Its legal foundations and historical implications

Abstract

Its legal foundations and historical implications

Research Summary

It has become well-known that the land of Iraq, the Levant, Egypt and other countries, after the Muslims conquered it by force, became tax land, and one of the consequences of that, according to the most famous sayings, is that its ownership is transferred to the state, and that if the ruler enables its people to work on it, then in exchange for a tax (financial function) paid annually to the state, they call it kharaj, and it has been This (kharaj) constituted the most important tributary of the state treasury, and then this money became a tributary of the ruler’s treasury in the Umayyad era and beyond.

Research into abscesses raises a number of questions:

1-What is the legal justification for confiscating lands whose ownership people acquired through labor or compensation, such as purchasing from individuals, especially those who did not fight the conquerors?

2- Do those who advocate the legitimacy of tax rely on a verse from the Qur’an, or an authentic hadith from the Qur’anic Sunnah, or an act of the Prophet (PBUH), or is the jurisprudential document based on political applications that were adopted in the time of Omar ibn al-Khattab and became an official act that was approved by the Companions, so consensus was claimed over it?

3-Is ending the ownership of individuals limited to those who left their land and evacuated from it while it is suitable for investment, or does it even include those who resided on their conquered land by force, whether they remained in their faith in exchange for a tribute paid to the state on their head, or who converted to Islam after the conquest of their country by force, because who converted to Islam before the conquest? His land is a Ushrim land, yet after the forced conquest of the country he demands tax on the land he works on, because if a Muslim owns taxable land, his conversion to Islam does not negate the tax on land whose title the state owns?

4- Do the scholars agree on the basis of this ruling and its evidence, or do they disagree about it? What is the ruling on what the evidence is different about?

5- Is land included in the concept of spoils according to Sharia law, or is it limited to movable property?

6- Is land ownership classified based on the faith of the person who owns it?

7- Does conquest establish a legal basis for ownership based on military supremacy? Is this basis logical?

8- If the tax was something that the generations of Muslims knew before the conquest, then why did they differ about its basis, its nature, and its rulings, such that Omar disagreed with the senior companions who were demanding the division of the land, as the Prophet (PBUH) did? The disagreement over it continued until Harun al-Rashid requested in the year (180 AH) a detailed clarification. From Abu Yusuf al-Qadi, that is, 150 years after the time of Omar. He replied to him with a book in which he wrote the rulings on tax, which he called (Al-Kharaj). Then more than ten authors after him wrote more than twenty books about tax, which you will find in Ibn al-Nadim’s index (), but they did not agree on its basis, rulings, and effects. A few of them mentioned that the tax system was a collection system applied in the Persian state of the Aksaris before the conquest of Iraq (), and it was also the same among the Romans and perhaps on the outskirts of the peninsula.

9-  Very few people mentioned that the term “kharaj” is one of the Roman administrative terms, and its pronunciation is “Khurjiya” () and a few said that Omar applied the Kharaj system based on the Kharaj office systems that he inherited from the conquered empires through the conquest, then it turned into an Arabic word in the time of Omar and the word became used. In Arabic, it means (a gift that people pay to the Sultan) in exchange for something, for nothing, or something like a royalty. It was said that it is what a people gives annually from their money to the Sultan for the sake of victory.

10- What is the position of the Al-Bayt School on the ambiguities of taxation in the legal and political experience of the first caliphate state?

On these questions, the research center