Non-Muslims in the Early Islamic Empire: From Surrender to Coexistence

Milka Levy-Rubin is a scholar of early Islamic history, and this Cambridge University Press book is her scholarly study of the legal status of non-Muslims under the early Islamic empire, covering the jizya poll tax and the Pact of Umar that formalized dhimmi status. Its strength is close use of the earliest available legal and documentary sources to reconstruct how this framework actually formed, rather than reading later, more developed jurisprudence back into the earliest period. Its limit is exactly that early focus, it is a study of the formation of this legal framework specifically, not of how the later legal schools developed or altered that doctrine in subsequent centuries, so a claim about later Islamic legal practice needs a source addressing that later period.