270 chapter 6
officials, administer border crossings, and organize warfare with non-Muslim
neighbours.135
The importance of the work in the wider sphere of Islamic fiscal jurispru-
dence has been summarized as follows:136
Despite its name, Abu Yusuf ’s Kitab al-kharaj is not limited to the legal
theory of the land-tax, but can be more accurately viewed as a develop-
ment within the sub-genre of state literature, i.e. the law of nations, for
its attention to issues of state administration in general and those related
to non-Muslims in particular. Abu Yusuf ’s work, while lacking organiza-
tion, is marked throughout with a concern for principles favorable to the
authority of the state, especially as embodied in the Abbasid Harun al-
Rashid. This interest in authority is operative on many levels, in its incor-
poration of material on the Islamic conquests, but most strikingly in its
focus on the caliph himself as lawmaker. The work is actually presented
as a conversation in which the jurist responds to the caliph’s questions
of matters of administration thus affirming a caliphal role in establish-
ing the law and maintaining justice. This feature of the work is meant
not to grant license to the caliph to act arbitrarily, but rather to draw
upon the legal authority of the caliph as Imam of the Muslim community
(al-umma) in order to given an air of legitimacy to state administration,
especially tax-administration. Evidence for this exists in the author’s in-
troduction, where emphasis is placed on the imam-status of the Abbasid
caliphs, and throughout the work in the tendency to attribute legal de-
cision-making to caliphal judgment (ra ’y) and authority. More than his
predecessors in the genre, Abu Yusuf shows a concern for Islamic iden-
tity in his presentation of his material as reports (often with chains of
transmission) describing the measures undertaken by the first Muslims
(al-salaf al-salih). This inclusion of hadith consciousness was one way to
associate principles of administration (and explanation of them) more
directly with the Islamic heritage.The new element that Abu Yusuf introduced into the literature on land taxa-
tion was proportional taxation. In the lands taken not by treaty but by force,
the kharaj was previously expressed in terms of fixed sums in cash, in kind, or
both, as imposed by Caliph ‘Umar I. In the Kitâb al-kharaj, Abu Yusuf dem-
onstrated the inefficiency of the fixed-rate system as imposed by ‘Umar and
135 Calder 1993, 109.
136 Heck 2002, 171–172.