Relations between Islam and the so-called "religions of the book" have always been a delicate issue. In classical times, the poll-tax (jizya) as prescribed by the Qur'an was the symbol for this ambivalence. Although it was de facto cancelled everywhere in the Islamic world by the beginning of the 20th century, and formally abolished in 1923, the topic was revived in the wake of the increasing Islamist tendencies in the past decades. The aim of this paper is to show how a classical Islamic concept is adjusted to (and defended in) the modern Islamist discourse. The debate takes place in the broad stream of Islamist writings on the alleged nature of an Islamic state as well as in modern Qur'anic commentaries; some authors (e.g. Sayyid Qutb or Maududi) are active in both genres. Modern Qur'an commentators (Fadlallah, Ibn Ashur, etc), on the one hand, tend to argue in a rather traditional way. The jizya is defended as a just punishment for the non-Muslims' unbelief, and the latter's unequivocal submission to Islamic domination is demanded as a necessary precondition for cohabitation. Often the jizya verse is directly related to the seemingly contradictory verse 2,256 which rejects coercion in religion. The contradiction is usually solved by the prohibition of coercion being related only with regard to inner faith, not regarding submission to the political system of Islam. By contrast, writings of a more political character are marked by a more pragmatic and modern approach. Instead of the classical concept of dhimma and its negative connotations, the frame of reference is usually the question of "citizenship" (jinsiyya). In this context, the jizya may be renamed so as to make it more acceptable, and it may even be suspended under certain circumstances, e.g. by the non-Muslims participation in the country's defence or the inability of the Islamic state to guarantee the minorities' safety. As to the question of tolerance, there is no unanimity: whereas Qaradawi praises the jizya as a model of Islamic tolerance towards non-Muslims, the Syrian scholar Buti emphasizes the mutually binding legal security of the system, explicitely rejecting tolerance as arbitrary. Both exegets and political writer agree, however, on the character of Islam as a comprehensive "system", and in this sense they interpret the key word in both verses, namely "din", which is commonly rendered as "religion".