about an encounter between one of God’s prophets with some
people who were suffering from the people of Gog and Magog. On
another occasion God rhetorically exclaims with a view to comfort-
ing the Prophet Muœammad in his encounter with the unbelievers,
“Or do you ask them for a kharàj, verily your Lord’s Kharàj is far
better” (Qur"àn, 23:74). And as the Qur"àn confirms on more than
one occasion that its definitive meaning is in, “an Arabic tongue”
the word by inference must be an Arabic word. Linguistically, it
means a payment, a regular payment, or a return. However, in tax-
ation terms, several writers affirm that as a land tax it was known
in Persia before the coming of Islam. But under the same term
Kharàj, early Islamic writers referred to it in their books as land
tax. Technically, the term could have a dual meaning: it may be
used in a general technical term to mean public finance as a whole,
including all taxes and the way revenues are distributed, as the early
writers did, but when used in a narrowly specifically technical man-
ner the term would refer to the revenue from land tax in particu-
lar. As such, one can say the state’s Kharàj, meaning state’s total
revenue, as invariably used by early historians, and land Kharàj to
refer to revenue from land tax (Al-Rayyis, 1977).
Books on Kharàj
In his examination of taxation in Islam, Ben Shemesh cites a num-
ber of books on Kharàj during the eight century or so. However,
the only surviving books are the three mentioned below.
Abù-Yùsuf ’s “Kitàb al-Kharàj”, book of al-Kharàj. In the peak
of the Abbasìd period, under the reign of the strong caliph Harùn
al-Rashìd (786–809) and in the midst of an impressive cultural renais-
sance, the caliph asked the jurist Abù-Yùsuf (731–798) to write a