The Pact of Umar

The pact circulates in several recensions and the form is consistent across them. It is not drafted as a decree from the ruler but as a petition from the ruled: when you came against us we asked you for safe conduct for ourselves and our people, and we undertook the following conditions. The rhetorical shape matters, because a self-imposed undertaking is harder to argue against than an imposition.

The conditions fall into groups. Some concern buildings: no new church, monastery or hermitage; no restoration of those in quarters the Muslims inhabit; no obstruction of a Muslim who wishes to enter one. Some concern hospitality and security: three days' lodging for any Muslim traveller; no shelter for a spy; no concealment of deceit. Some concern religion: not to teach the Qur'an to their children, not to prevent a kinsman from converting, not to hold public processions with crosses, not to raise the voice in reading scripture or in the funeral of the dead where Muslims can hear.

The remainder are about visible rank. Rise when a Muslim wishes to sit. Do not resemble Muslims in dress, in the parting of the hair or in the use of a kunya. Wear a distinguishing girdle. Do not use a saddle of the Muslim kind, do not bear arms, do not engrave Arabic on seals. In exchange the signatories receive protection of life and property.

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.