Dhimmi status and jizya

This charge needs disentangling, because it bundles a tax, a legal category, and a set of historical abuses, and each answers differently.

The tax

Jizya was levied on free adult non-Muslim men of means. It was not levied on women, children, the elderly, the poor, the disabled, monks, or in most rulings on those who served in the army. Against it stood zakat, obligatory on Muslims and not on dhimmis, and military service, from which dhimmis were exempt. Two communities were taxed under two headings, and the exemptions on both sides tell you the categories were doing fiscal and military work rather than punishing belief. Rates were frequently lower than the Byzantine burden the same populations had been paying, which is a substantial part of why Islamic expansion met the reception it did in Syria and Egypt.

The category

Dhimma means a covenant of protection, and it carried enforceable content: life, property, places of worship, and internal jurisdiction, so that Jewish and Christian communities ran their own courts in their own law on matters of family and religion for centuries. That is a legal pluralism with no counterpart in contemporary Christendom, which expelled Jews from England in 1290, from France repeatedly, and from Spain in 1492.

The abuses

Which is where the concession belongs, and it should be made without hedging. The status was unequal, and it was meant to be. Some jurists prescribed humiliating modes of collection, some rulers imposed dress restrictions and building limits, and there were episodes of outright persecution that the theory did not sanction and the practice produced anyway. A reader told that dhimma was a charter of equality is being sold something.

The verdict

The comparison the argument requires is with the alternatives available in the seventh to seventeenth centuries, and on that comparison the record favours the dhimma arrangement heavily. The comparison the argument actually makes is with a liberal constitutional order that did not exist anywhere until the eighteenth century and had to be fought for in Europe against Christian resistance. Judged by that standard, every pre-modern polity stands condemned together, and singling out one of them is a rhetorical decision rather than a historical finding.