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The Pact (Covenant) of Umar (c. 717 A.D.) is a treaty supposedly agreed between the eponymous second caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab and the ahl al-kitab (اهل الكتاب) ("people of the Book") following the first Muslim conquests. These people, called dhimmis (ذمي), were granted various rights and protections in exchange for their acceptance of Muslim political and social domination. 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 non-Muslim peoples living within Muslim-controlled states, as its terms were considered provisions of Islamic law throughout Muslim history.
Among the rights granted to dhimmis by the Pact are the protection of their persons, property, and the freedom to practice their own religious rites, provided they do so inconspicuously. In exchange they must 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.
It is important to note, however, that 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.
ARTICLES OF THE PACT OF UMAR
We Christians:
1 - We shall not build, in our cities or in their neighborhood, new monasteries,
2 - churches,
3 - convents,
4 - or monks' cells,
5 - nor shall we repair, by day or by night, such of them as fall in ruins
6 - or are situated in the quarters of the Muslims. . . .
7- We shall not give shelter in our churches or in our dwellings to any spy,
8 - nor hide him from the Muslims. We shall not teach the Quran to our children.
9 - We shall not manifest our religion publicly
10 - nor convert anyone to it.
11 - We shall not prevent any of our kin from entering Islam if they wish it.
12 - We shall show respect toward the Muslims, and
13 - we shall rise from our seats if they wish to sit.
14 - We shall not seek to resemble the Muslims by imitating any of their garments, the headgear, the turban, footwear, or the parting of the hair.
15 - We shall not speak as they do,
16 - nor shall we adopt their honorific names.
17 - We shall not mount on saddles,
18- nor shall we gird swords nor bear any kind of arms nor carry them on our persons.
19 - We shall not engrave Arabic inscriptions on our seals.
20 - We shall not sell fermented drinks. . . .
21 - We shall not display our crosses or our books in the roads or markets of the Muslims.
22 - We shall only use clappers in our churches very softly.
23 - We shall not raise our voices in our church services or in the presence of Muslims,
24 - nor shall we raise our voices when following our dead.
25 - We shall not show lights on any of the roads of the Muslims or in their markets.
26 - We shall not bury our dead near the Muslims.
27 - We shall not take slave who have been allotted to the Muslims.
28 - We shall not build houses over-topping the houses of the Muslims. . . .
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:
- Although the documents are attributed to `Umar, in all probability they actually come from the second Islamic century, and although they may reflect some of the policies and attitudes towards the conquered population which began to become evident in the period of the Umayyad caliph `Umar ibn `Abd al-`Azìz... the texts were only collected in the form in which they exist today sometime after that. "The covenant was drawn up in the schools of law, and came to be ascribed, like so much else, to `Umar I."
- (Goddard, p. 46)
Scholars have also 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 the 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 here.
See also
References
"Pact of Umar"