Encyclopedia of Islam

Further reading: Michael Gilsenan, Saint and Sufi in 

Modern Egypt: An Essay in the Sociology of Religion

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 156–187; J. 

Spencer Trimingham, The Sufi Orders in Islam (1971. 

Reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 

194–217; Pnina Werbner, “Stamping the Earth with the 

Name of Allah: Zikr and the Sacralizing of Space among 

British Muslims.” In Making Muslim Space in North 

America and Europe, edited by Barbara Metcalf, 167–185 

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

dhimmi

 

(from the Arabic 

ahl al-dhimma, 

people of the treaty)

Dhimmis are the non-Muslims who live within 

Islamdom and have a regulated and protected 

status. The term as such does not appear in the 

q

Uran

 but is found in 

hadith

 related to m

Uham

-

mad

’s treatment of Jews and Christians within 

“Remember God” says the sign posted on a stand 

with clay jugs containing water for thirsty passersby in 

downtown Cairo.

  (Juan E. Campo)

K  194  

dhimmi

---

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 c

airo

. 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. 

a

Fghanistan

’s  t

aliban

 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 m

Uslim

 b

rotherhood

 have recognized 

the equality of Muslims and non-Muslims in a