Muslim Jizya Payers in the Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Empire

Abstract

This paper aims to deconstruct the traditional narratives on the Ottoman financial and political strategies towards non-Muslim and Muslim subjects in the Western Balkans by re-examining the foundation, extent and consequences of the central government’s policy of demanding a payment of jizya tax not only from non-Muslims, as stipulated in the classical Sharia law, but from the Muslim population as well. Although academic community is aware of the ex­istence of Muslim jizya payers in several regions of the Ottoman Empire, this paper argues that historiographic knowledge on the mentioned phenomenon is rather rudimentary as present studies on this topic are based on a very limited data while official financial records that contain information on Muslim jizya payers, such as the jizya registers from the Ottoman Bosnia, have still not beenthoroughly analysed. Recognizing the need to include financial records into the account, the main research strategy of this paper was to identify and examine records of jizya payers which contain a significant number of Muslims in a taxpayer role as well as to compare and interpret this data with other financial, administrative and legal texts that could help us gain better insight into the phe­nomenon of Muslim jizya payers in the Ottoman practice. The main primary source for the analysis provided in this study was a register of jizya payers from the vilayet of Brod, in central parts of the Ottoman Bosnia, from the 1679, which have not been previously used in historiographic studies. On the basis of this financial register, it has been concluded that more that 90% of all jizya payers in the territory covered in the mentioned register were Muslims, which is an important and interesting fact that has still not been recorded in any other part of the Ottoman Empire. After identifying the historical background of Muslim jizya payer phenomenon in Bosnia, this case study explains its connec­tion with broader political and financial practices of the Ottoman authorities, as well as its relation with the Islamic legal tradition. Furthermore, the study uses the data from primary sources to additionally deconstruct the narrative that only Christians and Jews paid the jizya in Ottoman Empire, as well as it re-examines the validity and shortcomings of an old historiographic notion that jizya should be considered a primary reason in explaining why massive process of conversion to Islam took place in the Early Modern Ottoman Bosnia.