The attribution to Umar ibn al-Khattab, who took Jerusalem and Damascus in the 630s, gives the document the authority of the conquest generation. Scholars have doubted it for a century.
The case against is partly formal. The Arabic style and the legal vocabulary belong to a later period. The text presupposes a settled Muslim urban population living among Christians, which the 630s did not have. Its concerns, distinguishing dress, seals, saddles, the parting of the hair, are the concerns of a society in which the two populations had become hard to tell apart, a problem of the eighth and ninth centuries rather than the seventh. And the earliest full citations of it appear in jurists writing well after that.
Where scholars differ is on what the alternative is. A. S. Tritton, who examined the recensions in 1930, argued that it grew by accretion out of local surrender treaties, and that the terms of those treaties were considerably narrower. Others have associated it with the caliph Umar II, who reigned from 717 to 720 and who is credited with restrictive measures, and whose name may explain the attribution. Milka Levy-Rubin has argued that the conditions on dress and rank draw on Sasanian and Byzantine precedent for marking status groups, and that the pact codifies a practice older than Islam.
The atlas records the attribution as debated rather than picking among these, because the sources genuinely support more than one reading.