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God’s Water: Analyzing Land and Irrigation Taxation Systems Under the Early Fatimids
Abstract
The Sirat Ustadh Judhar, a tenth-century biographical and historical text, offers detailed insight into the early court and administration of the Fatimid state in Ifriqiya. The Sira consists of anecdotes, epistles, court documents, and the personal experiences of Judhar, a eunuch and chamberlain of the Fatimid court of Tunisia. This source provides scholars with exclusive pieces of information regarding the early Fatimid government’s dealings with landholdings, water resources, and their related systems of taxation and state revenue. This paper views those early instated systems, especially water distribution, through a contextual readings of contemporary historical and jurisprudence sources. Furthermore, this paper looks at the relation of taxation with the social strata of early Islamic civilization where the payment and distribution of taxes became the mechanism by which society was structured and reinforced. The early conquerors and military forces following the great conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries collected taxes and essentially became the elite class ruling over peasants, workers, merchants, and protected non-Muslims who worked to pay taxes, thus becoming an inferior class. In the years following the great Islamic conquests, this social dichotomy consisting in an aristocratic Muslim ruling class and subjugated and taxed populaces ceased to exist in its original form. The rise of settlement, the growth of the economy, and cultural assimilation brought about massive changes in the social structure of medieval Islamic society. This paper attempts to understand this development under the early Fatimids.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Egypt
Islamic World
Maghreb
Mediterranean Countries
Tunisia
Sub Area
None