Encyclopedia of Islam

Further reading: Eleanor Abdella Doumato, Getting 

God’s Ear: Women, Islam, and Healing in Saudi Arabia 

and the Gulf (New York: Columbia University Press); 

Edward Westermarck, Ritual and Belief in Morocco, 2 

vols. (New York: University Books, 1968).

jizya

 

(Arabic: poll tax)

The  jizya was a poll (or head) tax paid by non-

Muslim subjects (

dhimmis

) to Muslim govern-

ments. The legal basis for this tax (Q 9:29), 

commands Muslims to “fight those who have 

previously received revelation who do not believe 

in God or in the Last Day and 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.”

The legal texts that lay out the normative 

definitions of jizya are all from a period postdat-

ing the first century of Islam (ca. eighth century 

K  402  

jinni

---

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 c

airo

’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), a

Urangzeb

(d. 1707) imposed the jizya in 1679 after his 

great-grandfather  a

kbar

 (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 e

gypt

 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 m

Uslim

  b

rotherhood

, 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  c

hristianity

 

and

  i

slam

; J

Udaism

 

and

i

slam

;  i

slamism

; 

kharaj

;  m

Ughal

 

dynasty

;  o

tto

-

man

 

dynasty

; t

anzimat

.

John Iskander