The Caliphs and their Non-Muslim Subjects: A Critical Study of the Covenant of Umar

A. S. Tritton's The Caliphs and their Non-Muslim Subjects is a scholarly critical study, published by Oxford University Press, of the Covenant of Umar, the set of conditions traditionally said to govern the status of Christians and Jews under early Islamic rule, and of how caliphs actually treated non Muslim subjects in practice. Despite its age, it remains a standard reference specifically because Tritton treated the Covenant of Umar critically as a text with a debated and possibly later composite origin rather than accepting its traditional attribution uncritically, a methodological caution later scholarship has largely vindicated. Its limit is the ordinary one for a study now nearly a century old, more recent scholarship has refined the dating and regional variation of dhimmi status considerably, so a claim about a specific period or region benefits from checking newer specialist scholarship alongside this foundational critical study.