Pact of Umar

According to Islamic tradition, the Pact (Covenant) of Umar (c. 717 A.D.) is a treaty edicted by the Umayyad caliph Umar II (not to be confused with the second caliph Umar who had made the first treaty with Christians in Jerusalem known as "Umari Treaty") for the ahl al-kitab (اهل الكتاب) ("people of the Book") living on the lands newly conquered and colonized by Muslims. Muslims leaders were required to work out a way of dealing with Non-Muslims, who remained in the majority in many areas for centuries. The solution was to develop the notion of the "dhimma", or "protected person", who kept their religion to accept and submit to some rules. The Pact of Umar enumerates in detail many of the conditions of their subjugation, and served as a key foundational text in the legal elaboration of dhimmi status during the classical period of Islamic jurisprudence

Conditions

The Pact of Umar is a fundamental document in prescribing the condition of tolerated "People of the Book" (Jews and Christians) living within Muslim-controlled states.

Dhimmi are granted the right to practice their own religious rites in privacy. The protection of their persons and property was also part of the pact but the punishment for infringement was less severe than for a Muslim. During certain periods of persecution, these rights varied or did not apply.

To secure their rights, dhimmi would pledge loyalty to their Muslim rulers, pay a special poll-tax (the jizya) for adult males, and in general show deference and humility to Muslims in social interactions.

While the conditions of the Pact were authoritative, the level of enforcement varied, as shown by the existence of churches constructed long after the Muslim conquests.

Historicity

Modern scholars have questioned the authenticity of this agreement (which exists in several different textual forms), claiming it to be the product of later jurists who attributed it to the caliph Umar in order to lend greater authority to their own opinions:

Western orientalists doubt the authenticity of the Pact, arguing that it is usually the victors, not the vanquished, who propose, or rather impose, the terms of peace, and that it is highly unlikely that the people who spoke no Arabic and knew nothing of Islam could draft such a document. Academic historians believe that the Pact of Umar in the form it is known today was a product of later jurists who attributed it to the venerated caliph Umar I in order to lend greater authority to their own opinions. The striking similarities between the Pact of Umar and the Theodesian and Justinian Codes suggest that perhaps much of the Pact of Umar was borrowed from these earlier codes by later Islamic jurists. At least some of the clauses of the pact mirror the measures first introduced by the Umayyad caliph Umar II or by the early Abbasid caliphs. [Tritton (1970); Lewis (1984), pp. 24–25; Bat Ye’or (1985), p. 48; Goddard (2000), p. 46]

Scholars have argued that the Pact may have direct pre-Islamic inspiration:

:It has recently been suggested that many of the detailed regulations concerning what the ahl al-dhimma were and were not permitted to do come from an earlier historical precedent, namely the regulations which existed in the Sassanian Persian Empire with reference to its religious minorities in Iraq. Here there was a highly developed Jewish community, and separate Monophysite and Nestorian Christian communities, and during the late Sassanian period the rulers experimented with arrangements by which efforts were made to ensure the loyalty of the population by granting military protection and some degree of religious toleration in return for the payment of taxes.:(Goddard p. 47)

Text

The text exists in several different forms, one of them a letter from a community of Christians to Umar, enumerating in retrospect the conditions of their pact. One version of this letter may be found [http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/pact-umar.html here] .

References

*cite book|author=Hugh Goddard|title=A History of Christian-Muslim Relations|location=Chicago|publisher=New Amsterdam Books|year=2000|id=ISBN 1-56663-340-0
*cite book|author=A. S. Tritton|title=The Caliphs and their non-Muslim Subjects: a Critical Study of the Covenant of `Umar|location=London|publisher=Frank Cass Publisher|year=1930|id=ISBN 0-7146-1996-5 Medieval Islamic Civilization: An EncyclopediaBy Josef W. Meri, Jere L. BacharachPublished by Routledge, 2006ISBN 0415966906, 9780415966900878 pages

Notes