Not to be confused with Covenant of Umar I between the second

Rashidun

The Rightly Guided Caliphs or The Righteous Caliphs is a term used in Sunni Islam to refer to the first four Caliphs who established the Rashidun Caliphate. The concept of "Rightly Guided Caliphs" originated with the Abbasid Dynasty...

 caliph

Caliph

The Caliph is the head of state in a Caliphate, and the title for the ruler of the Islamic Ummah, an Islamic community ruled by the Shari'ah. It is a transcribed version of the Arabic word   which means "successor" or "representative"...

 Umar ibn al-Khattab and Sophronius, the Patriarch of Jerusalem

Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem

The Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem is the head bishop of the Orthodox Church of Jerusalem, ranking fourth of nine Patriarchs in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Since 2005, the Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem has been Theophilos III...

.

The Pact (Covenant) of Umar (c. 717 AD) was a treaty supposedly made between the Umayyad caliph Umar II (not to be confused with the second caliph Umar

Umar

`Umar ibn al-Khattāb c. 2 November , was a leading companion and adviser to the Islamic prophet Muhammad who later became the second Muslim Caliph after Muhammad's death....

 who had made the first treaty with Christians in Jerusalem known as "Umari Treaty") and the ahl al-kitab

People of the Book

People of the Book is a term used to designate non-Muslim adherents to faiths which have a revealed scripture called, in Arabic, Al-Kitab . The three types of adherents to faiths that the Qur'an mentions as people of the book are the Jews, Sabians and Christians.In Islam, the Muslim scripture, the...

 (اهل الكتاب) ("People of the Book

People of the Book

People of the Book is a term used to designate non-Muslim adherents to faiths which have a revealed scripture called, in Arabic, Al-Kitab . The three types of adherents to faiths that the Qur'an mentions as people of the book are the Jews, Sabians and Christians.In Islam, the Muslim scripture, the...

") living on the lands newly conquered and colonized by Muslims. Muslim scholars, and non-Muslim historians have questioned the historicity of the document.

The document develops the notion of the dhimma

Dhimmi

A , is a non-Muslim subject of a state governed in accordance with sharia law. Linguistically, the word means "one whose responsibility has been taken". This has to be understood in the context of the definition of state in Islam...

, or "protected person", who kept their religion to accept and submit to some rules. The Pact of Umar enumerates in detail many of the conditions of their subjugation, and served as a key foundational text in the legal elaboration of dhimmi status during the classical period of Islamic jurisprudence

Fiqh

Fiqh is Islamic jurisprudence. Fiqh is an expansion of the code of conduct expounded in the Quran, often supplemented by tradition and implemented by the rulings and interpretations of Islamic jurists....

.

Conditions

The Pact of Umar is a fundamental document in prescribing the condition of tolerated "People of the Book" (Jews and Christians) living within Muslim-controlled states.

Dhimmi are granted the right to practice their own religious rites in privacy. Manifesting their religion publicly or converting anyone to it was prohibited, as was keeping their children from becoming Muslim, or building houses of worship or repairing such as fell into ruins. Protection of their persons and property was part of the pact and the punishment for infringement was less severe than for a Muslim, though any violation of the terms of the pact by Dhimmi rendered them "liable to the penalties for contumacy and sedition."

While constancy to the Pact was not always assured, overall, added severity or liberality seems to have been considered something to be avoided. Notable exceptions were persecutions by Al-Mutawakkil around 850, and during the reign of the allegedly mad Fatimid caliph al-Hakim (996-1021). Sometimes the Pact was repromulgated as a reminder to forgetful dhimmi, and in so doing Mamluk sultans during the latter Middle Ages specified that dhimmi could not be in service to the State.

To secure their rights, dhimmi would pledge loyalty to their Muslim rulers, pay a special poll-tax (the jizya

Jizya

Under Islamic law, jizya or jizyah is a per capita tax levied on a section of an Islamic state's non-Muslim citizens, who meet certain criteria...

) for adult males.

While the conditions of the Pact were authoritative, the level of enforcement varied, as shown by the existence of churches constructed long after the Muslim conquests.

Historicity

Modern scholars have questioned the authenticity of this agreement (which exists in several different textual forms), claiming it to be the product of later jurists who attributed it to the caliph Umar in order to lend greater authority to their own opinions:

Western orientalists

Orientalism

Orientalism is a term used for the imitation or depiction of aspects of Eastern cultures in the West by writers, designers and artists, as well as having other meanings...

 doubt the authenticity of the Pact, arguing that it is usually the victors, not the vanquished, who propose, or rather impose, the terms of peace, and that it is highly unlikely that the people who spoke no Arabic and knew nothing of Islam could draft such a document. Academic historians believe that the Pact of Umar in the form it is known today was a product of later jurists who attributed it to the venerated caliph Umar I in order to lend greater authority to their own opinions. The striking similarities between the Pact of Umar and the Theodesian and Justinian Codes

Corpus Juris Civilis

The Corpus Juris Civilis is the modern name for a collection of fundamental works in jurisprudence, issued from 529 to 534 by order of Justinian I, Eastern Roman Emperor...

 suggest that perhaps much of the Pact of Umar was borrowed from these earlier codes by later Islamic jurists. At least some of the clauses of the pact mirror the measures first introduced by the Umayyad

Umayyad

The Umayyad Caliphate was the second of the four major Arab caliphates established after the death of Muhammad. It was ruled by the Umayyad dynasty, whose name derives from Umayya ibn Abd Shams, the great-grandfather of the first Umayyad caliph. Although the Umayyad family originally came from the...

 caliph Umar II or by the early Abbasid

Abbasid

The Abbasid Caliphate or, more simply, the Abbasids , was the third of the Islamic caliphates. It was ruled by the Abbasid dynasty of caliphs, who built their capital in Baghdad after overthrowing the Umayyad caliphate from all but the al-Andalus region....

 caliphs.

Scholars have argued that the Pact may have direct pre-Islamic inspiration:

It has recently been suggested that many of the detailed regulations concerning what the ahl al-dhimma were and were not permitted to do come from an earlier historical precedent, namely the regulations which existed in the Sassanian Persian Empire with reference to its religious minorities in Iraq. Here there was a highly developed Jewish community, and separate Monophysite

Monophysitism

Monophysitism , or Monophysiticism, is the Christological position that Jesus Christ has only one nature, his humanity being absorbed by his Deity...

 and Nestorian Christian

Nestorianism

Nestorianism is a Christological doctrine advanced by Nestorius, Patriarch of Constantinople from 428–431. The doctrine, which was informed by Nestorius's studies under Theodore of Mopsuestia at the School of Antioch, emphasizes the disunion between the human and divine natures of Jesus...

communities, and during the late Sassanian period the rulers experimented with arrangements by which efforts were made to ensure the loyalty of the population by granting military protection and some degree of religious toleration in return for the payment of taxes.