Practice question · Select all that apply
Governors in early Umayyad Egypt sometimes discouraged their subjects from converting to Islam. Which explanations for that are sound?
Hints
- Three of these follow from the fiscal arrangement; one invents a legal prohibition.
- The question is what a governor loses when a taxpayer converts.
Show the answer
- A. Conversion therefore reduced provincial revenue
- C. Protected status let existing communities keep their own law and worship, so the arrangement was stable
- D. Non-Muslim subjects paid a poll tax that converts stopped paying
Why
The dhimma was a working fiscal settlement, not a grudging tolerance: protection and legal autonomy in exchange for a poll tax. That structure gave the state a direct interest in a large non-Muslim population, which is why conversion took centuries rather than years.
Practise The Making of an Islamic World
The app has 5 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. History II is free to start.
More questions on The Making of an Islamic World
- In which year did the Hijra, the migration from Mecca to Medina that begins the Islamic calendar, take place?
- Islamic religious authority resided with the ulama rather than a formal church hierarchy. What institutional…
- The Abbasid revolution of 750 moved the capital from Damascus to a new city on the Tigris. Why is that more…
- Arrange these events in the history of the Islamic world, earliest first.
- The Arab conquests were followed within a generation by the conversion of most of the conquered population to…
- Sort each feature by whether it belongs to the UMAYYAD caliphate or to the ABBASID caliphate.
- Charles Martel defeated a Muslim force near Poitiers in 732. Muslim garrisons nevertheless held Narbonne…
- The translation of Greek philosophy and science into Arabic was chiefly an act of preservation, adding little…
- The Hijra falls in 622 and the emirate of Granada surrendered in 1492. Estimate how many years separate them.